A week ago today I was on a
flight from Istanbul to Toronto, having flown out of Tabriz (in northwestern
Iran) two days earlier. In my checked bags I had a kilo of honey, some dried
apricots, halvah, a selection of sweets from Yazd, sour pomegranate fruit
leather (called robb in Iran), fresh pistachios, a second-hand Farsi-language
cookbook, and a bundle of small kilims, as well as my well-worn clothing. My
other luggage weighed next to nothing physically, but was a rich load: memories,
emotions, early understandings, jam-packed notebooks, and digital photos.
I’ve been thinking about
this process of travel, memory, and story. People have different ways of
remembering. Mine tend to be visual: I have pictures in my mind after a trip. They’re
not so much of actual events. Instead they are images generated by my thoughts
about events or people or places. I would call them secondary images of events.
At the same time I also have hundreds of photos, moments preserved, you could
call them.
Because my memory works
with past experiences, digesting and processing them in sometimes surprising
ways, in the weeks right after a trip I like to keep that set of mental
pictures uninfluenced by the “reality” of the photos I have taken. Once that
digesting and processing is well underway, many memories have reshaped
themselves as stories or vignettes that are informative or tell a small story
in themselves.
When I then look at the
photos I often notice the gaps between my (processed) “memories” and what I see
in the details of the shots. The differences between them interest me. Sometimes
they are due to the fact that I failed to notice certain elements of a scene,
perhaps because I was caught up with other details, or with an emotional
context that kept my focus elsewhere. Sometimes the differences are because I
have subconsciously “forgotten” inconvenient, or ugly or uncomfortable details…
At the moment I am still
early on in the digesting process. Stories and cross-connections, ideas about
place and people, food and attitudes, are still taking shape, and will be for
the next month or two. I’ll try to help that process along by doing recipe
work. I find that as I draft recipes and shop and prep and cook, I often become
more sure about the importance of particular details, or I get a flash of
memory or insight.
This is why I am such a
believer in developing and testing my recipes on my own to start with. It
leaves me with a free head and imagination…so that unbidden thoughts can
surface freely.
All of this probably sounds
rather abstract and perhaps unreliable or fabulist to you. After all, am I not,
in writing cookbooks, supposed to be transmitting information rather than
invention?
Well, yes and no. I am not
a journalist, digging out “the truth” in a factual literal sense. Yes I want to
get the recipes right and to give them full honour and respect. But there are
other truths that story-telling and imaginative reconstruction and reflection
can elucidate. The aha! as I realise what anxiety or concern lay behind a
comment someone made to me, may take me weeks to arrive at. But when I am able
to understand the human, emotional, and social dimensions of a situation, then
I think both the story-telling and the recipes gain strength and reliabilty of
a deeper kind.
I hope that those of you
who have had the stamina to read this far can make sense of what I am trying to
say. I’ve been thinking about the connections between the “facts” on the
ground, be they in Burma or Georgia or Iran, and the emotional reactions I feel
or sense in a place. I admit that they are complicated.
It’s here, in the human
complexities of place and perception, that I find the juiciest excitement and
the largest potential for creative understanding. The trick is to not worry and
to not force the pace. Sometimes at this stage right after a trip I begin to
get impatient. I want to be further along in synthesizing my understanding. But
things take the time they take.
And so, in the meantime, I
plan to try making Tabrizi kofta, and sangak (bread baked on a bed of pebbles)
and dizi, and more. I’m trusting that the same process of subconscious
story-shaping that has happened before, most recently with the Burma book, will
take over and allow me to create a rich and reliable set of stories and recipes
in this new book of mine.
All I need is some
tolerance and understanding from friends and family as I look or act a little
dazed or distracted…
