Eating this way is surely effective, if you measure effectiveness by how much you get done in one day: this is yet another face of the ‘cold philosophy’ of disenchantment that John Keats deplored, the approach to life that made ‘all charms fly’. The disenchanted mindset has as little patience for the pleasures of the body as it has for the wildest flights of imagination.
Food, like art, requires us to slow down, and food, like art, helps us to do that. The slowness demanded by food is the wild tranquillity of nature: eating means bringing inside things that were outside, making them part of us by breaking them with our teeth and mixing them with our bodily fluids. As Anthony Bourdain put it, ‘good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay’.11 The paradox is that on the one hand, food dispels the illusion that we are not like other animals, while on the other, cooking is the sort of quirky idea that only a nerd like Homo sapiens could come up with. Eating is a matter of survival; preparing linguine all vongole is a sign of civilization; buying pre-cooked soggy pasta is a herald of decline.
A simple strategy to eat counterculturally is to eat seasonal food. In southern Italy there are of course supermarkets that make certain types of fruit and vegetables available all the year round, as in England and the rest of Europe, but it is still common to buy vegetables from smallholders, and cook seasonal recipes. On one level, this means that you are eating produce whose flavours are more intense. On another, eating seasonal food puts your body in step with the rhythms of the land. The bitterness of aubergines heralds summer: when you bite into the flesh of the year’s first aubergine, your mouth tastes sunshine, and your body prepares itself for the sensuous explosion the season will bring. Globe artichokes, with their metallic sobriety, tell you that the cold is coming and you better cosy up. Through flavour, you can pierce the human-shaped bubble we have created around us.
Taste allows us a pagan communion with the world, and not only with the world. The essayist Diane Ackerman has written that ‘taste is largely social’12: when you eat for pleasure, you eat in company. Families are kept together by bonds of loyalty and love, and also by bonds of flavour: they sit down together to break bread, and the pleasure of food nurtures the pleasure of conversation, of being present together in the same space, breathing the same air, drinking the same wine. Taste is an under-appreciated cure for loneliness. Then again, loneliness is exactly what a disenchanted society wants us to feeclass="underline" we are better workers, better drones, when we eat quickly, when we eat garbage, when we don’t mind our senses, when we are alone.
Taste is, it turns out, a matter of resistance.
*
Look at me: I am hugging a tree. It is a dismal sight. I am a shaven-headed guy pushing forty, with a face that recalls an expendable extra in a Mafia film more than a hippie sage. I wear a battered jacket, old jeans and wellies, and I have spread my arms as far as possible around the trunk, and rested my cheek against it. A dismal sight indeed. I don’t care. I am touching and being touched, and if you don’t like what you see, you can look away; being here, being the one doing the hugging, feels amazing. Let me explain how I got here.
The story I have charted thus far is a parable of defeat. Sight and hearing are reduced to an impoverished state, smell has been exiled, and taste survives only in remote corners of Europe. Touch fares even worse: it is the object of fear and ridicule, and it has been bound and gagged by the tightest social norms. Being ‘touchy-feely’ is an insult: feeling is wrong, touching is not the done thing.
Touch is frightening to the atomized society that capitalism thrives on, because touch, more than any other sense, more even than smell, cannot help being intimate. In a world in which too many people (and too many morons with too much power) still believe in zero-sum games, with winners and losers, touch reveals the lie. You cannot touch without being touched. The universe is touching you at all times, you are touching the universe.
The other senses might still allow us to labour under the delusion that they are detached reporters of the world out there, but touch shatters that delusion once and for all. Touch is an act of communication. Every time we touch we are making ourselves vulnerable. Every time we touch we are having a conversation with whoever we are touching, allowing them to touch us in turn. Touch makes the magical universe of Marsilio Ficino, in which everything is connected to everything else, palpable.
The art of touch was valued in classical times: the goddess of sexual pleasure (Aphrodite for the Greeks, Venus for the Romans) was not intellectually inclined, which does not mean she was dense. She possessed a wisdom of the body, and it was a powerful wisdom at that. It was not by chance that she had great sex with Ares/Mars, god of war, who was not exactly a thinker either, and was the bringer of a different sort of wisdom of the body, geared towards violence rather than pleasure. Eros and Thanatos always went together.
The art of touch has been lost. We say that good sex is in the mind; that imagination and mental connection are far more important than skin and sweat. But are they? When you are naked in bed with your lovers, you need more than telepathy.
I have often heard it said, and I have said it myself, that good conversation leads to good sex. That is true, and yet the contrary is true as well. Sex might be as good a way to make new friends as conversation, if only we were more touch literate.
The main way in which we represent sex, that is, pornography, has contributed to this lack of literacy. What looks good on screen doesn’t always feel good on the skin: one of the most often seen positions for performing oral sex – the so-called ‘69’ (or soixante-neuf) – became ubiquitous for the way it looks, even though, from a physical perspective, it is far from ideal for actual mutual stimulation. A lot of unsatisfactory sex happens when we do with our partners things that look good, rather than things that feel good. In our minds, we are continuously watching the film of our life, to the point that we forget to enjoy starring in it.
Lydia Daniller and Rob Perkins came to realize, after many long conversations about female sexuality, that no one knows the first thing about the female orgasm. Reaching orgasm during sex is notoriously difficult for women, but why? Daniller and Perkins found a possible answer in the fact that most people, men and women alike, are not too sure how to get physically there. So they interviewed a sample of women and, starting from their experience, they created OMGYes, a website aimed at educating people about pleasure. It is fascinating to navigate, for its clear, laser-like focus on physicality. Learn to touch, it says, and a brave new world will open up for you. Yes, it is important to set the mood, and yes, state of mind matters; but we still need to learn how to touch, skin against skin, and how to be touched.
It was this line of reasoning that led me to hug a tree. The art of touch goes beyond sex: I wondered how it would feel to try to understand a tree through touch. The very thought of this can make sceptics laugh and scoff. You must be touchy-feely to be a tree-hugger, right?
I selected a day midweek, when I had a good chance not to be interrupted (or seen), and I went to Oxleas Wood, in Greenwich. My plan was to hug a random tree, but then I surprised myself by trying to select the right tree to hug. I wanted it to be an oak, because I have a fondness for oaks; I wanted it to be far from the entrance to the woods; I wanted it to be old enough to have some history to it. In the end, I settled on an oak not too far from a dried-up stream bed. I took off my glasses, put them in my jacket pocket, and before I could change my mind, I hugged the tree. I rested my cheek against the rough surface of the bark, and waited.