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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 11/21/2023: The Shirt of Love [1]

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Date: 2023-11-21  

Ernst Eitner: Starry Night (1928) (You know, it took some brass to name your painting “Starry Night” in 1928, when van Gogh was already famous AF. Nice painting, though!)

Good evening, Kibitzers!

It’s quite chilly here this week. That’s good for me — I am a thousand times more comfortable in nice warm clothes in a relatively cold room, than in summer clothes in a warm room. That goes double for sleeping with a heap of blankets. Don’t know why. I like my head to be cold, maybe?

Anyway, I know it’s been cold in other places too. I hope everyone here is comfortable where they are!

This week is Thanksgiving, yet another American holiday of problematic origin from which I choose to extract something positive. (Western holidays in general, really, seem to not bear close scrutiny.) It looks like I’m going to be cooking on Friday, to accommodate various schedules, and I am still negotiating menu with both the pickiest eater and my own energy level.

Today, rather than a ton of videos, I have a poem, a little more info about the poet, and some Thanksgiving music and ambiance.

[A late note about the format of the poem, because it pissed me off: Apparently, in the very recent past, the single-space carriage return quit working here, the one you get when you press SHIFT/ENTER. It starts out fine, but when you close and reopen the draft, or publish it, the carriage returns vanish entirely. So: double spacing, with a teeny radish between the stanzas.]

Pablo Neruda, a Chilean poet of the 20th century, wrote a collection of odes dedicated to everyday objects. Someone waved a scrap of his Ode to the Table (Oda a la Mesa in the original) in front of me recently — probably Onomastic, who on most mornings posts a lovely art gallery with poetry and music in the comments of the APR. In any case, when I went and read the whole thing, I thought it belonged here, at our Kitchen Table. The world is certainly a table engulfed in honey and smoke these days (sometimes more on the ‘smoke’ side), and I am so thankful to be here among all of you, the people always dressed in the shirt of love. Thank you for being yourselves!

Ode to the Table

~ Pablo Neruda

I work out my odes

on a four-legged table

laying before me bread and wine

and roast meat

(that black boat

of our dreams)

Sometimes I set out scissors, cups and nails,

hammers and carnations.

❧

Tables are trustworthy:

titanic quadrupeds

they sustain

our hopes and our daily life.

❧

The rich man's table,

scrolled and shining

is

a fabulous ship

bearing bunches of fruit.

Gluttony's table is a wonder

piled high with Gothic lobsters

and there is also a lonesome

table in our aunt's dining room,

in summer. They've closed

the curtains,

and a single ray of summer light

strikes like a sword

upon this table sitting in the dark

and greets the plums' transparent peace.

And there is a faraway table, a humble table,

where they're weaving

a wreath

for

a dead miner.

That table gives off the chilling odor

of a man's wasted pain.

There's a table

in a shadowy room nearby

that love sets ablaze with its flames.

A woman's glove was left behind there,

trembling like a husk of fire.

❧

The world is a table

engulfed in honey and smoke

smothered by apples and blood.

The table is already set,

and we know the truth

as soon as we are called:

whether we're called to war or to dinner

we will have to choose sides,

have to know

how we'll dress

to sit

at the long table,

whether we'll wear the pants of hate

or the shirt of love, freshly laundered.

It's time to decide,

they're calling:

boys and girls,

let's eat!

A little more about Neruda: Here’s a short TED-Ed presentation by Dr. Ilan Stavans of Amherst College, about Neruda’s poetry and his interesting life in Chilean politics. (Neruda won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971; I mention this because it doesn’t make it into this account, and I can see why it wasn’t relevant to Stavans’ story. Nonetheless, it seems like a thing to know.) [4:49]

Madonna reads Neruda’s poem If You Forget Me. (The woman in the photograph is Clara Bow in the 1927 silent film Wings.) [2:09]

If you don’t have a dinner to be at later this week, here are two hours of cozy Thanksgiving kitchen ambiance. I hope we all like mashed potatoes, because we’re apparently making quite a lot of them here! [2:03]

George Winston plays his piece Thanksgiving. [5:15]

And Arlo, because holidays are all about tradition. I hope everyone here has a Thanksgiving dinner that can’t be beat! 🦃 🍽️ 🍷 🥧 🧡 [18:36]

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