Tuna Casserole
By Marty Smith from The Free Agent, March 1987 (a Portland, Oregon alternative newspaper).
October 10
I find myself trying ever more radical interpretations of traditional dishes, in an effort to somehow express the void I feel so acutely. Today I tried this recipe:
Tuna Casserole
Ingredients: 1 large casserole dish
Place the casserole dish in a cold oven. Place a chair facing the oven and sit in it forever. Think about how hungry you are. When night falls, do not turn on the light.
While a void is expressed in this recipe, I am struck by its inapplicability to the bourgeois lifestyle. How can the eater recognize that the food denied him is a tuna casserole and not some other dish? I am becoming more and more frustated.
This imagined humorous piece, should Jean-Paul Sartre have written a cookbook, has value in its own right in distilling the white noise of daily life. How are we to discover what we want from life when omnipresent spuriocracy[1] fill our senses and mind? I am reminded of a piece I recently read in the Los Angeles Times on the fallacy that a brain at rest is an idle brain. The idea is that our modern lifestyle retards the essential cognitive functions that unify disperate regions of the brain when at rest that might be the origin of the elusive sense of "self" psychologically and psychiatric conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, depression and schizophrenia clinically. This gives whole new credence to the idea of "losing oneself" in their work.
Food for thought, or for daydreaming.
[1] Spuriocracy: coined from the composition of spurious and mediocracy.



