What we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.

Jun 29, 2009 20:41

That's a quote from The Omnivore's Dilemma, a book I just finished reading while in the hottest bath I think I have ever taken while drinking the tiniest amount whiskey with a whole bunch of water in the glass.

I'm sufficiently dehydrated now, and working on a headache. The headache may have been brought on by my recent conversion from 60 oz. of water per day to a whiskey/wine/diet pepsi/coffee ration, or maybe from my latest midlife crisis, I don't know. Maybe both. Crying and drinking and soaking in hot water is certainly not the smartest thing I've ever done.

But I tried to do some thinking, too, and reading that passage in that book makes me consider what may be the ultimate problem of my life: is there such a thing as a simple life?

Today I thought about my life like it was a skein of yarn. Not the tidy kind you see in the yarn shop but the scraggly kind, the olive-green mass of Aunt Lydia's wool that my Grandma Bert gave me to practice crocheting on, if I could unwind it. I became very good at untangling knots, maybe in part because learning to crochet is to purposefully construct knots. I had no system, just an impulse. The skein of my life is like this too, untangling by instinct, not realizing that tangles tighten elsewhere as I work.

To those that know me well this sounds like specialized bullshit and it probably is, after all I am a genius at unnecessarily complicating my life.

Michael Pollan wanted to have the simplest dinner (which even he then unnecessarily complicated the preparation of), to represent the shortest route from nature to table. And yet the meal was so complicated, both in the getting of the ingredients and the coordination required to turn them into a meal for friends: harvesting yeast from the air, making stock from bones, gathering morels from burnt gashes in the forest. For every tangle we unwind, another knits together. Whether we take a bite of Big Mac or wild boar, we eat the body of the world.

When I read a book about homesteading last winter, the folly of a "simple life" was obvious to me; the economy of labor can't be divorced from the economy of modern science. For example: I couldn't imagine opting not to take my child to the emergency room if he had broken an arm falling out of a tree. For that I'd need money. For that I'd need to participate in an establishment greater than what I could eke from my own four corners of the world. Maybe Caroline Ingalls could have bartered fresh eggs with Doc Baker in exchange for an arm splint, but that's not the way of the world anymore. I would have to sell the eggs for money, and spend enough time away from my homestead to sell enough to pay for the splint, and in the time I was away, the labor necessary to continue my lifestyle would fall in arrears.

In some ways I can say that I did manage to uncomplicate my life. I ran away from a life of literally writing on papers and putting them in special stacks in exchange for money to pay for the privilege of driving on freeways to and from work. I live in a small town now (made smaller by the Internet) and I have become a part of a greater community with which I interact daily. Nowadays I hang laundry in the sun for fun, walk my neighborhood for sight-seeing. The relationships I form now are usually deeper than small talk, too. I am fortunate in that when faced with a dilemma, I now have a vast variety of perspectives to consult before choosing a path. I know many folks who I can rely on when I'm in a jam. That's a richer life than I had before, and while I live in a simpler house with a simpler commute these days, in many ways it's a far more complicated life.

I thought about the ladies I have known who had what I thought were probably simple lives. A common thread they all have, I now realize, is that I knew none of them well enough to have any idea what their problems could possibly have been. All three were single working women, as well. With cats. They did a lot of crafting or baking; one of them crocheted Alex a scarf which he gave to me. Were they happy, though? I never knew. Maybe all I needed to do was dust off a crochet hook and get back to work on my secretary spread.

I fantasized about another book I read, Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years, in which a mother spontaneously boards a bus while on a family trip to the beach and starts a new life in a new town. I have a way of waxing romantic about books like that, about the parts that reasonate, and forgetting the rest, particularly when it has been a number of years since I read it. But now I think that I remember that Delia goes back to her old life, in the end. That she found her escape hatch less satisfying than she hoped. That she was grateful to be taken back in. Guess I should re-read that book.

So in the bath, I got to thinking - did I run away from one complexity and straight into another, or does the real source of convolution come from just being me? Odd that I would wonder such a thing while thoughtlessly dehydrating myself. I mean, geeze, duh.

Then I thought - well maybe that's my problem. Too much running away from, not enough running to. I hear people say all the time how Bellingham is too small, how people can be such jerks, how frustrating it can be to live here - and that's all true! I get frustrated too, and want to blame it on my town (or my relationships, or my job, or my ...whatever). But it's just a scapegoat, because I can't run away from me. I would knit together another unique circumstance wherever I went. And besides, how can I ignore the richness my current complexity imparts? I enjoy the experiences and relationships that my "problems" contribute to my life. Which of those would I want to forego, had I hopped a bus to Pismo Beach (the town I had envisioned while reading)? None, of course. I value them all, even the nasty things that have happened, because I learned a lot.

No problem I have is divorced from my fingerprint on it. My problems aren't Bellingham, they aren't my husband or kid or Alexarc, they're not my friends or employees, they're not the economy, they are nothing more or less than the body of the world. Which is to say, there is no simplicity to cure it. Humans are complicated animals with complicated problems which sometimes call for complicated solutions. These problems feel as complex as the body of the world. I just have to figure out how to solve them with what I've already got.

navel gazing

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