RECIPES & REVIEWS

LETTING GO OF THE PAST, THE MOON THAT'S NOT THE MOON, FLANNERY O'CONNOR, AND MAKING UP SOME PASTA

“Few literary artifacts remain as consistently enigmatic as the author’s journal,” wrote Dustin Illingworth in his appreciation of the form for Literary Hub after months having read many written by some of his favorite ones. “What we find within their pages are wild, shapeless, violent things; elegant confessions and intricate codes; portraits of anguish; topographies of mind. Prayers, experiments, lists, rivalries, and rages are all at home here, interbred, inextricable from one another. A piece of petty gossip sits astride a transcendent realization. A proclamation of self-loathing becomes a paean to literary art. News of publication shares the page with the most banal errands imaginable. That juxtaposition, in which the profound and the prosaic rub elbows, creates the space for something like a revelation of character, one that finds the writer enmeshed in the sordidness of life, either striving to ennoble it or wading in its depths like warm mud. … I began with Flannery O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal, one of the most honest and vividly seeking things I’ve had the privilege of reading. If the span of time it covers is short (January 1946 to September 1947), its concerns are vast, even cosmic: How are we to be made worthy of grace? Intimate and urgent, this is a record unafraid of Dostoyevskian moral seriousness. ‘Oh, Lord,’ she cries out in the journal’s middle, ‘make me a mystic, immediately.” Being a writer of remarkable skill, her missives are often luminous, approaching something like a poetics of prayer: ‘Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon…”

I have never kept a journal but I have lived my life as narrative. When I was seven and eight and my parents died consecutive deaths in 1963 and 1964 - my father in a car accident and my mother the next year of esophageal cancer - I closed my little bedroom door out in the Mississippi countryside where my little brother and little sister and I had moved to be raised by our maternal grandparents and realized that I had to stop living my life in the way it was making me feel and begin to pay witness to it as both a character and the narrator. I had to separate myself from myself in order to understand myself. That’s more than ironic. But developing a sense of the ironic - honing that tone - seemed to help, too. I was already a ridiculed little sissy who was ridiculed even more because of my stutter. And now I was embedded in a world where the suddenness of the sadness that overtook me during those early 1960s in Mississippi felt like an act of physical violence not just an emotional one. The sadness was so profound it went past psychological trauma into what I now have come to see as a mystical realm where comprehension and all the messy needs that fall, if we are lucky, into a kind of order that goes into making us safely harbored in being human are not really needed. I hadn’t been lucky. I had already lost the safety of my harbors. I don't know if I were born a writer because whoever makes such mystical decisions at our births knew that I would need that embedded in me - I was its world - to survive what was coming too soon my way, or I became a writer to survive such a childhood. I do know that my desire and later attempt to be an actor was steeped in these same reasons. Writing was just something that I always did as a child because it was a part of me so I never thought of it as “a job.” But for the past 40 years I have made a life and a living as a writer once I realized that it could be.

Sometimes it’s been hard to pay the rent but I have never had any other job since I had that realization, There were the first couple of years at Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and then 14 years at Vanity Fair. I have written cover stories for myriad magazines and published two New York Times bestselling memoirs, Mississippi Sissy and I Left It on the Mountain. I helped launch The Daily Beast and conducted interviews for it for a few years. I then built up a substantial following on Facebook for over a decade by using it as a platform to write a meta-memoir in real time. In many ways, now that I think about it, it was my journal. After one year of sobriety and being in recovery for meth addiction and having almost lost everything before I was ready to let it all go, I moved to San Francisco for five years to create a magazine as its Editor in Chief and stayed on to become the Editor-at-Large at the Curran Theatre. I then moved back east to Hudson, New York, where I continued to freelance for magazines and worked for a year as writer for Sean Patrick Maloney when he was in Congress. I created my own website sessumsmagazine.com. And now here I am on Substack where I found this harbor as I navigate the world as a pilgrim having sold or donated almost everything I owned where I lived with it, all that stuff, the human need for it, in my Hudson loft. Being a writer is now really all I have left. It is who I am. I write. I have come full circle - not to Mississippi but to that little sissy who sat there behind a closed bedroom door trying to figure it all out by writing it all down. Creating a sentence made me somehow feel less lonely. It sill does.

I sit here now at a Pret in London having yet another budgeted meal and view the vista of all that came before from my acetic pilgrim’s perch in this latest chapter in my narrative. I guess my review for this edition of RECIPES & REVIEWS is a review of a life that got me to this perch, this stool in a Pret and all the corners I had to turn to wind up on this one on this day in the West End. My time as a writer for Vanity Fair that entailed heading out to LA for Oscar weekend and staying at fancy hotels and going to a round of parties that culminated at Vanity Fair’s seems as far away as my sissy years in Mississippi. I still haven’t watched the Oscar telecast. I did quickly read a list of the winners on Monday morning but I haven’t looked at any photos from any of the parties. I’ll search around for them at some point but not seeing myself in them anymore can feel to me like I failed at being that person. It is more fleeting these days - this sense of failure - but feel it I still do. It was easier to let go of all my stuff - my art, my clothes, most of my books, all of my beloved midcentury furniture -once I had made the decision to live this pilgrim’s life than it was to let go of the idea of myself as a Vanity Fair writer. I liked the perks and the attention and those generous multi-years contracts and my name on all those covers but I also had come to think of it if not my family then its substitute, my own Mary Tytler Moore Show. When it was over - it sort of fizzled slowly away, there wasn’t even a goodbye lunch, not even a so-so so-long, the sadness not as profound as my sissy years but certainly its echo - I had to come to terms that it was always just a job. But my sense of identity had become so, yes, embedded in it that it was difficult to disentangle, and once I did then who was I? Was being just another struggling writer going to be enough? It took the depths of drug addiction and the tenets of recovery - my sobriety has been far from perfect but my reliance on recovery where I mostly live no matter where I am in the world is not about perfection - as well as a lot contemplation and, yes, a lot of letting go to figure out that those are what fell into a kind of order to make me now who I am. Just the other day I wanted to bring up the sessumsmagazine.com site to mine it for a few interviews and pieces of writing for some Substack columns but when I signed on it wouldn’t come up. The hosting company was SiteGround and it had an old credit card number that didn’t automatically renew my account in October as it had before. I discovered that SiteGround keeps the files for a couple of months after a payment has not been received then trashes them all. When my sister, a website designer who so beautifully designed the site, called to break the news to me because I had asked for her help to get it back up, I calmly said to her, “How many times do I have to keep being taught the lesson of letting stuff go?” Even the sadness I felt at hearing the news felt calmer. But her work and all the work I put into the site have now vanished. They, like dead parents, no longer exist in the world.

Or maybe there is a world where they, like dead parents, still exist. I thought a lot about that - parallel worlds - the other night on my walk home from my tube station. Flannery O’Connor’s crescent moon hung high above Kilburn High Road with a lone star-like point of light as its wingman. They accompanied me on my walk and when we arrived, I stepped into the backyard to take their photo along with an eery orb of light atop the building across the way. I noticed that the moon seemed to have a little noggin atop it. But trying to ignore the nudge that noggin was giving me, I headed down to my basement room and pulled up the shade on my window for the frame of sky that is my view from down there. In the 30 seconds it had taken me to do so, the moon and its wingman had dropped down themselves to visit the orb of light. The texture of the air had changed as things already around in the night came alive in different ways. There was a stirring, a summoning. It too had arrived. The moon and the light then did their dance of engagement, metaphysics as a kind of vaudeville act. That is the only way I know how to explain it although I don’t really attempt explanations anymore because when I talk to people about it they get that look in their eyes that I saw in the looks of others when I was a child with two dead parents. It’s not pity exactly but such a generous dose of portioned out concern that I can feel pitied by it. That pitied child is stirred. He is summoned. Sometimes I think he will be my last man standing when all is said and it is done.

I thought about writing more here about my acknowledging of the parallel world and its acknowledgment of me. Meth use opened the portal to this parallel realm just as other drugs have opened them up for mystics to make their journeys there without having to leave where they already are. Once opened, however, those portals never really shut. You learn to live with the crack in that door just as you learn to live with that crack in yourself which causes you to become a drug addict and to wonder if you’ll ever be worthy of grace. It is an intimate urgent world behind that door. You enter it thinking it contains wild, shapeless, violent things but you discover that it is beyond human imaging and can’t be understood within any human construct. It is the natural world manifesting within its matter in another manner. It is deeply not human; experiencing it can make you more deeply so.

But I have written a lot about all this already in my second memoir, I Left It on the Mountain. I’ll leave it there. Before deciding that, I did go to the backdoor upstairs last night after eating my pasta dinner and talked to the moon about it. It was shining differently from the other night, and I told it so. Even using “it” here as a pronoun feels wrong but so does using gendered ones. I said I was thinking about writing about the other night in this column. I wasn’t asking permission to do so but I wanted to be honorable about it and was bothered a bit by my revealing something that might itself want to remain a secret. Or does the human sense of honor have a place in a world parallel to ours that doesn’t buttress itself with the imposition of moral codes but with the steady whir of its own balance. I even quoted Flannery O’Connor and told it about her own perception of such crescent moons. And I recited the subtitle of this column to see if it had a reaction to being referred to as not what it appears to be. That reaction is in the photo below as well as some of its dance turns with that light next door., a pas de deux that seemed to be manifesting parallelism.

After my pasta dinner and chatting up the moon, I headed downstairs last night to my room and read a bit from Pico Iyer’s The Art of Stillness. In it he writes, “The idea of going nowhere is, as mentioned, as universal as the law of gravity; that’s why wise souls from every tradition have spoken of it. ‘All the unhappiness of men,’ the seventeenth-century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal famously noted, “arises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber.’ After Admiral Richard E. Byrd spent nearly five months alone in a shack in the Antarctic, in temperature that sank to 70 degrees below zero, he emerged convinced that ‘Half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.’ Or, as they sometimes say around Kyoto. ‘Don’t just do something. Sit there.”

Pasta always makes me sleepy. Semolina works on me like an Ambien that’s not an Ambien. So I put down the book and, drifting off to sleep, I wondered what prayerful Flannery would make of my talking out loud to the moon that’s not the moon. Could she understand the concept of a prayer that’s not a prayer? I would love to have that dance of engagement with her here in the earth’s shade where I still reside when I emerge from its shadows.

Onward …

(Above are a few of the photos I took when I felt the air change the other night and the world stir and the moon dropped from the sky to engage with the light next door. Metaphysics as a vaudeville act. This is not what I saw - what I see - but what I so profoundly sense when I do see the light and the air changing and things like the moon and the natural world seem to be shapeshifting. I have come to think of it as having its own trinity - there is what is actually happening, there is what I am allowed to witness, and then there is what my camera records of the manifesting energy. There is no underworld. It is the world.)

(Above: The moon’s reaction when I told it I was writing this column. There’s its star-like wingman. But there are some other things that seem to be floating about and keeping them company. I am so nervous about posting these photos and writing a bit about it all - not only because I am wondering if I am disrespecting this world that hides in plain sight where it reached out to me years ago but also because I worry about the reaction that some people have to anything metaphysical being taken seriously. “Oh, don’t worry,” a friend said when I sent him a couple of these photos and one of the moon that I decided not to publish because it might be upsetting for some folks. “People are just going to say, ‘Oh, Kevin is back to being loony and moony. I thought he was over all that.” Loony and Moony. Yep. Sounds like a vaudeville act.)

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There is no video this week. Sorry.

And the column was a longway around to get to this pasta recipe. It is one of my favorite dishes to make. Simple. Quick. Healthy.

OVER THE MOON PASTA

Your choice of pasta but I like - of course - Angel Hair for this dish.

Also, choose the vegetables you like. I like asparagus, spinach, and either broccolini or broccoli as my combination. Saute them all in olive oil along with three cloves of chopped garlic. Add a piece of salmont to the pan. Pour it all onto the pasta and add a big dollop of Dijon mustard atop the salmon so it blends into the dish and creates a kind of sauce with the olive oil.