An as yet unnamed lasagne

Some time ago I wrote an entry about a lasagne I made and named Steve. I'm making another lasagne tonight, this time with greater reflection, because of the food paper I'm writing, but this lasagne is nameless.

It's a fairly sexy lasagne, I must say. The sauce is béchamel, which is basic white sauce, except I always stuff if with nutmeg and white pepper. The noodles are between layers of cottage, goronzola, mozzarella, and parmesan cheese blended together, and mushrooms, artichoke hearts, a little onion and garlic that I sautéed, to which I added a couple spoonfuls of chopped black olives.

I had the revelation I needed to make the next step in the food paper this morning as I rose. If you consider the sense of taste, you'll notice that it tells us a lot about sensation in general. For one thing, it shows us the synaesthesia of our sensoria - we live in whole sensory worlds, not individuated sense data that we compose into a whole. It's just about impossible to ignore this regarding taste, but we (and by "we" I mean primarily Modern philosophers) have done a great job ignoring it regarding vision, the sense they took as the model of all senses.

Right now I can only express the idea in phenomenological jargon, so pardon that. The basic notion I've hit on is that taste is the exemplary sense because tasting is the most intimate - what we taste becomes us, quite literally. This demonstrates that the alleged subject-object division, that bugaboo of Modern western philosophy, can't hold. We can't taste unless what we taste and our tasting become intimately conjoined.

That led me to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whom I spent three hours reading this afternoon, to pull together a few more ideas about what I've ended up calling the "founding intimacies" of perception. And with no undue modesty, I gotta say, I think "founding intimacies" is a damned nifty expression for it.