the position of bowls
Short; after Deborah Levy
In my parents’ front room are at least five decorative bowls. Possibly six. I counted them last time I visited, incredulous. How on Earth could you have six decorative bowls, and in one room alone? It felt like a scandal. There were other decorative bowls elsewhere, on bedside tables, bookshelves, the kitchen counter (though that one was filled with back door keys and mangy Post-It notes, detached from their neon herd).
I too have many decorative bowls. I am looking at one of them now; though in actuality it is a functional decorative bowl, a fruit bowl in residence. I painted it myself, at a Pottery Cafe, a few weeks before I went to university for degree number one. It is teals and turquoises, splashed with black. The rim curves slightly, like a sneering lip. There are a few spots I failed to cover with paint, they are still the spongy greige of failed children’s birthday parties. Occasionally I have left oranges too long in the bowl, and they have gained mould, which is a similar palette. I suppose I must have inherited my proclivity for decorative bowls from my parents, although they say most of the five or six in the front room were wedding presents. Some sort of wedding present. The 1990s equivalent of an air fryer.
Bowls are made for holding things. This includes memories. Of the five or six bowls in my parent’s front room, only one is full. In it are interesting shaped stones and pine cones picked up from walks and some strange clay-and-pipe-cleaner concoctions I designed as a child, which look a bit like the Easter Island heads would, if you were six and on very strong antibiotics. For a little while this bowl — flat and broad rimmed, an inverted rice paddy hat — sat beside two ceramic ponies, painted by my sister and I. Her’s was psychedelic, mine was prim and proper. This bowl was not empty, but all the others were. When I throw dinner parties, I move it to the side. What this means for my parents’ marriage, I don’t know.
I like bowls. I like the way you can cup them in your hands, no matter how large they are. The cook and food writer Nigel Slater has written about how he always uses bowls, never plates. There is a ‘reverence’ about a bowl which I understand, having also taken communion from a wide-brimmed silver cup. Something about the sensuous tactility of them. The comfort of ‘the holding of a bowl – more like cradling really’. Something Freudian about it. Once at a ‘anything but a cup’ themed party, a friend of mine drank from a wok. A film of oil kissed his lips. I’d been in love with him once, but not then. I felt delirious. I had the beginnings of Covid. But I also had a desire to project something I wasn’t, a bit like drinking from a wok. I had painted my eyelids blue and I drank gin from a straw shaped like a penis and pretended to know up from down, right from left, happy from empty.
‘The food jumbles unaffectedly in the hollow, the deep sides capture the scent of the food, increasing the enjoyment of every mouthful’. Other things jumble too, less clear ones. At my last proper job I sometimes washed the glass jam-jars which held paint water for paying attendees on art-making courses. I hated them; they stank and they made my nails hurt. Somehow I always came into the office wearing white trousers on the days I’d be washing them up; colleagues pointed this out, it felt like I’d failed to share one of those copypastas, you know, repost this or face stained white pants for the next seven years. These were jars not bowls but they held things. They held hopes, I know that. Most of the people on the courses were older, my parents’ age. They had their own front rooms full of empty decorative bowls. They had grown children too. Once someone complained, told me she couldn’t put paint in such a dirty palette. Wasn’t she paying enough to remove the oil paint?
What would a clean jar hold?
Once, accidentally, I attended a Tibetan singing bowl yoga class. Gong! and you’re meant to be silent, Gong! and how to be thankful, grateful, this is meant to fill your cup. The question is with what?
Bowling Alone — a different sort of bowls. Sense of the world as a fishbowl which becomes narrower with every lap.
Right now my bowl is empty, my fruit bowl sometimes full of mould. Half full, half empty. The morals of the glass jar. Sometimes I want to cup things to my chest and hold them, watch their rough debris sift between my fingers. Sometimes I want to swallow them whole.
Lately I’ve been lonely; empty bowl, or upturned, like a tortoise shell, defence against the world. I used to hide under my father’s desk, in the room which now has five maybe six empty bowls in it, and stick post-its on the underside of his desk which is now a dining table. Emotional gum which peeled off sentiments like I Love You or I Hate You or probably things less memorable or more important. When you are a child and upside down, the world also is a sort of bowl. You cup out your arms and can cradle it. You deal in contradictions. Emptiness is not just a gap or a lack. It is always an opening. It is always something to be filled.
Something entirely different.
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this is so wonderful
this is so lovely. thank you for sharing<3