A PUBLIC ADDRESS GIVEN IN A RESTAURANT

 

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Chatter to fill the gaps, it feels like a kind of date…

 

Ching, Ching, Ching.

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Appetizer:  Sticky Licker

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A voracious reader, a voracious eater, who reads their own words is completing some sort of loop and eating their own words.

 Unhealthy?

The first stab of nervous indigestion.

 

 

For Starters:  Matter Mutter 

 

Tonight I want to talk about my favourite organ. 

 

Something that has a very close link to food, Lets talk about it.

 

Lets talk about Bowels.

 

I am prone to digestive analogies. I am comfortable with the gut.

But politeness determines that we are not supposed to talk through them, with our anti breathe… WHAT!!!!

 

Lets be honest, modest…  and admit that language, like so much else is a by-product of digestion. Look at worms. Post Bowel. Pre Voice, but with an active sex life.

 

Here we are this tube with noises at both ends. The noises at first uncontrolled, unshaped. 

 

Our inner world as silent as squid. 

Then feeling the shape of these coughed up gutterances our sensitive upper eating tract shapes, oh so like those famous slippery potters hands. 

And from this clay shaped the first word, which was possibly an apology.

 

Lets swallow ourselves and surf that peristaltic wave deep down.  Into warm dark depths.  

 

The surface area of the bowel is now estimated at 30 x 40 metres squared. Smaller than the previous description ‘the size of a Tennis Court’. Now perhaps more suited to Badminton.

Researchers say, ‘about the size of an average studio apartment’, 

 

Who needs more? ‘House bigger than your stomach?’

 

Well all I would say is this, I have often considered the FACT the bowels in surface area are almost exactly equivalent to the area that would be covered by all the Flags, Ceremonial, signal etc carried by a 18thcentury Man of War Sailing ship.

 

Imagine now if you will all of bowels spread out and undulating, shifting, flexing flashing and shifting colours like carpet of live octopus skin.  

 

-Roll em back up and pop em in, they have work to do.

 

-Our top bits for a while had grown giddy with their new, non ruminative verticality (two legs like the birds!). But increasingly we recognise our lower portions and even a land beyond mentation, or even sub mentation. We might have got all clever and metropolitan but we cant deny where we came from. Guts.

 

The emotional gut, a porous border. The way things get in from the outside. The way things leave. Our life filter.  And thought, originally the spaces between eating, now grown into something that wonders why it was divinely fashioned… 

 

                                                                or coughed up.

 

 

Second course: Waiting for Plato

 

Let me describe a friend of mine. This person is not holey like you or I. They are a perfect sphere without orifice or even dimple. 

 

And they exhibit an attitude to the world that I can only describe as that of an inverted haggis.  Although saying that aloud, I can see that it might require some explanation.

 

OK so perfectly spherical gives nothing out, takes nothing in.

We nicknamed this personage Plato. 

Plato?

You see there was a kind of Elijah situation going on. A place was always set,  cutlery, elaborated linen and plate and side plate.  At the end of the meal always the same. No show. This perfect sphere had not turned up, had not moved an inch. 

And we were left with an empty Plate. Silly really  you see…  A plate o’ nothing.

 

Empty but ready to be full.

 

But oh what dishes this sphere could describe. I remember one story particularly.

 

A French chef was invited to New York to prepare a banquet to celebrate the opening of the Chrysler building. He was asked for a range of structurally beautiful food. The crowning dish was a savoury pudding of multi layered jellied super complexity. It processed through the banquet, which was taking on the high gantry of the baroque scraper, on a silver salver carried by four strong roller skating dames. 

 

A pause for a photo op against the New York skyline was their undoing. The cameras flash disturbed roosting bats whose panicked flight caused alarm and a sudden tilting of the tray. Over the parapet slid the majestic pudding and plunged through the blue. What mayhem would the weight of this falling object wreak on those on the pavement?

 

But not one particle, not one crumb, reached the ground. The baroque concoction melted away, was consumed by the air, friction licks as it fell.

 

Well the Sphere might relate this story. But how could it ever understand it, mouthless, gutless as it was.

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Desert: Eating Trifles

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Distant rumbling.

-A tiny bit of space left for a sweet thing or an awkward silence….