Glory be to God for yellow fruit

Bananas are back! We are celebrating their return with gusto. Also the mangos have arrived from their northern climes, sweet and succulent, smelling of paradise. But king among the yellow fruits is lemon. My favourite thing at the moment is pasta with lemon, chilli and garlic - unbelievably good. Lemon with thyme on chicken or potatoes works a treat, and lemon desserts beat chocolate hands down in my book. I can't sufficiently rhapsodise this fruit. But Pablo Neruda could. Here's his mouth-puckeringly exquisite poem “A Lemon.”

Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium

Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it -
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.

From hands of falsehood

In Shakespeare's Sonnet 48 he frets over the freedom of his beloved (the unnamed Youth) to come and go, to be stolen by another because he can't be kept under lock and key the way possessions can. It's a striking expression of love taking the form of jealous fear.

It's about a person, but as I read these lines I can't help but think of Shakespeare's work as the lost treasure. Because he couldn't lock it up, nothing prevents “vulgar thieves” (hello Oxfordians) from preying on this prize so dear.

How careful was I when I took my way,
Each trifle under truest bars to thrust,
That to my use it might unused stay
From hands of falsehood, in sure wards of trust!
But thou, to whom my jewels trifles are,
Most worthy comfort, now my greatest grief,
Thou best of dearest, and mine only care,
Art left the prey of every vulgar thief.
Thee have I not locked up in any chest,
Save where thou art not, though I feel thou art,
Within the gentle closure of my breast,
From whence at pleasure thou mayst come and part;
And even thence thou wilt be stol’n I fear,
For truth proves thievish for a prize so dear.

Kitchen classics

Here's a gorgeous taste of Mark Crick's Household tips of the great writers: recipes in the style of Virginia Woolf, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Raymond Chandler. The latter is particularly good:

"I sipped on my whiskey sour, ground out my cigarette on the chopping board and watched a bug trying to crawl out of the basin. I needed a table at Maxim's, a hundred bucks and a gorgeous blonde; what I had was a leg of lamb and no clues."

Delicious.

Is everything sacred?

Wendell Berry has a line that there are no places that are not sacred; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. I like this thought. It accords with a view that sees the earth as irrevocably blessed, and a view of landscape as enchanted.

I've been listening to Geraldine Brooks' lyrical lecture on “Home,” the first in her Boyer series (here). She muses that our word “home” comes from a root meaning “haunt,” and I like that too. The places we call home are haunted, not only by us, but by memory, history, association, and affection. Earth as home is haunted, enchanted, blessed. Sacred in a way we can't efface, though we can desecrate it.

The disenchantment of the world, said Weber, characterised the fate of our times. Our fate seems now to be indelibly linked to a warming climate and a planet in decline. The darkest vision of the climate catastrophisers has humans as ghosts. I wonder if the reversal of climate damage will come in part through re-enchantment, through a reconsideration of the sacredness of our home.

A penny for your opinions

Self-expression is the new entertainment, says Arianna Huffington. I would add that self-expression as entertainment is replacing information as the content most retailed on air and web.  Witness the comically misnamed Fox News, which is an expensive but effective way for Rupert Murdoch to express himself. Witness Alan Jones, whose part-ownership of 2GB makes him the equivalent of a self-publishing novelist. Witness, most recently, the regrettable Kyle Sandilands, who seems to take perverse delight in demonstrating that his value as a radio host is in inverse proportion to his contribution as a human being. (The exodus of his sponsors seems to indicate a downgrading of his currency, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t ever, ever go away.)

For these self-expressers, the least charge of misinformation yields the disclaimer ‘opinion,’ which in turn is sustained on the grounds of entertainment. Opinion doesn’t have to be truthful or civil, particularly when neither sells as well as violations of both. In fact to seek these qualities seems to spark wild declamations about freedom of speech.  The defenders of offenders like Bolt, Sandilands, Hadley and Jones seem to feel that censorship and tyranny are poised to choke our long-cherished freedom, and only await opportunity to leap from the shadows and silence the chorus of our democracy. Yet those arguing for freedom of speech as an absolute and without limits have radically undervalued the other values by which we manage to live democratically. It seems to me that we are most protective of those goods we are least in danger of losing. We are afraid of silencing diversity when we are most in danger of cacophony. We are afraid of losing our liberty when our more likely loss is liberality. And we are afraid of losing opinion when what’s ebbing away is truth.