The Bread Lecture
I am holding a jar full of sourdough starter in my hand. It is at just the right point in its cycle to begin the dough. It smells both sour and floral, an unctuous almost intoxicating smell that rests on the knife blade of decay and sensual life. It is a living thing. The jar is a communal congress of microbes, wild yeast, water and milled wheat. The wild yeasts are captured from airborne transmissions. To keep this community thriving I have to kill off 80% and replace it with fresh flour and water. The exiled goes into the compost or I can give it to you to grow your own village and pass it on. Viral transmission need not include sickness, it can be an act of sustenance.
I’ve said something like that many times before a class I taught for 11 years about myth and contemporary art and most recently in a performance called The Bread Lecture at The University of Kentucky Art Museum and Orange County Museum of Art in 2019. The lecture braids bread making with image making, teasing out how art is metaphorical sustenance necessary as our daily bread. At the end of the lecture, I hand out small jars dolloped with my own starter. Participants take home a letterpress card explaining how to keep it alive. It requires the physical presence of the audience and my handoff. I feed the audience with my bread, shake hands and swap bread anecdotes.
I most recently incanted the first paragraph while standing in my backyard in Portland, Oregon on a hot spring Sunday morning. I was trying to create a video to post in lieu of the canceled performance at the museum where my current exhibition is on ice. I intoned into the small screen of my iPhone, as my neighbor inexplicably decided to begin a house project at 7AM. My setup looked pretty swell. Certainly more picturesque than repurposing a white museum space. I was framed by the slanted corrugated roof that protects my earthen oven. The early morning sun lit up the vegetable garden behind me. The painted scroll that normally hangs on the gallery wall slightly aglow with the rising sun waved slightly in the breeze. Birdsong and buzz. The cooked loaf sat in one of my own ceramic bowls. The bespoke shot seems made for Instagram. When I held up the jar and spoke into the camera about the sharing of the starter and the living vitality of art, I could not stick the landing. I imagine viewers watching from a cramped space on their own time. Not everything can be digitally retrofitted. The controlled atmosphere of a museum gallery full of people and the smell of starter and bread is more alive than the video files of my beautiful, handmade garden. One is a shared experience, the other is a kind of pornographic echo.
Fermentation and Culture
In order to make bread using wild yeast I need some forethought. My maternal little bit of goo needs to feed a larger starter. That requires time and fermentation. If I’m going to have a baked loaf by the afternoon of the next day I need to get started the night before. The jar smells a bit sour and has thinned to be more runny than viscous. It’s hungry. I mix the fresh flour in warm water in a plastic container and put a big heaping tablespoon of the starter into the mix. I close it up, go to bed and we all dream through the dark night.
The cereal grains that make up our lexicon of bread making began as grass seeds. The word “cereal” is derived from Ceres, the Roman name for the Greek Goddess Demeter. She blew on the grasses to engorge the seeds so they fell heavily down and were not dispersed on the wind. Over generations the grain has been coaxed to grow in river valleys and flatlands. An agreement emerged between these swollen grasses and human beings to carry on a mutual relationship. The partnership developed into a particular kind of home bound rootedness different than our nomadic ancestors. The kinship requires fermentation.
Fermentation is culture. It is the medium that allows wild yeast to feed and predigest the grains we eat. Without it we could not consume the seeds we cultivate. It is no accident that fermentation and culture share common words. Culture–language, music, art, belief etc.– is a living thing and must be fed. In our current hyper-capitalized world art has become the equivalent of factory white bread. It looks like a good loaf, but it has no life. Bread, like stories feed us and need to be fed in return. When it all goes quiet as it has for the past few months, that vitality is directed inward. It is through Demeter and the sunny pastures that we come to be here resting in the yeasty dark. The abduction of her daughter Persephone by Hades and the enforced separation of mother and daughter turns the wheel of the seasons. We are in Hades’ refrigerated halls right now awaiting our next feeding, looking through the translucent obsidian ceiling of the underground into the sun-warmed earth. It is cold down here. We are fermenting. We better get used to it.
We need to eat art, metaphorically at least. If the basic unit of the bread is the grain kernel, then the germ of the artwork is the image. Images refer to ideas and experiences that are otherwise fleeting. They are the basic structure of metaphors. Metaphor is how we understand our world. Images as metaphors reflect to others our core cultural values and the complicated experience of a lived human life. The experience is shaped by our understanding through art. You don’t eat the wheat directly from the chaff. The threshers must work and fill the grain bins and then the culture must partially digest it before it is ready for the bake. We need those images in paintings, stories, songs and poems to ferment through the process of making a piece of art. Spiritual nourishment. Stuff that is too quick or too reactive lacks depth. Sometimes there are poisons present that will kill you if consumed unmediated.
Over the past hundred years things have gone faster. We like quicker bread, instant food, more consumable art. Apps create the illusion of inevitable rapid gratification. Commercial yeast was designed to be more predictable and shorten the gestation period of the bread. New wheat varieties and more aggressive milling and extraction created pale all-purpose flour. It is fast, predictable and dead. It’s hard on the tummy. The term democratization is often used when speaking of this corporate food. Convenience, progress and triumph follow the shark of the market like feeder fish. One reason I have to try and share old fashioned bread starter through an iPhone camera instead of previously scheduled events is because we stretched, extracted and sped up the living world so much that instead of the microbial husbandry of the bread starter we have the punch drunk marauding of corona virus.
It is early morning. We shake the dark dreams away and pour a hot cup of coffee. Open the starter and it is now fruity and vigorous. Time to mix the dough. I measure the starter with the warm water and add the flour. The flour comes from a small local farmer milled with care. It is an exchange that
re-ties communal bonds through agriculture and baking craft. The water is about 90 degrees, the temperature of a swimming pool in mid July. Let the yeast and the grain feel that same nostalgic pull towards the infinity of summer. The dried and milled grain might remember watching the clouds drifting overhead from its field. The wheat might recall the song of cicadas or swifts hunting insects as they do their curlicue dive-bombs. Most bakers worth their salt say that it is the management of the fermentation and not the oven or the wheat varietal that makes great bread. Image making is the same. It is partnership and it requires discipline and restraint.
The story begins in sun and field. It is the kind of day that seems to shoo the shadows away and encourage the sense that nothing will change. Persephone is with her young friends picking flowers. Persephone’s steps are perfumed from the spring blossoms. She is exuberance and hope. In the middle of this seemingly changeless day she is lured by a single narcissus of surpassing fragrance. When she bends to pick it, a maw in the earth opens up blowing the cold breath of the cavernous underland. Her granite skinned uncle Hades rides up in his chariot and seizes her. The abduction breaks the safety of the day as she is absconded down to her awaiting throne in the underworld.
Now is the time to mix in the salt. We add the salt to the resting dough and a bit more water. Reaching in with a wet hand so the stretchy dough doesn’t stick, pull the dough from the bottom and fold. Do this several times as you turn the bowl. Being in the Underworld sucks. Imagine Persephone–a being of youth and sunlight and growth–in the stifling prison of chthonic elegance. Imagine suddenly seeing the bright future that just days before stretched in front of you in an ever expanding view blocked by the dim walls of Hades’ halls. The presence of salt in the dough does just that. In a collaboration and counterpoint with the expansive yeast it blocks the microbes from over enthusiasm. Its realism is both flavor and temper.
I am no bread expert. I am an enthusiast. I bake for my family and friends and strive to make great loaves. Professional bakers possess a material knowledge far beyond mine. They understand how to transmit that knowledge through books and videos. What my experience gives me is the ability to spot a good metaphor that leads into deeper thinking about our culture. Bread, like the art I make is not necessarily about grandstanding. I sure feel good when someone admires what I do, but it is more satisfying when it is shared and consumed.
Cover the dough lovingly with a kitchen towel. It needs rest. In order for the yeast to do its work and make the dough rise it needs time in the darkness.
The Bulk Rise
While we wait in the kitchen for the dough to rise we can consider two images: one is a young woman pouring milk from a red earthenware pitcher into a lobed shallow clay dish. Hunks of crusty bread fill a woven basket and plate. The second is a small child in a red sweatshirt in absolute terror and distress. She has tiny red sneakers and stands unheld as her mother (seen here only from the waist down) is frisked by a border patrol agent. She is illuminated by the harsh white light from the head beams of a military truck. The first picture by Johannes Vermeer is The Milkmaid painted from 1657-1658. The second is a photograph from a series taken at the US- Mexico border in 2018. One is a painting and one is photojournalism. One radiates the safety of home and plenty, the other the terrible coldness of an oppressive system. In the photo we are outside in every meaning of the word. They are separated by time and medium yet they both are images that communicate powerful yearnings and experiences. There is a deep tug of empathy.
It is likely that the bread on the table of the milkmaid is not for her. She will be serving it to someone else who will take the bread for granted. Her beatific gaze may be that of a young woman who aspires to a higher station or simply the absentminded hum of daily rote. For now, she is alone. The little girl on the roadside at night is so far from morning bread. Her world is being disrupted before her eyes. She is about to disappear into a labyrinth overseen by Underworld thugs. Mother is everything and now she is gone. That is a different order of aloneness.
Through a trick of the gods Persephone’s desperate frightened screams are muffled. In the ether a single cry reaches her mother; Demeter. Demeter feels sick. Demeter is the goddess of the living earth and all the green growing things. So when she goes looking for her daughter on the earth she expects one of her charges would have some knowledge. No one can account for Persephone’s whereabouts. The olive trees are mum, the grasses know nothing, the wind is ignorant and all the birds and insects are silent.
Demeter walks the earth drawing the vitality of the world into herself. Carrying a lantern through the deepening dark, the barley fields become brittle, droughts drain riverbeds and leaves fall from trees. Someone has stolen her daughter and until she has her in her arms the world will shiver. She discovers that a preordained deal was struck between Persephone’s father Zeus, his brother Hades and their mother Gaia. This is betrayal of the highest order. Her young daughter is beyond her reach
and away from the sun in the cold beauty of the underworld. She was duped by her own family and the men in charge. Unreachable, Demeter decides to play chicken with her seemingly more powerful brothers. Zeus may have the sky and the storms, Hades all of the glittering underground wealth of gold and oil, but Demeter is the green growing Earth. If the people begin to starve they will no longer light their fires and feed the gods with their smoke. And without the people to breathe the life of the gods into image they stop mattering. It’s a reminder that the true source of cultural power is in the grasslands and fields.
The separation is unbearable. While Persephone adjusts to her new surroundings and dreams of bright warm expanses, her mother wanders in deep grief in the upper world. The place that Persephone casts her hopes to now has the grim, damp aspect of the Underworld. Demeter and Persephone are mother and child, but they are also each other’s person. That there is no physical connection, no sense of where she really is and the loss is quite possibly irrevocable not to mention preventable drives Demeter’s enraged forward motion.
Bulk rise isn’t a completely passive time. Every now and then we lift the kitchen towel from the bowl. Wet our hands and pull the dough from the very bottom and tuck into the center. This encourages glutens to form. The glutens are the webs that hold the gasses of the eating and farting yeast. Over the period of the bulk rise, the dough becomes more responsive, more springy. You feel it coming to life in your hands.
I didn’t used to be a big fan of the golden age of Dutch painting. It was something that was more historically dutiful than heartfelt. When our daughter was three we were in New York City. We thought the Met would be a good place to meet our friends with kids the same age. The Milkmaid was on view. I went because it was there and as an art professor in Oregon there is a certain capital one acquires from seeing major works through travel. I was not prepared for the luminous, embodied experience I would have with the painting. There was the physical flood of pleasure at the paint and the color as an experience of the body. And then there was the picture itself. The image pulling me into all different states of memory and sensuous empathy. The bread, the light and even the touch of the clay all grew into a living thing. That experience became the baseline example of why I think art should be experienced in person and with the body. That requires mobility and privilege.
My daughter was about the same age as the girl in the photo when we saw the Vermeer. Before she reached ten years old she traveled more than I did before I was forty. In the past several years opportunities to travel to Cuba, Mexico City and France came through work. I remember in particular when it was still unclear what the travel restrictions were coming into Havana from a brutally early flight from Mexico City. Sleep deprived with shoddy Spanish our daughter Devlin and I went though customs. I couldn’t quite understand everything and before I knew it our passports had Cuban stamps on them. I was supposed to have a separate sheet stamped. I spent the rest of the trip worried about our return to the US. Would we be stopped? But then again, I’m a white man and a professor. There were protections we had the girl in the photo doesn’t.
Baking bread requires patience. It requires some foresight and sensitivity to touch and smell. Making bread is a way to be present, to abide. What we are doing right now in this hand-wrung, paused present is waiting and hoping. That’s the business of seeds. The wheat kernel is just a seed before it is milled and made into flour. There is so much it has to do before it comes around to growing as grain that can once again be harvested and made into winter bread. So many things can go wrong: droughts, floods, fires, insect infestations, bad leadership that pulls the plant too fast. I’d like to say that I’m patient. But I am as impatient and anxious as the next. Instead I make bread and find metaphors rising in the covered dough.
The longest part of the process is now over. It’s now early afternoon.
Shaping the Loaves
Demeter has shrunken herself into the image of a cloaked old woman. She arrives on the island nation of Eleusis. She waits on the edge of town. When a group of young women about Persephone’s age arrive to fill their bronze pitchers, she reveals herself. She spins a tale of being kidnapped by pirates from her home in Crete. She was left here in fragrant Eleusis with no wealth and no way home she says. She asks if a woman such as her, a woman far beyond child bearing age could find employment as a nursemaid. The young women say that yes, in fact there is exactly that opportunity at the home of Keleos and Metanaira. Their infant son Demophoön was born late, a surprise and divine gift. All the people of the household can sense this traveler is something other than a cast off old woman. A crackle of energy behind her dim eyes betrays her divinity. But as we all do, we’d rather believe in the pitiable crone than the goddess that came to our house to nurse our children.
Goddesses and Gods do not reveal themselves fully to we mortals. It would turn us into an ash heap. The big energies require the mediation of images. We don’t look directly into the sun for a good reason. However without its light and warmth we’re goners. The images with which we sustain ourselves, be it figures of speech, motifs that appear in paintings or the vagrant stanzas of folklore are the protective coatings around an idea. The shape of the image is a container for the true power of an idea. The idea could be one of transcendence or it could be about sustaining power systems. The image world that we occupy is paper thin. It’s why we have a fake celebrity as a president and people are more likely to believe in his fool’s gold than the power of science and research. We are served flimsy and sickly images. Think of the surface of these images as still water. If you bellyflop from a great height onto the water it can break your back. But if you understand that this is just a reflective surface that obscures the true depths you could knife dive right through it and see the whole vast complexity beneath the veneer. Those in power are mightily focused on us just considering the exterior finish. Artists need to dive in and bring up the sunken treasures already present.
Demeter begins to transform the infant Demophoon into an immortal. A little spite deification. Every day she rubs the baby’s body with ambrosia and feeds him the milk of the goddess. He grows stronger and stronger. She shapes him into a future god. While Demeter is in her self-imposed quarantine the green world has gone fallow. Seeds dream underground, farms fail, stocks deplete. Panic and anxiety grow like mold throughout the populace. The gods are getting nervous. If the people don’t go back to work and give them libations their gig is up.
Consider another image: the Alice Neel painting Mother and Child ( Nancy and Olivia) from 1967 depicts a a young mother seated cross legged on a stool. Her bright hazel eyes are wide open with exasperated surprise. She holds her squirmy baby close to her cheek. The baby looks on too. Both are watching the painter intently. Which means the image that is left over from the encounter leaves the pair staring at us. The mother’s acid green and navy blue dress is composed of quick, wet strokes. A sea foam green door frames the center of the picture and behind that a pitcher sits on a small table with turned legs. We are invited into the scene. It feels alive with the intimacy of a moment shared. This is the kitchen of the everyday, the apartment whose walls we’re now accustomed to looking at all day and night for weeks. Everything from the baby’s kicking feet and the mother’s crossed legs are about to change. She looks like she’s about to speak. This is the trick of the image. Alice Neel presents us with an image of presence and immediacy, but through a combination of medium (oil paint), image (mother and child in a domestic setting) and visual voice (Neel’s expertly applied strokes and exacting observance of psychological portraiture) we feel our way into the image. There are two states at play simultaneously. The first is the sensual, empathetic specificity of the mother and child. We could know them. It’s so human. The second is the deeply ancient idea of maternal love and the bond between mother and child. The form of the artwork holds all of these different ideas inside itself. The immediacy we feel is a result of the artwork holding its form to deliver the meaning to us. The picture speaks of the fleeting but it took hours to shape.
It’s time for us to shape our loaves. Laying the springy, floral smelling dough onto the bench we cut the one mass into twin rounds. We have to be careful not to undo all the work of our culture. Compressing the dough now would flatten all those lovely air pockets and reduce the gluten. Use a light hand. Let it sit under the towel for thirty minutes or so. Bench rest.
Using a bench knife or pastry knife, slide under each round and fold the dough with wet or floured hands. Fold it into itself like an envelope with four tabs.This creates the surface tension of the crust. We put the dough balls into floured baskets. Have a seat. Here’s another cup of coffee and a little sweet. We’ve got a little more waiting around to do.
Baking
For the finishing touch, Demeter places Demophoön in the hot coals of the hearth. This is the final bake of his immortality. Metanaira hasn’t been completely comfortable with this old woman so she snoops a bit as mothers often do with new babysitters. She sees Demeter putting her baby into the fire. Understandably Metanaira runs in to pull the child out of the embers. The hysterical Metanaira
calls for the removal of this insane old vagabond. It is at this moment that Demeter reveals herself in all her golden plaits and radiant glory. She says, “Humans are foolish! They have no sense to know their destiny ahead. When good or evil comes you are too blinded by your own folly!” The image just slipped its skin to reveal its source.
Demophoön never does get to be immortal but it’s still a leg up in the world to have been rubbed with ambrosia and fed the milk of the Goddess. Once the assembled household realizes they’ve had a divinity in their midst they bow down. When something blows open and changes everything, one remembers the little clues that were previously overlooked. The answer was there all along but we didn’t want to see it. If we did, we would have to course correct and accept the consequences. It’s much easier to go with the mundane surface of things.
In a wood fired earthen oven like the one we’re baking in, you have to start the fire a few hours ahead of time. The first smokey flames begin with small twigs and slivers of wood. Over time you feed enough fuel to keep the fire going and push it back into the recesses of the oven. Hot flames dat out of the mouth of the oven like tongues. You begin to feel the outside of the oven gaining heat. The purpose of the fire is not to use its heat directly but to warm the walls and floor of the oven so that it radiates back into the belly. Once the whole oven is hot we need to rake out the coals. Rake them into a metal can and close it up. The coals can be used later. Now, with a sopping wet cloth we clean the hearth surface and remove all the small embers. Close the oven up and let heat distribute evenly. The dough is turned out from the baskets onto a wooden peel covered with flour and cornmeal. With a lame (a tool that is a razor blade secured by a wooden handle) you slit the top of the dough. The dough rounds are full of tension. The incision allows room for growth by controlling where the energy of the oven is directed. We could simply put in three utilitarian slashes or we could add the image of a wheat stalk and bless the bread with the memory of its origins.
What is true of immortals-to-be is true of our bread. It has to be left in the oven for the right amount of time. Too soon and you have a gooey mess, too long you have a hard inedible block. Ovens are crucibles of transformation. The enclosed space of gathered heat is the place where the dough becomes bread. If the timing is right and the oven is ready your loaves will experience something called “oven pop”. It’s the moment of last ditch expansion from our loyal microbes before burning up. It’s why you have to score a loaf to accommodate for that big puff and rise. The airy labyrinth of holes in a well baked loaf comes from this process. It is the result of small deaths. The yeasts die for our toast and jam.
Any art form is a process of cultivation, fermentation and baking. Art takes the time it takes. There might be a few corners to cut, but cut too many and there are consequences. The biggest being that you end up with something inedible and useless.
The bread is baked. It comes out of the oven with a brown caramelized crust that emits a whisper song of crackling perfection. Let the bread cool it is not time. We are not quite ready to eat.
The technology of bread is closely aligned with ceramics. Both require a controlled heat for transformation. Without the heat of the oven, bread is just dough and without the metamorphosis of the firing in a kiln, ceramic is simply clay. They are symbiotic forms. Clay vessels figure prominently in The Milkmaid and even the ceramic vase in Mother and Child is an important pictorial element. The vessels ground the picture with domesticity. Cuneiform, the first recorded writing is on clay tablets. They recorded the wealth of fields and attendant labor. The organization around agriculture and writing arose with patriarchy and the suppression of the Goddess. With the new structure comes a new dominant image of divinity: the entitled, patriarchal Sky God. The Sky God didn’t build the world but feels he’s owed it anyway. And he’ll take all the credit. Certainly human labor was transformed in the wake of a grain economy. Writing, ceramic technology and bread all arose together. So much of what references joy, warmth and home throughout our history is bound up with those tectonic changes. Unfortunately they also brought wealth inequality, slavery and ecological dominance.
Which brings us to our final two images. One is a large stoneware storage jar from South Carolina. It was made by Dave Drake or “Dave the Potter”. Drake was an enslaved African American potter. He was freed after Emancipation. Pottery was a trade throughout the Slave Power south. The ceramics were made for all kinds of domestic uses from grain storage jars to bread bowls on plantations. Using the same sgraffito technique that ancient cuneiform used to count the laborers and the yields of the field, Dave inscribed his voice into the skin of the wet clay. He would sign the shoulders of these massive jars with his name and witty, often satirical poems. The system that evolved to justify his enslavement had its seeds in those old tablets. He used that same literacy of oppression to announce his humanity and presence. He made an image as alive and immediate as Neel’s mother and daughter and Vermeer’s milkmaid. It is in the bake, in the firing that the words become indelible.
A more recent image: a burning home backed by a wall of fire. It is a house in Paradise, California being subsumed by 2018’s Camp Fire, one of the regular infernos that sweep through the western United States. The town which was a modest rural community lent a gravitas with its name. Paradise is burning. Fires started by seemingly minor sparks grow quickly out of control. The news images were horrific but like mass shootings have become commonplace. That house in the picture means that there is another homeless family in the world. It means there are more people on the highways looking for respite and home. Closed borders and burning towns are connected through the same system. It means that an irreplaceable swath of mature forest has to start from scratch. L.A. was awash in particulates beyond its usual pollution. The smoke permeated everything for miles. A hazy red pall hung over the city for weeks. The forest fires were a dress rehearsal for a pandemic. We have been harvesting and cutting and burning and eating for centuries. Now a collective pause means that Los Angeles has true stars in the sky.
The outdoor wood fired oven has the ability to contain the flames and transform dough or be the careless start of a conflagration .
By now, the gods have sent envoys back and forth between Hades and Demeter. They are desperate to broker a deal. People have to get back to normal so they can sacrifice to the gods. Without sacrifices one cannot enjoy the Olympian benefits of godhood. An agreement is struck to return Persephone to her mother. Hades is outbid. As long she hasn’t eaten the food of the underworld the agreement stands. Persephone’s long imprisonment is at an end. Imagine her relief. She will be among the sun and the green world with her mother at last. But Hades has one last trick up his sleeve. On their way to the reunion he slips her a few of the honey sweet pomegranate seeds from his gardens. Persephone, not he, has broken the contract.
When Persephone arrives back into the air the fragrant world springs into green life. Mother and daughter are reunited holding each other at last. They have missed each other so much. In their embrace, Demeter senses the change in her daughter. Something is amiss. She has eaten the food of the dead. Seeds are underworld fare. The reunion will be short lived and fraught. When your loved one has shared the food of the Underworld with another they will never hold you the same way again. However, the gods are not about to go back into quarantine. A compromise is reached. For three months out of the year Persephone retreats with her new husband to reign over Hades’ realm. For the rest of the year she and her mother weave the vitality of the living world. During the dark cold months the world sleeps. Seeds and grains need to be stored and stories held when Persephone dons her dark cloak and Demeter retreats from view into her temple on fragrant Eleusis. This is the time to eat bread.
Eating and sharing
It is now early evening. The table is set with ceramic plates and water pitchers. Maybe there’s wine on the table. It’s been a long day. But right now, every day stretches into the next. The formality of the table setting is so that we can remember when we gathered with ease. We try to recall when the days had the rhythm of a beehive. Quiet in the cool of the morning, rising to frenzied buzz with the comings and goings at the high heat of day until the last stragglers return with pollen for the evening. But those busy days with their plans and anxieties are gone for now. Day is done. Maybe some honey would be nice with a slice of bread.
My mother baked all the time. She made whoopee pies and French Canadian crepes and her specialty: dill bread. It was a basic sandwich loaf. It was a straight forward recipe with white flour and commercial yeast. The herbal scent of that bread was so heady that all of my brothers and I could probably recall it immediately. I adored that bread. My parents grew up in New Hampshire during the Depression. So for my mother baking was as much pure survival and basic sustenance as it was pleasure or art. And yet it infused me with the habit even before I could give it words. She died in 2014. She was always so vital and healthy and then cancer ran though her so quickly that we didn’t have time to grasp the loss. We gathered for her memorial at the church in Concord, New Hampshire where she and my parents had been married sixty something years earlier and even further back to their infancy and baptism. I had not been in a church in years.
Growing up, I was a disaster at catechism. I rejected the Catholicism I grew up in by the time I was fifteen. Sitting in the church however and watching the assembled receive communion broke me open. Maybe the structure and the institution wasn’t working anymore, but the images were. The metaphors were alive and well and I absorbed them into my own life. The crux of the mass was not the shame or the hierarchy, it was the simple but holy act of breaking bread together. This was a question of image. If we look through the image of Jesus, shining behind him is Osiris the Egyptian god of the Underworld and barley. Behind that is the the triple faced Goddess; one mask of which is Demeter. She is associated with the rhythms of the moon. Behind it all is the agreement of the living grain and the people. In my mother’s very humble kitchen with whatever ingredients she could afford she sustained us. The communion was not about some outside patriarch even if our own house was ruled by one. The communion is the daily feeding of culture. A large amount is dumped but some small bit gets to be that perfect loaf of bread which needs to be eaten. And the memory of the perfect loaf is sustenance beyond the physical pleasure. The seed still has life. It could still nourish. It just needs new fields.
I don’t think anyone makes bread just for themselves. Making bread, just like making art, is for sharing. It becomes consecrated in the act of giving. The metaphorical bread I mentioned at the
beginning of this, the connection to art making and meaning making isn’t simply an intellectual feint. It’s not frivolous. When we consume the metaphorical bread we connect the physical thing in front of us to the depths below the surface. The reason that the current powers want us to see only the surface is because that is a transactional world, one that is falsely utilitarian. Any culture worth feeding is an ongoing series of agreements of conversations between the fleeting and the permanent and the elements of air, water and earth. It requires mutual respect and patience. We have to abide with loss and separation.
I am well aware of the shortage of flour engendered by the quarantine. Amazon sold out of home flour mills within weeks. Flour, beans and toilet paper seem to be what anchors us to a sense of security. The pandemic laid bare the thinness of the images we hold most dear. The warning had been telegraphed to us for some time. We didn’t notice the angry goddess in our midst. Just yesterday driving along the Columbia Slough campers and broken down cars with tents attached to the bumper lined the wooded bypass. They are the equivalent of the Hoovervilles and dust bowl refugee camps from the Depression. Cupboards are thin and fuel scarce. Renters barely hang onto a shelter they can call home. The bread baking I have been describing throughout is a luxury and a privilege. But it cannot be dismissed outright. The culture that feeds us, sustains us and gives back to the future requires tending by all. It is the strangled image world of our contemporary media and politics that abets a rotten system that leads us to accept these conditions.
JSMA@PSU, the museum where this was supposed to take place is closed until further notice. The scheduled date of the lecture has come and gone. I cannot pass out the starter to an audience. I cannot slice the bread and give it to a gathered group. We are in lockdown and separated. It will not always be so but now we’ve all eaten the food of the Underworld. I miss human touch and the ability to pass food to a guest. But I know that right now a video of these acts is a charade. The bready metaphor is more alive in this essay written in the words that evolved out of early cuneiform than in the tinny approximation of life in a video. At least there is private communion here in the reading. I will wait until we can touch again, when the culture is full of yeasty burbling microbes and not rampaging viruses. I think, as we ferment down here and dream of bread in sunny fields that we need to remember that the metaphorical bread nourishes visions. Those visions could be a reunion in which the Olympian powers that got us here in the first place can be upended. That is the starter I give to you until we can sit side by side.
Daniel Duford
daniel@danielduford.com
If you enjoyed this piece, you may also like Carla’s Ciambelline and A Lovely Tomato Soup