DICKSON

 

It was a bitter, stormy Arctic night, and I pictured roadside homes with families and hot coffee on the table. The snow jam was an emergency that touched Dickinson itself. The scene, beyond the cars and lights, was Desolation itself, the Greenland ice sheet in the darkness. I watched everything impassively, rereading Barthes's passage on Japanese chopsticks for the thousandth time: "The chopstick divides, separates, pushes aside, nibbles, instead of cutting and grasping, like our cutlery; it never violates the food: it untangles it little by little (in the case of herbs), or else undoes it (in the case of fish and shellfish), thus rediscovering the natural fissures of matter (in this, closer to the primitive finger than the knife). Finally, and this is perhaps its most beautiful function, the double chopstick transports the food, whether when, crossed like two hands, supporting and no longer grasping, it insinuates itself under the flake of rice and extends it, lifting it to the diner's mouth, or when (in an ancient gesture from all over the East) it slides the food snow from the bowl to the lips, like a shovel. In all these uses, in all these gestures it implies, the chopstick opposes our knife (and its predatory substitute, the fork): It is the instrument of food that refuses to cut, to grasp, to mutilate, to pierce (very limited gestures, set back in the kitchen preparation: the fishmonger who skins, before our eyes, the live salmon, exorcises once and for all, in a preliminary sacrifice, the murder of food); through the toothpick, food is no longer a prey that is violated (meat upon which we sink our teeth), but a harmoniously transferred substance; it transforms the previously divided matter into bird food, and the rice into a stream of milk.” Finally (I thought, after reading) the bus driver, a good and maniacal man, was able to start and rev the diesel engine. The bus with the “Chicago” sign drove ahead, uncertainly amid the blizzard. Within minutes, we returned to dry ground after hours of tribulation. But for me it was a different “spectacle”, receding like a temporal groove in my peripheral vision. Then that crowded café and the excitement of Friday morning—mainly because of the traffic jam caused by the snow. Thoughts producing tumultuous, undulating, and inflamed resonances. Certainly, ideas are always stronger than facts; otherwise, desire would be less beautiful than pleasure, and it is more powerful, it generates it.