a cosmic uncertainty (deborah)
Consciousness is very weird. I have been thinking a lot about life and death and mortality recently, partly because I am nearing the end of my thirties and partly because our beloved friends’ beloved dog died not even two weeks ago. Most of the time I wasn’t thinking very much about the weirdness of being conscious, though I was frequently absorbed with whatever free-floating anxiety gripped my nervous system. But I am now, perhaps, nearing (or am I in?) a cosmic existential midlife crisis, though crisis is too heavy a word. A cosmic uncertainty.
The other night I was re-reading an Animorphs book that I found while wandering the aisles of a bookstore. In Visser, a pair of parasitic aliens are traversing the universe, looking for a new species to colonize; they find our solar system and our blue planet, after so much searching of barren rock and unsuitable hosts. I flexed my toes and stared at my legs, acutely aware of the scale of this celestial body and its carbon, the endlessness of space, or perhaps the finiteness of space, we can’t know. How our brains are like an opaque box of mystery, how we don’t know why some drugs work the way they do. How we exist for just a blip of time, how all of these things can feel so strange even though so many other people have had these same thoughts. How we can even have these thoughts, encode meaning in a few brushstrokes, travel to the past or the future or to some distant galaxy on a different plane. How some stars in the sky might have burned out a long time ago; the light we’re seeing is just a fading transmission. How we wake up and think, how am I here? That disorienting moment in the night where you don’t know where you are, or even who you are, for a second.
“Who am I? Where am I going?” Tony Soprano says in a dream.
When I told J about my recent rumination, he asked, And how can we hallucinate and dream things that feel so real? We are rewatching Mad Men and in S3E5, Betty dreams about her dead father. There is a scene where she’s clearly on a green screen, lit in soft focus on a lush green residential street. Watching television feels like a collective dream. Sometimes Lynchian. Pixels flare in millions of colors to produce something that isn’t real but is real at the same time. Another night I was in the bathroom staring at the thick fibers of a cotton towel, struck with the realization that so much human industry had to cohere to create this tableau before me, around me. I suppose that with some of my panic I am also feeling awe and wonder. In Weapons there is a horrific nightmare sequence followed by a character waking up and yelling, “What the FUCK!” which made everyone in the theater laugh because we have all been there. Life is what the fuck.
I finished Julia Child’s My Life in France which has been a fun and compelling read. But as it’s a memoir, and we only get one life and that life must end, the ending feels sad, and I feel sad to finish reading it. In the book she says she is not a sentimental person, while her husband is (he calls their leaving a house “a symbolic death”). On one brief page, though, are some sentiments: She has “melancholy moments” where she wishes she had a daughter. She tells a friend that she can see “at our time of life the great difference between ourselves and those who have produced!” It’s funny that she says produced when she has indeed produced so much.
Anyway we’ve kept nectarines in a fruit bowl in the kitchen and while they were perfectly juicy earlier in the season, this latest batch was dry and mealy. I decided I could throw together a cobbler and we could still enjoy the fruit through the alchemy of maceration. I very slightly adapted this from a Chez Panisse blueberry cobbler recipe and was surprised to find it very moreish. I think this will be a keeper.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
Slice around 4 ripe nectarines (I ended up with less than 500 grams here, but up to 4 1/2 cups) or whatever berries or stone fruit you have on hand.
Add around 1/3 cup sugar and 1 tbsp all-purpose flour, and let sit.
Mix 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, 1/2 tsp kosher salt, 1 1/2 tbsp sugar, and 2 1/4 tsp baking powder. Cut in 6 tbsp cold salted butter until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Add 3/4 cup heavy cream and mix lightly until the ingredients are moistened.
Decant the fruit into a baking dish (I used a 9” x 9” square glass dish).
Press the dough together to make around half-inch thick patties and arrange them over the fruit.
Bake around 35 to 40 minutes, until the top is brown and the juices bubble thickly. Let cool a bit and serve warm, with whipped cream or just more cream poured over it.
