Chopsticks

Eating with chopsticks is eating with the eyes. The process of teasing apart the wholeness of dishes and eating them in small pieces is as aesthetic as it is gustatory. When the food is transferred to the mouth, there is a brief instant when the food is suspended in the air, gently held by its temporary chopstick frame. At this instant, visual pleasure briefly supplants, then augments, the pleasure of tasting. This instant becomes a satisfying pulling of the world up and into oneself.

Using chopsticks combines the satisfaction of repetition with the beauty of visual representation. Open on the mouth end and closed on the finger-fist side, chopsticks suggest a film frame. The food, in the larger frame of the dish, is repeatedly separated into smaller, wood-framed pieces, which pass one by one in front of the eyes before disappearing into the mouth. Not looking at the procession of images is missing the whole point.

Working the chopsticks is a delicate, nimble process, requiring balance and a certain concentration. The motion involves a twisting that not only enlivens, but presents different angles of the food to the eater's eyes, and if one looks, to everyone else's as well. It allows one to see the near as well as the far side of the morsel, the entire three dimensional area. With chopsticks, the texture, wetness, floppiness, color, and steam all present themselves up close in a way that might be considered rude with a fork.

The chopsticks reanimate the food, move it, energize it. Everything arcs through the air. This re-created motion is clearest especially when eating uncooked foods, of which there are no shortage in Japan. Pieces of fish, especially fish, move swimmingly towards the mouth. Shrimp, even when crackly, deep-fried tempura, are temporarily re-born through motion. Dense packets of sticky rice sway for one last moment before performing rice's purifying and satiating role. Long sticky strings of natto need a circular flourish of the arm to recapture disobedient, escaping threads. Chopsticks dramatize eating, emphasizing the potential for pretending and performing over the biological demands of alimentation.

In contrast, the knife and fork are direct in their quickening of consumption-cooked, cut, poked, delivered. They work without the elaborate ritual dance. They make eating into serious, adult surgery. Of course, chopsticks can also mechanically shovel in wads of ramen noodles, half-bowls of rice, or pre-cut browned chunks of beef, but look around any "Japanese" restaurant, and what hits your eyes is a prancing, delighted ballet of sticks in the air.

Chopsticks wave around, hug pieces good-bye, jump around to make points and then clack down to rest. It's a magnificent performance. In looking across the space of the restaurant, the communal lofting of pieces of food up into space transforms the restaurant into an auditorium composed of different table stages each with its own dancings, bouncings and shakings.

This chopstick ballet is, like real ballet, a concentrated writing and re-writing of objects in space. Scholars have even suggested that chopsticks arrived in Japan at the same time as brushes for ink writing. The food is written into the air, then into the body, placed there as if by the hand of another, distant enough to be an imagined parent feeding you again. Chopsticks are not your own fleshy hand, but not a cold, metallic tool either. They are more pencil than scalpel.

Chopsticks turn the pleasure of eating back to that forgotten time of being fed, of being the object while feeling like the subject. Children, after all, spend as much time playing with and looking at their food as they do actually eating it. The body's own chopsticks, the forearm, is composed of two parallel bones which move in similar fashion.

Chopsticks help re-visit, with frail dexterity, that dormant feeling of not knowing when something is separate from us and when it is us. They make a meal another example of the transience of life -- oneness on either side with some pleasure in between.

After and between use, chopsticks are never laid down apart. Rather, great care is taken to place, and re-place, the two sticks together, uncrossed, side by side, on the top of the bowl, on the chopsticks rest, or on the side of the plate, always together as if, finally, again one.

--Michael Pronko