The Poetry of Making Pasta

precious ephemeral instances
rays of light
perfectly cast shadows
that devour the moment
insignificantly grabbing
everything in its path
the realisation that nothing
lasts beyond the now
the present gifted to us
by no one

There is something special about making things with your hands. From wooden tables with the smell they emit when you work on their surfaces, the touch of flour sticking to your hands as you make pasta or bread. A long-forgotten art lies behind the everyday objects; bread, pasta, wine, love.

Every so often, I find myself, hands covered in dough, making pasta. Pasta is so easy to make, and there is poetry behind the movements of making things with one's hands. And in this moment, which I share here, the lighting in the kitchen was beyond perfect. It was almost as if the moment shouted toward me to capture it, to eternalise this fleeting moment.

And so I did, I listened to the call of the universe. With floured hands, I tried to capture this moment, one that always moves past us, one that few ever encounter.

There is a certain poetry behind repetitive actions, the kneading of the dough, the shaping of individual pasta sheets or shapes, the repetitive movement behind making the same thing over and over again.

Few find comfort in repetition, few find comfort in the mundane.

But the poet, the artist, the lone figure wandering through life in a constant mode of reflection, will find solace in the small things.

Making pasta is a strange thing. One can buy it from any shop, in bulk, prices so cheap, but this takes away from one's experience of life, of working dough under one's fingers, touching one's food.

There is a story that every sourdough baker's bread is different, with their unique strains of yeast and bacteria on their hands "infecting" their sourdough starters. And there is beauty in this idea of radical variance, alterity, difference, otherness.

We are so obsessed with keeping things in neat boxes, to claim that we understand. We are so obsessed with cleanliness (in borders but also in cooking) that we are afraid to touch our own food.

There is a certain kind of poetry in touching one's food, in being intimately involved in the very process of making.

***

life is texture
textured life
tangible touch
touched by tangibility
we are sensed-creatures
touching
touched
listen
listened
born into a sensual world

***

I find some comfort in the idea of things, of tangible things. For many, life is abstracted, theories, concepts, floating detached from life, from being, always in the heavens.

But as soon as one is reminded about the very nature of our beings situated in the world, beings from this very world, we might anew appreciate our sensibility.

The gritty sensation between my fingers of the flour reminds me of my being in the world, my feet touching the earth, the earth touching my feet.

In the end, the product looms and looks into the void. I am overshadowed by the very thing I created, like a monster, she rose from the centre of the flour pit.

I hope that you slow down to appreciate the beauty of everyday, mundane, things in your life. They are truly beautiful once you contemplate them.

They are fleeting, before you realise it, they are gone.

Happy photographing and keep well.

All of the writing and musings are my own, albeit inspired by the rough texture of life and pasta. The photographs are also my own, taken with my Nikon D300 and Nikkor 50mm lens.