Flames and the Charred Remains

As we sped home through the dark, bottles and pots clanking in the back seat of the car, our clothing reeking of smoke, my mother and I sat in silence. It was a silence that can hardly be described as companionable; a menacing, prickly silence threatening eruption. We were both exhausted, drained by the elaborate events of the day and by the frenetic activity of the past week.

Utterly overwrought, I felt my every nerve straining for sleep. After two big feasts in seven days, feverish wrestling with my blog, a phenomenally busy weekend at the coffee shop, a half marathon run earlier that day, and too much sangria at my latest feast—a birthday BBQ on the beach—I was in a sorry state. Mum and I snapped at each other, arguing pointlessly and circuitously over invented disagreements, and then retracted again, mute and wary.

This, I reflected, is the dark side of a feast, the side I rarely write about but that surely everyone who loves to entertain has experienced. You have plotted and planned, you have prepped and cooked and served the food. For a greater or lesser span of time you have poured every ounce of your energy into this event. And then, in one mad delicious dash, it is over. For the most part feasts end blissfully, lingering on and slowly sighing out like a retreating tide. And you are left basking in contentment. Yet sometimes these festive gatherings blow out like a candle, leaving you lost in darkness, stumbling in an unfamiliar chaos.

The beach barbecue had been one of the latter, enjoyable while it lasted yet violent in its death throes. I was drained and depleted. In the retreating wake of food, friends, and the communion of a good meal, it was ironic that I felt starkly, earth shatteringly alone. The words of the poet philosopher John O’ Donahue swam into consciousness complete with his lullaby Irish lilt:

One of the lovely things about longing is the way in which it remains so faithful to us. And when you think of different times in your life; you know really good times when you feel that everything you want is on your table, . . . that everyone that you really want is there in your life right now, and you are really happy that they are. And you feel that your life has kind of come together and that you are at one with the call of your destiny and with the subtle kind of wisdom of your soul. And yet it is precisely at such times that another uneasy voice awakens within us; a voice that whispers to you that there is something missing, or that there is someone still missing in your life. This is an awkward voice and it often awakens and becomes audible at the most inappropriate times, often when everything is completely as it should be. . . .This voice at times can bring you to tears and qualify in a frightening way everything that you believe about yourself; the voice that says there is something missing.

Although I have experienced this voice in many places and at many times, it can sometimes form the gnawing vacancy, the dark underbelly, of a feast. Perhaps I am surrounded by the debris, the chicken carcass and ragged beef bones, onion peel and heap of pans. Perhaps I am with several friends or one in particular, or perhaps it’s just me and the dogs—it makes little difference. This voice catches you off guard and brings you tumbling to your knees in one annihilating instant. Every passion has its fire and, necessarily, its antonymic shadow, the charred remains destroyed in ceaseless search for its untamed and untamable fulfillment.
I do not want to make this sound more dramatic than it truly is. The dark side of a feast, its accompanying voices and the sense of annihilation that it produces, all of this emerges and evaporates within moments. Yet to leave it unacknowledged, or worse to repress it, would be to falsify and perilously ignore an insistent, essential truth.