"Breath properly, stary curious, and eat your beets"

For some time now I've entertained an only somewhat tongue-and-cheek notion that plants of the genus and species Beta Vulgaris--beets and chard in particular--are beings possessing some essence of the divine spark, that they are sentient. I think the genesis of this notion is probably rooted in a time, not too long ago, when my wife and I attempted to grow vegetables on a small commercial scale. It was then that I became vaguely and unexpectedly smitten with the rainbow chard patch. So it was that my romance with the Beta genus began in earnest. That romance has only deepened in the intervening years, as has my comfort with my own eccentricities. Accordingly, I've been of the habit lately of testing the reception of this pretty crazy sounding idea--but only of course while in the safe company of other probable lunatics--anarchists, vegetable gardeners, certain anthropologists, children's book writers, artists, etc. It was in just such a scenario, while attending a party of fellow mad-persons, that my pronouncements concerning higher consciousness of beets and chard inspired the host to produce a copy of Tom Robbins' book Jitterbug Perfume. 
"Have you ever read this?" he asked.
"No, I haven't." I responded.
"It features beets," he said, with a knowing nod and mischievous grin. He then proceeded to produce an extra copy of the book and gave it to me as a gift. These are always the most deeply rewarding and treasured kinds of gifts--the unexpected and unsought ones. I've discovered the more I open up to the world at large--the more I go about whistling, stooping mid-stride to examine some interesting thing just off the trail, or looking skyward to identify who's casting that winged shadow on the ground; the more I go about talking aloud (to no one in particular), immersed in the heterodoxy of the birds and the beets--then the more proportionately forthcoming are such gifts. This is something Bingo Pajama, Tom Bombadil, and all mushroom hunters know instinctively. As Annie Dillard put it in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, "The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast cast broadside from a generous hand." Once we recognize their worth (and that is the key), then we see our paths littered with them, just waiting to be picked up.    

I had never read Tom Robbins. I once picked up a copy of Still Life With Woodpecker with the intentions of reading it, but I just never got around to it. I think I must have traded it in at a used bookstore somewhere. Anyway, I took straight away to reading Jitterbug and it immediately captured my attention, which no doubt had something to do with the introductory paean to beets. Then, with the introduction of the old god Pan as a central character, I was doubly hooked. (Anyone who knows me very well knows that Pan is among my gods of choice). A book about Pan and beets--what joy! I haven't had that much fun with a book in a long time.

It ends in the same manner in which it begins, that is with ruminations concerning the transcendental qualities of beets. For those who may not be familiar with either this book or with the greater poetics of beets, I thought I'd reproduce a few quotes here:

"The beet is the most intense of vegetables . . . Only the beet departs the body the same color as it went in."

"The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown."

Indeed.

Which brings me to the two points I'd thought of writing about even before my friend introduced me to Jitterbug Perfume. The first. This spring was a particularly challenging season for growing things (it was magnificent for wild mushrooms, however, which helped considerably to balance this season's challenges). It was cold. It was hot. It was cold again. It was wet. Ad nauseum.

Now, I have had some inexplicable difficulty growing chard the last several seasons (though I've had smashing success with beets) and so I was terribly anxious about the bed of chard that I was nurturing neurotically through this difficult spring. It was chard, after all, that served as the seductress responsible for my beet family lust. This season, besides being a bizarre growing season, was also difficult for me in several other ways. I just felt out of sorts. When I considered it, I came to the conclusion that my current malaise might correspond to this dearth in chard production. So I placed considerable energy into this bed of chard, having convinced myself that it served as some kind of barometer of my mental health. After much fretting and much petting, my chard made it. Now I have the healthiest looking chard I've grown in years. I am a happy man. This very week I plan to cook chard with black-eyed peas, a favorite combo. I'll serve it with cornbread. Then my happiness will approach something like ecstasy. Oh chard! What a mistress.

Second thing. As I said, while I've had a hard time with chard the last several seasons I've had great luck with beets. (Chard and beets, it should be noted for the botanically curious, are so closely related as to be classified as subspecies in an otherwise barely distinguishable lineage). This year the beets came up strong and have continued to prosper as greens. The roots, however, have been slower to develop. So while my chard anxiety has been eased, I've been struck with a mild case of beetroot blues. In the interim, however, I've been enjoying another of my favorite combinations--eggs over easy crowned with lightly sauteed beet greens from thinnings, served over toasted corn tortillas and topped with habanero hot sauce and sour cream.

So the moral of the story is this: "Breath properly, stay curious, and eat your beets." 

Raw Women and Cooked Men

I'm not sure exactly what I intend with this blog. I guess I'm utterly fascinated by the perpetual feast, the "universal chomp," as Annie Dillard put it, that is life on earth.  Over the winter I wrote two things down in my notebook (yes, an honest to goodness tangible artifact): "between birth and death, there is mostly eating and sex;" and, "In winter we struggle to eat; In summer we struggle not to be eaten."  I wrote down a good many other things as well, but these illustrate a general thrust that seems to continually occupy an expansive territory in my imaginative terrain.  You see, I like food: studying it, growing it, acquiring it, preparing it, and of course eating it. I love it. And I know too that, whatever else I am, I am food. We all are. Indeed, that's all anything is when it comes down to it. Everything is food. Only the gods are exempt from this most basic of realities. For the rest of us mortals ("mere bellies" though we may be) life is merely a passage through the alimentary canal of a hungry planet. So existence, the great dance of life, is really a matter of eating and (not) being eaten.  

Fiery Gizzard, besides being the name of a singularly spectacular creek and hiking trail on my native Cumberland Plateau, seemed like an appropriate name for a platform for engagement with topics such as these . . .  

I recently read an article by a favorite anthropologist of mine in which he recounts the 1929 ethnography of yet another anthropologist in which the latter reconstructs an exchange between a Fijian king and a carpenter who built him a particularly fine canoe: "The chief apologized that he could not offer the carpenter a 'cooked man' or a 'raw woman,' for Christianity, he explained, 'has spoiled our feasts.' The 'cooked man' refers to an enemy cannibal victim, the 'raw woman' to a virgin daughter of the chief offered as a wife." I am certainly not advocating either cannibalism or an economy of virgin daughters, but this account has something to do with where I'm  going with this blog, even if I'm not quite sure what that might mean. 

I teach undergraduate anthropology classes. In a section concerned with cultural meaning we examine the concept of key metaphors--that each culture possesses a distinct handful of domains from which they/we construct the bulk of their/our cultural narratives ("the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves").  By way of example, we look at Franz Boas's (and others') documentation of the Kwakiutl Cannibal Dance.  Central to this ritual enactment of core cultural values is the appeasement of the spirit of Bakbakwalanooksiwae ("cannibal at the north end of the world," in Boas's translation). This mythical spirit is the originary cannibal, or the cannibalistic impulse that has the potential to manifest in all of us if we do not undergo proper socialization. The ceremonial dance is performed by a secret shamanic society known as the Hamatsa (an initiate of which is pictured below).

Every time I look at this photograph, taken by Edward Curtis in 1914, I can't help but wonder what is going on in this man's head, or rather, what cosmic synapses are fusing in his cortex in this momentary state of ecstatic unity. The accompanying description reads:  "Hamatsa shaman, three-quarter length portrait, seated on ground in front of tree, facing front, possessed by supernatural power after having spent several days in the woods as part of an initiation ritual." After such initiation this man is ever after qualified to represent one of Bakbakwalanooksiwae's many mouths in the course of the cannibal dance ceremony. For the Kwakiutl, as for many peoples of the world, eating is damned serious business.

In a related concept in Kwakiutl cosmology, the souls of the dead are thought to enter the body of salmon (the principal food item for most all peoples of the Pacific northwest coast) and are released back into the eternal cycle of life only when that salmon is eaten, thereby releasing the soul to animate another human body. Thus salmon are always and only eaten with greatest respect, as they are nothing less than the bearers of souls in the great re-cycling bin of eternal life/death, the deliverers of what in Sanskrit was called samsara--the continuous flow. This is in some sense a form of cannibalism, but one whose end is the perpetuation of the life force of a people. For the Kwakiutl then, food, eating, and hunger are key metaphors, the axes around which cultural identity and self conceptualization revolves.  

In a similar conceptualization, and since her work seems to be a general guide in this entry, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard excerpts a quote from an Inuit shaman who says, "Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that men's food consists entirely of souls." Yes siree! Exactly that!  

It is matters such as these that interest me here. I'm also just quite simply interested in food and eating. So, a celebration of life's comestibles; a picaresque of mytho-gastronomic intrigue; tempered with a recognition that we all eventually end up on the menu. And maybe that is what we all seek after all, this reintegration, by way of digestive forces, back into the great belly of the universe. We'll see what comes out of it.