Tuesday 14 August 2018

Look after yourself

That's what the doctor said to me today, at the end of a shattering session. In saying to me this simplest of the phrases that can be said to a person who's in trouble, she took all the things we'd talked about and melded them together, compressing all their messy complications back into their natural, indivisible relationship.

It was cold as I left the consulting rooms. I was cold, and tired of being cold, and I felt horrible inside, as I had all day. I had eaten a bowl of muesli at my desk at 7:30am, then a much too large and milky strong coffee had put me off any more food. I had found some dark chocolate squares in my desk, and eaten those. At about three o'clock I had forced myself to eat some vita-weats and half a banana. I thought about the doctor's advice and wondered whether there was something I could eat which would make me feel like I was looking after myself. As I rode along I imagined what this might be: a meat pie, warm, fragrant, with flaky pastry and sloppy inside. I contemplated an image, experimentally, of myself going into a shop and buying a pie out of a pie warmer, and going outside and raising it to my lips, breathing in the steam. I realised I was drawing on a mental picture indelibly laid down when I was a child, and I'd heard the parent of a friend retail what even then I was able to recognise as a well-worn family story about my friend's grandparents when they were young. The story was that the grandfather, at maybe twenty years old, had had all of his own teeth extracted by a dentist, preparatory to having a set of false ones installed, and when the grandmother had gone to meet him after this session, she had come to him while he stood on a street in Footscray, eating a meat pie with his wounded, newly toothless mouth.

$6.85
I suppose there was probably an element of perversity, masochistic austerity even, to what I did eat next. I didn't eat a pie, which would have made me feel very ill, but I knew I needed to eat something to do yoga at 6pm without feeling faint, and I also had to organize Leonard's dinner, so I stopped at a convenience store and bought some potatoes to make into chips for him, and picked up a 'paleo bar' for myself: expensive, processed, unpleasant to eat, stupid, sweet but bland, faddish, soulless, sad food, swallowed down with a side serve of negativity on a windy footpath.As I rode off I thought about the previous afternoon's essay club. This had been an island of peaceful equilibrium in a long period of disturbance, discomfort and surreality. To borrow and adapt a concept recently expounded to me, I have been experiencing a dissonance between who I feel I really am and who I feel that I am expected to be (even though both feelings belong to parts or moods of myself), and recently I have had periods of intensity to this feeling that have made me feel vulnerable, almost persecuted. Food and eating are often physically difficult in this state. The discrepancy between the atmospheric pressure and the pressure within my body makes me very cautious about loading up my belly. I eat enough and I eat healthy food, but it's fuel, and what I can't usually stomach is food that is conspicuously comforting to eat. Going about knowing that I feel bad essentially because one aspect of myself is picking on another is exhausting and depressing, not least because of the complicated and tense internal self-observation involved in the situation. Going to sleep is often the greatest relief, because it means oblivion and relinquishment of the pressure to watch, evaluate and judge.  Sleep is good, work is often pretty okay too, because it absorbs so much attention that not enough of my mind is free for the continuance of this relentless inner scrutiny. Essay club, like craft camp and a couple of other things, is a very good thing, and a part of its goodness is that I enjoy the snacks.Essay club: I don't exactly know why, although I think I can guess, it induces in me a rapprochement between the scrutineer and the scrutinee, and for as long as it lasts, the tension evaporates as if it had never existed. Yesterday's conversation was about Anthony Bourdain. We read this breakthrough essay that he published in the New Yorker in 1999 and this long profile  which appeared last year in the same organ. I hadn't known anything about Bourdain and I had been startled by the widespread public grieving which followed his death. I also listened to an old episode of WTF where he was Marc Maron's guest, and I had time to watch a single conspicuously journeyman episode of his TV stuff. (He went to Berlin and ate a great deal of meat and potatoes and talked to some very obvious people [none of whom were women], in obvious ways, about this food.) It wasn't much exposure but it was definitely enough to make me resolve to explore this Bourdain person a good deal further, largely because he embodied so very many of the traits and antecedents of manliness as it's practiced and aspired to by the kinds of men who live powerful and influential lives in my world. Orwell, Hunter S. Thompson, Burroughs, meat, filth, profanity, gonzo, Asia via Blade Runner, restlessness, punk, swagger, drugs; but also, discipline, work ethic, hierarchies, curiosity about others as an ethical stance.  In terms of how this translated to food and eating as an expression of culture and relationality, I think his constant attention to the question of who made the food and why, and the connection between the answer to this question and how good the food is to eat, is important. I'm interested in how he achieved a practical reconciliation between this sophisticated perspective on food and his relentless addiction to meat, which hurts the inside of a body, especially in the quantities he seemed to ingest it. Accepting hospitality in whatever form it comes is a timeless human grace, it seems to me, but at the same time, the words Bourdain used to explain how it feels to absorb the tidal wave of hospitality that hits him wherever he goes is as evocative a phrase as anything ever uttered in the analytic context: he described it as being 'food fucked'. Bourdain's lifelong and absolute contempt for vegetarianism is boorish and unoriginal in conception and expression, but I freely concede that when it comes to the oral pleasures of eating and the provision and taking of comfort via food, it is difficult for vegetarian cooking to pull off effects that are available very easily to cooking that involves meat. It's been at least ten years since I ate an actual carnivorous meat pie but I remember the taste, the richness, the grease and how good it can be to eat. (There is no vegetarian equivalent to rich greasy meaty junk food, kebabs, scarfed down after an evening of drinking. What could there be? Tetra-Pak tofu? lol. The best I can come up with is a brilliant cheese, such as the French cow's milk cheese called Langres, which blows my mind in an apocalyptic detonation of pleasure every time I eat it, but it's really not post-binge street food, although technically it might be I guess in that can be obtained from the fromagerie and booze shop in Lygon St until quite late in the evening.) I also recall the taste of a hot, spicy, oily bratwurst bursting out of its skin and spitting darts of hot fat into my mouth; I remember barbecued lamb, juicy meat cooked in a tandoori oven, steak and kidney pudding. I don't want to eat any of these things, partly because eating meat has always seemed so perversely unnecessary to me, but also because I know I'd only feel sick inside, all that heaviness sitting like lead in the centre of my body in a space already rendered contorted and sore with stress and anxiety. And yet if it is only about the satisfaction, the feeling of being nurtured and nourished and yes looked after by what one is eating, then the eating of properly cooked meat can't be surpassed. I recently shared in a dinner that was meat-free because of my presence and even allowing for this never being a situation conducive to simple pleasure, purely at the level of food and orality I found it a dismal eating experience: much of it was cold and raw, it had no richness and sloppiness. I felt embarrassed on behalf of vegetarianism.  Outside of the intermittent oases of essay club, craft camp and cognate feasts, the comfort food moments in my life follow on from physical activity that leaves me feeling light and empty inside. The toasted cheese and tomato sandwich I buy and scoff on Wednesday morning is a treat that I only indulge in after a demanding dawn training session, not because that's when I have 'earned it' or some similarly mingy, abstemious notion, but because the almost nauseous lightness of my belly in the aftermath is the only time I can tolerate, and therefore relish, all that golden, oozing bread and salt and grease. Likewise, post-yoga I feel empty and this means I can eat, and profoundly enjoy, one of the immense hunks of pure soul food that is four oily crumbling freshly fried falafel balls smothered in hummus, tahini, salad, pickles and chilli, and crammed into a soft pillow of puffy white grilled pita bread, made with genuine and palpable enthusiasm and goodwill by the people at Very Good Felafel in Sydney Road, Brunswick.



Looking after myself



4 comments:

Fyodor said...

Treat.Yo.Self.

The Anthony Bourdain grief is mystifying to me. I always wrote him off as the snarky high-priest of hipster foodies, and his TV persona the kind of faux-adventurer over-produced into what bourgeois Americans think approximates "worldly", a bit like the Bear Grylls of ethnic food-porn. But then American food culture is so fucking god-awful it's a low hurdle to clear. You can't really appreciate the astounding success of Starbucks until you've drunk "coffee" from a typical American diner.

lucy tartan said...

See, that's one TV reference I do get, but only because it crossed over into the hinterlands of meme. I did try to appreciate Parks & Recreation - having seen local government workplaces at close quarters, it should have worked on me - but it didn't measure up to 30 Rock, which I'd been told it strongly resembled.

I know what you're saying about Bourdain. All of that. I'm just wondering (hoping, I suppose, as part of the unending War on Cynicism) if there was something a bit better and stranger about him that survived the neutering process applied by the formulaic nature of food / travel TV shows. To begin to answer that question I can see I'm going to have to have a long conversation about him with the essay clubber who suggested him, but in the event couldn't attend because she got one of those social invitations that shouldn't ever be declined and which I think you will enjoy hearing about at some point.

Fyodor said...

30 Rock is legendarily good, sets too high a benchmark. I didn't really warm up to Parks & Rec until the end of the second season when it really found its groove. Needless to say, Ron Fucking Swanson is an iconic character of shockin' awesomeness.

I am probably unfairly harsh on Bourdain. He wrote an interesting take-down of NY restaurant "culture" and he seemed to be a genuinely charismatic guy deeply passionate about food and the people who make it. It's the valorisation and monetisation of his snarkily pretentious hipster [but I repeat myself] foodie persona that turns me right off.

"...she got one of those social invitations that shouldn't ever be declined and which I think you will enjoy hearing about at some point."

It involved Swedish sperm-thieves, didn't it?

lucy tartan said...

No - rather it's something that I think would even more utterly destroy EP's ability to sit up straight and keep typing. What a pity he's not available for testing this theory.