07/04/2024

omelette

on avoidance

most days except tuesdays, i make an omelette for lunch. it is often the only constant in my life. i miss this omelette when i am not home or if i am travelling. 

the recipe is a sacred text, unvarying: two large brown eggs, 30g of chopped bell peppers, 30g of chopped onion. seven revolutions of pink himalayan salt, two of black pepper. then, the spice dance: cumin, coriander, paprika, chili, garam masala, and sometimes parsley – each a generous eyeballed shake.

in a pan slick with sizzling avocado oil, the mixture transforms. it spreads like a golden tide seeking every corner of this pre-seasoned pan from target that i’ve treated like a patina’d cast iron. the omelette rises, thick and fluffy. flipped, pressed, folded - a tripartite ritual followed by three big squeezes of organic trader joes ketchup completing the tableau. sometimes, infinite jest serves as a literary garnish.

this ritual is a carefully choreographed dance of avoidance, an intricate waltz to sidestep every essence of the egg. each element – the crisp vegetables, the aromatic spices, the tangy ketchup – serve as a colourful curtain obscuring the starring ingredient. the density of infinite jest becomes a mental fortress, its labyrinthine sentences a maze in which thoughts of the egg’s true nature can lose themselves. this daily performance transforms a simple omelette into an elaborate disguise, a culinary sleight of hand where the egg simultaneously takes center stage and vanishes into the background. it's a paradoxical act of consumption and evasion, savoring a dish while skillfully dodging its fundamental identity.

perhaps it is time to crack open this shell, and to let the yolk of existence run free. i ought to set aside the spices of distraction, put down the weighty tome of avoidance, and savor the naked truth of the egg, and of myself. 
maybe i’ll finally taste this rich, complex flavor of life i've been masking all along.

If it is the case that our understanding is an effect of the metaphors we choose, it is also true that it is a cause: our understanding itself guides the choice of metaphor by which we understand it. The chosen metaphor is both cause and effect of the relationship. Thus how we think about our selves and our relationship to the world is already revealed in the metaphors we unconsciously choose to talk about it. That choice further entrenches our partial view of the subject. Paradoxically we seem to be obliged to understand something - including ourselves - well enough to choose the appropriate model before we can understand it. Our first leap determines where we land.

If we assume a purely mechanical universe and take the machine as our model, we will uncover the view that surprise, surprise - the body, and the brain with it, is a machine. To a man with a hammer everything begins to look like a nail.

lain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary