I’ve never been much of a sweet person.
I’ve always craved a bitter taste, a salty taste, a spicy taste, even a sour taste over sweet, preferring BBQ to cake, bok choy with cilantro lime butter to ice cream. Lately, however, I am noticing an increased desire for sweet and I wonder about that. In some ways, I think it could signal a welcome shift, one that could be about being willing to be vulnerable, open, willing to taste sweetness. I wonder.
Each taste is its own world, it own constellation of messages and information, its own body of feelings and desires. For me, since I don’t eat much that is either naturally sweet or sweetened, the simplest food can be very sweet. A tomato, for example. Recently, I was presented with some beautiful heirloom tomatoes, yellow gorgeous globes, home-grown with love and care. I can’t eat the skins of tomatoes since they contain arsenic (the nightshade family of vegetables all contain arsenic in the skin; tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, eggplants are the most familiar ones). They trigger my immune system and my body starts to act frantic and confused. But these tomatoes were surely too beautiful to pass up. So, I peeled them. Peeled, I added them to my salad, topped my rosemary coconut bread with a slice of bacon, a slice of peeled tomato and a bit of avocado. Heaven. Sweet.
It began to seem that the more I ate of the sweet, watery tomato, the more I wanted. It began to seem like a conspiracy. I’ll have to eat more tomatoes. I’ll have to find ways to hide such an obsession. (Although, who knows why I would do that since everyone, I mean absolutely everyone besides myself, seems already obsessed with tomatoes). But I am going to stick with the story that it is the sweetness that got me. It certainly isn’t the impulse to garden as I am anything but inclined to play with dirt.
What is it about sweet that calls to us and keeps calling?
What are we after? Could it be we are after our home, the earthly home, the simple ground of being? Sweet is the taste of the earth in Chinese medical thinking, the taste that nourishes, harmonizes, brings things together. Sweet is the center but not the center of attention. Sweet is the way we live into ourselves if we are gentle and the way we touch another when we are paying attention. Sweet is the taste of home.
Too much sweet, especially coupled with heat, however, can make things sticky, heavy, stuck. Too much sweet can make things impossibly murky, soft, and cloudy. The strange thing about sweet, much as we may love it, is that it can become a buffer, a zone of not feeling much. So much sweet can take away our sensitivity, make us lose our orientation to the many vicissitudes of life. Sometimes we need the buffer and sometimes that buffer becomes the mainland, becoming our only landing place. When that happens we lose perspective, as we crave the cushion, the softness of sweet, we forfeit the clarity that other tastes can offer. The loss of the capacity to taste many tastes will impair our health ultimately, yielding tiredness, fogginess, even a sense of being lost in our own world.
What lurks in the other tastes is both death and life.
What lives in sweet is just a kind of presence. Sweet represents our ability to appreciate and stay in a given experience, even when that experience has edges of bitter, sour, salty or bland. With a bit of sweet we can stay with our fear, our excitement, our boredom, long enough to get all the information we need to make the right choices. We need our choices. Other flavors offer them. With too much sweet, our power to choose is diminished, our perception of where the edge lies is blurred.
Lounging in the sweet makes me lazy, but each morning with the bitter of my cocoa I remember what it means to take some action, to claim a precious moment of excitement, a new day, knowing that it won’t last, knowing that it is temporary. Sweet is lovely, nourishing, gentle and I am savoring it as much as I can. Yet I can’t help but also love the pinch of bitter, the acrid bite of smokey salt, the sour of goat milk ghee, the bland of MCT oil and well, the sweetness of just knowing it is the beginning of another day on earth…
The Meaning of Taste by Steve Godwin
1.
Sweet is always first in line,
or would like to be.
Heaven is probably the kind of place
where you’re expected to have dessert first.
But, leaving heaven to heaven,
search no further
than this very world to receive
the love letter made of chocolate,
the songbird’s praise
for the deep blue day,
the scent of lilac, cloying
yet irresistible.
A memory of someone’s lap
you used to curl in,
the taste of being good.
2.
The note in the melody
you weren’t expecting,
sour lives on the part of tongue
that detects the joke
amid all the muttering,
savors irony, enjoys the sting.
It’s the one at the edge
of the crowd, making faces
like the uncle in plaid
who always liked a pickle
with every meal.
Yet it’s known
in serious circles too:
sour’s the only taste
that ages well, the only one
that goes vintage.
3.
Bitter is a wind
that robs you of all you don’t need.
It is the taste that teaches us
that pain teaches us.
A taste hard to acquire,
it may at times mix with sweet,
but don’t count on it.
Count on lying dormant
till the pill wears off,
dreaming of the day
when you will get up,
throw clean water in your face,
put on a new suit of clothes.
4.
Salt is the story of life.
It walks with us through every door,
turns every corner we turn.
All our paths are salted,
beginning middle and end.
It seasons us the way
a good tool wears in the hand,
the way our bodies
enter the world every day.
Perhaps because we came from the sea,
it is the taste our bodies make.
Do we weep for our former home?
Isn’t there a life somewhere more mythic
we’d rather be living, the flavor
of which is said to be of the earth?
Steve Godwin is a graphic designer, book artist and poet, with a BA from UNC-Chapel Hill and a BFA from Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC. He studied book binding at The Penland School of Craft in western N.C. in 2005. His artist books have been included in exhibitions at Bookworks in Asheville and at The Design Gallery in Burnsville, N.C. Steve was awarded poetry residencies at The Vermont Studio Center in 2006 and 2008. In 2010 he co-published a book of his poems coupled with photographs by Rick Ruggles. Steve currently is working on a collaboration with a photographer focusing on the N.C. Museum of Art. stvgodwin@gmail.com www.artistbooks.ning.com/profile/SteveGodwin
