Rendered
Water, Fat, and Salt
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The best things in life are fried.
Rendered
I’m still in yesterday’s clothes.
The captive sounds of knowing
sizzle into the grease of a pan.
I try not to let them burn me.
On plates cutlery clatters.
Where there is fat
there is flavour.
We eat life.
In the fires of becoming,
knowing shrinks - like frying bacon.
What is left to bite on
doesn’t bend the same.
It is more brittle. It comes apart.
It breaks.
We can’t see and touch
what has melted away
yet we can feel it.
Are we what is rendered?
Are we what gets left behind?
We dine on what remains
harvested in the food of what was.
We are all cooks in that kitchen.
We focus on creating a future
while we still scour through the old
recipes of our past.
Is today built on
what yesterday left behind?
What got left over - in
the pan - of knowing?
What disappeared?
Did it break apart easily
or are we still chewing on it?
© Jamie MillardThe older I get the less I seem to need to know. The more I need to be.
Is knowledge rendered into being? Something always speaks from the spaces between. Is meaning the same thing as understanding?
Nothing puzzles me more than time and space,’ wrote Charles Lamb, ‘and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.’
The paradox. We are living in two worlds. The physical reality of what we can see, hear, touch, taste and smell and the mysterious emotional energy of what we cannot observe with our senses. Both worlds are connected. The questions belong to both. We belong to both.
If there was a map of discovery, intellect wants to grasp onto the sensual compass of the physical. The spiritual moves through the depths of the emotional. All of these realms of human being need connection. A me to we.
Living into these questions I am often called the dreamer. We are all dreamers. We all participate and share in this world of our illusion. We create it. Together.
Rationally, we may say truth is made rather than found. Emotionally, maybe truth is more of a journey. A becoming.
The fire of art can melt us. It can render out parts of us we never knew that we had. It can break us open to leave us different. What remains has been changed. To feel into a different way of seeing. Being.
Even art can get lost in the senses of a concrete rational reality. It can become decorative as opposed to beautiful. Beauty is not born of the physical. It is irrational. It is more emotional. Something that can’t be measured or advertised let alone be put down into words. It cannot be captured. Much more naked than nude. It’s not on display. It doesn’t need to pose. To perform. We long for a balance with the emotional and spiritual yet art too can get lost in the physical and intellectual.
It took me a while to realize that we have been art all along. Reaching for a harmony of function and emotion. We need both. Poetry is an empathetic attempt to breathe into the collective of the emotional and the spiritual while still living in the latitude and longitude of the intellectual and physical. A poem exhales feeling into a form of expression that evokes our shared experience. One that is not of language yet must speak through the world and the words of language. We are all trying to express the connection of our experiences through novel ways where language has never been. We truly are the metaphor. The bridge that connects the two worlds we all live in-to. The two worlds we live of.
In our journey life renders out the fat and the water to leave the salt behind. We all live in this world yet it is a different world we each live of. Depending on the depths and grips of our geography, history, trauma, imagination, and emotional regulation as well as our present place of survival, that cooking just takes a long time. Maybe even lifetimes. One day we become the form of our longing. Meet you there.
Thanks for Being - Here.
Thanks for stepping into the fires of words. Thanks for being brave enough to share your own words as we render into being. We are the salt of another language.
Lots of Love,
Jamie
Hi Jamie,
“We are the salt of another language” — our other worldly languages touch us in codes that we feel into being — our expansiveness. Where soul’s knowing may seem not to relate to intellect’s knowledge — perhaps it is attachment to belief and story — that creates the myth that seemingly separates the possibilities of a union between knowledge, knowing — truth? Those other worlds we inhabit — beyond the linear reality of time and space? Beyond the reliance of what is apparently known?
Perception — in the shrinking of one, an expansion of (an)other?
Your curiosity and questions beget possibilities — what is infinite is open for us to create. We are the art and the artist. Soul’s metaphor, the bridge. As your poignant poem and prose invite us to reflect. Always stunning.
The fires are literally burning down here on this side of the planet. Thank you, as always Jamie, for stoking them — to feel into who we are. 🙏🌀💙
Dear Poet, your words feel like an invitation into the alchemical kitchen of psyche ... that place where heat, pressure and time reveal what’s essential. As I read (and listened), I kept thinking of Jung’s journey of individuation ... the slow rendering down of everything we think we know until only the true salt of our psyche remains.
Naturally, I’m writing about "salt" this week ... we couldn’t script this thing called life if we tried!
Your image of knowledge shrinking "like frying bacon" is just perfect! For it’s what happens when our ego’s certainty melts away and something quieter, truer begins to speak to us. Being instead of knowing. Essence instead of accumulation.
And yes, we live in two worlds at once ... the visible and the invisible, the literal and the symbolic. "We truly are the metaphor." Your poem moves between them like a surreal dream, dissolving the boundary until we're standing at the threshold and both feel necessary to the meal.
"It took me a while to realize that we have been art all along." What you call "rendering" is what I’ve always felt as the soul’s way of shaping us ... burning off what no longer serves, leaving behind the flavour of who we’re becoming. The salt. The soul.
Thank you so much Jamie for sharing the sights, scents and sounds of your inner kitchen. It feels like I'm standing at the stove with you ... watching old forms melt away and new ones take shape. "We are the salt of another language." Utterly salivating, utterly soulful! 🙏💖😋