The Necessity of Passionate Living

I came across this bit of poetry...

Water above the firmament:
    winter rain descending; the roots of vitis vivifera clutch-
    ing earth.
Spring warmth:
    water drawn through vinestock, stem, and leaf: tendril,
    flower, fruit.
Summer heat:
    sun fierce upon the hills; in the grape now, water, glucose,
    fructose, tannin, acid; all beneath the thin firmament on
    which the Spirit's brooding leaves behind a bloom of
    yeast; Saccharomyces ellipsoideus: the thumbprint of the
    Lord and Giver of life.

...in a cookbook.

It is the most bizarre, insightful and inspiring of cookbooks, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection, written by Robert Farrar Capon, a priest and food lover. And by lover, I mean the most ardent, romantic type of lover. A lover who would put poetry in a cookbook.

Capon's fervor for his food--his overwhelming passion for it--is a call for us to approach life in the same way.

But do we? Do we approach the mundane of life, like cutting an onion, with such passion that we may swell into creativity? To allow life to speak to us passionately and to let the everyday become poetry or sculpture or song or theater?

I know I don't that often. While I have cultivated a habit of finding creativity in the garden (pun intended!), I don't often have an enthusiastic, passionate response to something. If you're like me, we tend towards a response that makes us connoisseurs, not passionate evangelists.

Let me explain. After brewing a new batch of coffee and trying it for the first time, it is easier to taste it and define our palette. Maybe blog about it, describing its nutty and berry notes in detail. That's the connousier approach. In many respects, its what our culture wants. Its what I want as well. I can't count how many times I've let an Amazon review convince me out of purchasing music or a book because I don't want to buy something that is not "the best" even though my foot was tapping to the single or I was enthralled with the book's premise.

I think there is a better approach. An artistic approach. It's an approach that finds necessity in passionate living: to not reduce everything to an expert's, arms-length approach. Instead, the artistic approach is the creative approach. Being a poet, I often look to the Romantic poets for their poetic examples of passionate living. Just look at the titles:

"Ode on a Grecian Urn"
"Ode to the West Wind"
"Ode to a Nightingale"
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" 

 These odes are passionate responses to everyday things, even urns, which might be the most uninspiring of objects. Yet Keats doesn't take the expected approach, to discuss the merits of Grecian folk artistry and its place in Western Art History, though that would make a nice essay. Instead, he writes with passion, eliciting lines such as

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

All that from an urn. 

So my challenge to you is the challenge I am giving myself: create with passion this week. Let the fireworks and BBQs, the leisurely walks and DVD marathons produce more than a connoisseurs opinion, let them push us toward creativity and passionate living!

Comments

[Jeanne Damoff]

"To allow life to speak to us passionately and to let the everyday become poetry or sculpture or song or theater?"

Yes! This is my desire as well. Thanks for these great thoughts, Thomas. Here's to the artistic approach and beauty hunters everywhere. Cheers.

[Heather]

Have you read The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman?

[Thomas Turner]

No I haven't. Is it a novel or non-fiction?