NSFW Beans

There Is No Such Thing As Repetition

Sometimes a pot of beans is the most monotonous thing I can imagine. More often it’s big and boundless and full of possibilities. And occasionally, though not very often, it’s just food. I have been making slight iterations of Good Beans on Toast every week lately and revelations abound. This practice is not repetition. Because, as Gertrude Stein said, “there is no such thing as repetition.” It is insistence.   

I am noticing, in each return to these beans— there is something else there too, within the task of the cooking itself. 

The cooking is happening and there is joy / creativity / thought in that action and the resulting fruits, but it is not the act—  it is the act within the act. It is eroticism. Yes, making beans is erotic. No, not in that way, you sick puppy, erotic as Audre Lorde describes it: “For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that…