Love, Desire, and Other Things That Rot

There are few things as universal to human experience than the pleasure of sharing a meal with
a loved one. The kinetic affair of its creation, the care in overseeing its bake time, the pleasure
in seeing it mix, sizzle, rise - and tumble down into the sweet mouth of a loved one. Our
relationship with food and its relationship in mediating our relationships with one another spans
the spectrum of sugar and spice, sweet and savory. Meat. Tofu. Pomegranates. Cake. What
simmers between us when we bite, chew, swallow?

I. Love is an Act of Creation

When we think of love, we tend to first imagine the overwhelming variety. Thrumming,
passionate, all-encompassing – we feel that love keenly. But I bet when we first think of
food, we picture the comforting kind. Soft, warm. Something we reach for at a table with
others. This food is inviting, communal, made with a love that creates for others.

Behind the scenes photo of Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting on the set of Romeo
and Juliet, dir. Franco Zeffirelli (1968).

The world was not generally a kind place in the 1500s, but there was often kindness to
be found amongst the embers of what we would call kitchens. Bolo di Amor. Love cake.
First thought to have been created in Sri Lanka under Portuguese rule, there are
competing theories for the origins of this name. People used to laugh that the cake was
named so because it was often baked in attempts to win the hearts of a recalcitrant
suitor. Wouldn’t it be fun to fall in love with one bite of a spiced cake? But a perhaps
more valid explanation of the famous cake’s name would be the amount of love – and
special ingredients – that go into baking this cake from scratch.
“When you cook for someone, this is a deliberate act of nurturing. This very simple thing
is the currency of genuine intimacy.” Barry Jenkins, director of Moonlight (2016).

You’re alone, married, and alone. Beautiful dresses suffocating in their beauty, lonely
nights spent listening to the same phone calls delivered to you every night – No, darling,
extra work in the office, I’m afraid. Don’t wait up. Go to bed. I’ll be back late.
Exasperated sighs fill the apartment like a balloon, lifting you up, up, up away from this
rock that’s weighing down your finger. You’re not dumb, I’m afraid. And neither is your
neighbor. You’ve met because your respective spouses are cheating on you with each
other. Terrible, terrible, ironic so terrible it carves its hole in your stomach and has you
reciting lines. But your new friend –
 In The Mood For Love, dir. Wong Kar-Wai (2000)

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, dir. by Park Chan-wook (2005)

II. I Love You So Much I Want To Eat You

Have you ever seen something so cute you have the strangest desire to snatch it up and
hug it so close to your chest it bursts into tiny pieces that dance merrily around your
awestruck form? I think I first saw an old lady lean over a young child and exclaim,
“You’re so cute! I could just gobble you up!” in a children’s cartoon. Gobble you up!,
cackles the witch in the dark corner of my room. I used to think it was grotesque. What’s
our food here?

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer
all my children’s letters, sometimes very hastily, but this one I lingered over. I sent him a
card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, 'Dear Jim: I loved your card.'
Then I got a letter back from his mother, and she said, 'Jim loved your card so much he
ate it.' That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care
that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate
it." (Maurice Sendak in an interview with Terry Gross, host of National Public Radio's
"Fresh Air”) // OR “When Carson was a child, she read a book called Lives of the
Saints and loved it so much that she tried to eat the pages. It sounds like an apocryphal
story, but yes, she says, "I did do that." Source

Often in fairy tales a mother is presented with the solution to her fertility problems in the
form of a choice. Do eat this but don’t eat this, and a son will grow big and strong in your
belly. If you do eat this thing that you should not eat, a son will grow big and strong in
your belly, but the word might apply more loosely. Son. Grow. Strong. Bellow. Any and
all of those. Chew, chew, choose nicely – hah! It could be said that desire, especially for
women, is “transformative and transgressive.” Often, the queen consumes both onion
skins and births a monster instead of a little boy. Sometimes, we love and desire a love
so much it grows. And grows monstrous.

Hansel and Gretel, Anne Sexton (1971):

Little plum,

Said the mother to her son,

I want to bite,

I want to chew,

I will eat you up.

Bakhtin describes the grotesque body as a thing so enmeshed with the world that it
grows and “outgrows itself, transgressing its own limits.” Think of the top of a
pomegranate, puckering, with its leafy skin reaching up and outward – here, the outside
and inside reach out to one another and suck each other in. But now think of a body –
your mouth open, gasping, spitting, shouting. Your stomach, growing full, fuller, fullest.
Carnival – carnal, celebrated community. Paired beautifully with some fine meat on the
side.

“Chapter XXXVIII” of Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais, illustrated by Gustave

Doré

It sounds like a riddle, right? What’s the one thing that grows and grows the more you
satiate it? The sphinx used to perch on her wall and throw a riddle or two down to see
who’s smart and who’s a snack. I love you so much I want to eat you.

“Did he find that one last tender

place to
sink his teeth in?”

Hegel, describing romantic art in Aesthetics : “[Romantic art] emerges from itself into a
relation with something else which, however, is its own, and in which it finds itself again
and remains communing and in unity with itself…Therefore the romantic Ideal expresses
a relation to another spiritual being which is so bound up with depth of feeling that only in
this other does the soul achieve this intimacy with itself. This life in self in another is, as
feeling, the spiritual depth of love.

We may therefore name love as the general content of the romantic in its religious
domain.”

“If you love me, Henry, you don’t love

me
 in a way I understand.”

Wishbone, Richard Siken

III. Digestive Processes

Often, a wonderful, lush meal is ended not with a delectable dessert, light and airy on
the tongue, but a rumble and a sharp twist in the stomach. The digestive processes
always seem to get you in the end. The carrot you snapped and minced with your molars
finds itself in the same place as the slab of meat on your place that started to blur
around its edges as you cut for its first bite. You chew something over to understand it,
you devour a reading that resonates sharply – plink plink plink – within you. We are
creatures who consume, but we are more importantly creatures who digest. Jacques
Derrida said of his work on Hegel that “the very notion of comprehending [is] as a kind of
incorporation…understanding is still an assimilation.” I understand you – where do we
start?

Anne Carson in Eros the Bittersweet: “Desire is not simple. In Greek the act of love is a
mingling (mignumi) and desire melts the limbs (lusimelēs, cf. Sappho fr. 130 above).
Boundaries of body, categories of thought, are confounded...All our desires are
contradictory, like the desire for food. I want the person I love to love me. If he is,
however, totally devoted to me he does not exist any longer and I cease to love him. And
as long as he is not totally devoted to me he does not love me enough. Hunger and
repletion. (1977, 364)”
 “Digestion” by Frederic Belaubre

“Our culture rests on a structure of sacrifice. We are all mixed up in an eating of flesh—
real or symbolic.” Jacques Derrida

Hello, Stephanie’s thoughts here. I’m going to fight Christie again on the necessity of
conclusions and say I don’t think you NEED one, but if you did want to forego that, the intro
should be more representative of all your sections, while right now it leans in favor of the first
one. I also think right now the third section is much weaker compared to your first two. I have
trouble telling what the differences between the second and third sections really are, especially
because they both deal with cannibalism to some extent.
Otherwise, I love this! Really excited to see it in its final form, and i really enjoy how visceral it is.