Why does the sight of a cabbage make me tearful? Why do I caress small smooth onions in my hand and wonder at the silent form (tapered cylinder, ringed, orange) of a carrot? And why, when I chop them to prepare a meal, does it feel like an intimate affair with a loved one?
Words cannot access this question because vegetables do not use words. Yet my mind grinds away on old texts like a demented AI system. The real intelligence is looking back at me, and perhaps that is why I submit, softly and with moist eyes, the truth of my own intelligence addressed silently by these familiar items, items that have nourished us throughout our lives. Each not limited to its appearance but a symbol of something, of an overarching reality. That is why they are potent in their inanimate presence.
In their unique perfection – mute, untrumpeted, inexpensive, commonplace – these vegetables are beautiful. When there is no hurry to prepare the dinner, I can stop and relish these things – if ‘thing’ is an adequate noun for what is at once my nourishment, a form in my daily experience and a token of its (and my) true origin, present here and now.
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