1. At 10 o'clock this morning, Bill, Diane, Bridgit, and I each cozied up to our laptops and enjoyed the next of our fortnightly salon on ZOOM. Back in April, along with Val and Colette, we started an informal study together of the literary genre of comedy.
When these friends asked me if I'd return, informally, to my role as an English instructor and I agreed, I wanted to explore the genre of comedy with one another primarily because the word comedy is so different in a literary sense from the way we use the word commonly. Commonly, comedy basically means funny. No problem.
But, traditionally, works of comedy, yes, might be funny, but the word comedy in the literary sense is used to describe stories that focus much less on the individual and much more on community, on our social existence. Traditional comedies often tell stores about brokenness being healed, waking up the spirit of goodness, the joy of communal life (meals together, dancing, making music, joining forces to help others, especially to help expose destructive lies or misunderstandings and replace them with clarification and liberating truths). Whereas tragedies explore the limits imposed on life by the inevitability of death, comedies explore what is eternal, ever living, life sustaining in human life.
I began my presentations with attention to the different formal and structural aspects of comedy.
But, in our last two meetings, I moved our attention more to the spirit of comedy -- or the comic spirit.
A month ago we explored the spirit of comedy by reading, feeling, and discussing the mystical poetry of Rumi.
Today, I turned our attention to the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and his book Being Peace.
Primarily, I wanted us to join together and contemplate and discuss the concept of Tiep Hien or Interbeing.
Interbeing is not a belief.
It's a way of understanding what's fundamental in reality and fundamental to human existence.
Reality is a web of interconnectedness. I've been reading about this fact in the natural world of whales, beavers, and salmon, reading books about ecological relationships.
Interbeing probes the reality that the foundation of human existence is not in individualism but in the way we "interare". Connectedness is the ground of our being.
I have thought throughout this project with Bill, Diane, Val, Colette, and Bridgit that our examination of comedy -- our discussions about Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Mary Oliver, Enchanted April, and other books, poems, movies, and plays that are, in the literary sense, works of comedy, was all leading us to see that comedies, by and large, are always leading us to see life in terms of relationships, interdependence, community, and interbeing -- and that the health of us all, mental, spiritual, and physical, depends largely on how we steward our interdependence, our connections to one another.
You wouldn't think it, but a deeper exploration of comedy takes one right to the heart of some of our country's deepest conflicts. The American spirit, seen traditionally, is a spirit of individualism, of personal freedom.
The spirit of comedy, the experience of mysticism, the fundamental insights of interbeing go against the grain of the American spirit.
So, inevitably, as this project concludes and as we look forward to getting another project underway by watching The Hollow Crown, a British made for television enactment of Shakespeare's Richard II, Henry IV, part 1, Henry IV, part 2, and Henry V, we have grappled together with big questions: What is the foundation of human existence (original sin? individualism? interbeing? [for starters])? Can we improve our lot in life by acting on behalf of one another (as comedy suggests)? What contributes to human renewal, reconciliation, healing, restoration?
And, always before us, whether our project is comedy, Shakespeare, or one of our wide open, open ended, jumping all over the place discussions, we always seem to come back to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be an American? What is America? Why is America the way that it is?
Why do I think what we do every two weeks is educationally sound?
We don't arrive at answers. We listen to each other. We share our experiences and our observations. We continue to search, explore, weigh, land, take off again, and let our minds be occupied by our discussions all through the two weeks that pass until we meet again.
We consider questions afresh. We puzzle over subjects. We trust each other.
We are doing every two weeks what I tried to make happen in every course I ever taught and it's thrilling to experience it working the best it ever has in our little group of Westminster Basementeers.
2. After we bade one another farewell after a spirited two hours or so on ZOOM, I got busy sprucing up the house and eventually cooking my contribution to dinner tonight.
Eventually, I turned my attention to the food. I put the chicken in the oven. I decided not to stuff the chicken with the dressing I made. Instead, after the chicken had roasted for about an hour, I took it out of the Dutch oven, poured the liquid fat that had puddled up into a bowl, lay the stuffing/dressing on the bottom of the pan, put the chicken on top of it, and poured the liquid fat over the chicken.
My hope was that putting the chicken on top of the dressing would give the dressing some of the chicken's flavor and would moisten it as liquid fat continued to accumulate under the bird.
It worked.
Once the chicken's interior had reached the proper temperature, I put it on a cutting board and wrapped in it aluminum foil and let it rest until Christy, Paul, Carol, and I had finished our cocktails -- then I would carve it.
3. I decided on Friday that I wanted tonight's meal to have a general Middle East/Mediterranean focus. Usually we have green or cabbage salad with dinner, but I plunged into this Mediterranean cookbook of mine and looked for other kinds of salad. One caught my eye: it is a Moroccan-style carrot salad. I thought the sweetness of the carrots, the citrusy brightness of the orange segments and lemon juice, and the earthiness of the cumin, cinnamon, and cilantro would go perfectly with the Palestinian chicken.
I was right. Carol made the Moroccan carrot salad and it was perfect.
I also wanted some kind of vegetable side dish and my latest issue of Cook's Illustrated featured a recipe for Briam, an olive oil rich roasted vegetable dish from Greece. In part, it's a potato dish and I thought the potatoes would pair well in texture and taste with the other parts of dinner and I really liked how the Briam recipe combined potatoes with green peppers, tomatoes, and onions (Christy used leeks instead of onions). I loved the Briam. I loved how the chicken, dressing, salad, and Briam all complemented each other and worked together to make a delicious dinner.
I thought a small dish of ice cream or sorbet would finish this meal off aptly, so, for dessert, I offered both RaspberrySorbet and Rum Tres Leches. I liked how light this dessert was and I found the sorbet especially refreshing.
We ate outside.
Thank God.
It had been since Patrick and Meagan were here in June that I'd hosted any kind of get together on the deck. Even though the cushions to the patio chairs are getting ratty and even though the wild, untended gardens in the backyard don't have the beauty and grace of Christy and Carol/Paul's beautifully groomed gardens, we seemed to put these drawbacks aside and we had a fun time eating, talking, laughing, and enjoying another great evening together.
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