Read books, repeat quotations

15 July – Sneakily plotting, most likely I kidded no one so much as me. I assumed that anything I wrote was incomprehensible, written plumbing depths of unfathomability and bewilderment, written to understand myself a little. One part of my gauzy sneakiness, hidden from me (perhaps transparent to others), was that I was taking a wonky, tremulous path, a free-form “let’s see where it takes us” escapade, embracing the spontaneous, hugging chance, while all the while I was holding tight to a comforting narrative.

Unimaginative, the oldest story in the book, my plot was – or now strikes me as – a cliche. I should not be surprised. My title is a cliche: my thoughts were corralled, these chapters coalesced around a cliche: the unpalatable truth. This cliche gave me if not wings, then nimble fingers to cook and write again, digits that feel far removed from a conscious brain, and which performed a sly sleight of hand that fooled and distracted me whilst a curious convalescence was woven.

For years I did not write, and fear – of cliche – was one reason why. Literary types wage war on cliches. Stamp them dead. My trepidation seems distant now; not fearless, sure, but hopeful that we can breathe life into cliches – electrify and appropriate them, live by them anew.

Another silly excuse not to write: the fear of not being understood, or worse being understood. It is no time now, however, to lumber myself with what anyone might think. It is too late to stop trying to be honest, or to start self-censoring. No point second guessing the tastes of others. I tried to be clear to be clear to myself, to cut out showy layers and unnecessary ambiguity – but who is to say what is not needed? Just as you can’t tickle yourself, who when writing is there to say, ‘OK, we get the hint’?

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” EM Forster. How do I know what I like until I cook, taste, write – or maybe until I eat with another? And how was I to know that I was plotting until faced with a twist not in my script? Nothing if not a taste test, this exploration must make a turn. Do I have the stomach for throwing away the script? In ripping up the plot, as fragments land, will I be able to find it pleasing, let confetti settle for a while without discerning shape or purpose, without imposing structure?

****

In a book dedicated to ingredients the author says, seemingly with a straight face, “Never put anything into your mouth that does not bite back.” Not how I would phrase it, but yes, take no prisoners with flavour, you will only be short changed. Each raid of the pantry should capture gratification, satisfaction, fullness. No middling average please. Short intense espressos; long, milky lattes. Refined, best baguettes. Coarse earthy, wholemeal, naturally. Just no supermarket pap. The unarguable, indefatigable superiority of vitality and personality, give me flavours that fight back, which provide resistance to roll with.

In each encounter – with food, as much as we may wish to begin afresh, in the very process of learning from our mistakes, we recalibrate and overshoot. The ineluctable tendency to fight the last battle, play by dated rules.

Burn a dish once and next time caution will stay the hand. Serve up something underdone and a gadarene stampede of enthusiasm will inevitably result. Champagne corks will arc. No recipe book apprehends the unconscious kitchen manoeuvres we find ourselves performing: filling a level teaspoon with ‘take it slow’; or a ladleful of unwitting ‘standoffishness’, which can be replaced, if not available, with a few drops of ‘hard to get’; a slight shrug of ‘take it or leave it’; or otherwise pouring for the most generous measure of ‘overwhelm too soon’; a deluge of spontaneity; or the carefully weighted but unmistakable ‘big gesture’ (all the while not really having the faintest idea how any of this will be received. Maybe the waiter confused the orders?). The wise head chef may call a halt, checking expectations from running away, formulate wary tactics and strategy, but the amateur cook’s stomach says, “What that hell, this is food, follow your nose. Do what feels reckless but right.”

Oh to be a lucky general. The kitchen clock, the oven thermometer, all technology can be relied on only up to a point, the point at which intuition accrued from experience must take over, the hunches which teach us to know not to disturb an omelette frothing in butter until it has settled down, or to know when to stop not to over-whisk meringues and bludgeon the lightness and frivolity out of them.

No matter. However kitchen-weary, I will stand the heat. There is no getting out. Tastes re-awoken; rouxfully sensing though that some easy lessons are never to be learned. The cliches just don’t stick, fail to become hardwired or grove my thoughts. For example, that thing people say about eggs and a basket. I can never take it in. (The cost being that I will never be that accomplished, relaxed cook with the insurance policy such an actuarial attitude buys. The faint queasy sense of being rashly over-exposed I lay off, reduce my emotional liability, by taking pleasure – or at least some sort of sustenance it seems – from messy breaks.) Or something about the way biscuits fragment. Or seas of bounteous fish, conjured as consolation and inspiration. Cod philosophising, I don’t get it; not to worry, there are plenty more cliches as we will see.

No longer a cadet, though quick to faint long after passing out, recent self-report cards record that I have got a little better at marshalling the troops. Time has told me to spot a rare, rare find. Ingredients which shine without ornamentation. Not to ask for more. To sidestep the callow error of warping an ingredient into what you think it should be, rather than loving for what it is. For all the crushing impulse to smoother with affection, don’t. Don’t force, don’t meddle, don’t rush; handle with respect and, whatever you do, don’t try and change.

****

“A natural-born communicator.” My favourite phrase employed by PR companies when they take new staff onto their books. A phrase that does a lot of work, but clients are presumed to suppose that it is reserved for the coming of a superstar: the real experts in expression, those with a unique gift (which will now, all hail, be put to the service of corporate good.) We can only aspire to be a “natural-born communicator”, except that, with our ums and ahs, we all are. Whosoever writes, or rather regurgitates, that phrase should be sent back to nursery – to just try and stop any child from communicating.

****

Language has changed the landscape of the brain, we think, annexing cerebral areas once used for movement and sensation. Those regions are rich in connections for processing sensory stimuli. Any attempt to translate sensory pleasure into words will, however, only ever be an uncouth guess. Our thoughts and experiences of flavour are broader, and more lithe, than language. Language, carrying us across, but at best an approximation, inadequate for all that remains, and has to remain, implicit and ambiguous.

Gnawing at our thoughts. Language, steeped in metaphors of taste yet with every food-related word seemingly lending itself to an easy borrowing, describing and conveying flavour sensations is both too facile and impossible. (How else to describe pea soup except pea green? What else could a latte be but milky? We all get our just desserts. In a sense.) Words fail us. We speak of a meal which is unspeakably delicious. Some things just are. When smitten, what to say but “I think this wonderful”?

And then, when things don’t work, when we fail to adequately put something into words, or when words fail us (blame the words, I say), what else can we do now except redouble our attempts to express ourselves – keep on writing, keep on cooking? Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Becket. He knows there’s no success like failure (and that failure’s a success, after all). That is all that a hopeful romantic no less can do.

Beating a retreat to sheltered taciturn terrain, leaving the battle to be alone and bite my tongue, or return to my original garrison position with its narrow perspective that a sense of taste, or sense of self, can be developed in a cork-lined room, unmediated. None of that is an option.

Turn, turn, turn. In sticky situations I turn to words, knowing keenly that words are only part of the story. That which we call crème anglaise we would call a custard by another name. Perhaps I should buy flowers. People carry roses, use emoticons. An emoticon: a rose with no thorn, just a face with no history or character. As I am advancing cliche, perhaps I should come to the defence of emoticons too, though infantilising, possessing little subtlety, a quick, easy, dirty route to expression, but communication all the same, providing I imagine a dopamine hit, playing on the same neural networks of motivation and reward which we share with honey bees… I can convince myself. But no, for the imprecision of feeling it has to be language, not 2D faces. I’ll embark yet again on yet another “raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment”.

*******

Cooking. The pure plain vanilla essence of “let’s see how things turn out”. Relax. I mean it is only food. Clod-hopingly smash glasses, that’s fine; and there’s always a takeaway should we ashen-face the homemade pizza. The urge to gallop off into the sunset, while I know that after the sunset comes dusk; after the feast comes the washing up; and remember that my happiest New Year memory is not a meal, or a kiss, but raucously doing the washing up to The Strokes in the early hours.

****

Tolstoy compelled his future wife Sofia to read his diaries before they married. She was 18, unprepared and understandably distraught by his non-fiction, his biography of whoring, venereal disease, monumental gambling, and most shocking of all, it is said, an affair with a peasant. In short, he was saying, “I’m no picnic”.

Despicable, patriarchal, getting his excuses in first (and he would not have been happy we can safely presume if their roles were to have been reversed). I find it impossible, however, not to have a sneaky regard for Tolstoy’s compulsive sharing. An unholy patron saint for deluded souls who have faith in the power their words to convince, those who are thrilled by the possibility they might be read and understood by another, who entertain the illicit idea that having their guarded private thoughts publicly paraded could be a good thing, who are consumed by the strange, unknowable possibilities that are uncorked when we open up, when we let others in. Tolstoy wanted, I imagine, for there to be as little pretending and misunderstanding as possible and we can all understand that desire. He didn’t want to be saying anon, “I couldn’t believe after all these years, you didn’t know me better than that.” Better that she knows from the first supper that I sometimes eat with my fingers, rather than three years later being scolded for spurning the cutlery.

The untruth, of course, is that total frankness is possible, or that it is a silver bullet cutting through all the uncertainty. As Maupassant said, realists are just the best liars. We don’t read anything as literal truth, even, especially, private diaries. The author of his own story of his life, the inescapable choices what to include, what to emphasise however obliquely, what to intersperse, how we punctuate.

As such, I have come up with a different ‘no picnic’ policy. When I say “I’m no picnic” I mean “I am: no picnic?”. I inevitably respond to the suggestion there will be no picnic with incredulity. I can only say ‘yes’, start spreading the tablecloth.

***

What to cook? Pastry with a crust that is short and sweet, loaded with butter?

Or steak tartare?

Read books, repeat quotations. Mangle, mistranslate, misappropriate quotations. Steak tartare. Propounded by French intellectuals as a “magical spell against the romantic association between sensitiveness and soppiness”. Good luck I say to their striving for sensitivity without the soppiness. Slice and dice and mince your minds all you like; mine I know not, but know it well enough to know it not to be sectile.

No, I shan’t force it. Shan’t shove a meal into this chapter. I have been eating well, and occasionally it is OK to relax, to not cook. I stopped cooking before but that was forced, in the way that any involuntary loss of pleasure is forced. This is a choice, armed as I am with a new learned rule of engagement, that a sense of taste can be as much about saying ‘I don’t like’, or ‘I choose not to’, as much as ‘I like’, ‘I choose’. Besides, a sense of taste is broader, and more supple, than the encounter with flavour alone. From the first sentence, what I wondered would trying to write do to my taste for words? Trying to put flavour into words would challenge my long-held, vexing sense that while words are one thing I know, sometimes I don’t know if I know words at all. I read but do I truly taste? I read but do I really savour and enjoy?

A morning then of licentious reading (when I should have been in the library. Loose morals, indeed.) The book I read, I half read once before. A book about all the madness in our souls. About betrayal and torment and scrupulosity. A book that is highly crafted but also feels unglazed, real.

The last time – the first time – that I settled down with it was on a mountain in Kazakhstan, cut off by the snow in a Soviet ski resort. Alone. There for work, I had sloped off to ski. The purposed of the trip was ostensibly to write an annual report for a Kazakh real estate and oil services company. A different type of writing, but which also speaks of scripting a narrative, crafting key messages.

The book, a classic, I had been chided for not having read. I tried to read for illumination, not pleasure, only to be stupefied. It broke me; the crack on the spine records that I only got part of the way through.

Two and a half years later, I gobble it up. It makes sense. Careening through the chapters, reading it is a quavering, rapturous experience, even richer the sensation of re-reading. Things come back and return. Every word feels in its place; forgotten, I couldn’t recite it of course, but the recognisable cadences and characters and the familiar dramatic narrative unfurling. Stepping in footprints, noting thumb print smudges, pencil marks. (All my marginalia comes back to me with shades of mediocrity). Knowing the route, I hurtle down. Unshackled. A second run after being frozen, stationary on a ski lift which has hauled me steadily up. Snapping, pinging back to life. Have my tastes have changed? Is that why I am now receptive – or can it be that I enjoy because I now sense that I have a taste?

For the first time I understand what is meant by that teacherly instruction to ‘read with a purpose’. Our purpose can be as idiosyncratic as our tastes are crazy. Read with a purpose, however catawampus, write with a plot, however higgledy piggledy, and cook … well, the appeal perhaps is the that purpose is always clear: eat well.

With words, I am not cut out for clinical filleting, but I do know a hook that will snare my attention. “Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?” says the tragic heroine.

*****

My plot sits shredded on the compost. Perhaps fertile ground yet, maybe breeding a little life out of dead cliches, stirring dull phrases. The narrative can decompose while I deconstruct or de gustibus or whatever it is I do. The plot can take a tenebrous, dank hibernation in July, or be surprised a shower of summer rain, for who knows what nutrient-rich tubers or lilacs or some flowers may burgeon, which tastes may bud.