Dear Tamar:
Cooking brings me peace. I love to feed people, to try new ingredients, to honor my cravings, to drop treats off on my friends doorsteps. (Oh, and did I mention I cook professionally?) But lately I am finding myself paralyzed in the kitchen: how can you keep cooking in a world where people continue to starve?
-Lost in the Sauce
Dear Lost in the Sauce:
I started this reply to you several times. Each attempt began with my recounting an instance of my own despair.
I’ve decided not to recount my despair. The question you’re asking is asked by artist after artist, after disasters and genocides; it’s asked by theologians and everyday thinkers, and, quite often—though in different terms—by children. It’s a question many of us ask at some point, if not always as precisely as you have. How can I pursue pleasure in the presence of so much pain? Or: How can I delight, knowing what I know? (I know “delight” can have two vectors—to feel, and to foster a feeling. I mean both.)
I’ve collected examples of other people contemplating some version of the question, and offering reply. I’m going to give you their words before I try my own.
First is the below, by Bertolt Brecht. It’s a poem which has a way of rising up like sea foam when a wave of horror pounds our collective shores.
Motto by Bertolt Brecht, translated by John Willett
In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
There’s much sadness in that poem. There is the assumption of eclipse—in dark times, what is there to occupy the mind but darkness? But the poem contains something else: Brecht’s suggestion that even a mind occupied by darkness can make song. it. He is, of course, correct. Evidence abounds. See: Field Hollers. See: The Blues.
Here is a remarkable poem by Mahmoud Darwish, which touches down repeatedly on something similar.
In Her Absence I Created Her Image by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Fady Joudah
In her absence I created her image: out of the earthly
the hidden heavenly commences. I am here weighing
the expanse with the Jahili odes ... and absence
is the guide, it is the guide. For each rhyme a tent
is pitched. And for each thing blowing in the wind
a rhyme. Absence teaches me its lesson: If it weren’t
for the mirage you wouldn’t have been steadfast...
Then in the emptiness, I disassembled a letter from one
of the ancient alphabets, and I leaned on absence. So who am I
after the visitation? A bird, or a passerby amid the symbols
and the memory vendors? As if I were an antique piece,
as if I were a ghost sneaking in from Yabous, telling myself:
Let’s go to the seven hills. Then I placed
my mask on a stone, and walked as the sleepless
walk, led by my dream. And from one moon
to another I leapt. There is enough of unconsciousness
to liberate things from their history. And there
is enough of history to liberate unconsciousness
from its ascension. Take me to our early
years—my first girlfriend says. Leave
the windows open for the house sparrow to enter
your dream—I say...then I awaken, and no city is in
the city. No “here” except “there.” And no there
but here. If it weren’t for the mirage
I wouldn’t have walked to the seven hills ...
if it weren’t for the mirage!
I offer you both because they both answer you. One acknowledges darkness and reassures its interlocutor that even when the subject is pain, song persists. The other insists that the absence of a place, a dream, a land, a love is still the place, the dream, the land, the love—that the soil of the mind is fertile enough to shape any substance, even air, to its imagining.
Here is one more response, again in the words of another, who contemplated a different, but adjacent, version of the question. This is C. S. Lewis, from On Living in an Atomic Age (recently quoted in the New Yorker):
If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.
Dear cook, I will now try, myself: I believe that living with the knowledge of hardship is the wellspring of mercy. If you cooked before in ignorance of people starving, cook now in awareness of it. If the awareness changes the peace you find in cooking, allow it to. Be clear that it isn’t cooking to which the change inheres, but injustice. Do not give up what you love. That is despair. It is your duty to keep singing. And if darkness or absence or a new awareness arises in you, as you sing, or as you cook, invite it in. It may be the ingredient your sauce demands.
Tomorrow, March 22, I’ll be answering food questions LIVE on WAMC! Here are a few ways to ask me a question on the radio:
Call in during the show from 2-3 p.m. at 1 (800) 348-2551
Email voxpop@wamc.org during the show
Tweet @WAMCVoxPop
You can subscribe to the podcast here: iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher.
your writing is my favorite writing! reading the everlasting meal for the second time, and it’s even better than the first. xo
I really enjoyed your post and shared it already. I was LOOKING and searching and found a place to linger in.