The CuisinArt

From Adam

–

Pitiable destination, never to be reached
A weak stream drying
Droughts of love and verve, parched for a crest that would replenish strong rivers,
Flowing lush beneath a permeable blue
No solace, but the desert
Dried tears, salt and not much more

Weak streams creep
Creep toward a sea of dust
Stream to dust, dust to dust
Nothing here in the delta
Desolate, easily traipsed

I’ve come far in search of rivers, to the horizon’s end
Prayed they be wide and rolling; spare me weak streams

Abandon it, abandon the attempt
Before the arrival at the weak stream’s delta

Nay, I’ve pressed on in misery

An oppressive trail
Full of old dogmas and forbidden gratifications

The straight and narrow, like an arrow to the horizon
Black as bold typeface in a blurry, smeary green-gray jungle
Flagellated in contrition, I mush forth with eyes on the line
Limping gait favoring to the left, to the right
Footfalls lead, follow
My uncomfortable, uncontrollable arousal into brambles
In search of always sweeter fruit

Though I walk the line
I veer subconsciously,
In search of sweeter fruit, delectable indulgences
And sap on the trees
Scarred, mute, remorseful,
I trek haphazardly from the darkness,
Back to black as boldface

Guiding stars lay hidden
Cotton web clouds stick to my thoughts, my memories
Clouding my reason, chastity
Diffusing the black bold straight-and-narrow

Yet somewhere an alabaster moon, partially concealed
Hovers like peering over shoulder,
Threatening to expose the fraud, painstakingly spun
A looming apprehension and
A persistent, recurring erection at the wrong time

Amidst the uncertainty, the doubt, the lack of
A light to follow through the night,
There remains a steadfast guilt
Guilt of the circular penitent, succumb to his egression’s transgressions

A beacon, pulsing, warm, stands like a monolith deep in the smeary jungle
And I veer into brambles
I bow to my own obelisk in the wrong place, always at the wrong time
Huddled in the shadow of its respite, I am lost to the horizon and old typeface
I am tempted by something that stings to spite such things
Overcome by fructose and bramble berries
Red as sin in the smeary gray-green

Sullen, bedraggled, utterly sober, wading once more back from brambles
Again, still again, I follow footfalls
Those deep, weary drums that sound the dirge

I fail to grasp: no sweeter fruit but straight lines black and bold
Sullen, steeped in the languor of misdeeds and paths too often taken,
I tread the line
To the delta
Slightly off kilter, dead and closer to dead.

from Adam

–

There were three of us in a tree.  Much of our time out in the savannah was spent in this tree.  Most often, the savannah was plain and empty or dotted with harmless herbivores.  Occasionally there was the pride of lions, however.  One male and three or four females.  We would keep our distance and remain in the tree when they prowled.  One time as I recall, I was down foraging the savannah when I noticed the pride, absent its patriarch, back and to the left.  Warily I watched them as I moved to the tree.  I knew that if I took my eyes off them for more than a moment, they would begin to stalk and I would be pounced.  My fear impelled me a run and I noticed one of the females beginning to lurk low and towards me.

I made the tree.  My companions and I surveyed the approaching pride with great apprehension.  Of course they could scale trees, better than we in fact.  Our only hope was that we were foreigners here on the savannah and our strange appearance would deter them from feeling we were easy prey, as with the sharks.

Their final approach and arrival.  Three or four female lionesses sit eyeing us in our dendriform refuge.  All parties are aware of the futility of our position; they could reach us with a feline’s leap, no need for scaling.  We produce a cacophony of primal hoots and hollers in the hopes of frightening them.  To no avail.  In derision, they echo and amplify our calls.  Sensing an impending massacre, I try to reason with them.  “If you kill us, they will kill you.  They will kill all of you.”

The matriarch alone shows any concern for my remark. They all understand what I have said.  There is always a demand for retribution among those that feel it is in them to mete out justice.  Disregard the messiness of morality.  Punish the perpetrators and their kin.  Atrocities will not be suffered in grief alone, but in vengeance. The matriarch tempers her excitement for an anthropic feast.  The others remain eager.

“They will kill all of you.  What good would that do you?  Needless bloodshed.”

They are not convinced.  The desire to take flight, but nowhere to fly.

“We are your advocates.”  A half-formed notion.  Half bargain, half principle.  “There are so many of them that would let you pass, but we are your advocates.”

They know it is true.  Here a victory, but inevitably total defeat.  Before in the long before a victory, an act of survival without reprisal, but now things had changed.  The great assent had reversed much of the law.  Now was a time for diplomacy, even for those who once reigned absolutist kings and queens.  They relent in their siege.  We are their advocates, frightened in a tree.

New From Adam Marc. I’ve added no photos to this one, for obvious reasons…
–
I have no intentions of following the linear model. No intentions of hanging a line with dazzling ornaments. There is no need. It is ever so cumbersome.

How long can an echo resonate before it is too faint to be heard? How far away can a home linger on the horizon before it is lost in an abyss of curvilinear uniformity? How long can we walk forward before we forget what’s behind us and what’s ahead?

I saw a photograph that chilled me. A family stood smiling some time decades ago. A homely family if ever I saw one. Four or five women in the front row, two men in the back. All smiling. Two of the women and the two men stood erect, proud in their middle-aged youth. The other women, all but one, bore the signs of a life of toil. Homely older women, but seasoned. Their ankles creased, their feet bound by their tight old black shoes. Their frocks loose fitting, flimsy linens doubtless many years old, also with the look of hard labor that begs respect from those who understand.

All smiling. A tradition, but something genuine there. They looked very much the family, very much the rural family, salt of the earth. Their smiles, the hardness of the old women and the pride in the youngers’ posture, all spoke of triumph. Triumph over hardships. An unending battle, still ongoing, but overcome. Perhaps their solidarity the source of the victory, perhaps their God. Yet the triumph plain as their appearance, simple yet durable.

Chilling, their deaths. Some decades ago. Already at least middle-aged. A reasonable presumption. Where are the remains? Not worth a photograph, too chilling, too mortifying. Gone their smiles. Gone their solidarity. What of their God? What of the triumph? The hardships overcome, the costs born, to what end and who will hear their legacy and who will carry their torch? All disintegrated. Scattered beyond recognition. Something lost, antiquated, frozen.

How unthinkable it would be to consider who might ponder your lifeless simulacrums after you have ceased to smile, after those that you huddled with to keep warm have cooled over. In what sands lay buried the remnants of Ozymandias?

Their lives, before the photograph, after the photograph, preoccupied with dreams, plans, struggles, life. All old and outdated, all expired. The black and white tells it all, so too the horror of the smiles.

The other, neither erect nor worn. A disabled. A woman disabled. Her face and limbs contorted by a haunted mind. Also smiling. Her right arm interlocked with one of the other women’s. An equal in love. Cherished, protected, a source of solidarity and triumph through hardship. A loved and a lover. Happy, if any of them were. She too taken by some decades. A testament to resilience, altruism, compassion, but undeniably of futility and fragility also.

Chilling, the future. Their future, our past. Our future, another their’s past. Look at a photograph behind glass and see a strange family passed. Look at the backlight, the reflection and see the familiar darkened face and glinting gaze of the past approaching. Youth, pride, triumph, struggles, toil, dreams, all to be washed away and disintegrated. Forget judgment and condemnation, who will keep you together? How long can you huddle for warmth before the embers die out? Good or bad, virtuous or vicious to be but a mortal?

The photograph family, all the appearances of happiness, yet they are gone. Is happiness a thing to be enjoyed only in the smallest temporal quantities, a transience more protean and ephemeral than a lifetime, itself soon to end? Photographs raise questions even as smiles offer answers. Carpe diem. Live for the moment. Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today. Don’t forget to stop and smell the roses. All sage, all hollow. Nothing, no toil, no huddling, no God to shield me, you, us from the curse of loneliness, the scourge of quietus. Damn the questions. Damn the answers if they are as I suspect. Is this the comeuppance of sentience, the bittersweet fruit of the Tree of Knowledge? Cogito ergo sum. Mort.

A photograph chilled me to despair and cast me into desolation. It was of a family, a homely family. But all photographs bear this ghost, this specter of the present turned future, the future rotted to past. How prescient that red fellow, whichever one he was, may he rest in peace, that warned of the soul stealing of the photograph. The photographs of the present are never developed; they are always of the past, when more life was harbored. The quaint treasures that bedeck books, walls, and mantles, they are but grim reminders. Who can participate in the thrill of once was; who is relegated to the vicarious role of spectator of never again? What soul is there in the past? What soul was left in the family, may they rest in peace? Hollow.

A dreadful, calculating theory of a grand coping mechanism. Terror management theory. Cogito ergo sum. Mort. We know we die, yet we live and even rejoice. A peculiar thing, this perseverance. No matter our struggles, dreams, plans, pride, it ends in disintegration. How do we press on, fight, fight the dying of the light? We are no immovable object to the unstoppable force. Our mind’s weave a silken veil, a rose tinted concave glass of grand delusion through which hope may be grasped till death do we part. And what function God? Such is the theory. And if it malfunctions? A lame cow is put out to pasture. Plagued by the realization of the truth, we are crippled within society, useless if the plague is malignant. Van Gogh’s last painting was as ominous and more than the photograph. A road over a small hump through a field of wind swept wheat. Gray, tumultuous clouds gathered, crows circling. All in signature chaotic, foreboding swirls. To where, no answers, only questions. Crippled by the plague.

Manage the terror is a neat notion. Hem in a black tempest that perpetuates itself endlessly, a black hole. Lean over the event horizon and even time loses all meaning. Manage is neat like trimming hedges or emptying the recycling bin. Menial management that can’t triumph in perpetuity.

Yet what have we but to hedge our bets that happiness that is transient is well worth the stake we all must put in as big blind. The past is tragic, but the present refuses to be. So long as infinity persists, the present will be one step ahead, a flash of color in an endless spectrum of dead undulating energies, a sea of infras and ultras, greater thans and less thans.

I was chilled today as I stood alone in a stranger’s house before a photograph of people I will never know. I can only guess at their story and no one will record mine. Damn the questions and damn the answers if they are as I suspect, I will huddle close to you to keep warm while flames yet flare.

Although I have nothing but disdain for graduate students, and although he looks like the junior counterpart of Sanford & Son, I do proudly make an exception, welcome, and present our newest Author: Adam Marc. Here is his first submission…

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Art draws from us two of our greatest strengths, our capacity to feel and our ability to design. The former is a visceral experience, the latter an analytical tool. Combined, these two basic human attributes allow us to express and create beauty and ingenuity. They also allow us to reverse engineer the fruits of others’ labor; they grant us the privilege to critically engage with the art that surrounds us. Subject, form, and content are the constituent elements of art upon which to base any such appraisal. Though these elements may be most salient with visual art, they also apply to the written word. Indeed, both writer and reader stand to benefit enormously from assuming this perspective.

Because it is so often construed as the foundation of a work - debatably so - subject stands as a profitable starting point to understand writing’s essential qualities. Truth be told, subject is not so very important to the success or profundity of a piece of writing. The sublime can be universally educed from the mundane, so long as there is an adept observer willing to expend the resources in the process of extraction and refinement - a tall order to be sure. Here it is elucidating to invoke the meaning of Einstein’s famous e = mc2 equation. This simple mathematical formula conveys that each atom throughout the universe contains a staggering amount of energy, as evinced by the nuclear fission that at once provides us with a viable, albeit controversial, source of energy and a means of self-destruction, and also the nuclear fusion that can power our sun for billions of years. Similarly, everything we experience, corporeal, metaphysical, imaginary, is laden with the vast potential to transform the way we conceive meaning and purpose in our lives. This is no less true for writing as it is for nuclear physics.

A personal example that immediately comes to mind is D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. The novel tells the tale of three generations of a rural English family from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The details of the lives of this, the Brangwen, family are unremarkable. They are all decidedly average. And yet, the events of their lives, particularly their emotional reactions to those events, are the source of a resplendent order of narration. So well acquainted with the capricious, enchanting nature of love is Lawrence that no reader can walk away feeling as though they are alone in the intensity of their daily libidinal pleasures and pains.

We are collectively endowed with the ability to detect, record, distill, and embellish the poetry that fills our lives. This is an invaluable gift. Another example, albeit from another discipline, is the style of Paul Cézanne, the Frenchman who pioneered Post-Impressionism. Like Lawrence, forty-six years his junior, Cézanne was a master at capturing the highest qualities of the often-overlooked aspects of existence. In particular, he painted still lifes, an apple arrangement here, a landscape of his native Aix there, always devoting utmost attention to depicting the purities of visual forms. His signature tool was color. Cezanne radically transformed the artists’ palette by illustrating how light and natural color complements can yield a work that is as vivid and nuanced as a Realist painting. Heavily criticized during his own time, Cezanne has since come to be regarded as one of the few individuals to incite a paradigm shift in his craft. His contribution has little to do with subject.

And yet despite how arbitrary the choice of subject may ultimately be, it is a persistent cause of much angst amongst novice and virtuosic writers alike. A blank page is an intimidating page. Being able to write about literally anything can be paralyzing for the writer who has so much to say (read: show) and no conduit through which to say it. In a recent address to a group of aspiring wordsmiths at Ithaca College, the author Tom Wolfe noted that every 20-something has one autobiography to write, but they don’t have two. Implicit in Wolfe’s remark is the notion that subjects accrue with the accumulation of experience. Experience does not have to be equated solely with a quantity or even a quality of life events. It may also refer to an enriched perspective on life. As time passes and lives follow their course, people naturally become more attuned to the highs and lows of the human condition and are thus increasingly capable of articulating them. Thus, a person might conceivably be able to write two categorically different autobiographies on the same period of their lives; the subject would be the same, but there would essentially be two different authors coloring the details.

In the end, subject is about exposure. An individual - a reflective mind - needs only remain open to either the breadth or depth the world has to offer in order to wax eloquent and prolific. The most moving accounts can come from intensely probing the presumably insignificant aspects of our daily routines, as in Robert Burns’ poem To a Louse, plumbing the vortices of our psyches à la Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or circumnavigating swaths of the globe in the manner of Bill Bryson. Even subject can be the subject of writing. From one self-proclaimed aspiring wordsmith, explore your environs, both internal and external. Do not be afraid of the span of the horizon or the reach of the sky; they are your muses.

Next installment: Form.