12.12.23

in the soil

One thing I struggle with here is the lack of control even the most careful gardener has over their plot, and I am not the most careful gardener. The weather, the wildlife, simple bad seeds; last year’s broad beans, for example, last year’s broad beans sown in the autumn to overwinter grew high in the warm wet November and then in the warm wet December, too high and blousy for the first hard frost, there I did everything right but the weather had other plans. Here I suppose is the chance-element I said before that I wanted in writing, in the kitchen, here it is in abundance, too much, or maybe it is just that here in the soil you have to wait for months to try and rectify your mistakes, your failures, whereas in the kitchen you can try something twenty times a day here I am a year later to try again and perhaps again to fail.

in the kitchen

A while ago I worked with a chef perhaps over-promoted and certainly overtired and out of their element who was fond of saying to other cooks also overtired and knee-deep in the preparation of an over-complicated dish that we need to make the perfect plate of food, a sentence that still arouses a certain amount of resentment in me. It is not that I don’t think perfection is desirable exactly but more that I don’t believe it is possible, in anything really but especially not in cooking where the experience, the creation of it, does not stop on the plate as it hits the pass but continues into the service, the wine, the music, the company. In any case I prefer to think of most things I cook as part of a work-in-progress, perhaps tomorrow another ingredient will seem better, perhaps another cook will show up with a better idea.

on the page

Thomas Bernhard’s writing often seems to take the form of a rant sustained for many pages and without breath, as it were, and Old Masters is true to form. Translated by Ewald Osers the narrator reports to us his friend’s opinion that [n]ot one of these world-famous masterpieces, no matter by whom, is in fact perfect. That reassures me. It makes me basically happy. Only when, time and again, we have discovered that there is no such thing as the whole or the perfect are we able to live on … We truly love only those books which are not a whole, which are chaotic, which are helpless ... There is no perfect picture and there is no perfect book and there is no perfect piece of music, Reger said, the narrator writes, and although Reger is on the available evidence and to be kind to him an irascible and bigoted old bastard I find that this reassures me too, like the reversed piece of mosaic that reminds us only God makes perfection.