EBTL.050817

Still, After All These Years

crapula (n) – “the sickness or indisposition following upon a drunken or gluttonous debauch”

thus,

crapulent (adj) – “Of or pertaining to crapulence; suffering from excessive eating, drinking, etc.”…from Blount (1656): “surfeiting or oppressed with surfeit”

There is also something quite satisfying about the employment of indisposition here. Disposition, of course, refers to arrangement, order, being put-together, as well as to temperament, but if one thinks also of disposition in terms of what one is disposed toward, what one is prepared to do, the use of indisposition to mean unwell becomes particularly evocative: to occupy a general state of not being willing, prepared, or inclined toward anything. What better description of the truly, wretchedly ill, or, more to the point, the truly, wretchedly full?

I’ve been thinking of late about feast days, and my misgivings therewith. I’ll leave aside for the moment the specific problem of Thanksgiving (cultural genocide, settler colonialism, etc.) and keep things in the general terrain of secular(ized) holidays that have the feast as a central component. I have spent most of my adult life in Montreal endeavouring to recuperate such holiday meals back into a meaningful relationship with my and my friends’ lives. You know how it goes: “We, who are isolated by necessity, circumstance, or design from our families, and already skeptical of the trappings of this particular tradition, still have an interest in forging new (or at least modified) traditions, returning to the ostensible spirit of the holiday (a celebration of each other, and of the food that sustains us), and of course taking advantage of a day off work, and so shall assemble anew and cram our gullets in common. To each, and each to their excesses, raise a glass.” This is all well and good, to the extent that it comes off. However, just as often I have found the food becomes an impediment to the very connections I had so flattered myself as to declare the basis of my interest in the whole exercise.

Concerning spending time with those one cares about, any sort of meaningful engagement on an emotional or intellectual level tends to be eclipsed by the necessities of frantic food preparation, consumption, and recovery. I am not typically one to speak ill of overconsumption, nor of the demarcation of days devoted to its celebration, but it nevertheless has crossed my mind at more than one holiday dinner that those assembled in the midst of so many elbows around the table are so busy eating that little time is afforded to savour either the meal or the company. I suspect that a combination of the ritualistic gluttony of the holiday and a certain banality of its average fare produces this situation, in which we feel compelled to dispatch helping after helping of turkey (surely the most ponderous of possible birds) and mashed potatoes as if each time we are expecting to find writ across the freshly scraped surface of the plate some longed-for truth. It is the dissonance of a meal that is supposed to be “special,” but is comprised of food that is so fundamentally boring that we feel compelled to plow through it, questing an ever-elusive satiety that we are denied and given surfeit in its stead. It is perhaps a mercy that we are too stultified by the end of the affair to acutely register our disappointment, instead mustering at best a pained sympathy for the others similarly indisposed.

The above might come across as somewhat snobbish. “Buddy’s got a problem with mashed potatoes?” I hear you exclaim. But no, with the exception of turkey, I in fact like all of the “traditional” dishes of the ambiguously Anglo-Saxon Protestant milieu so familiar to white, middle-class Canadian thirty somethings: mashed potatoes are great (or can be, so long as the potatoes are subordinated to the true star, butter), I love boiled turnips and bacon, Brussels sprouts in almost any form, dressings and stuffings of various descriptions, but whether it is the vengeful spirit of religious observance scorned or just my own refusal to be happy, the meal so often feels like crapulence without succulence. Jonathan Meades has written similarly about Christmas,1 and although his take is more polemic against the overdressing of the traditional British meal, his description of such holiday cooking as “centrifugal” strikes a chord for me (resonant, if not entirely pleasant). I have come to think of the holiday meal in terms of an “absent centre” around which the maelstrom of food and festivity swirls, a much-anticipated yet dismal scene from which one limps home and flops defeated into bed, uncomfortably full and yet curiously empty. But where is this absent centre? The turkey is there, the people are there. The snow is gently falling or finally melting or still well in the offing as the leaves clatter in the blazing multicolour trees. Perhaps what is missing is me. Perhaps I am merely horrible.