Friday on my mind

Ha, well. The door is shut, the locker tied up. I am fatigued and dead, the latter quite befitting this Hallowed Evening. My sister-in-law undoubtedly will have illuminated her garden with a big grinning pumpkin, the contents of which she made into a superb soup last Saturday. For those interested, here’s the recipe:

Apple Pumpkin Soup

1 large onion, chopped
1/2 pound of bacon, chopped
one 15-ounce can of pumpkin (or equivalent)
1 cup water
2 cups apple cider
1/4 cup brown sugar
4 cubes chicken bouillon
1 apple, chopped and unpeeled
dash of liquid smoke
salt, to taste
2 teaspoons white pepper
1/3 cup crystallized ginger, chopped

Sauté onion and bacon lightly in large pot. Add pumpkin, water, apple cider, brown sugar, chicken bouillon, apple, liquid smoke salt, white pepper, and crystallized ginger to the pot. Cover and simmer for 1 hour. Stir frequently. Blend to thicken in blender-size batches. Serve with sour cream: one teaspoon on each serving.

I particularly like ‘a dash of liquid smoke’. This is where language becomes poetry. It conjures up images of Macbeth-fashion cauldrons and real mean, ugly witches – not that new age Wicca naf crap. It speaks of mists and fogs and slow burning wood chips. Of course it is not quite PC since the European Food Safety Agency has established it is slightly carcinogenic, but so are cigarettes, the latter far more I daresay. The effect of a dash of liquid smoke is quite negligible compared to my daily intake of tar and nicotine, which rather peaks at this time of the year. Stress, you see. Hard work. When under duress, etcetera. My guardians and well-wishers will not approve, but I don’t care, she said defiantly, lighting another one.

Hallowe’en. We should be paying tribute to the evil spirits in the wake of All Saints Day, to placate them. According to the Celts the boundary between the living and the deceased dissolved on this day, and the dead became dangerous for the living by causing problems. Ah, see, that is why my being fatigued and dead tonight becomes more dangerous for the living. I am going to cause some problems, indubitably. Watch me.
Those who know will have noticed a certain tendency toward moody irritability this morning and witnessed some small outbreaks of irrational and compulsive behaviour on my part, snapping at people (under the guise of mumbling to myself and snatching scraps of paper out of someone’s baffled hands) for almost no reason. I said, almost no reason. A woman has to defend herself, justifying her taking everything personal and all that. Let no man tell a woman that it might be hormone terrorism lest he spend the rest of his life like the Headless Horseman in Sleepy Hollow.

Now the curious thing is that twenty years ago no-one in his right mind in the old world, being our good old Europe and in particular the continental part of it, would have thought of celebrating Halloween. Two decades later, this quintessential American custom has been embraced with unabashed enthusiasm, which belies the prevailing anti-Americanism that marks the overall European response to the reign of the Bush II empire. Even the smallest village in the remote Flemish hinterland runs riot with it, as testified by my sister-in-law’s grinning pumpkin. I predict that Obama, should he be elected and I sincerely hope he will, assisted by the banking crisis boomerang, will turn good old Europe into Thanksgiving adepts as well in four years’ time. Mark my words.

The American Dream in the sixties, the American Nightmare fifty years later. L’histoire se répète, toujours. As Gibbon so expertly demonstrated, Roman customs and culture had never been so fervently embraced in every remote nook and cranny of its crumbling, weakened empire than when its hegemony was dropping dead from exhaustion. Its cultural imprint survived the onslaught, lived on, transmuted, giving rise to an astounding new amalgam. As it always does. There is nothing dark about it.
I am not being pessimistic. Growth and development hinge on death and rebirth. Waiting for the Barbarians has lead to the birth of Europe, which in its turn lead to the birth of the US.

No-one has expressed that concept more beautifully than Claudius Claudianus, 4-5th century AD, in his 'On a Crystal Enclosing a Drop of Water' (De crystallo cui aqua inerat, verse XXXVI (LIX):
See this vein which runs in a bright streak through the translucent ice. This hidden water fears not any blast of Boreas nor winter’s chill but runs this way and that. It is not frozen by December’s cold, nor dried up by July’s sun, nor wasted away by all-consuming time.

Compare that to D.H. Laurence, Winter in the Boulevard, 1916:
The trees down the boulevard stand naked in thought,
Their abundant summery wordage silenced, caught
In the grim undertow; naked the trees confront
Implacable winter's long, cross-questioning brunt.

Brutal, but wonderful. Both inextricably linked to the same idea. The ciclo del enfermo.

While we are waiting for the Barbarians, we better enjoy ourselves entretemps. I have been listening to Brave marin revient de guerre as sung by Kiki de Montparnasse, whose creed was “all I need is an onion, a bit of bread, and a bottle of red wine; and I will always find somebody to offer me that."
A woman with balls.
Speaking of which, that is exactly what I professed to be in the company of one of my colleagues, who paradoxically admires women who make clear from the onset that they are not hunting for the steady relationship, and what I was thinking of when smoking my last office cigarette of the day in the company of the female cleaners. All of them women with balls, in a different, tougher, far more admirable sense. I was listening in to poignant yet amusing stories related, with tender humour, by one of them about her demented 80 year old mother and her imaginary lover, when in walked the new male cleaner of Croatian descent, wearing sky-blue latex gloves, for his Friday cigarette.
“My, do you smoke?”, exclaimed the one who related the story of the demented mother, “I have never seen you do that.” “Nowadays only on Fridays”, he replied. “I used to smoke two packs a day”. Admirable, I think by myself. That man has stamina.
Good-looking, winning smile, a quick glance. Asks me most charmingly if he can borrow my lighter. But of course. I notice how the right arm muscle flexes, the brachioradialis to be precise. And my imagination starts running riot and tends to get physically very explicit. It doesn’t do that so easily on a lightning bolt meeting with strangers, certainly not so with male Croatian cleaners at least 15 years younger than my own interesting self, who guards her present-day modesty with admirable restraint. I will not go into details since this would lead me into all the clichés of the blue movies I usually sneer at. Suffice it to say that I would have asked him home if the others hadn’t been around. If I would have got there. It could have been mid-stairs for all it mattered, to give you an idea. Interesting phenomenon. My guardians and well-wishers will nod approvingly and exclaim there is hope at last. They will also harbour some smug smiles that they will use against me on every possible occasion. ‘Ah, you said that women are different?’ I can just hear them say it.

I better get on with the affair of the eighteenth century cow creamer. Much safer ground. Now cow creamers, indeed, are a very peculiar thing. I happen to have one myself and always thought I was one of the very few in the world to have such a quirky object in their possession, having inherited it from my grandmother. Mine, of glazed painted porcelain, is definitely not eighteenth century, more early 1920s mass production. It is utter kitsch and objectively speaking quite ugly. I took an absurd fancy to it as a child. Don’t ask me why.
I had actually forgotten about the whole cow creamer were it not for the delivery of my library arm-chair, which in turn, as it goes, led me to P.G. Wodehouse’s well-known novel that centres around the affair of the eighteenth century cow creamer. My curiosity was awakened. A search on the net revealed that cow creamers are a major industry. Ever since the populace took to drinking coffee, which they did from the early 18th century onwards, cow cream jugs have been massively popular, the first ones made by the Dutch. I read that “The hollow cows could be filled through an opening in the back, with the mouth serving as a spout and the tail as a handle”. That is exactly what delighted me as a child. “The popularity of these jugs was not diminished by the fact that they were very unhygienic and were potentially the cause of salmonella poisoning”. Ah, again not very PC. Not surprising I like it.

Should one sneer at a cow creamer?

It’s All Saints by now. The evil spirits have been placated. I am no longer fatigued, no longer dead, on the contrary, I am very much among the living, my virtue assaulted but it held its own very well, norms and values thrown to the wind like caution, yet nothing happened. That is irony. Or pragmatism, whatever you like.