Fasting and Feasting

I am rereading a lovely book, “Fasting and Feasting” by Adam Federman for at least the third time. It is a biography of the English food writer and artist, Patience Grey, who left England in the 1960s to live in rugged and primitive conditions in the Puglia region of southern Italy. The landscape was spare and harsh, fierce in its simplicity. Often she and her partner, the sculptor Norman Mommens, didn’t have running water or electricity. They gathered weeds for salads. The tough living conditions forced them to literally fast, or almost starve at times. “For Patience, life had been stripped down to its essence,” says Federman.

But Grey wrote beautifully about finding one’s purpose in life and then throwing oneself headlong in that direction, whatever the cost. Although she began her career as a food writer, by 1974 she wrote that she was “not particularly interested in food anymore” but rather “in what people do on whatever food they swallow.” Indeed, “the role of work in everyday life” was the essence of their life experiment.

The two of them thought of their work, and by extension their lives, as a “craft or calling.” She called the absorption of work “the door into happiness.” She wrote, “It is such a small thing, but if you go on doing it long enough it becomes something, a sort of interior song.”

I find her passion challenging and invigorating all at once. Rereading this book is a bit like a spiritual chiropractic adjustment, nudging and prodding my lazy thinking and soft edges. It’s an infusion of rigor and discipline, a searchlight probing into the dark and shadowy corners of my hours and days, practices and routines. Lying on the couch, a cold drink at my side, I find myself squirming a bit. Even on my worst days, I know: I have it awfully easy.

Recently we were having dinner with some friends who have a home in Alaska. They were telling us about the fishing industry, both about the over-fishing problems and then what that means for the local economy. Although I eat mostly vegetarian these days, I like fish. I like to eat fish, but I’m listening to reports like this and I wonder: what is the right response from us? Do we eat only certain kinds or ones caught under certain conditions? Do we eat fish only on Fridays or feast days? Do we stop eating fish entirely?

I think we might be asking ourselves such questions a lot these days. There are so many horrifying and sad situations around us on every street corner and in every park. We are faced with what will be—and already is—a horrifying election season. Doing nothing never feels right, but it is easy to be overwhelmed and feel helpless. What is the right response from us?

All this makes me ponder the choices Grey and Mommens made to step out of society, turn their back on what they perceived as escalating consumerism and devote themselves to their art, under very spare and difficult conditions. When she spoke about their lives, she was concerned that “the romantic view of what they were doing would obscure the day-to-day labor and discipline that made it possible.” According to Federman, Patience “was very critical of the artists, mostly young…who seemed to want an alternative lifestyle but were unwilling to put in the time and labor to make it happen.” Quite simply, the two of them had work they believed in and they worked, day in and day out, regardless of the season, their mood, the weather.

The mood in the world at large feels precarious these days, and it’s difficult to know how to come together and keep moving forward. Around here, this weekend marks the beginning of the 12th annual Quintessence Summer Festival, in which 100-something amateur singers come together to begin a week’s worth of rehearsals on a major work, culminating in a performance with orchestra next weekend. This year, the piece is The Lost Birds: An Extinction Elegy by Christopher Tin, which given the state of the world, could not be more relevant. The piece consists of 12 movements on texts by poets such as Sara Teasdale, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson. It’s about loss and hope and all the things that make living in this world precious and painful all at once. And it is heartbreakingly beautiful.

I find myself wondering if there isn’t a message for us to wrestle with embedded in the title of Grey’s biography—Fasting and Feasting. In 1986 Patience wrote a book called Honey from a Weed, which is an exploration of the eating practices of the peasant class in both the Italian and Greek communities where Grey and Mommens spent time. It describes—in a way that is both charming and challenging—the reality of eating from the land throughout the seasons of the year. Yes, there are times of celebration, of feasting. They eat fish, drink wine, sing and dance with abandon. And then they fast, and go back to work with a quiet simplicity and focus.

It wouldn’t be a bad thing, probably, to have the likes of Patience Grey shake us out of complacency, align our spiritual postures a bit and teach us to work with purpose. “There is nothing to say about work. It occupies you intensely if it’s what you choose to do,” she said.

In a world that is breaking apart, what is the right response from us? I don’t pretend to have an answer here. I have my own stuff—quite literally—to grapple with. But I’m paying attention and suspect that there is wisdom all around us if we are listening. “I feel we must have fewer and fewer things,” Patience Grey wrote in 1972. All that could never be said/All that could never be done/Wait for us at last/Somewhere back of the sun, wrote Sara Teasdale a century ago. Hope is the thing with feathers, said Emily Dickinson, That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops at all.

There is work to be done and songs to keep singing. Hope is the thing.