THE SECRET OF OIL

I sit at my dinner table anointed. I'm having white corn on the cob and spring potatoes. This ritual involves pouring a considerable amount of Israeli oil on your plate, and sprinkling it with rock salt from the Kalahari desert. The salt is very important. You then take your precious little fingers though the mix, and with them thus baptized you grab a potato. First, you smell its peal for the divine earth in it, and then you toss it vigorously though the salty oil, before you bring it to your lips – no, no, no, not yet. You don't bite it yet. You hold back. You allow your lips to kiss it to the point where you swear that you are one with the potato, that you come from the deepest underground in Africa, and that you are resurrected after having been crucified on Mount Scopus, Har HaTsofim, in Israel at harvest time. Bachelard, the magician, brings you back to your senses, when you begin to contemplate the whiteness of the corn. As the cob also gets enveloped in the Kalahari mine, you start speaking in tongues. Well, in Bachelard's French, to be more precise, which you, however, translate into English: “When a poet tells us of the secret of milk, he is not lying, not to himself, nor to others. On the contrary, he is finding an extraordinary totality” (On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, 8). My partner follows my fingers getting deeper and deeper into my throat, and asks me: “is that oil good?” I faint.