My friend D. sent me a link to a Live Journal of one of his friends, someone else who likes to post her Shabbat meals. I noticed that she likes to make lists, I can definitely relate to that.
(There is a poem that begins, "What I like best is making lists of what I like best" but I cannot find it in my bookshelf or through Google. It might not be as good a poem as I remember, but I wish I could post more than that first line here! If you are reading this and know the poem, please let me know what it is.)
I was thinking in schul this past Shabbat morning about the piyyutim (liturgical poems) between the Barchu and the Shma. I realized that the impulse to catalog the things we like is liturgical. Well, okay, I'm being disingenuous because my husband wrote a graduate paper on how this works in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and the ways that Whitman was consciously using biblical parallelism. So I know that making long lists of things you love is a feature of liturgical writing. But what came to me, again, on Saturday morning, was the ways that abstract concepts join more representational images in praising God in this section of the liturgy. So, the moon and stars praise God, and the seraphim and ophanim (various holy/angelic beings) but also the abstract concepts of Tiferet and Gedulah, the Hebrew alphabet, and the Sabbath day itself.
Well, okay and why do I think this is related to blogging? What I like when I read someone else's blog, especially a food blog, is the way that they can evoke their everyday experiences and sensations. It's the same thing that I like about all reading, really, is the "the letters invented by the clever Romans long ago to fool time and distance" (a line from a Grace Paley short story)--the way you can know someone else, even someone very different, and know their life and story. This happens, I think, the way that people attempt to know God, through litanies--I mean through lists, menus, catalogs.
This is why I was so distressed about the issue of lost languages. What you lose are untranslatable jokes, little songs that your great-grandmother made up to sing to your grandmother, and the recipes that she used to make her dinner. All the dumb things that you can't believe people are posting on the Internet, which it turns out are the most important thing in the world.
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