Kitchen
On alchemy and life's batterie de cuisine
Happy Imbolc everyone! I’ve just returned from visiting the snowdrops in Dunwich woods, first flowers of the year, and thought this was a good moment to announce a new focus for this column. My much-loved and much-missed partner Mark Watson died two years ago this month and in the intervening time I have logged most of our key speaking practices here, and also compiled a small book of his teachings, The Plant Pamphlets. As I prepped a Dark Mountain post to announce its new PDF form, I wondered: would anyone be able to do the same for me when I am gone? Do, in fact, the seeds garnered from a life of embedded work in a territory matter?
I’ve already made a ‘death box’ to house any directions for the practical stuff, but what about the metaphysical? A small collection, like Mark’s, anyone could just pick up and flick through to gain a sense of what one person was up to on this beautiful and demanding planet, and how this life might be useful and connect with your own?
In my case, you could read all 49 posts on this platform, you could read my six published books, but what about one volume where you could access the essentials, a reduction if you like, a stockpot for your own future dishes.
But first, before the ladle, a refresh …
1 We are where we are: a recap
So, dear readers: for those who might not know what goes on in The Red Tent, or how it works. I started with this Welcome post in September 2023 when the wind changed; for those of you who have been here since the beginning, do skip to Section 2: Kitchen metaphysics:
Then followed a sequence of twice-monthly standalone posts that laid out the practices, entwined with life on the edge of England. Here are two of the main ones:
In the second year, these were consolidated with two series about our main teaching practices: one about writing as a metaphysical practice, The Uneasy Chair (5) and the other The Labyrinth and the Dancing Floor (6)), outlining the steps that help break the mindset of modernity and find our feet on the Earth.
Here are the intro posts to both series:
After these series were completed, I began to post some of my main metaphysical essays online, as well as unpublished plant and tree chapters from 52 Flowers That Shook My World. One of those unpublished flower chapters was Wild Plum. In it, among other things, was a description of how I hung up my butcher’s apron and a lifetime of ‘non-veg’ cuisine and discovered an unexpected doorway to the living, breathing Earth.
To become kin again with the animals, to return from our lonely exile means you have to relinquish something dear, dear to not only yourself but all those you meet. No modern person likes to look at their bargain with the physical Earth, and will fight very hard against feeling even the slightest prick of the rose’s thorns. But sometimes we long for a relationship with our wild home without knowing we long for it, and when you taste its forgotten fruits, you are prepared for the thickets and briars.
I had also stumbled – inadvertently in retrospect – on a working metaphor for this new book.
2 Kitchen metaphysics: a plan
Metaphysics only really makes sense when it is embedded in the hands-on physical world, the ordinary worlds of knife and fork, kin with plants and places, creatures and soil. It is no accident that the primary receptacle for Earth alchemy is the mythic cauldron aka the cooking pot. So, the focus for this book will be what is known as ‘kitchen work’, both literally and figuratively. The tasks and recipes, the pans and people, all the sweetness and bitterness that goes into making a dish, including its gathering, preparation and, of course, feasting.
When Mark died, I found my life extinguished, except for two small embers that continued to glow in the dark: one was the bundle of speaking practices we built our lives around, and the other was cooking. No matter how emotionally catastrophic my situation become, or how much extra work I had to shoulder (in the house and garden, at the Dark Mountain desk and depot), I took out the chopping board each evening and cooked myself a hot supper, as we had always done. I would turn off the computer, and pour a glass of wine to consider the day. In the winter I would make the fire; in the summer, sit on our ‘terrace’ and watch the sun go down between the sycamore trees.
These were the only things that made sense and their shared alchemical language held meaning when the rest fell away. A baker proves bread, a musician practices their instrument, I assemble ingredients, prep and cook them over a fire in a certain order, as cooks have always done. I sit down and relish the dish.
A baker proves bread, a musician practices their instrument, I assemble ingredients, and prep and cook them over a fire in a certain order, as cooks have always done.
Our relationship was magical from the start. Even though I was a newspaper fashion editor when we met, light years away from the metaphysics Mark already taught, change and transformation was a language we shared. We loved to explore the deep, the unknown, everything that might liberate us from our personal and collective histories, any experience that might reveal what we were doing here on the Earth. The goal for most seekers is to to be enlightened, to be good, to be perfect and devote yourself to gods or gurus; the goal of alchemy is to transform base matter into gold. It requires you to to be entirely feet-on-the-ground, hand-on-heart-engaged and working within the messiness and mayhem of creativity. You don’t do metaphysics on your knees, or sitting on a cushion, you stand at the stove, You watch your back. There are sharp knives and naked flames and slippery floors to contend with. And heavy sacks. Lots of them. And washing up.
No one is cutting up those onions except you.
3 What Goes Down in My Kitchen Goes Down in the World
Gary Snyder once likened the true inner work of a human being to the life cycle of a mature oak or rainforest, where energy is gleaned less from sunlight in the canopy than from the recycling of dead matter – dead trees and animals – that lies on the forest floor. This ‘detritus energy’ is liberated from these dead forms by the transformative actions of fungi and insects.
Transforming old thoughts and feelings, composting our past becomes, in short, the life-energy that fuels our present lives. Both within the personal life and within the collective, the individual, the creative writer and mystic act like mushrooms. We liberate energy from what is dead and give energy to the living, and thus become symbionts rather than parasites within the collective consciousness of the Earth. (‘Blue Mushroom’)1
Cooking is a frame for this transformative process. There isn’t an endpoint in alchemy, it’s a daily practice. Maintenance. You are an animal, so you need to eat every day; you are a transforming, storytelling animal, you need to speak and remember at the end of the day. You live in many dimensions, and you need to be aware of them and hold them in balance. Those dimensions can found embedded in the physical world: in rocks, in the wind, in the tree, in your hands as you stir the pot. The mythic world, our dreams, our unfettered imaginations, remind us how to connect with the spirit of things in the material, and to keep the door open, to keep liberating.
We are cooks and also chefs. We don’t just do this work for ourselves, or by ourselves. We know if we don’t there is a ‘fall’ into gross matter. Into an artificial fast-food world where everything that would nourish life, heart and soul food with roots and kindness and meaning, is rendered into abstract numbers or symbols. Where the forest starves.
The trick in the alchemical kitchen is knowing your station: what part you play and what is required from you. And when. Timing is everything.
Over the coming year, some of the prep work for this book will be posted here. Meanwhile here is some stovetop reading you might like to dip into:
From Dark Mountain’s Dark Kitchen issue: Sea Beet, Sugar Beet
From The Red Tent:
Du Cann C, 52 Flowers That Shook My World
Happy Imbolc! It was a powerful moon last night. Heads down though again with snowdrops and aconites, that same coast, just 250 miles north.
Thank you for sharing news of this new project, Charlotte and I wish you happiness. Forgive me, but Mark was a fortunate man to have been so loved. Your recollections of him in these posts have been very moving. Be well.