Author name: Paul Edward

God is not only within me but in part I am God. My soul is God and I’m always reckoning this with my earthly body and thoughts the pieces of me that are human. I think Jean-Paul Sartre was right that we have no predetermined meaning and that we are free and thus responsible for creating it. Though I think he was wrong about GOD DIVINITY SOUL… I don’t agree that existence precedes essence. In the beginning we were filled with the capacity for divine searching it is our essence—And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters…*—though we are free to abandon the search and abandon it many do.

I am faced with the gargantuan task of reckoning my inner God with my human thoughts. I loathe the human and yearn to stop him. But how to live metaphysically in a physical world? I feel the walls of a certain kind of reality closing in on me. The infinity of messages calls emails HVAC plumbing lease loans labor bills and bills etcetera. I am unsure of my position on it. It seems impossible to entirely ignore it. And so I give to it an inch and it takes full advantage of the mile. I perceive hostility between the outside world and me. I skew toward the total and all-consuming dedication to ART. My profound responsibility to it supersedes conventional life and one day it will transcend it. Though I am still enshrouded in guilt and must continue to remind myself that my responsibility to humanity is through the lens of my artistic engagement. Though humanity does not often share my view. This is an isolating pursuit. Yet I attempt to explain myself as a courtesy—I recognize the world beyond me. It would be easier if I did not. And more and more I wonder not if but how I can leave it abandon it. It’s reaching and reaching there on the dusty roadside it’s pathetic scornful disgusting. But how can I explain this place? That when the cap is returned to the pen I will butcher snakehead and rockfish and Amish chicken to prepare it for this week’s lunch and dinner guests. But I will also prepare it for trial and error… I’d like to explore how to make it better. These 12 courses are my gifts and I always wish to give more and to give more fully and… We are all the same because we are afraid to give ourselves. My guests ask me many questions and often apologize for doing so. But my answers are also my gifts and my guests are moved by this generosity. They are so used to walls. But here there are no walls.

     I’m inspired by Marina Abramovich’s months-long performance the Artist is Present in MOMA. Its aim was “to explore the power of silent, uninterrupted, and shared presence between artists and spectator. It removed the barrier between artist and audience, creating an intense emotional experience through deep eye contact and long-duration, focused presence to explore vulnerability.”

     As such the evenings here are shaped just as much by my guests as they are by me. I make the first moves. And those guests who have come for this, or who open themselves to this once they’ve discovered it upon arrival, are the ones who get the most from it, and I from them. In this shared experience there are glimpses of our oneness. It cannot be broken down into parts. Into the abyss we fall and burn. You can see this, yes? Our despair sitting there next to our impatience. Our drooling expectations. Our emails messages phone calls our now now NOW… Here is a piece of raw rockfish. It lived for 5 years. It is cleaned and its flavor and texture are enhanced by time. Brushed with a local soy sauce—the bean that grew and matured over 100 days. A bean then harvested and processed and fermented and aged for a year to develop its natural beauty depth sweetness its essence only revealed through patience and time.

Post Script:

Blue Jay

A Blue Jay fluttered across the road

that split the soy fields.

And I thought how beautiful

And I thought life is fleeting

And I thought I am aware that I won’t be here someday.

And I was sad but grateful.

How lucky I am to see

the fluttering Blue Jay

beneath the spring morning sun.

Life.

Oh vanishing life.

I will return to the whole

But I hope not too soon.

*KJV Genesis 1:2

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When you lift a heavy weight you get stronger in the end. But first it weakens you. My arms are quivering.

I’m not enjoying that all these scribbles are mostly consumed by my small sufferings. Though a bit of self-indulgence may be required to jog the pen. I’m hoping these words metamorphose into a butterfly. But a moth is possible. Likely. Ugly things can be beautiful. More beautiful. I’ve been scribbling among soft sounds: pen scratching; china teacup rattling; the heat blowing through ducts; birds chirping beyond the window glass; the occasional rumble from bombs across the bay in Aberdeen. Though I think a bit of quiet music will tune rumination to reverie… Yes that’ll do hush hush now I can feel again my heart like a slow drip. Drip. Drip. A sip of smokey tea. I am rubbing the skin right off my face and my forehead my temples there’s quite a drama playing out in my head. Melodrama, perhaps. I can’t decide if every fiber of my being is fueled by internal conflict or cliché… I’m back to scribbling about my small sufferings. Or I never left. It’s like my thoughts enjoy lining up at the abattoir. Chop chop chop. Yes melodramatic. Until I roll away from this place in my mid-size pick-up truck to collect one-hundred pounds of ground beef from down the road and head with it across the big bridge to Baltimore. What hats will I don then? Country neighbor. Stoic boss. The light fades…

I offer more than food and drink. Let me cook for you yes yes and always. But let me write for you let me hang a photograph on your wall. Not for you to think of me no no to think of the world how beautiful it is how haunting it is how you swallow it whole how it swells in you and bursts out again in lightness rejoice rejoice REJOICE! The other week a dinner guest asked what I do when the inspiration runs dry. Within this question was the answer I’ve been searching for. EUREKA! This! I said to him, I cook. He did not realize that he had had it backward. The cooking is what I do when I am not writing. Like writing is what Anselm Kiefer does when he is not painting . I suppose this fact causes hesitation in others. They don’t quite believe it. Why would I build such a place if this was not the vision the dream? I’ve been reading a book on Emily Dickinson and the author notes: The intensity of her affections overwhelmed others. Indeed.

And so this story I tell from within these walls is something unique and varying and diverse. Built from a place that functions less as a restaurant and more as a studio a workshop an atelier… with a pleasing view of the river and bay. I am guided by the greater light that rules the day and the lesser light that rules the night*: by higher laws. And as such:

     “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, –you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind,–I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that.” [Henry David Thoreau, Walden]

I write yes and cook and photograph and document and read and argue with myself while pacing endlessly between sips of strong black tea. Touch of cream. And four times each week this place does metamorphose into something of a butterfly: 12 courses of Chesapeake cuisine for eight souls. I could not tell you why. Unusual yes it is. I don’t know of another restaurant that serves eight and only eight souls each night that doubles as a laboratory of the soul, a workshop, a library, a studio, an atelier… and I know of no author whose workplace doubles as a restaurant… no I don’t imagine there is such a place as this pace someplace else. And I’m only allowing it to become more itself… the bookshelves and books: my precious. I’ve left them in boxes for too long. I want to hold them. Devour them. Written by Man and so long ago. But not all that long ago, no no Henry David Thoreau was civilly disobedient just yesterday—compared to Time—and the soul of humanity has not especially grown since. Yes I think rather it’s devolving. But I’ve no interest in what humanity may or may not be up to. That’s what cities are for. I’ll remain here at the periphery and endeavor to keep humanity out of arms reach. There are nettles and chives and chickweed and cress and wild asparagus and ramps and morels to forage. And books to read and essays to write. And pies to bake and merengue to whip and set aflame… fish to filet and chickens to butcher… beckoning me from the banks of the Sassafras are the loblolly pines. They’re whispering ancient names. The bay winds are carrying ancient rhymes.

Post Script:

…it’s 11:17 now and I am home and in bed. I could say I’ve been endlessly searching but it’s beginning to feel like hunting. Today I’ve read passages from Thoreau, Emerson, the notebooks of Anselm Kiefer, a transcription of an Anselm Kiefer interview, the blog of Maria Popova, half of a biography of sorts comparing the lives of Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin… and I finished with novel words from a beautiful man the Nobel Prize winning Jon Fosse. Yes I’m hunting for something that doesn’t exist. I already know this. And simultaneously I am creating the very thing that I am hunting for because I know it doesn’t exist. Though these books these essays and passages and journals and transcripts they feed me I need them they help to formulate my ideas to borrow a small bit of structure. I just dozed with the pen in my hand. I don’t want to give this day up I’m not ready to I haven’t made the discoveries I hoped(ing) for. I haven’t broken through. Though I don’t believe in that sort of thing. Art doesn’t work this way you have to beat it down. And work and work and work and I was at my desk thinking and scribbling at 10:45 and I thought how crazy I am that I do this every day that I’ve been doing this every day for decades and there is “nothing to show for it” but also how crazy I am that inside me the voice is only stronger more convinced than ever of the importance of the work. But why! Yet here I am in bed falling asleep scribbling and scribbling even just now good-grief eyelids heavy and closing. Ok so but wait here is this gem taken from someplace online:

“Kiefer’s own acknowledgement that there is no turning back [from painting to writing] understates the fact that not since Paul Klee has a painter broached so powerfully the topic of his own disappointment of striving hopelessly for poetry in the physical.” [Ethan Perets, Parsing Anselm Kiefer’s Digressive Notebooks]

But EUREKA! Again. That is exactly me but the opposite. I want my words to feel like a two-story tall painting that has been torched and left in the rain. Because that’s how I feel them clawing their way out of me.

Actually I think this is how it was with James Joyce and when someone asks me—indignantly—why his books are so difficult I think the only answer is because they had to be.

*KJV Genesis 1:16