.

“I’m not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought my bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience—bring words close to the body—as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out. To bring language close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language. Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises. The ritual sense of language. Or the cry.”

“Encountering an artichoke, one might wonder how the first person to eat that vegetable ever got past the exterior spines and the interior core of throat-raking needles to discover the sweet heart hidden within. Many foodstuffs present similar mysteries, such as rhubarb, whose poison parts surround succulent stems, or vegetables and meats whose toxins require hours of careful flushing before they relinquish edible substances. The vast family of peppers can burn the tissues of the mouth, eyes, and nose so painfully that they are sometimes used as punishment, yet they also have become immensely popular in the diet of many peoples. None of these examples represents bounties of the earth immediately inviting to the palate, and given the sheer difficulty of finding the nutrients to be had from fierce, dangerous, or toxic substances, we might well wonder that human beings ever learned to eat anything beyond the first fruits of the garden of Eden - one of which proved to be the most dangerous of all! (…) The remarkable thing is not just that we managed to eat, but that we managed and continue to manage to take considerable pleasure in foods that present us with challenges to both our senses and our sensibilities.”