For Dessert
It was several years ago when, in the height of an overemotional pre-literary whirlpool of unrequited love, the one that usually produces lyrics, I wrote an essay that was meant to be part of a book, the book I was writing. It was an essay on art and hunger – I haven't read Knut Hamsun's Hunger yet although a friend of mine had recommended it to me long before the essay – art because I was enraged by the failure of my numerous attempts at showing the world how much I disagreed with it, being a true artist; and hunger because it was a time when food was scarce and all I ate was the cheapest possible of everything; and I hadn't had a bite in about two days.
While writing, I could register in my mind how the feeling of hunger was steadily being absorbed by a much more intense one – that of the process of creation, now given an outlet, and the pleasant sensation it gave the restless mind-machine troubled by everything in the world. I wrote pages. I wrote as fast as I could, afraid not to lose track of the galloping steed of thought, rushed to a place unknown, hastened by its own inertia, in a seeming attempt to fly.
I had even forgotten about the realisation of the outcome and meaning of the opposition of hunger vs. art, i.e. the physical vs. the metaphysical, when a knock on the door seized the harness of the madly running steed and made it slacken its pace, turning it from a frantic one into a steadily rapid one. The words the peeping-in head uttered, after a few questions on my general condition, were: ‘Do you want to eat?’
’Yes, I do; I do very much’, I almost cried, realising that the battle of transcendency had been suddenly won by the stomach, not by the mind. I can’t remember whether I wrote another sentence or a couple more, or headed outright to the visitor's room – to eat, and tell a living person of what I had been trying to tell the sheet of paper.
Later on, I returned to my literary wanderings, this time in a much different mood and pace. Having read what I had written, I continued writing as there were more words that wanted to become materialised.
It was, and it still is, an essay, or a chapter that was the result of this. I remembered it on my way back from the English lessons I teach now, hungry as a pack of wolves, agile and flourishing in my light-yellow shirt and light-blue pants, quick paced and smiling, the day being a good one, although hot and dry.
I wondered whether to first sit down and write, and then eat, for the sake of experiment, or to first diminish the chance of a sudden victory of Nature over Art by having a couple of sandwiches. Neither of these came first as I decided to shave, then eat, and then sit and write.
‘Why not let Nature have it its own way’, I thought, knowing that it always does, eventually.
‘Creation needs to be disciplined, should the creator want a stable creature, able to live on its own’, I concluded as a sage would, but a clean shaven one.
I can now have my dessert!