Place Journals, 2-4

Entry 2, 8 February 2011

Flour, yeast, skin heat;
patient things, living & not,
that touch, bind, & grow.

One key place for me, both physically and mentally, is at the Village Baker. I suppose the mental aspect includes the place I go when I handle ingredient, dough, and bread that includes handling it in my own kitchen. Though cooking holds its own grace, creativity, and spirit, baking is a collaborative act. It is collaboration between oneself and yeast, the flour with the humidity or aridity, the heat of the oven with the sugars in the dough that brown as they bake. Food – growing ingredients, handling them, creating food, sharing and dining – holds so much spirit for me, so much of the reality of community and the manifestations of place.

Douglas Adams tells a joke in one of the Hitch-hiker's Guide “trilogy” novels. He describes in some detail the notion of gravity and the mechanics of the universe and that, with the proper calculations and scientific instruments, one could describe all the bodies in the universe with a single slice of fairy cake appropriately monitored. One of his characters is subsequently strapped into a machine to understand the universe, based off of a piece of fairy cake, and the oddball Zaphod learns, not to any great surprise, that the universe exists for him. He releases himself from the jaw-dropping immensity of the universe that machine portrays, greets his shocked and scientifically-minded captor, and eats the fairy cake, explaining that the universe exists just for him.

I fail at articulating Adams's particular wit and good humor, but I love the notion of a piece of cake explaining everything in the universe. Especially because, on certain days and with certain other conditions, that piece of cake is the perfect explanation of the universe. It is only when our understanding of food is immensely impoverished do we think of it as simple. The experiences we have with food are historical, memory-filled, place-based, illustrative, and moving. Smells return us to our mothers' kitchens; tastes plunge us into private worlds of mystery and discovery; and only special intimacy rivals the tactile detail and intensity with which we confront food.

Participating in the craft of food, especially the interpretive labor of baking, is so important to me because it connects us in all these ways and more. The process and the product of baking are ever-changing, organic, surprising, and satisfying. To meditate on the endeavor, one wonders exactly where the baker ends and the baked good begins; or, for that matter, the roles of the yeast and heat of the oven in their functions in producing each particular loaf. Speaking as one with great experience in baking, the dough speaks and acts differently, engaging you with its own moods and behaviors on each day. Learning to interpret and entertain dough challenges our ideas of sentience and insentience, labor and participation.

But who is patient in this communion? I don't know exactly. “Patient things, living & not” is intended to portray this delicious confusion. First, by valuing and appreciating the virtue of things, we begin to breakdown the dichotomies between subject and object, actor and the acted upon. What can we learn from the objects around us? Do they manifest virtue? Do they describe lessons? How is it that we can benefit from them unless we share something, well, spiritual?

This interrogation extends with the third line, “that touch, bind, & grow.” The bonds between the dough, this dynamic and collaborative food, and the surroundings – the bakery, oven, table, pan, ourselves – are sticky in more ways than one. Sometimes we like to “sanitize” cooking through instruments, tools, and appliances; we make the food appear clean despite its messy history. The manual to my electric mixer has a spotless red appliance, whisk-like blade attached, and a bowl full of what is likely brown frosting without a hint crawling up the edge or sitting on the lip; but everything about the image suggests a lack of mess, polish, and serenity. Cooking is not serene! Nor ought it be. Cooking is about combinations, amalgamations, transformations; biology, chemistry, and spirit!

What is growing, I wonder, and what arises therefrom? What exactly is bound together? I know with my fingers and eyes and nose what is touching, but the magic of it is in the unknown. Gluten forms in the molecules of the flour, but require the water; the yeast feeds on sugars and produces carbon dioxide bubbles, but they have also been awakened from dormancy. Being raised Catholic, I was challenged and eventually discarded the notion of transubstantiation. Now, though, I identify as a witness of the miracle. The only problem is I see it everywhere.

~~~

Entry 3, 9 February 2011

I
My circulation
and inhalation weave flesh
into keen cold air.

On my bike, especially in the cold chill of pre-dawn morning, I breathe deeply of the thin, sharp air. It cuts and soothes and bites and warms. My muscles heat up under their layers, even my hands in their cozy, wind-breaking gloves, and I can push the heat to where I want it to go. Sometimes, at least. My eyes tear up as they become irritated by the aridity, my throat tingles with the hint of a cough, and my lungs and diaphragm quake when the occasional hack arises. My body is, in all of these responses and interpretations, in conversation with the environment; even down to my blood.

“Weave flesh / into keen cold air” bares the weight of this thought. I am stuck in this idea of coming to know a place, both body and spirit. If anything, our bodies are the first to engage with the project. A subject raised in class – during the guided imagining exercise, I believe – was the replacement of atoms and cells in our bodies over rather brief periods of time. I also think of Pollan's reinterpretation of “corn people” in The Omnivore's Dilemma; our bodies reflect the molecules and the construction of the food we consume, and we ought to take this to heart if we want to be part of a more sustainable, rooted culture. Most of us are mostly constructed from corn carbon, composed of carbon molecules taken in from the abundant corn-based products we consume.

I want to consider a different way in which we are our inputs. In our air is nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, water molecules, and various other compounds in small percentages. When we inhale, we take all of this in and the otherworldly, inverted forest of our lungs and their alveoli transform that gas into little baskets, carried by our red blood cells, all over our body. The membrane and mechanisms are semi-porous, selecting only what it recognizes or the molecules that confound the system; that is, most of the bad stuff stays out, but some of it gets in. When all goes well, our circulation reflects that positivity. If the air is appropriately dense or our lungs are efficiently adapted, then the thrum of the blood in our bodies is calm and persistent. When the situation changes, everything happens faster and less certainly. Lactic acid and carbon dioxide builds up in our blood vessels and tissues, dust and pollen and mucus accumulate in our lungs and esophagus, and our blood is less capable of moving the life-giving oxygen throughout our body.

The whole process is an act of replacement, consumption, and recovery. These are not deleterious in the same way as they sometimes are in common parlance. Rather, we are taking part in the reciprocal relationship that an ecosystem characterizes. My carbon dioxide with sunlight feeds plants and algae, just as their oxygen and sugars – also, conveniently, from them – metabolize into carbon dioxide for them. Waste equals food; or, in other terms, there is no waste, it is all food.

II
Clouds casting shadows
veil the fat, descending flakes
that sublime in light.

It snowed yesterday morning and is all gone again by now. I may have slipped on some of its icy remnants, but I think that is from the more determined precipitation of weeks before. The temperament of Flagstaff bewilders me. It fluctuates wildly. The amicable snow of yesterday morning all happened before light had crashed in on the Safeway parking lot. (It is our parking lot, too, as well as a number of other shops and services; but I think everyone identifies it with Safeway.) The snow-laden clouds themselves obscured the dawn and obfuscated the light later in the day. I realized that it had all come and gone while many Flagstaffians slept, entirely unaware.

In the bakery, I think we all felt that the day would have been a good one to stay warm and cozy in our beds. The change in the air had surprised me. It was not warm, hovering around twenty degrees I think, but a density or taste that has often eluded me here. Only later when I heard talk of snow did I realize it was moisture. So quickly after moving here from the Midwest, where air is perpetually thick with humidity and its precipitate threats, I have lost the sensitivity or maybe the awareness to such tastes and accents suspended in the air.

Or perhaps I am learning the new dialect of this place, catching the suggestions of colloquialisms and turns of phrase that specific places develop. Flagstaff, and its residents, have their own spins of language that I am learning. The language of its residents, with their tendency toward transience, is often in between or hodgepodge, touched with tempered references from all of our different origins. The language of the place, though, is especially loaded and exciting. Air changes abruptly from day to day, a morning of cloud is gone by night while the daytime sun wards off all but the most determined. I dress for both the chilliest morning and the encouraging warmth of midday when I leave work. Sometimes – more last semester than this – I would leave for work and not return again until the sun had set; a whole day spent in and between the places I work, study, converse, dine, reflect, and ride.

That is a strange thing to consider, especially with the previous haiku in mind: the places I ride. Often, we do not consider our in-between locales. Roads, sidewalks, pathways, trails, neighborhoods, lanes, corridors, and so on, those get us to where we are going. The brief splash of snow, its remnant ice, and the repercussions of each are more hindrances for the places I ride, the places many drive or walk. These are the most prone to elemental, meteorological transformations.

I use “sublime” here for its abundant meanings. In art, the sublime transcends the world, reveals divinity and our inability to understand it. The sublime awes us. In chemistry, sublimation is the transformation from solid to gas; what was solid becomes, almost miraculously, insubstantial and unbound. In each case, the sublime is about one reality juxtaposed, without clear explanation, on another. The morning became a different morning. It happened twice, even. All the while, it evaded most of us. What are we to make of that?

~~~

Entry 4, 10 February 2011

I
Winter's sun kisses
unkempt transient gardens
fertile with green dreams.

II
Glass, leaf, ceramic;
co-mingled, interwoven;
what bulb might burst forth?

Just a few weeks ago I moved into a new place. It is a house, just south of the tracks, that used to be a Mexican wedding chapel and, before that, was a workers' union building. The structure is very much its own, the landlord even more so, and it is refreshing to get out of the apartment that never quite fit.

Tim and I are captivated by having a yard. It is one big mess at the moment, full of dry and disregarded stems of grass that have bent over under now vanished snow, dropping from a few different household dogs, and the debris of parties and unthinking previous residents. I spent some of this afternoon, between reading sessions, picking up cans, shards of glass, odd bits of broken dishes, and every so often finding something interesting. I am tempted to see if Tim would drink the mysterious, unopened can of Tecate still suspended by its plastic six-pack rings.

We want to clean it up, trim the overgrowth, tidy the leavings, spread our compost, maybe dig up space for a rain garden, definitely cultivate an herb garden, and Tim has the bright idea of tiling an extended patio off of the cement pathway. Even just as month-by-month renters, we think of this place as potentially our own, not just ours.

Today Sam, who has lived here for a few months, asked how long I planned on staying; he was happy and perhaps a little relieved to hear that I wanted to stick around for a good while. The house is marked, mostly by the accumulation of odd appliances and décor, as an attractor of transience. That isn't to say transient people, but the feel of shifting, ebbing, uncertain movements. Human-oriented green spaces do not generally appreciate such shiftiness and the yard reflects that. That said, such a wide open space is a rare discovery in Flagstaff with its higher price of living and houses sitting on cozy lots. It would please me to see a more lived in locale, a cared for yard or garden.

Almost since moving to Flagstaff I have been engaged in composting. In the apartment I constructed a box from the remains of a desk I found behind Absolute Bikes. With a little chicken-wire fence and some large terra cotta pots found along the road, I became able to turn the compost between sections. The product has been rich and alchemical. My mother has laughed a good natured laugh whenever I tell her of these industrious undertakings, but I was giddy to pull out a handful of soil, still pockmarked with brown egg shells and the hearts of leafy greens one day. Now we have a place to put it, even if the cold is trying to complicate my experimentation.

If anything, the compost and the arrival here feels like a lesson in patience. A sharp eye and wise use of what little spare time I have has allowed me to make something out of what would have been nothing. Well, not nothing, but just waste to end up in a landfill or something. Instead, through the organic alchemy of warmth, life, and food I have yielded a sort of gold all my own.

Besides patience, the compost has taught me compassion. My brother and his wife tend a compost heap in Louisiana where it stays about seventy degrees just about whenever. At the reception for their wedding, we all chatted and fanned ourselves while we sat doing as little as possible and sweat. I imagine that their compost teaches them generosity, magnanimity with its ease at digestion all they pile on. Out here in the chilly heights, one has to dig and feel and smell, rinse and turn and feed; I sense an Other in there, listening and speaking in calm whispers what it appreciates, what it needs, and what it has to give to me.

I read outside most of the day. It was cool, but the sun shines beautifully on the yard. The light is rich and delicious, an appropriate compliment to Barbara Kingsolver and Gary Snyder. (Thoreau had to wait a while.) The sun was rich and delicious, lazing all through the afternoon. The wind rustling with a sharp chill. Today has been my day off.