Some things taste too good. They are so of the season, of the moment, even, that they can’t be comprehended by taste alone. A goat’s afternoon milk in a steel pail stippled with drops of spring rain, made into soft fromage de chèvre, caramelized with the dark yolks of hens’ eggs into the rustic elegance of a Basque cheesecake in a hot farmhouse oven, topped with a lick of last summer’s raspberry honey jam, is that—it tastes too good to understand. It is everything. It the raison d’être of this entire endeavor of a farmstead. Intimacy as an ingredient may have diminishing returns—cake is delicious even if you didn’t make it yourself, or milk the goat yourself, or sprout and plant and split and cultivate the raspberries and extract the honey on a hot late summer’s day, a few knuckles throbbing from errant beestings through holes worn in your gloves. But it is an ingredient, and you can taste it, maybe not with your tastebuds, but with your heart, or whatever it is that holds the love and confusion and poetry and pain and memory and effort and work that goes into that cake—that cake that emerged from nothing but the grass and everything it takes to grow it and get it to a goat. How can you understand that? How can you taste that? The past of all you’ve done to make it, and the future of all you know there will be to do, pressing in on each other, holding that creamy, impossible piece of cake on a silver fork in the quivering, sudden present.
Is it worth it? I daren’t ask myself.
But, yes.
Yes.
No one has been alive before
I’m acting like I’m not even here,
like the things I see don’t see me;
like the things I feel don’t feel me.
I’d like to believe that I don’t have to play
this game we’ve made of living.
I sometimes have the strangest and best
feeling about myself when I am a disappointment
to someone. Fuck you!, I think.
It wasn’t even my idea.
Look, no one has been alive before,
so everyone is a bullshitter.
Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight
Trees. Trees! Seven new plum and apple whips in the ground. 30 new white pines. 25 new river birch. 25 maples. Along the road, along the gateway to the field, in the yard and by the sauna.
The does are finished kidding, and goat milk has returned to our lives. Yogurt, cheese, lassis, tzatziki, yum.
A Short History of Decay by Emil Cioran. The most unrelenting, despairing, and ennui’d of the pessimistic philosophers, Cioran’s first major work is like a punch in the teeth. Bleak, for sure, but also an interesting perspective. He’s fond of pointing out that he believes life is a statistical error, a mistake and an aberration of the universe, and because of this, it is essentially a curse to the living. His main conclusion, as far as I can tell, is to not try too hard at anything, though he went on to write nearly 30 books, including The Trouble with Being Born, On the Heights of Despair, and Drawn and Quartered. He impressively and consistently railed on the meaninglessness of life, the meaninglessness of ideas, and the bliss of oblivion. The creativity of his thought is a kind of art, and while not an uplifting art, a beautiful and intriguing one.
A small amp and some modulation pedals to get that Pink Floyd / Tommy Iommi sound for Harvey’s little Loog electric guitar. I’ve always been an acoustic player, but Harvey’s interest in the electric sound has piqued my interest. I have warmed up to amps and pedals as being extensions of an instrument—you can use them to get a completely unique sound, a bit of magic.
Cheers,
Jake
Some time ago you said that you made some ink. Some time ago, I too made ink. Not because of you. And I assume you made it not because of me. Yet somewhere betwixt it all we made ink for our own reasons. We may have even been inspired by the same reasons, or not. Anyhow, what recipe did you follow, if any? Mine called for Gum Arabica. Been meaning to ask you this for some time now. But it was your poem that did it and, perhaps, something in 'whatever it is that holds the love'. What a nice turn of phrase. It should be inked!