Will carbohydrates be the downfall of Western civilization?
This sentence cribbed from the back of a cereal box (organic flax and raisin bran) is not the less poignant for its source. I’m even using my most loathed word, caregiver, which summons up the image of serene but slack-faced busybodies so intrusive in our lives of late. Everywhere we are imperiled and fear burbles in us like the third stomach of a cow fed on noxious weeds. Around the clock the media smothers us with war, famine, disease, and widespread sexual mayhem, and even the animal kingdom is pestered minute by minute by faux scientists demanding more money for research. There is clearly a worldwide conspiracy to drown us in fear. Even the solace of food and alcohol is suspect not to speak of the cigarettes so valued by Albert Einstein, James Joyce, and me.
Oddly, before I am free to help others I’m struggling to ascertain my own specific relationship to the ninety billion galaxies out there. No information on the matter has been forthcoming and I’m itching to get on with my new job as a caregiver. One of the more remote galaxies, M109, is said to possess a trillion stars which is half again too many. It is difficult to get your head around these ninety billion galaxies but until we learn our connection we’re only whistling in a cemetery.
Meanwhile I need this alternative career as a caregiver in order to make a quick mil and retire. Any writer naturally fears elimination in the last round, the end of the third act, as it were. Miracles are possible. I read that the Cleveland Clinic can remove a five-foot section of colon through a one-inch incision. This is astounding. Presumably something was wrong with the colon or they wouldn’t willy-nilly remove it.
I concocted a couple of quick showbiz ideas but no one has bitten yet. How about retelling the story of Anne Frank starring Lindsay Lohan? Instead of Nazis we would have apostate Mormons and locate the story in Utah. Mel Gibson is the evil ruler bent on murdering all non-Mormons. Lindsay is being hidden in the basement of a pharmacy/liquor store, perfect for her behavioral issues. Of course she is discovered and Mel is ready to cut her heart out on an altar in the Tabernacle when she escapes, running nudely through the desert, jumping on a horse that in turn jumps off the rim of the Grand Canyon where Lindsay is swept by the Colorado River south to safety in the arms of a poet who heals her dependencies. Another, perhaps more marketable idea is a simple TV series to be called Guess the Disease. Each segment would have a succession of terminally ill patients with a rare disease giving measured symptomatic clues to a panel of doctors who try to guess it. In addition to solving my money problems this would offer much-needed help to prizewinning doctors. A dear friend was recently charged $50,000 for a three-hour neck surgery and who can live on that? They put in long days and need a new car to drive home.
Meanwhile I want to retire and live in a willow grove beside a lilting stream with Dawn Upshaw singing to me. I have not yet determined the chef or wine steward. If I only have five minutes left to live I’ll simply pet my dogs as that’s not time enough to prepare and eat a proper meal.
I’m a bit fatigued from spinning fictive fibs for the few remaining readers of literary fiction. Next week I have to fly to Paris and do twenty-seven print, radio, and television interviews in five days. I’m told by my French publisher, Flammarion, that there might not be any time for me to eat. I’ll pack a few sandwiches in my duffel and hope that they don’t deliquesce. In my childhood we poor kids often took lard sandwiches to school and many of us grew big and strong, mostly big. Luckily in my fridge I have a block of Mario Batali’s lardo. It is wonderful melted on French bread. I won’t have an oven in my Paris hovel but can encase the lardo in bread and keep it in my underarm until it melts. This is the much-wanted American ingenuity.
Sergei Yesenin wrote:
Here on earth I wished to marry
the white rose and the black toad.
What an accurate metaphor for our lives. The white rose is our ideals inextricably wound together with the black toad of our actual lives. How much can I help you, gentle reader, when I’m mostly only a forensic pathologist of a dying culture, a morgue that has only recently discovered it’s a morgue not a five-star hotel? And I’m a poet and what is a poet but a wandering trollop with a weak smile, a bareback rider without bridle or reins? That preposterous aesthete Rilke actually insisted that everyone should eat Quaker Oats. Did this help in war-torn Europe when Verdun claimed 800,000 casualties in ten days? Perhaps. Camus maintained that the critical decision was whether or not to commit suicide and that once you assent to your own survival you must commit to life with your full energies. As an irrelevant aside I must observe that while millions of humans have committed suicide, dogs avoid this act, except for that famous Eisenstaedt photo of the Pekingese, bored with Paris, leaping himself from the top of the Eiffel Tower. This was definitely a black toad moment.
Of course it’s presumptuous for me to think I can help you when my own life has been a model of disorder, but then because of the structure of time I can’t very well go back and scrub the paving stones I’ve walked upon. And I must be honest. I can’t tell you to lessen your carbon imprint by riding a bicycle to work when I don’t own one. And I have severe shortcomings. Last year an observant doctor told me that I didn’t know how to breathe. When I was young, members of my family would yell at me while I was reading on the sofa: “Breathe!” I’ve observed that I didn’t breathe adequately while talking and writing but then scientists have proved that there is no more unhealthy profession than writing except for dump picking, which exposes one to trillions of malevolent bacteria daily. I chatted with some Mexican kids who were dump picking down on the border where I live in the winter, and these kids were covered with ulcerated sores while the writer’s disfiguring sores are interior. Oddly children can be fine if their parents don’t cut off their legs and blind them with their own disappointments. In the interest of honesty I should add that I’m blind in my left eye from an injury and my right leg is slightly crooked. Mom only told me this when I was in my fifties: “We were sorry we couldn’t afford to fix your leg when you were a child.” I also have gout, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and severe kidney stones. I have also had some success that I have learned to view as a disease.
However, I have a healthy diet and it is here that you might find my value as a caregiver. I don’t short myself at the table because I have learned that it is more fun to eat than not to eat. Michael Pollan, a food genius, has pointed out that we’d be better off to adopt the eating habits of our grandparents and great-grandparents. The invention of the supermarket has been generally disastrous for human health, though of late there has been a specific improvement in food options. France and Italy have also suffered from supermarkets but there open public markets still abound. I regularly visit a half dozen in Paris, preferring as I do markets over cathedrals and museums. There are grand markets in Arles, Narbonne, and Lyon, and in Italy my favorite is in Modena. It occurred to me that the giant pig’s head for sale in Lyon was far more beautiful than the Statue of Liberty, not to speak of the smarmy Mona Lisa. At this moment at eleven A.M. in Montana my wife is picking raspberries, green beans, scallions, tomatoes, and new potatoes for lunch. If you don’t have a garden it’s not my fault. Cities should have gardens in every vacant lot and on rooftops.
Some health points are obvious but we still can’t see them. If you’re emotionally distressed drink a big glass of French red wine. It’s easy and works immediately. While the wine does its job you are free to watch the lovely clematis flowers and vines work their way up the branches of the small dead plum tree in the garden.
Of course our individual, sociological, and political problems are so immense that all palliatives are slightly pathetic. I write about food as it is clearly the largest of problems, especially to the couple of billion people among our population who don’t get enough. There is also the question in the United States of whether bad food is better than little food. Something in addition to our sodden educational system is making us stupider and stupider. There has been immense political and media effort to make our minds smaller and smaller. There seems to be a severe evolutionary glitch unless you view our whining, indolence, fear, and ignorance as the easiest adaptation to reality. We have a clear oligarchy of the very rich and when you slip down the food chain a notch you have what H. L. Mencken called a booboisie.
Back to Michael Pollan and the food of our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, so far from the supermarkets exuding their stale poisons. I have to travel a great deal and it would be complicated to stow Grandma Hulda Wahlgren’s pickled herring and homemade butter in my carry-on, or those huge crocks of confit of pork or sauerkraut by Grandpa Arthur Harrison. The easy solution is to quit traveling and stay home and raise my own pigs. As a child I would hear, “Jimmy, slop the hogs,” and I would carry a huge pail of kitchen leavings out to the pigpen, watching with a great admiration the way these burly creatures ate with fabulous energy.
Even a poet as deranged as myself can’t quite offer raising your own pigs as a solution, though it is an obvious step in the correct direction. There is also the somewhat embarrassing fact that I can afford to buy specially raised pork, chicken, beef, and lamb. In France they call such people as myself the members of the gauche caviar, or the Armani Left, but then I’ve already said that success is a disease that diverts one from the more graceful qualities of life such as nature, love, and fishing, submerging the unlucky soul in narcissism. A famed mega-mogul in American business said on his deathbed, “Why do I have to die?”
Only humor and humility allow you to endure life as a senior with its clear view of a mile-high, neon-lit exit sign. I offer suggestions in the spirit of one building a rickety bridge across a deep ditch full of venomous snakes. At dawn tomorrow drop your cell phone in the toilet during your morning pee. In 1944 people averaged forty phone calls a year and now they’re over five thousand. Your cell phone time can be spent growing vegetables and learning to cook. Keep your lights turned off. All these electric lights are heating up innocent nature. Look out the window on a night flight and so much is ablaze for no valid reason. The world is running out of potable water, or so we are told. When you pour a glass of water finish it even if you have to add whiskey to manage. Fire a large-caliber bullet into your television screen. Avoid newspapers and magazines and movies, all of which have been unworthy of our attention. I will allow fifteen minutes a day of public radio news so you won’t lose track of the human community. I want to say to give your excess money to the poor but other than being generous to my larger family and friends I can’t seem to manage this, so ingrained is my greed. Naturally we all fail. Just last night I watched a few minutes of a BBC program about how women as young as fifteen in England are having plastic surgery to make their vaginas more attractive. Seriously. I kept hoping that the cast of Monty Python would pop out of the woodwork but no such luck. What chance does a fiction writer have in such a world?
Mom, now deceased, told me to try to light one little candle in the woeful darkness of this world. I have a blue chair in the yard in front of my green studio where most often I have neither candle nor match. I watch the clouds move this way and that. Over the top of my wife’s garden, which has a high fence for protection from deer and elk, I see the Absaroka Range of mountains, part of the cordillera of the Rocky Mountains, that start up in Canada and descend to our winter home on the Mexican border. When I sit there every day, even in the rain and wind, I dwindle into absolute humility at the world’s disarray. Yes indeed we are suffocating under three feet of spin-dry lint mixed with goose shit. However after looking at the gardens and the mountains for a while, the birds flying left and right, up and down, I think of the ancient Lakota saying, “Take courage, the earth is all that lasts.”
For morale reasons it behooves us to live vividly. While I was having a little lunch of breaded pork steak, potatoes, green beans, and tomatoes, also some scallions and tiny carrots dipped in aioli, I remembered that on his deathbed Unamuno cried out not for more light but for more warmth. People should try freshly picked potatoes, a pleasure of a different order. Today we’re having fresh Japanese eggplant with yogurt and mint. I was thinking momentarily of becoming a missionary of food with a semitruck containing a living diorama of a cow, a pig, chickens, a couple of lambs, and dozens of vegetables, then quickly discerned I should leave this project to the young.
Cooking vividly offers mental equilibrium. We’ve been using a lot of buffalo lately, gotten from Wild Idea in South Dakota. Poached buffalo tongue with garden beets and salsa verde, altered from a recipe by Fergus Henderson (a brilliant man), was splendid, and so were buffalo ribs cooked slowly Chinese style. Having once watched in Nebraska a battle of two buffalo bulls weighing a ton apiece, I find it impossible to imagine how the Lakota hunted them with bows and arrows off horseback.
Yes, heat is more immediately valuable than light. I’ve been cooking largish pork shoulders off to the side of direct coals for five hours. You make a marinade invented by J. S. Brown of Tallahassee, Florida, composed of a quart of apple juice, lots of garlic, a handful of black pepper, a bottle of Frank’s Louisiana Hot Sauce, and three-quarters of a pint of cider vinegar. Don’t worry, you soak the meat overnight, you don’t drink the marinade. With long cooking the pork, an immense gift of the gods, becomes soft and tender, and you slice it onto toasted onion buns, with a thick slice of onion and your own favorite swabbing sauce. I recently read that two men who have reached a hundred years both attributed it to daily onion sandwiches. Not wanting to live that long I’m backing away from this idea.
I owned Clifford Wright’s Some Like It Hot for years, but only lately became attentive to this compendium of peppery recipes that is sure to become one of my bibles. I’m planning to do rabbit in adobo sauce to prepare my loins for next week’s trip to Paris. When I return, to restore myself, I’ll try Wright’s Peruvian pork roast, which contains a full cup of cayenne in its thick marinade paste. Yes, a cup! This should raise my brain temperature to a fervent level.
In Blaise Cendrars’s Panama there is an intriguing line: “Like the god Tangaloa who was bottom fishing and pulled the earth up out of the waters.” Wouldn’t it be nice to think so?
Meanwhile, I offer a small recent poem that helped me temporarily counter the expanding borders of the ineffable.
Broom
To remember that you’re alive
visit the cemetery of your father
at noon after you’ve made love
and are still wrapped in a mammalian
odor that you are forced to cherish.
Under each stone is someone’s inevitable
surprise, the unexpected death
of their biology that struggled hard as it must.
Now go home without looking back
at the fading cemetery, enough is enough,
but stop on the way to buy the best wine
you can afford and a dozen stiff brooms.
Have a few swallows then throw the furniture
out the window and then begin sweeping.
Sweep until you’ve swept the walls
bare of paint and at your feet sweep
the floor until it disappears. Finish the wine
in this field of air, go back to the cemetery
in the dark and weave through the stones
a slow dance of your name visible only to birds.