Gluttony

I grew up an expatriate in the third world, meaning that early on I grew gluttonous in a way that I still have trouble with. Let me explain.

The only place to get Snickers bars in Lusaka, we thought, was at the commissary, a building that I never saw, but which I imagined as a sort of cross between a military bunker and Candyland, except that instead of passing through it visitors were content simply to browse the shelves - forever, if possible. In order to do this you had to be American, meaning you had to work for the American embassy. Families, like my own, who were employed by less reliable organizations were forced to shop at the local Zambian supermarkets, where the controlled chaos of the African food industry made every visit a harrowing adventure. Aisles shifted and items appeared, or disappeared with a dreamlike suddenness that would have taken a full-fledged Joseph to comprehend. Boxes of South African breakfast cereal stood like soldiers at attention, or better yet, like men impersonating soldiers and trying not to laugh as my brother and I inspected them. Their cardboard (the reverse sides of which we could see, since many of the box-tops were torn open) was unbleached and their mascots harried beneath sagging speech-bubbles. “Tommy the Tiger says: ‘You will enjoy my flavored cornmeal!’” Except that, next to his radiantly chesty American original – a stencil of which I had made in one of my notebooks the previous summer and now kept under my pillow, along with two issues of Gamepro and a MacDonalds placemat – Tommy looked haggard and even a little guilty-looking.

America, like heaven, was somewhere else. Still, there were windfalls. In the middle of the melee my mother clung to our cart-handle like a dowser clutching her dowsing rod. She held her head high, her flared nostrils sifting through the layers of spoilt milk, okra, and split-open rice bags until they caught on something interesting. Sometimes this was nothing we could use. A bottle of curry-sauce stamped with letters that looked like tiny pictures of different types of noodles. A shoebox sized container of pickled shark meat. Or the tiny chewable ginger ties that were delicious, sure, but which, because of their packaging, smell, and general grit, my brother and I rejected immediately as Not American, meaning Not the Real Thing.

Given this general atmosphere of difficulty, you would think that stumbling onto a box of Snickers bars would have caused my family immense joy; but if anything, I remember feeling only terror. Afterwards, in our boiling Volvo (its inside smelled like a gigantic sponge, at least during the rainy season), we poured over our carton like priests before an oracle, examining each little detail. Where had it come from? What did it mean? And did the fact that splendor had entered our lives mean the favor of the gods, or their curse? Either way, we all felt the presence of something bigger there, lying under our hands with ominous generosity, like a case of candles that we had bought and then discovered was full of dynamite…

The literary thing to say here would be that my un-American childhood created a vacuum of expectation that the real America could never satisfy; but the truth is that my childhood expatriation wasn’t un-American: it was hyper-American. So, after fifteen years of living on the continent that presumptuously assumes its name, America has never disappointed me, because I haven’t found it. I eat and eat and eat and it sucks, because despite all the resources at my disposal, I can’t find the flavor I’m looking for. I spend hours on the internet trying to find out what was in the Mezoe orange juice (battery acid, grapefruit rinds, and didn’t it always seem to suggest just a bit of salt?) that I habitually poured out on the concrete at the American Embassy School of Lusaka, because it lacked the nectar-like sweetness of my classmates’ Juicy Juice.

This Christmas, my dad the unreconstructed expatriate (Dakaar, for now at least) very generously gave me his old MacBook. His undeleted iTunes library includes a bunch of Eagles songs, which is funny because, like that great and admirable homebody the Dude, I loathe the Eagles more than fruit flies and freezing rain combined. “Take It Easy”, “Get Over It”, “Learn To Be Still” – but then isn’t this the point? The West coast’s gluttony for stillness and relaxation is the three-ton Buddha we place on our scale in the hope that it will counterbalance a deep and inborn anxiety. But that’s narcosis, not absorption. As a deeply anxious person myself, I know that the worst thing anyone can say is “Don’t worry.” Why not, I want to scream back? And where does your sense of calm get you but further immured, further removed, further stuck, in other words, in the hell that is disconnection and detachment?

(and alright, I can’t believe I’m going to do this, but the Eagles even showed us what that place looks like, right? It’s the Hotel California, a legitimately brilliant marriage of form and content that is far more hellish than even a above-average high-school term paper can reveal. Listen to it again: it will ruin for you, in order, 1) Don Henley, 2) guitar solos, 3) classic rock radio stations. This is not a song about California: it’s a song about art, or the failure of ambition in art, or what happens when you succumb to the gluttony of satisfactions that some concierge has handed you, but which you yourself take no pleasure from)

To rush into the third act here (since, let’s be honest, an Eagles reference should sound like a death knoll, for anything, anywhere): the good thing about gluttony is that it feels like a search, whereas the bad thing about gluttony is the way that it promises an end to searching and so focuses us on the goal, rather than on the process itself. Like each of the seven deadly sins, it is deeply idealistic and therefore unforgiving, meaning that it justifies itself by saying that everything we can actually see and experience is not It, not Worth It, not the Real Thing. By doing this, it robs us of our enjoyment and so alienates us from the very food that we need to survive. It allows us to accept our fear of being human, which condition, with all its pain, can be our sustenance.

Gluttunous writing is not hard to find - although it's important, I think, that we distinguish it from writing that is legitimately hungry and therefore overflows through pleasure, rather than disgust. Stephen King and James Clavell are only two examples of writers who write as if the only purpose of opening a book were to finish it, as the only purpose of opening an XXL bag of Dorritos is to be able, half an hour later, to scrunch that same bag up and throw it in the trash. I don’t say this Puritanically, or because I dislike Dorritos (I pretty much worship them, which is why I can pretend to know what I'm talking about). I loved and love both King and Clavell, among others (Timothy Zahn, anyone?), and in many ways owe my love of reading to the complete immersion that their worlds offered me when I was a kid. But I know I have to be careful. I remember what those Snickers bars tasted like when we finally opened them, and what they led to, which was not even more desire, but the despair of knowing that I would never be able to eat enough. The suspicion that we had been duped again, and that these were not the actual Snickers bars I'd heard so much about, but some strange simulacrum, a box of fakes.

I want to live. More importantly, I want to want to live here. I grow impatient, these days, with things that suggest I should want to live somewhere else. Or language that suggests, by its use or misuse, that language is not important. Books of gluttony exhaust, but books of appetite – I’m thinking here of books like 2666, or The Castle, or Moby Dick – both satisfy and provoke, by some strange and beautiful paradox. At the heart, for all their searching, I think they embrace what they are, no matter how limited that is. Kafka said that patience wasn’t just a virtue, but the virtue: not a humiliated waiting, but its own kind of fulfillment. Osip Mandelstam: “To speak is to be forever on the road”. We are all on the road. And, being on the road, our only recourse is to speak, and in doing so transform the alien corn into Keats’s “alien corn”, which is both haunting and gorgeous. The Real Thing, which I like because it shows something I suspected even then: that art is what makes us real, brings us closer, rather than the other way around.

So speak.