“I explain the reasons for and benefits of silent eating. “Use your other senses to know the people around you.” (Oh, to me, talking is a sense.) “Without talking, you can still communicate with your fellow diners. Look at them. Smile at them. Rest from your usual social personality. Without the distractions of conversation, see your food.” Naked lunch. “Feel the energy and atmosphere of the room. Listen to the sounds”–birds are singing!–”and smell the food and the cut grass. Hear the noises of your chewing, and be aware of tastes and textures. Slow your eating, enjoy each bite.”
It’s not a passage from a weightloss guidebook. It’s from Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace (271), where the war veterans attending the writing workshop at the Community of Mindful Living are asked to a meditative, silent lunch. I have to admit that the idea of silent eating is a bit strange, although the call to “rest your social personality” is attractive. The book’s been interesting, if a bit slow going, so far. I always enjoy Kingston’s formal innovations and experiments–what she does differently in each book formalistically in relation to the content.
Despite the narrator’s (presumably Kingston herself, but you can’t be sure; remember the autobiographical controversy around The Woman Warrior) insistence that the workshop is not about healing–”Healing, I avoid that New Age word. It implies that something’s wrong, that they’re unwell, and need fixing” (265)–it (and the whole book) seems very much about healing. I think the iffiness that we (or at least me and the people around me) feel at the suggestion of healing is interesting. I remember getting a question at the MLA on healing in Theresa Cha’s Dictee. Although I steered away from any therapeutic implications in my readng of the text, and made that clear in addressing the question, I have to admit that healing through literature is something people who take literature seriously always have hanging in the back of their minds. It’s just that we don’t know how to talk about it in a non-New Agey way.
Kingston’s book is fueling my desire to be a part of writing group. Creative writing and not critical writing. I’ve thought about it when I was in Seoul–since I had a few fleeting ideas about stories I’d like to write–but I’m a bit hesitant to look into the possibilities of joining a writing group. It is quite a bit of a commitment. Do I have the time to do it at this point? I had the urge to write fiction a couple years back when I was in Chapel Hill too. And I did scribble a couple of short (really short) stories that are, ahem, embarrassing. It’s hard to keep on writing on your own when you have other commitments and interests. I am, however, always enamoured by the idea of sharing one’s writing with other writers who are interested in listening.
