E-Verse Radio

The “Cleanse,” or, Life in the Fast Lane

by Ernie on 14/08/07 at 2:46 pm

Tonight I will begin to come off a fasting “cleanse.” I have not eaten solid food for nine days, instead drinking a sinister concoction of squeezed lemons, purified water, cayenne pepper, and grade B maple syrup. I have received an astounding amount of nonconstructive criticism and the usual skepticism that attend most of my endeavors, but, if nothing else, I do feel quite clean, after all, and I am satisfied to have done it. I also have proven to myself, a true and at times profligate gourmand, that I can in fact abstain from all the flavorsome morsels in the world for at least this long (tonight I will sip a cup of okra, pea, and onion soup I simmered overnight in my old crock pot). When asked the most obvious question, “Why are you doing it?” I quietly affirmed to myself: because I want to know that I can.

On day three, I wrote a poem, one of the last partly competent mental acts I was able to complete before today.

The Fast, by Ernest Hilbert

Eating never seemed such a miracle,
Rest never so lonely and bathed with dream.
Never before, never such air and sky.
Eating�the word is luscious, rich, lyrical.
Snowy nerves raven, crave soft drops of cream.
The cayenne dust smolders and corrodes like lye,
And the lemon pressings I swallow wreak
Havoc below. I laze, lax, without doubt.
I have learned that a fast makes the world clear—
Lesson learned in being empty, slow, weak,
Brought on by myself, not tyrant or drought.
Everests of stubbornness put me here.
Rituals of glut and wealth melt to air,
Through scoured-white days, to a thousand-year stare.

Note the poem is not only a sonnet but also an acrostic. The initial letters of each line spell my name, “Ernest A. Hilbert.” This has no significance whatsoever. I just felt like doing it.

I also became painfully sensitive to the amount of food available in all of its forms in American life. The smell of bacon from a food cart when I rose from the subway in the mornings became excruciating. I even went to dinner with family at a Thai restaurant on the rather painful second day (the worst for hunger and caffeine withdrawal).

What little television I watched during the fast seemed to be saturated with commercials for food, all of them for various, and at times fantastic, inventions of meat, cheese, and bread: Taco Bell, Burger King, McDonald’s, Subway, Pizza Hut, you name it.

The infantilizing Kentucky Fried Chicken bowls are the most egregious, though please understand that, as an aficionado of sheppard�s pie, I am not saying this because I believe they don�t taste good.

I must admit that, through it all, I fantasized about food like some slavering pervert; I dreamt of all sorts of wonderful combinations of fried chicken and sushi and spaghetti and ice cream. Perhaps the longest day, so to speak, was that spent at Surf City this past Sunday.

I worked up an appetite, as one does, swimming in the ocean and basting myself on the beach. The smell of food is everywhere on the island, and I came to realize that part of the “beach experience” is eating seafood and drinking beer, so much so that food is as integral to my memories of the shore as swimming or anything else. Ah, what I would have done for a fried clam sandwich and a cold beer . . . .
Last night, I began chapter ten of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust and encountered this stunning passage on the subject of food and man’s relationship to it. The first sentence runs for over two pages before reaching a full stop. I reproduce only a portion of it here, enough to give the flavor (strange punctuation and lack thereof have been preserved from the original and are not the result of poor transcription):

“Perhaps eating had something to do with it, not even pausing while he tried with no particular interest nor curiosity to compute how many days since he had sat down to a table to eat and then in the same chew as it were remembering that it had not been one yet since even though already half asleep he had eaten a good breakfast at the sheriff�s at four this morning: remembering how his uncle (sitting across the table drinking coffee) had said that man didn�t necessarily eat his way through the world but by the act of eating and maybe only by that did he actually enter the world, get himself into the world, not through it but into it, burrowing into the world’s teeming solidarity like a moth into wool by the physical act of chewing and swallowing the substance of its warp and woof and so making, translating into a part of himself and his memory, the whole history of man or maybe even relinquishing by mastication, abandoning, eating into it to be annealed, the proud vainglorious minuscule which he called his memory and his self and his I-Am into that vast teeming anonymous solidarity of the world from beneath which the ephemeral rock would cool and spin away to dust not even remarked and remembered since there was no yesterday and tomorrow didn’t even exist so maybe only an ascetic living in a cave on acorns and spring water was really capable of vainglory and pride . . . .”

Faulkner has earned devotees and detractors. Both camps very likely react in opposing ways against the very same thing, his prose style, very often composed of drawn out, high-wire acts such as the above. But after not eating for nine days, all I have to say is: Amen, brother.

Ernie

Ernest Hilbert is founder of E-Verse Radio.

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