I try to eat lean--salads, fruits, and a variety of lean meats with a bit of cottage cheese and a few other items to provide those ephemeral nutrients we often overlook. Doing this requires me to cook pretty much every meal or on occasion eat lunch at the University cafeteria, which is actually well suited to my needs. This day, as I was wedging cherry tomatoes next to leaves of Romaine, green peppers, mushrooms and a scattering of yellowized cheese, I was struck by the mundanity rooted beneath the chaos. Students pass through lunch, as do most of us, in a frantic plate-to-gullet procession. And putting aside the gorging and, frankly, nauseating table manners, they confront lunch as little more than a gnat flitting about their eyes. Get it out of the way and move on. While this youthful gluttony is in part developmental, they simply need a lot of fuel, it suggests how few have been raised to appreciate the pause, that moment of reflection, lunchtime offers, and how this lack of interest is reflected in the larger culture. Students have classes at noon, adults have working lunches, and everyone moves rapidly toward dinner and death.
Those cultures that appreciate the time lunch provides are well rehearsed. The Spanish and large swaths of Latin America have the siesta, the East Indians take long lunch breaks even though they may work all day, the French drink wine and enjoy cafe society, an older American enjoyed the martini over a plate of corned beef and sauerkraut. What seems obvious now, as I make my circuit around the salad bar following the train of mastication, is that a person or culture that doesn't appreciate lunch, doesn't appreciate the morning, and the experiences that emerge from the ebb and flow of the day.
When I was in Vienna, in which the cafe is an institution, I noticed not only that people took long lunches, as this is the main meal of the day, but also talked to each other. This point may seem obvious: I see people, one might say, talking at lunch all the time; however, along the Ringstrasse a different tenor in this conversation seemed to prevail. Reminiscent of stories about Brahms’s, Beethoven’s, Mozart’s, or Hofmannsthal’s mid-day declamations, people engaged each other, using this time as an opportunity to explore ideas, linking the efforts of the morning to the reflection of the evening. Over the last year, due to myriad, I'd forgotten the potential of this time to help me find equilibrium, as I reflect not only on my work but also on what makes that work and my life meaningful.
To do this, however, we need to retire with a thought and rise early with the intent to think. Ask a friend or student or whoever to describe the sunrise and she might say, "I couldn't see it I was driving to work," or "I couldn't see it I was driving home from work," or "I didn't realize the sun rose. Isn't it always up there?" Of course, when you see the morning, you realize why so many cultures revered it. A feeling of comfort and calm emerges from the aesthetic as well as the genetic response to its promise of beginnings. Of course, reams of self-help books and new-age treatises expound on this idea, and for the most part their pronouncements range from humorous to absurd. For example, one such book mewls that the “morning uplifts the soul to the potential of the day.” Of course any day has potential to be good only in the abstract. I could meditate into utter inaction and contemplate the cosmos in complete disregard of where my next foot might fall. Yet, as with all things, poetry provides an insight where conscious or even conscientious insight ends.
For some the morning colors the fog of memory, bringing to these moments an air of redemption, a breath we might take to diminish fear and see the day as we do a wide stretch of calm water. As we look over it, our perception is pulled toward that distant shore, a horizon that suggests a transition, perhaps a revision, among forms: earth diffusing into sky as that moment of exhalation frames the angle of introspection. Such an angle is suggested in the opening stanza of Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.”
Complacencies of the peignoir, and lateCoffee and oranges in a sunny chair,And the green freedom of a cockatooUpon a rug mingle to dissipateThe holy hush of ancient sacrifice. (1-5)
A still life, these objects frame an absence that dissipates the divine, which in scattering infiltrates each object with a whisper of presence, a presence that recalls the gnostic concept of a divine spark. In that whisper resides knowledge, a knowledge that emerges for us in the construction of meaning. In complacencies of the peignoir and the lateness of the coffee, for instance, is a reluctance to engage in the ritual of Sunday, certainly, but also the expectations of the day itself. In this resistance, both complacent and late, we are drawn into a moment of introspection, a moment similar to that of gazing over water that begs us to ask, to ponder, to mine existence for meaning and invest this meaning in the objects around us. Manifesting meaning into the world is the function of introspection, and the action we witness in Stevens’s poem. These objects are not merely present; they suggest in their relationship, their “angle of repose” in Wallace Stegner’s words, fragments of meaning around which consciousness, a being in place, eddies. Our understanding of our life emerges as we draw this fragments into coherence as either a thought or maybe something more structured, such as a narrative.
In Boston, I noticed this angle of introspection in the robe of the woman I was with as she draped it over the dais on her way to the shower. In the folds of the fabric and bend of the loosened belt, I began to outline a structure of feeling that defined the emotional composition of the room. The perspective emerged in a drawing I completed while she showered. In retrospect, this image defines loss, but had the love I felt for her been reciprocated, the image would no doubt suggest a link between us, a moment when emotion previously ephemerally became manifest in the movement of lines and the weight of values, gestures that articulate in the reification of an instance of sincere feeling. The dissonance between what I felt as I completed this drawing, which I did before she came out of the bathroom, and that conveyed in a poem I wrote in response to it a few months later reveals that irony that defines heartbreak.
It’s done like this, quickly,lines becoming shapesand hatching hinting at shadows—The dissonance--however I might describe its central irony: heartbreak, sadness, loss—is the meaning encompassed by juxtaposing these two texts. Lunch is the time, the moment of introspection, that allows me to confront this meaning and make it part of my life, as painful as that is to do.
a breath taken and held to shape the word from the chill off the street,or to trace the curve of the beltthat winds across the robe and hangs,falling to quiet
the exhale that is lusty in line workfaint in crosshatch, loosein a touch thatmistook the impossible for the possible.
And now, holding the doggy bag, I stumble wearier toward dinner.
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