To eat

My mother wasn’t a cook.  She was a number of other things, but she wasn’t a cook.  Sundays, though, were always special and it is perhaps out of that that my sisters became cooks.  The culture that nurtured us, we have to admit, was not one with a developed cuisine.  I think, for example, of cheese:  I grew up with two sorts – cheddar and sweetmilk.  Charles de Gaulles said how can one govern a nation with 350 types of cheese. 

French bonjon – a kind of veg stirfry, quickly addictive

During my year in South Korea I began to ask myself if the West had developed any food culture.  (The French would have lynched me.)  A traditional Korean meal was a many-sided adventure.  How you combine the many side dishes became an art.  And I haven’t experienced those exquisite tastes again. 

Of course, I didn’t experience many dishes from France and my knowledge is poor.  From a baguette to bouillebaisse French food is another adventure.  And there is a long tradition of elevating food.  Interesting that English don’t share this long, sophisticated history.  In Afrikaans culture the most popular food types come from Indonesia. 

French ratatouille

If the French philosophize about food, allow me a word or two.  There are few things that draw people to the present moment as lovely food.  Regret from the past, anxiety for the future –  they disappear in the majesty of taste.  And when there is nothing left on that plate, when it has been scoured by spoon or fork, there are few things as heavenly as that second helping. 

Why couldn’t we replace our hatred and intolerance for people with a love for food?  The love for French culture and for French food was part of the decision for the Germans, insisted on by Hitler, not to ruin Paris.

©  Will

www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Bridgewater, Somerset West

March, 2023 

My images, published by RotsWolk Publishers

Poetry by Antjie Krog

Four summer poems for Cape Town

(a)

the bay blinks milk

sailboats sown like duwweltjies

behind wax paper the mountain gnashes from the blue

(b)

the lion stares at the mountain

fondle the reef of small trees

cuddle the stony back of the head

put your hand on the downy flank – for quite some time

until she flabbily shakes her head

and gets up

see! houses and flats slip down the slopes

and turns her thighs to the north

shake-paw she walks along the waves

searching

for something humanless

like a desert

(c)

come day! come mountain

bloused in blue

come make me yours

gather me against yourself

lightsoft bundles

of bluebreast sky

fathoms and fathoms thereof

(d)

is it wide here

wider than the widest of water and wind

is it soft here

is it green here

and always blue

am I without name here

in me inflamed am I with love

for so lovely

Source

Antjie Krog: Down to my last skin. Random House, Cape Town. 2000.

http://www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Bridgewater, Somerset West

March, 2023

My photograph

HAIKU

Poetry by Bashō and his school

On the moor:  from things

    detached completely –

how the skylark sings!

A village where they ring

  no bells!  –  oh, what do they do

at dusk in spring?

How rough a sea!

  and, stretching over Sado Isle,

the Galaxy

Very soon they die  –

  but of that there is no sign

in the locust-cry

Snow that we two

  saw together  –  this year

is it fallen anew?

A sudden lightning gleam:

  Off into the darkness goes

The night heron’s scream.

www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Bridgewater, Somerset West

March, 2023 

Source

Donald Green (ed.):  Anthology of Japanese Literature.  Penguin Books. 1955. 

# 

Struwwel Peter

Struwwel Peter, also called Shock-headed Peter or Shaggy Peter, was a collection of children’s stories, written and illustrated by Heinrich Hoffmann in the 1840s.  He was a psychiatrist and wanted what he considered relevant reading matter for his own children.  The result was a collection of moral tales published as one of the first with multi-coloured prints in a children’s book.  The stories themselves each have a clear moral  –  ‘the disastrous consequences of misbehaviour in an exaggerated way’ (Wikipedia).  The book was well received throughout Europe, but, for various reasons, is not that popular today.

Two examples of the stories:  The very sad Tale with the Matches tells of a girl who plays with matches, accidently ignites herself and burns to death.  The Story of the Thumb-Sucker tells of a mother warning her son not to suck his thumbs.  When she leaves the house he resumes his thumb-sucking, until a roving tailor appears and cuts off his thumbs with giant scissors.

Grimms Fairy Tales had appeared in the early 19^th-century and it has often been pointed out what grim cruelties we find in those stories.  The matter has been debated endlessly.  Bettelheim feels that children, when they are told the stories verbally, mediate the horrors and adapt this content at their own levels, so that a statement like “The prince cut off the giant’s head” does not horrify the child, but sets things right, offering consolation that problems can be solved.  Showing this to a child as an illustration or in a film is another matter:  s/he is not longer mediating the image him/herself.   I myself had nightmares for years from films that I had seen.  I wasn’t at all troubled when the witch in Hansel and Gretel was pushed into the oven. 

Struwwel Peter, in my opinion, are modern-day allegories  and have not been formed over millennia of story-telling, a time in which the stories, the images used, take on a form which has a positive, even profound, effect on children and on us.  In Struwwel Peter the horror is directed at the child from a parent’s point of view and convenience, and has no “happily ever after” ending, the deep consolation for the child, what Jung calls the conjunctio, the integration of disparate factors.

©  Will

www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Bridgewater, Somerset West

February, 2023

Sources

Wikipedia:  Struwwel Peter (and image)

B. Bettelheim: The Uses of Enchantment. Penguin Books, 1976.