Sara and Friends Ruminate Until the Cows Come Home
December 2016. There’s a vegetarian restaurant in Berlin called ‘Till the Cows Come Home’. They specialize in slow food. One customer complains: I have been waiting more than 30 minutes for risotto. Another: this place is truly fuckin’ slow. What do these diners expect? The header says: Vegetarian Slow Fuckin’ Yummy Food. EAT LIKE YOU GIVE A FUCK!
Cows and other ruminants do. In the interests of nutrition, they rechew the fermented bits downed earlier. All vegetarian. Diners eating like they give a fuck need not go to these same lengths. There’s writer Anne Carson and her mother chewing their lettuce carefully, her mother also studying the lettuce. (Glass Essays) There’s Violet Beauregarde, the silly gum-chewing girl in ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’. ‘By gum, it’s gum!’ she shrieks. ‘It’s a stick of chewing-gum!’ It’s tomato soup! It’s hot and creamy and delicious! I can feel it running down my throat!’ And there’s Violante in Carson’s ‘Kitchen’. Violante in the pantry/Gnawing at a mutton bone/How she gnawed it/How she clawed it/When she felt herself alone. Seems there’s a progression of sorts here. A tendency to go to greater lengths. A movement from giving a fuck to GIVING A FUCK.
Consider Marcel Proust in’Rembrance of Things Past’ Volume 1: One day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,” which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, not, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?
Proust goes on, realizing the truth must be in himself. Putting down his cup he examines his own mind, paragraph after paragraph, all the while realizing it’s an abyss of uncertainty. He suggests it would be easier simply to drink his tea and return to his more usual brooding, but the obsession has taken hold.
Word has it that if you’re a ruminant, ruminating is good. If you’re a person, it’s not. All that chewing. Clawing. Gnawing. Thing is…if you’re a Violante or a Proust there’s bound to be a lot of chewing whether or not it’s good for you. If you’re Anne Carson.
- Carson’s mother: You remember too much. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down. (Wacher)
- Dr. Haw: When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them? Why keep watching? Why not go away? I was amazed. Go away where? I said. This still seems to me a good question. Why keep watching? Some people watch, that’s all I can say. There is nowhere else to go, no ledge to climb up to. (Liberty)
Meanwhile I’ve developed an appetite for Petites Madeleines. Have become quite obsessed, in fact. Fortunately I know someone who makes them.