21.1.25

in the soil

Any action repeated is a ritual if it is wanted to be, and certainly this yearly task of cutting away the spent wood and tying in the new growth, performed in the dead months of the year as a propitiatory action both practical and symbolic has become to me a ritual, the first thing I do here every year in the new year – a little late this year as I have been away for the holidays and then for work – an action which will not bear fruit until late in the summer when the blackberries, if I have cut away the correct wood and tied in the strongest branches, will come thick and fast among their thorns, taut and bursting with the late-summer sun, hard to imagine in this relentless misty grey which seems to exist without sunset or dawn, even as the days get longer.

in the kitchen

I seem for one reason or another to have been cooking a lot of rice, rice steamed in the little two-portion rice cooker I bought us for Christmas to have with Japanese curry sauce and fish cakes from the corner shop, rice steamed in the larger rice cooker at work we mainly use for cooking polenta for service to be stirred through crumbled sausage cooked in butter and lots of parmesan and more butter to make a staff meal of risotto alla pilota, the risotto of the rice-millers of Mantova who supposedly could not spend the time at the stove to make a risotto properly, rice toasted in a big pan with sautéed pink radicchio to be cooked properly with gradual additions of boiling water – not stock if you want to taste the vegetables properly, I think – and finished with soft pungent cheese, tonight I will sweat some leeks from the allotment until very soft and juicy and cook another risotto with them, the slow stir of ritual.

on the page

Simon Critchley’s On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy is a very interesting look at the (European Christian) mystic tradition through the lens of modern philosophy which asks what ways of thinking or existing we might have lost in pursuit of a rationalism which in fact denies huge swathes of lived experience; the seeming paradox of the mystical obsession with devotional objects and with performed ritual resolved in the idea that mysticism is not a denial of objective reality but rather an attempt to experience it as intensely as possible.