food poem 6
Today in my red Rubbermaid container I ate two boiled potatoes and two boiled eggs for lunch. It was good and filling. I'm living pretty frugally and I'll eat almost anything. I like to pick up the slack of other's over-indulgence; I like to eat the unwanted food and the excess - but I know this is a play-act at poverty and that I still participate in the same wealth as my parents and that this is merely a new configuration of the old paternal relationship.
But, I mean, there's a lot here. A lot to be had. So even as I spend hardly any money and work hard to support myself, I guess I just don't want self-sufficiency. Even as I relentlessly pursue achievement in work and school and art, my life has organized itself around a pattern of least ambition. I'm huddling in the shadow of excess cast by my family and by the affluent nation I live in, getting by on what is left to those of us with enough time and attention to scrape it up, and, all the while, never moving or upsetting or accomplishing anything.
It's not a bad place to be if you could live forever in it. But I'm reminded of my mortality by a hairline already receding. Often it feels like the dimensions of my life have reduced to what I am going to eat next. The only time I can overcome this constant anxious hunger is when I am really living: like deep in an important conversation, or in the few times recently I've felt in love. What I'm doing is not really living; what I call ambition could also be called a reason to live. We were talking last night about sin in the Platonic view which is moving away from God (and therefore goodness is moving towards God); what is it then to stand still?
Which is not to say that those peers of mine who are career-driven and GETTING THAT PAPER have a reason to live, either. And remember this:
With the few ingredients left in my fridge and pantry, a beautiful little meal has taken form. (Sometimes new and beautiful and good meals which I could not have planned or imagined take form of themselves through the effect of hunger, and lack, and love). Standing in front of the pantry window, my bowl on the dark-stained scratched smooth wood surface of the window sill, I'm looking out at the grey snow and the house across the lane. It's late afternoon and the light is already failing. I've spent all day at work, outside, exhausting myself taking Christmas light strings out of a tree with a long pole and listening to Tolstoy novellas and Joan Baez's early covers, in turns, and sometimes just traffic noise, and pausing occasionally to stand still with neutral expression to look out, while feeling myself breathing and the blood circulating in my body and my muscles taught. And thinking quietly. And pausing to write things down like this.
