(Day 12 of this year’s Advent series. Yesterday’s piece was about bodies; today we consider transmutation.)
Strange Transmutation
Liquid, silver, salt: strange
Transmutation,
Yet no stranger than
Bread into body,
Wine into blood
Or water
Into earth.
Bless thou this earthly wine
Back into water –
That I may flow
Over stone
And under soil –
Following your call.
I lead what you might call a “sardine-rich lifestyle.” With precisely 0.00% intent to stock up on mercury, deplete the oceans, or recycle enough cans to form a fleet of Ferraris (“yeah, metallurgy…never knew the name”) – I nonetheless eat sardines for 7 out of 21 meals a week. That’s – hmm, that’s ⅓ of my meals. Huh.
These numbers are not being idly dropped for bragging rights, you understand. My goal here is to convince you that when I say I know how much energy a tin of sardines holds, I know exactly how much energy that tin of sardines holds.
Specifically, 4.5 hours worth. If we’re going to talk about transmutations, that’s a pretty decent conversion: 1 tin of sardines for 4.5 hours of anything I want to do. There are very few other simple trades, I feel, that would give me such a happy exchange of the hyper-specific for the utility of the extremely general, while also being fishily delicious.
Of course, there are probably some…downstream consequences. The great fine-print issue of food chains is that one participates by participating. So eventually I’ll have to make good on all those sardines I borrowed (7 tins a week * 52.14 weeks/year * average life span of oh, 120 years). Still a better deal than most banks offer, but I definitely think about it every time I open another tin and see the little silvery bodies inside. They’re pretty much perfect, except for no heads.
Now, in terms of systems of consumption, David Foster Wallace wrote a piece called “Consider The Lobster.” I’m not going to quote it here, but I will recommend it heartily as a piece of food writing that is deeply concerned with the problem of exchange and costs, and a far better examination than I can offer.
What I am going to quote is Sir Terry Pratchett, in the Discworld novel Small Gods. The book is, you know, about gods. And belief. And sort of, also, about consumption, as in the actual costs of existing, which from a certain view point – that’s what everything is about. Oh, also miracles.
“….And wine made of water! A mere quantum mechanistic tunnel effect, that’d happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn’t a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time…”
From the viewpoint of zillions of years, everything turns into everything else.
From the viewpoint of today, one tin of sardines has turned into 4.5 hours of my lifetime, filled with work, writing, planning a birthday party, and a truly magnificent walk that included a December-blooming rosebush scented like pink lemons.
From the viewpoint of something-less-than-a-zillion-years, the differences between me, my sardines, and water – or even wine or bread – are very small indeed. All are tiny, temporary bundles in a system of raucous interchange. Don’t poke their edges; atomically speaking, they mostly don’t exist.
Also, don’t poke my sardines. I need 4.5 more hours out of them.
Citations
Pratchett, Terry. Small Gods. London: Victor Gollancz, 1992.
Wallace, David Foster. “Consider the Lobster.” In Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, 235-282. New York: Little, Brown, 2005.
Skeleton At The Feast 