Existence is grounds for dismissal. It has only recently occurred to me that I might not be allowed to eat after I die. This is discouraging. “Make hay while the sun shines,” they used to say back on our ancestral farm, a tiny splotch of poor land in northern Michigan that ensured our continuing poverty—that is, except at the table, because if you have cows, pigs, chickens, and a big garden, you eat bountifully if not well. Even in the Great Depression when the gut of urban America was scoured clean, country people hunched at a full trough and thus it is that I come from a long peasant tradition of three square meals a day. We ate a lot even when we weren’t hungry because it was the way of my people.
Perhaps I should have called this little essay “Food and Religion” because, after all, religion is a mood, albeit an occasionally substantial mood. Toss aside your simpleminded incredulity for a while and think of me as Baba Ram Jimmy, a round, brown old man who has lifelong sought spirituality through food and drink. Right now in America it is hard to see the stars and moon through a blood-smeared windshield. In such difficult times we must turn to the sacral elements at hand, to specific rituals of worship, even if our private God is a twenty-ton Olmec stone head so neutral that it makes the Buddha look like a fraternity glad-hander. Needless to say the obvious rites at hand are breakfast, lunch, and dinner, by which we connect ourselves to holiness while still recognizing we are but animals in human clothing.
I am currently in physical and mental training for another assault on the mountains near Collioure, France, to look for the lost valise of poems by Antonio Machado, and much in my recent life has warred against this noble mission. After a glorious trip to northern Italy in late October to parse the mysteries of the white truffle, the inept folk at Lufthansa held me captive in Frankfurt, Germany, for a full day during which I caught a near-fatal virus. When I reached home in Montana, I fainted and tripped on a throw rug (non–alcohol-related household accident). The fall turned my face into a purple grapefruit (photo available). Instead of a visionary experience, this fall produced nothing; a discouraging view, this pure nothing. The trauma did induce a temporary exchange of personalities with Paolo Ranucci, a cobbler I met in Modena, Italy, but more on that later.
Inevitably this trauma led to a slump I could ill afford, what with a novel due in March for that Walmart of words, American publishing. There is no place in the world for me except where I already am, and luckily this is usually near a kitchen. I began my recovery from the slump by making posole, a Mexican hominy stew, out of a large buffalo heart a worried friend had sent. A hunting acquaintance gave me a package of mountain lion chorizo, having shot a record-size male that had been preying on calves while it was courting a snarling female. How unaware we become of danger during our absurd mating dances. A writer I know in Paris was struck by a taxi when he hurriedly crossed Boulevard Raspail in order to follow a girl with a pert butt. I made puttanesca (whore’s sauce) several times, thinking it appropriate for a writer. I ate antelope short ribs and the liver of a virgin elk, followed by Hungarian partridge, quail, and doves. I turned a keg of salt herring into a huge bowl of pickled herring using the recipe of my grandmother Hulda Wahlgren, who lived to be ninety-seven, though she did say to me, “This is going on too long.” I came down with gout, which gave my right big toe an aching pulse synchronous with my face. I drank a lot of French red wine even though my type 2 diabetes requires that I walk two hours per bottle. It’s far better to walk than to have your feet cut off because of this disease. Armandino Batali, the father of Mario, sent me a large package of lardo and I began to further turn the corner, back to a Technicolor life. To be sure, lardo is pure pork fat but we don’t shrink from the high fat content of the very necessary Jewish corned beef tongue. Besides, if you study the behavior of pigs you witness a lust for life that leaves the tribe of whining writers sucking hind teat, a shriveled and unproductive food source indeed.
I knew my recovery was nearly complete when I wrote ten pages of my novel on New Year’s Eve. I hadn’t written that much in a day since I completed my novella Legends of the Fall in nine days in 1978. I certainly won’t try it again because the effort ruined a night’s sleep. The earth began to whirl too fast. The dead used my brain as a chat room. I sensed there was a bear in the bamboo thicket outside the patio. My dog Zilpha didn’t want to sit on my lap, a nightly ritual, until I coaxed her with a piece of herring. Labs seem to be the only breed that enjoys herring.
So I’m now back in training for Machado and for a book to be called “Pilgrimages,” wherein I visit the graves of twenty writers I revere and try to reconstruct a bit of their mystery, and also what they ate. Research can also become errant and confusing. For instance, one day I was nonplussed to discover that three different small third world cultures have idioms that refer to the female pudendum as a grief muffin. Of necessity, these are cultures where muffins are part of the diet. We are where we live. This becomes evident in the foodways of the rich folk in the United States, who wander to and fro across the land acquiring lifestyles commensurate with their warm feelings about their wealth. They are fond of a neutral cuisine that reminds one of Umberto Eco’s ideas on imitation. Women wearing fifty-grand’s-worth of turquoise and lace granny dresses serve you Mexican food as remote from Mexican cuisine as a Winnipeg McDonald’s. Genuine food tends to emerge from the spirit of place. When I was eating the boned stuffed pig leg, zampone, in Parma, I thought how shameful that this great dish wasn’t available in the United States. Couldn’t the woebegone Republicans of Iowa be saved from political mischief by being set to work boning the millions of local pig legs, but then these people are repelled by the staff of life, garlic. The spirit of place even enters our sexual behavior. When I was in a little town north of Kathmandu, having failed to climb a peak in sneakers, I met a drunken Tibetan prostitute while I was dining on a bowl of tsampa and rotten yak blood. Through an interpreter this woman offered to sleep with me for a thousand dollars, but I couldn’t partake in her couloir or crevasse. We tend to think of all Tibetans as strict adherents of the Dalai Lama but this is apparently not true.
Back to Paolo Ranucci. I met this cobbler in Modena when I stopped by his dusty shop one morning after a nail in my worn shoe had bloodied my foot and ruined a two-dollar pair of socks. He speculated about why I wore such cheap shoes when he had seen me emerge from an expensive restaurant across the street the evening before. “Instead of the esteemed Sassicaia, drink Antinori plonk a couple of days and then you can afford a good pair of shoes,” he said in English. Sensing an anti-American binge in the offing, I countered by asking why Italians are uniformly ignorant of their great poet Gaspara Stampa. This intrigued him and we went to a café for a few glasses of harmless prosecco. It turned out that in the 1970s, Ranucci had attended the writers’ school at the University of Iowa for two years but then, for reasons of the bad local food and a shortage he sensed in his own talent, he left. He returned home and continued the family tradition of shoemaking, pointing out that the brogans he wore in the café had been made by his father in 1948. I admitted that my disgusting shoes were less than a year old. We had a light lunch at Giusti of tagliarini laden with white truffles, braised pig cheeks, and veal chops to fill any stray empty stomach corners, plus a couple of bottles of old Barolo. Once again I had spent my shoe money. It’s so easy when you’re hungry and throwing caution out the always-open window.
Ranucci’s point of view was colored by pastel melancholy. He had decided he’d rather be a good cobbler than one of a hundred thousand mediocre poets. “Why bother if I can’t be a singular lamp burning in our collective death ward?” he asked. I was stumped while we sipped at our crystal goblets of grappa. He advised me that on my upcoming trip for a week in Florence, after a full day in the Pitti Palace and the Uffizi, I should meditate on the liberally given American degree, the master of fine arts. Isn’t it a little cheeky? he wondered aloud.
We spent a couple of hours walking off lunch, when a stretcher would have been more appropriate for me. I fell down in what I thought was the garden of the Finzi-Continis, my face narrowly missing a pile of dog shit that appeared to be a metaphor of our invasion of Iraq. We visited the market, perhaps the finest in Europe, and I bought a large white truffle to eat like a soiled apple with my after-nap coffee. Ranucci cautioned me on my religious habits, saying that I might visit Dante’s house in Florence and try to envision a better Beatrice than the possible sin of gluttony.
And so I did. Luckily I had packed a difficult book, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women by Caroline Walker Bynum. I had never thought of the figure of Beatrice as nearly as interesting as a bowl of steaming tripe, but I had been wrong before, having stridently insisted in the 1980s that this whole computer thing was going nowhere. I took the Bynum book along to a fine meal at Cibreo and several pages became shamefully stuck together with tripe juice. I had spent the afternoon at Dante’s house, and that night under a full Florentine moon I dreamed of my own Beatrice, only she was wearing garishly red hot pants. On my dawn ten-kilometer run along the Arno, I questioned whether it wasn’t a little too late for Beatrice to become an intimate part of my life, especially when she wouldn’t properly dress the part.
Now I’m on the eve of an unpleasant trip to New York City, where I intend to resign from everything. Writing novels is massively discouraging, compared to tercets and strophes. New York City is enshrouded of late with a sickly green bubble, a theme park for the rich with The New Yorker and the New York Times its possibly blasphemous mouthpieces. A martini costs fifteen dollars and a passable hotel room five hundred. New York City makes the supposed greed of Paris look like a Girl Scout bake sale. Mario Batali’s Casa Mono restaurant is next to my little hotel and I have written ahead to see if they will make me oatmeal crepes filled with an epiphyte flan, those flowers I saw hanging from phone lines in Veracruz that live solely on air and rain.
Of late, I’ve had the urge to return to Earth for a while before being launched into space as a fatally skinless rocket. I’ve been noticing tiny black beetles and a number of new species of small brown birds, the soul life of crows, and have been studying Roberto Calasso’s Literature and the Gods, sensing that these waifish creatures, the gods, can’t be approached directly—and certainly not by publishing books. Their names are unavailable to the ambitious.