Peaceful and Exciting

Photo by Sharon Robinson

My friends Sharon and Chris were married at the Swedenborgian church in San Francisco in the early 1990’s. It was a beautiful day. The guests walked in the diminutive walled-in garden outside the church, under the trees in the golden fall sunlight. The ceremony was so simple that there wasn’t much to do and I had no role in the proceedings. I was captivated by the church, designed during the Arts and Crafts movement. At its front was a mantelpiece decked with pine bows, pine cones and candles. The wooden floor was lined with individual chairs with hand-woven seats. Other than flowers and candles, and the old wooden wainscoting, there was little decoration.

Sharon was beautiful in a white dress with not a shred of lace, either real or faux, on it. It had puffed sleeves and a full skirt with a hemline just below her knees. With his Mediterranean good looks, Chris and she made a fine pair. The church was full of friends. Illuminated only by late afternoon sunshine coming in at the windows, everyone shone.

We moved off to a reception in someone’s crowded apartment afterwards. I met Chris’ Lebanese mother, his Norwegian father, sisters and brothers, a lovely British aunt who had taken up residence in San Francisco. Food for the affair had been made by Chris’ friends at the San Francisco Culinary Academy where he was a student. There wasn’t much of it and I drank a glass of wine and talked to people who spilled out into the sunny hall outside the apartment.

As wedding gifts, Sharon and Chris wanted nothing but pieces of a set of Finnish designed china, thin, bone-colored, translucent. Michael and I had instead opted to take the two of them out to Chez Panisse, to the set meal served downstairs. None of us could any longer afford this repast normally, each evening of which had become a cultural event. The four of us often got together for intellectual discussions over interesting wines and great home-cooked food. Chris and Sharon had met when she worked at a bookstore across from the espresso and dessert shop he was running. 

According to Friedrich Nietzsche, humans are first and foremost bodies, and these bodies engage the world every day in complex, patterned, rhythmical ways of which we are only dimly aware. Western Christianity had, for almost two thousand years, downplayed the body. Being aware of ourselves as physical entities and engaging with the rhythms of the world can be called taste. It is the method by which we sync ourselves up with the world, or not. Based on our sense of our own self-organization we move with the cultures we grew up in, those we see around us, or the aspirational patterns we perceive. Thus we find the harmony in our lives.

James Hans’ book The Sovereignty of Taste insists that despite seeing themselves as social constructs or essential identities, people are still “governed by patterns, individuals who develop out of self-organizing structures that evolve into mental patterns, aesthetic creatures from beginning to end whose lives are most accomplished when they devise the means to discern the appropriate patterns in their lives and discover ways of playing meaningfully within them.”

If beauty is the organizing principle in the world, taste is the process of noticing how close things come to the ground of their being. Taste is neither arbitrary, nor subjective, but a way of experiencing both in ourselves and in the world around us a sense of authenticity, of grounded truth, of reality. Each of us knows in our bones whether we are on the right path for us. And we know exactly how close to real the food we consume and the mental and spiritual food we take in are. We know, in some way, whether the work that we do, the “entertainment” we engage in, the purchases we make are wholesome and healthy for us. This knowledge is taste, a sense with which we have each been endowed and from which our judgments stem. 

I have known many people who give conscious thought to the rhythms of their lives, but Sharon and Chris seem to me exemplary. Both of them had reason to leave home, making their way in San Francisco, as many of us did, with no external financial help. Watching them over many years since, I have been impressed at how they parlayed minimal circumstances into rich lives. They have lived in the same small third-floor apartment on Nob Hill since their marriage. When they wanted a garden, they got on a waiting list for a plot in the community gardens above Fort Mason.

Chris worked as a cook for many years, while Sharon got a teaching credential and taught kindergarten. Once they had a daughter and Chris wanted to share summers with his family, he too got a teaching credential. At present, both of them work in the San Francisco school district. For most of the years their daughter was growing up, the family spent summers in Italy, renting a place in the same village each year. They learned its language, it's culinary customs, and used the village as a jumping off point for European exploration. Each of these decisions was grounded in careful thought and built upon.

When I visit Sharon and Chris’ home, the food is always interesting, informed by their European travels and Chris’ study. Textures include fine old linens they have found in antique stores, very simple bouquets, views toward the San Francisco Bay. It isn’t perfect. Beauty doesn’t mean perfection. Rather the opposite. It is the form we have been given, polished into its best and most grounded shape. Their home reminds me of what Gertrude Stein said of Paris: it is peaceful and exciting.

Thus taste has an element of acceptance to it. Nature in its wisdom puts out many shapes and has many stages over time, all of which exhibit beauty. The child with enormous eyes on a cancer ward, the older woman who dresses in dark clothes so as not to call attention to herself, the flowers going to seed by the side of the road are all imperfect. Our innate taste allows us to see that they are of the earth and accord them their beauty.

My youngest sister told me that she once came home from school crying because she wasn’t as pretty or as smart as some of her classmates. Our mother took her on her knee and said, “So do you think God made you wrong?” Clearly there was nothing she could say to that!

As a culture, we are desperately in need of a better understanding of beauty and a more grounded sense of what is good in life. We have bodies; they are in nature; this is reality. Most of us are happier when we incorporate physical activity, whether sports, dance, yoga or martial arts into our lives. When we do these things with others, they become teachers of taste. Literature and movies also provide characters from whom we can learn. They help us see the world around us.

When we look, we will see that most of those around us are doing the best they can. Our tastes are constantly engaged and educated by being in the world and taking each other as examples, for good or for ill! Nature has not made us wrong. We are each the flowering of a complex seed which bears within it the emergent person. This flowering is, at its best, peaceful and exciting.