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Today saw the inaugural dinner at my new apartment. It is also the night we pick up the farm share, so there was a shakedown of sorts while we sourced various ingredients and retrieved pots, pans, knives and colanders from boxes. The menu: green and purple beans sauteed in butter with salt and pepper; and pasta with a sauce made from olive oil, onion, garlic, basil, oregano, thyme, salt, pepper, braised greens, eggplant and fresh heirloom tomatoes.
My new stove is awesome. The gas jets are very forthcoming, making it easy to keep a very low flame without the fire going out. The only downside is that we need to install some over-range lighting.
To make a fresh sauce (or sauce fresh tomatoes) as I understand it: heat olive oil and saute garlic and onions; add the vegetables that take longer to cook (eggplant) and spice. Add tomatoes. Sauce/simmer. Fold in any greens (like basil, beet greens, etc). Simmer until satisfied and serve.
We ate it. It was delicious.
A friend abroad sent an apt gesture through the tubes - The Porch of the Caryatids at the Acropolis!
I've always been fascinated by Greek mythology, and consider the caryatides a wonder. There they stand at the Acropolis, staid architectural supports for eternity, serving as stoic and civic counterparts to the Danaides. Why? What is the source of the idea and its surrounding culture? I use the handle 'karyatid' as the inheritance of the most stable machine running Redhat 5 ever. I needed a name and 'caryatid' was taken. My first computer, built from scavenged and donated parts, was implausibly stable server for 5 years until the BIOS chip melted. It lived up to its name. True story. But I also use the handle 'karyatid' because of Auguste Rodin's "Caryatid Who Has Fallen Under Her Stone." When I saw her at Musee Rodin, it was raining, she was serene and defeated and it looked as though she were crying.
When most people see that sculpture, they think of the passage that Heinlein wrote in "Stranger in a Strange Land:"
"This poor little caryatid has fallen under the load. She's a good girl - look at her face. Serious, unhappy at her failure, not blaming anyone, not even the gods... and still trying to shoulder her load, after she's crumpled under it.
But she's more than just good art denouncing bad art; she's a symbol for every woman who ever shouldered a load too heavy. But not alone women - this symbol means every man and woman who ever sweated out life in uncomplaining fortitude until they crumpled under their loads. It's courage... and victory.
Victory in defeat, there is none higher. She didn't give up... she's still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her... she's all the unsung heroes who couldn't make it but never quit."
A romantic idea, for sure. It is one that stuck with me when I was young. What, in this world, is higher than "victory in defeat," and stoic unsung failure, he writes? What is more noble than the enduring, crushing fate and uncomplaining burden shouldered by the Every Man? "Takaru", Vonnegut would say. The elevated Every Man, memorialized in the form of the fallen caryatid, is nothing but a slave.
The real victors in this world are not the ones who are silently crushed under their burdens. When I see Rodin's caryatid, I wish I could roll the stone off of her shoulders and take her home to rest. She was defeated because she had the narrow vision that her burden was the only burden; her task the only task alloted her. Destroyed by determinancy. Another path, albeit a scarier one, would have been to seek victory in the face of uncertainty. She could have thrown off her stone even though it would mean she was no longer a caryatid. I can't blame her for her choice, but I am saddened by it. Unless, of course, she knew something about the worth of her burden that I don't know.
Jess and I were talking, and the uncertainty of choice is probably what we would define to be an American ideal, or even "the American Dream." Not that everyone embraces it, but I feel that the victors and forerunners of humanity are the ones who excel despite their burdens, who move and change despite the predestined function imposed upon them by the conditions of their birth and society. Our heroes are not unquestioning and noble caryatids suffering alone. They are instead the people who turn choose to turn their suffering, strength and gifts towards questioning and freedom - who have the fortitude to shoulder that even greater, uncertain burden. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo Van Gogh. The suffragists and the civil rights activists. Evariste Galois. Gay-rights activists and feminists. Pieter-Dirk Uys. Jesus Christ. Captain Sam who joined up with the Marines. James Tiptree, in her way. The women at Holla Back. Hopefully, me. Hopefully, you.
