In another place we said that the body is a thin web of flesh woven around a void. When we cook the void becomes active: Fire. Longing. It burns and transforms… For this to happen the kitchen must become a place of destruction. Knives are sharpened in order to cut. Fire is lit, in order to boil and burn. If it is true that cooking joins together what nature has separated, it is also true that cooking puts asunder what is joined in nature. The raw must cease to exist for something different to appear. One must die first, in order to be resurrected… The man had to be dead in order to be ‘eaten’ by the villagers. ‘My flesh is meat, indeed, and my blood is drink, indeed. Except you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you’ (John 6: 55, 53) (p.83)
Cooking,
alchemy,
the fire of the stone and the fire of desire transubstantiate
the raw into a new substance,
and the body,
in the darkness where taste dwells,
reencounters its lost blessedness.
When food is taken, the power of the kitchen is also taken inside our bodies. The disciples of Emmaus reported that they felt something burning inside, as they ate. Their eyes were opened, and they knew. Vision and knowledge come through eating. The body is resurrected through eating… (p.84)
Eating is more that feeding: it has to do with remembrance. ‘Eat and drink in remembrance…’ But we do not remember what is buried in a chronological time. The past is gone, forever; it is a time which no longer exists… we remember only what is still present, and yet forgotten. Remembering is the awakening of what was sleeping, the resurrection of what had been buried (p.85)
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