Prep Time

The recipe for my Minnesota Wild Rice Soup said that prep time would take ten minutes—though that measure would not include the 30 minutes preparing the wild rice which is actually a semi-aquatic type of grass and not rice at all. Preparing the wild rice should have been considered prep work because when it was cooked it would be added to the soup and not cooked as the soup. I could even prepare the rice ahead of time, test for its chewiness and add it at the appropriate time. I did so.

Why exactly should prep time be distinguished from say, cook time?  Prep is the necessary gathering, peeling and chopping of the vegetable and fleshly ingredients that will constitute the meal when cooked, though to be sure, as a vegetarian I do not prep any meat or fish product. The distinct designation of prep time seems another example of the establishment of time standards by which activities can be measured and life organized. In the novel Measuring the World, Daniel Kehlmann attributes to Alexander von Humboldt the idea that measurement creates reality. Numbers become a means of controlling chaos. The notice of prep and cook times places boundaries on the process of meal preparation and makes chaos containable. But Thoreau writes “We are compelled to live so thoroughly and sincerely reflecting on our steps, reverencing our life, that we never make allowance for the possible changes.” For Thoreau it was the wild he sought, perhaps the wild another name for chaos. He opens the essay “Walking,” with an advocacy of wildness: “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil.” I do not think Thoreau would adhere much to the establishment of requisite prep times. Me? I am a somewhat careless cook and experience the kitchen chaos as my usual modus operandi. Sometimes it seems a bit wild in there. And yes, I understand that defining a time for prep time and cook time does seem to control the chaos of running between cabinets and shelves pulling down and drawing out and preparing ingredients immediately required to the recipe. But the establishment of prep time and cook time are irrelevant to me: I prefer to prepare the meal in some leisure listening to music to accompany the rhythmic chopping, peeling and shredding. I sometimes wear ear buds to leave my partner in her silence and her reading in the next room. Also, during what is referred to as prep time I place at some safe distance an alcoholic beverage to accompany my engagement in gathering and preparing the ingredients for the dish. I am careful to to keep any of the worked-over pieces of vegetables as they are being gathered, chopped, ground and shredded from flying into the shimmering liquid in the crystal tumbler. I am a careless cook and I never do meet the standard set by the prep time established in the recipe. I turn the volume of the music up. I take another sip.

Prep time. The readying of materials that when done are to be transformed into the meal. But I wonder now why prep time is separate from cook time. Is it really a distinct and separate activity? Ecclesiastes says that there is a season set for everything, though Kohelet does not designate an order or time dimension for the occurrences of anything; he says only that there is a time for everything. “There is a time to be born and a time to die; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to plant and a time to reap, a time to rend and a time to sew.” And so to follow Kohelet there must be a time to prepare and a time to cook! A time to consume and a time to wash the dishes. But one thing is also very clear to me from Ecclesiastes: everything will occur in a life though there is no set time or even order for when or for how long anything might occur. Except, of course, for the times of being born and dying. Nor is there much direction as to what is to be done while waiting for each happening. The recipe sheet says that prep time is 10 minutes, but that is not consistent to my movements. I am not so ordered. In fact, I am not prepping, I am cooking dinner. And it all began at the market! Thus, it might be that our lives can be understood as always prep work and simultaneously always cooking. I do not need to be cautioned about prep time because in fact I couldn’t cook anything without first preparing; why then is prep time kept separate from cook time on the recipe sheet. What chaos is being controlled? Having read through the recipe and setting my priorities I think that I can decide how much time I want to spend setting a dinner on the table, when to begin the process and how quickly or leisurely I want to work. Thoreau welcomes the chaos—wildness—as a way to be alive in the world. In the film “The Taste of Things, cooking is life. We are always cooking. As I chop my vegetables I wear my cut gloves to forestall the time to rend. But as Hamlet says, if it be not now, yet it will come. I don’t know why I care to distinguish prep time from cook time. It is all one continuous activity. 

Fra Lippo Lippi

A flâneur, a purposely lost rambler, is how I like to characterize myself. I know that I hadn’t always been such; once I had worn my clothes tight-fitting and my shoes stiff and highly polished. But I had experienced some wonderful moments when I knew what it felt like to wear my clothes loose. But it was an all too brief summer and when it ended, so, too, did my sauntering; I returned once more to my tight-fitting wardrobe and stiff shoes. Sometimes, even Thoreau would complain that “it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses.” That is, though his body is walking his mind is bound too tight. There had been, of course, those times when my walk was no saunter: I had felt too encumbered and unfree, and I would discuss with my therapist the unsatisfactory experience and the sources for my anxieties. I learned a few things and sauntered more, and during some walks there would occur transcendent moments when the world and me were transformed. Thoreau says he thinks “not much of the actual . . . It is a sort of vomit in which the unclean love to wallow.” Whew! But no, HDT doesn’t avoid the actual—in a sense it was where he always started—but at times he could not transcend it.  I hold with Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi who says, “This world’s no blot for us/Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good—/To find its meaning is my meat and drink.” In a way this was Thoreau’s method.

Fra Lippo Lippi struck out from the staid, cautious style then in vogue in the art communities and developed the realist manner of painting though not without harsh critique and chastisement of his work from his clerical superiors. They would have had him paint the soul so that the people would forget the physical, their hard labor, their oppression and their poverty. His superiors scolded,  

Your business is not to catch men with show,

With homage to the perishable clay,

But lift them over it, ignore it all,

Make them forget there’s such a thing as flesh.

Your business is to paint the souls of men—

Lippi stressed that if he painted the world about him it would lead people to the soul. To lose the physical world was not the purpose to which art aspired. Art, Lippi believed, returned the world to us. In a conversation with a guard who had apprehended Lippi as he returned to the monastery after a night of ribaldry Lippi responded: 

For don’t you mark? We’re made so that we love

First when we see them painted, things that we have passed 

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;

And so they are better, painted—better to us

Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;

God gives us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out.

His art, Lippi asserted, should give people the world that they were too busy, too distracted or too oppressed to see. For Lippi art might be the invitation to saunter and to transcend. Art might be the impetus for the achievements of other freedoms as well, as Thoreau seemed to understand. Those who would so saunter would see the world’s meaning that they had not before been aware. They would find in the art what would scratch their itches and then come to apprehend soul. Indeed, Lippi’s art would provide them access to meaning and it would begin with the physical world. Art was not a distraction but a summons. Centuries later Bertold Brecht would hold that his theatre was meant to portray the world for his audience and not an opportunity to lose that world in the exhaustion of catharsis. He did not want his audiences to sit passively and forget themselves in a work’s story, Brecht wanted his plays to inspire his audience to think about and question the world they live in. 

Once I had believed that all I needed to know was that beauty was truth and truth beauty, but since then I had experienced and learned a great deal. I recognized that beauty was not an immanence within the object but appeared as an event. Beauty was a description of a feeling that arose in as a response to a relationship between the particular work of art, between anything experienced and the one experiencing it. And I considered that beauty occurred when an experienced tension in the work was felt, and beauty happened from the experience of the release of that felt tension. That release made possible moments of transcendence for the one experiencing the work. I have been listening for years to Leonard Bernstein’s recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Beethoven’s symphony was one of the most beautiful works I have known, though I admit that I have experienced a great deal of beauty in my life. But every time I would hear that music he experienced beauty. He remembered Harvey Sachs’s description of the third movement of the Ninth that followed the difficult, turbulent, sometimes even violent images of the first two movements. He writes “ . . . the third [movement] tells us that we have both lost and won—that as aware human beings, we have no choice but to wade through the horror and anguish and then die, but that we are able, from time to time, to see beyond and soar above these facts and to understand just enough to be able to appreciate the beauty of being moral.” For me the third movement released the tensions that the first two movements had caused and it prepared for the magnificence of the final choral movement. Sachs’s words described transcendence, to recognize the tensions and to experience a resolution of them, to feel one’s itches and to scratch them. Then I knew beauty; then I had beauty. Yes, the experience of beauty scratched one’s itches. All experience of beauty in art—visual, aural, tactile, gastronomical, aromatical—what Lippi referred to as simple beauty, would be found in the quotidian and it was from there that transcendence would happen. 

I think I have searched in my life for beauty and now understand that its potential was present always with me. Walking down a dusty, noisy street today, I thought, yes, the experience of beauty and the source of transcendence comes from having faith in the seed. That within that seed there was a tree that would burst forth and in time flourish. Beauty was truth as Fra Lippo Lippi had asserted. “If you get simple beauty and naught else,” he says, “you get about the best thing God invents—/That’s somewhat; and you’ll find the soul you have missed/within yourself, when you return him thanks.” The awareness of the soul was not a permanent presence but a transitory happening in the experience of beauty. The soul was called into being by the experience of beauty. Transcendence he knew now was not to lose the world in abstraction; rather transcendence would be experienced when the world appeared with new perspective. The experience of beauty led him right back to the world, and he would give thanks by making available the experience of beauty for others. 

 

 

If it Were Up to Me

The latest obscene shooting at Annunciation School in Minneapolis is yet another violent and deadly occurrence in what is turning out as a horrible, horrible several years that has been filled with wars, mass shootings, assassinations, and among other things, a cruel, ugly, vindictive government headed by Trump and meekly followed by sycophantic (and terrified) Republicans. The latest shooting is another instanceof the callous disregard for human life displayed by opponents of gun control. The shooter, Robin Westman, wrote in her journal dated July 4, “Oh my God! I got it! I have a shotgun! It was not too difficult at all!” Exactly the problem! She added that a high-powered rifle was next on the shopping list. I read in the New York Times that earlier this year Ms. Westman wrote that she had been watching so many mass shooting videos online that she worried about being placed on a Federal Bureau of Investigation watch list. But in early July, her state-issued gun permit had arrived in the mail. Exactly the problem! 

            I will not rehash the obvious arguments for gun control in the United States. But I will angrily address stupid comments by people like J.D. Vance who said that the shooting suggested that more mental health care is necessary. Of course, the Republican cadre had already assented to cuts in Medicaid and Medicare, to health care fundings for mental health facilities. The hypocrisy is blatant and dangerous but will be almost certainly ignored by a deliberately blind, intellectually vacant and ethically compromising (and compromised) MAGA electorate. 

            Yes, I know that greater access to mental health ought to be made available; so, too, by the way, should medical care for the physical well-being. The two are not disconnected. But first it must be acknowledged that if the guns weren’t so easily available then those suffering with psychological problems wouldn’t have access to them. No access, no mass shootings. I have heard statistics that there are more guns in the United States than people. For every 100 people there are 120 guns. There are 393 million guns in the United States.

            I watch a great many detective shows many of which are British: Inspector Morse, Lewis, Shetland, Vera, Grantchester, Endeavour, Brokenwood Mysteries, Foyle’s War, George Gently, Midsommer Murders. etc. etc. etc. Firearms in Great Britain are heavily controlled: one must show a very good reason for having one and then be subjected to a heavy vetting process. Pistols are banned. The detectives in these shows carry no weapons. Unless confrontation with and arrest of a suspect seems to be dangerous, guns are not issued to the police (the uniformed coppers!) including the detectives. Yes, the criminals sometimes do have weapons—guns—but the difficulty of obtaining them means that acquisition must have been difficult and for most criminals been y rarely successful. Most suspects do not have weapons, and the detectives chase after and arrest the bad ones without need of guns. Indeed, often the arresting detectives and uniformed police have to chase after the suspect; many discover they need to be in better shape.

So many problems might be resolved if guns were less available. Certainly a military presence in the cities of the United Sates would be unnecessary: but maybe Trump enjoys the military might he controls and strict gun control would render occupation by the National Guard unlikely.
With better access to health care so many troubled individuals might be helped before they went on a killing rage. I am weary of the days of prayer solution to the violence. The children were praying!! I have long believed that the skills to recognize and reject the hypocrisies of people like J.D. Vance ought to be developed in schools, newspapers and journals. 

As Cheryl Wheeler sings, there are many targets for blame for mass shootings, but “If it were up to me, I’d take away the guns!”