The powdered wig of serenity.
In 1723, Henry Bolingbroke and Alexander Pope wrote a letter to Jonathan Swift. In it, they pontificated on friendship, retirement, serenity, and peaceful complacency. Ever the political philosopher, Bolingbroke explained to Swift that “[r]eflection and habit have rendered the world so indifferent to me, that I am neither afflicted nor rejoiced, angry nor pleased, at what happens in it…Perfect tranquility is the general tenor of my life.”
I can’t help but wonder how one attains this level of serenity. It’s not apathetic or ignorant – that’s a very different type of complacency – rather, it’s something one must cultivate, earn. It’s something I’d like to cultivate. To earn.
This is the story of my attempt to find that serenity through pita bread. Cooking is the closest I come to meditation; the process is tranquil, it follows logical steps, and it yields reliable results. The world outside my kitchen fades into the distance, loses all resonance.
Yeasty!
So, here we go.
Step One: Dissolve a packet of Active Dry Yeast into half a cup of warm water along with a teaspoon of granulated sugar. Let sit until frothy.
I have about ten minutes to kill now, so I read a Charles Simic post about ignorance and the “commonplace delusions” that most Americans hold. These are delusions that I hear and see on a daily basis, that infuriate and anger me beyond expression. Why are most people perfectly content with ignorance? Why is it ok, even valued, to actively avoid knowledge? Are we so afraid that we turn our backs on anything other than what we’re fed, deluded though that information may be? Does it not bother us that the majority of the world thinks we’re batshit insane??
DOESN’T EVERYONE WANT TO BE RELATIVELY INTELLIGENT???
I am already failing miserably at serenity.
Step Two: In the bowl of a stand mixer (you can also do this by hand in a regular mixing bowl), combine three cups of flour and 1¼ tsps. of salt. Make a well in the center and add the yeast mixture. With the mixer on, slowly add another cup of water. Mix well, until a dough forms. The dough should be slightly tacky but should pull away easily from the sides of the bowl. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 2-5 minutes.
Operation Serenity Now is back on track. Mixer is on. Soon, I will be kneading the dough and proper meditation will begin.
I notice that the dough is really sticky. Crap. I didn’t account for the fact that it’s been raining here all day, and it’s really humid. I stupidly forgot to cut back on the water. That’s ok. I’ll just add more flour.
WHY ME????? WHYYYYY??
But I’m nearly out of flour.
WHY DOES THE UNIVERSE HATE ME??
The universe does not hate me. I know this because I found a small bag of flour in the back of the pantry. I also know this because I do not believe that the universe is sentient. Not in a way that would directly affect my baking, anyway.
Kneading the dough now. Seriously, Dear Interwebz, if you have never baked bread, you should do it just for the kneading process. The repetitive motion is vaguely hypnotic, and you get to work out your pent up aggression. Not that I have any pent up anger, but you might. I’m thinking about you here.
Step Three: Add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil to a large bowl. Put the dough into the bowl, making sure to coat it on all sides with the oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a kitchen towel. Let rest until the dough doubles in size – one-to-two hours.
I complete this step without major incident.
I wish I could pretend that I used the two hours of rising time for contemplation and self-reflection. But I can’t lie to you, Dear Interwebz. It’s not that I didn’t try to be contemplative and quiet. I really tried to sit and listen to the breeze — I even opened the window, but the breeze was really wind, and it started blowing rainwater into the kitchen. Now I was just pissed off about cleaning rainwater off the countertops. Trying not to get too angry about how much I suck at serenity, I pick up the novel I’ve been re-reading, Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love. This is a remarkable, REMARKABLE, novel. So remarkable that it brings the real world tumbling into my kitchen.
“ ‘What do I think? I think we’re a nation of cowards,’ he says bitterly. ‘I hate to say it . . . [b]ut we live by slogans. We take comfort in them: “The Great Egyptian People.” “The peaceful, patient Nation, that when it is aroused shatters the World.” Shatters the world? Tell me, when in all of history did the Egyptian people rebel? When? When ‘Urabi spoke up for them, they sold him out. They ran away and let the British in. You’ll say 1919, but 1919 wasn’t a revolution. It was a few demonstrations and it changed nothing…Fifty-two? That was not a rebellion of the people. It was an army movement which rode the people and told the people that it spoke with their voice. The people have no voice.
‘What are we then?’
‘We’re a bunch of intellectuals who sit in the Atelier or the Grillon and talk to each other. And when we write, we write for each other. We have absolutely no connection with the people. The people don’t know we exist.’”
Soueif published this novel in 1999, twelve years before the Egyptian Revolution. So, this character, while rightly frustrated about the Egyptian politics and government post-Empire, was ultimately proven wrong by the Egyptian people. Huzzah! Serenity is mine!
I’m lying.
The architects of last year’s revolution were undoubtedly “the people,” but the transition has been hijacked by the SCAF (Supreme Council of Armed Forces). Oh, I have no doubt that there will be a mostly peaceful transition of power from SCAF to a new elected leadership; however, the generals who are already in the process of reconfiguring power structures and maximizing their legal authority, are also well on their way to redesigning “hegemonic executive authority and reinstat[ing] Mubarak’s menu of manipulation.”
I look at the clock. It’s only been fifteen minutes.
I put down the novel, pull up my Facebook page, and start scrolling through the cat videos, snarky comments, and pictures of my friends’ lunches. But it’s all a lie, Dear Interwebz. It’s a lie I tell myself, of course, because I know that among my many, many activist and politically aware friends’ posts, there will undoubtedly be something to lead me on a path of angry contemplation. It doesn’t take long before I find myself searching for updates on Trayvon Martin’s murder. The sadness is overwhelming. I cannot even begin to imagine the pain that his family is enduring. And I’m angry. There are so many things to be angry about in this situation – a life taken too soon, a family in mourning, an incompetent police force, a nation afraid to acknowledge racism for what it is, a nation afraid of forceful language, of harsh labels, a nation afraid to say the words “lynching” and “racist,” so instead says “killing” and “possible racial motivations.”
I cannot abide cowards.
A racist killed a young black man. Own this.
Can we stop saying we live in “post-racial America” now?
A news alert just popped up on my phone. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales has been charged with 17 counts of murder, along with other charges including attempted murder and dereliction of duty. I click through to the story. I had been wondering when he would be formally charged for the massacre he committed in an Afghani village. I did not doubt that the charges would be commensurate with the atrocity or that military justice would be swift. Nor, sadly, did I doubt that the spin machine would be in full swing. I stumble upon a Robert Fisk op-ed for The Independent wherein he argues that the “deranged soldier” story is overused and not terribly accurate. I start thinking about semantics, about memory and representation. Bales’s lawyer, John Henry Browne, has stated in interviews this week that Bales does not remember “some of the events” at the time of the attack, and that he did not receive medical treatment after a concussion he sustained in a previous deployment in Iraq. Browne goes on to state that
“[t]here’s no crime scene. There’s no DNA. There’s no confession, although they’re leaking something, which I don’t believe until I see it. This is going to be a hard case for the government to prove. And my client can’t help me a lot with some of the things because he has mental problems and I believe they’re totally legitimate.”
Madness and the unreliability of memory have long been tools of liberation in narrative. Insanity can free a character from the strictures and bounds of society. Bales and his lawyer are not inventing a new type of defense; they’re rehashing an old one. But in order for this representation to work, in order for Bales to convincingly play the part of the deranged soldier who suffered some sort of breakdown, rather than appear as the criminal who massacred 17 people based on little more than their ethonoreligious backgrounds, certain things need to be removed from the dominant narrative. The voices and memories of the Afghani survivors of his atrocity must never be heard.
In The Drowned and the Saved, Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi notes that “[i]t is natural and obvious that the most substantial material for the reconstruction of truth…is the memories of the survivors.” Levi was, of course, talking about the concentration camps of WWII. He goes on to discuss the unreliability of memory, its ultimate degradation over time, and the difficult, yet imperative, process of rebuilding history through the testimonies of victims and oppressors. Bales is no Nazi, nor is the treatment of the Afghani people comparable to that of the Jews during the Holocaust. However, Levi’s arguments about memory and representation hold true in both cases. A true reconstruction of events, one that aims to preserve a narrative, document trauma, and acknowledge power relations, cannot sustain a story like the one Bales and his lawyer are telling. A single story, a single memory, cannot write history. The people of Afghanistan, the villagers who survived his shooting spree, must be erased in order for Bales to successfully play the role of the victim.
And so we turn a mass murderer into an innocent victim.
Has it been two hours yet?
Tiny dough balls of rage.
Step Four: Preheat the oven to 500 degrees. Punch the shit out of the motherfuckin’ dough.
*breathe*
After punching the dough, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface, knead for a couple of minutes. Roll into a ball, and then divide into eight equal pieces. Lightly flour a baking sheet, roll each portion into a small ball and place on the baking sheet. Cover with a kitchen towel.
Lightly flour a large towel or sheet, and lay it out on a big surface (table will do). Taking one small ball of dough at a time, use a rolling pin to roll each one into a flat round – about 5-6 inches in diameter and ½ inch thick. Place each loaf onto the floured towel and cover.
Be sure to preheat a baking sheet or pizza stone for ten minutes before baking the bread.
I’m about to be in the kitchen for a good 1-2 hours, so I plug my iPod into the dock and start a news podcast to run in the background. WHY DID I CHOOSE A NEWS PODCAST?? WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME, INTERWEBZ?
Flattened discs of rage.
The rolling, flouring, preheating process goes swimmingly, peppered as it is with my colorful, non-serene responses to reports on continued massacres in Syria, trans-vaginal ultrasounds, student loan debt, and the depravity of election cycles.
Step Five: One (or two) at a time, place loaves onto baking sheet or stone. Bake for three to four minutes (until bread puffs up). Turn to bake (for less than a minute) on the other side. Remove to cooling rack. Using spatula, gently press down the loaf to release the steam. Repeat until all loaves are baked.
Well, I’ve baked the bread. All the loaves puffed up. I almost feel bad about my inability to achieve a level of serenity such as that described by Bolingbroke in his letter to Swift.
Almost.
See, I didn’t tell you the whole story of that letter, Dear Interwebz. Swift wrote Pope and Bolingbroke back, of course. I don’t really know if Swift envied Bolingbroke’s claims to serenity; I suppose that’s possible. At the time he responded to their letter, Swift was working on Gulliver’s Travels, arguably one of the least serene, yet most valuable, works of satire in British literary history. It was this Swift who sent Pope & Bolingbroke a sarcastic letter that ridiculed their philosophizing and claims to complacency, and explained that he could never achieve “the kind of serenity” they claim to possess.
“I have no very strong faith…in your pretenders to retirement. You are not of an age for it, nor have gone through either good or bad fortune enough to go into a corner, and form conclusions de contempt mundi et fuga saeculi,–unless a poet grows weary of too much applause, as ministers do of too much weight of business.”
Who needs serenity when satire is an option?
So to all of the Bolingbrokes and Popes in my life (of which there are surprisingly many), fry up some cheese, enjoy the bread, and don’t be too surprised when I poke fun at you for your contentment.
Ever your Swiftian friend,
Rima the Arab Girl Denton, 2012
Dinner with a side of satire.
