Quick note! The second Desire as Craft Write-In is Thursday April 25 at 5 pm pacific on zoom. This is free for my paid subscribers and Deeper Wider students! Curious readers can drop in for a small donation. Our theme is bitterness, which is a great fun. This will be an hour long session with a craft talk and a writing prompt. RSVP here.
My first favorite poem was In the Desert by Stephen Crane. I came across it in elementary school:
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial
who, squatting upon the ground;
held his heart in his hands,
and ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter-bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
I loved the image of this creature, and the affinity I had for it, my own beastliness.
I have a pronounced bitter gene. One of the ways I know this is because grapefruit tastes like poison to me. Recently, a friend was making dinner with me and her job was to make a fruit salad. She wanted to know if there were any fruits I didn’t like. I proceed to speak a five paragraph essay about my feelings around fruit generally. I like fruit but I’m not like, oh I need that fruit. But otherwise I like fruit as a whole.
When she put the bowl in front of me I hesitated before finally telling her, “I made a mistake. I don’t like grapefruit.”
She begins laughing hysterically.
“This whole thing is basically grapefruit!”
We are snorting with laughter.
“And you talked for such a long time about fruit,” she squeaked out. So I said that maybe I like it, that I hadn’t tried it since I was a little kid and that I didn’t mind Fresca or pamplemousse La Croix.
“Oh wow, wow that’s foul.”
“What’s wrong with you? It isn’t foul at all.”
And so we kept eating it, trying to figure out what was going on for each of us.
“It tastes like poison,” I told her.
“What does poison taste like?”
“Like by eating this I will die.”
“You must not like bitter things.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “I love plenty of bitter things.”
I asked what it tasted like for her.
“Sweet and kind of spicy.”
“No,” I said. “This is not spicy. I like spicy. This tastes like poison.”
We spent a long time googling my issue until we found someone writing from my perspective. Bile is what they said it tasted like, and that this was based on a gene.
“What’s bile?” my friend asked.
“Ever spit up phlegm as a kid?”
“Oh god, that’s awful. That’s what it tastes like to you?”
I think if you were to sink your teeth into me right now that’s what you would taste. Bile. This person is poison. Whatever’s inside this person could kill me.
I feel it in my body, my muscles marinating in it. There’s a smell to my skin too, something close to rot.
I want a biohazard sign over my body. I found a way to walk with one anyhow. I see someone attractive as I walk down the street and I glare, don’t fucking look at me. I feel nauseous.
Romantic love does the same thing, generally too the thought of sex aside from what I do with myself.
Bitterness is a noun yet I feel it as the adjective to have or be sharp, an un pleasant taste, I too am marked by rancor and disappointment.
I sat in the park with friends and I saw this cute masc of center person. They are listening to their headphones and I am explaining my feelings to my friends. I am keeping my eye on this butch, even though I don’t want anything to do with them.
“Like that person there,” I said. “I find them incredibly attractive, but do I want to date them? NO! They’re probably a monster.”
My friends laughed.
“They heard you! Look. They got up and left so fast.”
Oh, no! I’m the monster.
“It’s ok,” my friend said. “A safe bet that the random masc in the park is probably a monster.”
Hippocrates stated that there were four fluids in the body, which resulted in the four temperaments.
Black Bile—Melancholic
Blood—Sanguine
Yellow Bile—Choleric
Phlegm—Phlegmatic
The resulting temperaments came from Medieval philosophers, and then from there they were adapted into different personality types such as Myers Briggs.
In high school I had to take the Myers Briggs test. The guidance counselor had the INFP’s stand up. In our senior class there were three of us, I was one of them.
This yellow bile group, the main fluid in our bodies is empathetic and intuitive and feeling and perceptive. The only thing that saved me from being a complete freak is that one of the girls was very popular and adored for how she wouldn’t let teachers kill bees or spiders if they came into the classroom. She would take it on herself to make sure the bug made it to safety. The other person standing aside from myself was my best friend, who I was in love with and desperately trying to keep alive.
There are things that taste bitter to me, and then things that taste like poison. But when I google what yellow bile’s flavor the answer is bitter. Why does this feel like the wrong word for what I’m tasting and what I’m experiencing.
I feel sick the day after eating all that grapefruit. My pancreas, with which I have chronic problems wakes me up in the night. It is increasing and I worry that I have to go to the hospital. I cancel my phone call with the Carpenter who gets very upset when I cancel but this time takes it with a different kind of emotional gravity. He doesn’t want me to go to the hospital either.
I am supposed to talk to him about whether we can see each other. I don’t want to talk to him because I know that I have to tell him—again— that we can’t see each other. That if I see him I will feel the pull to fuck him and I’ll suddenly be in something messy and harmful and not worth the incredible adult act of ending the thing before it got too horrible. I’m thinking of The Gardener too, and how it would hurt her if I slept with him. I’m thinking about how I don’t want to have to be accountable to her or to anyone really, except myself.
Instead of talking to him I enacted my usual regimen when my pancreas acts up, which is to limit food and water. It was the middle of a heat wave, so I also stayed very still in bed.
When my pancreas hurts it is a sharp ache, and then this feeling like my body is filling with poison. My back hurts. It starts to feel like my organs are pressing into my ribs. Even thinking about it brings the feeling up.
But lately, it’s been The Carpenter—before the break up and once I started talking to him again.
I am hot for him before this talk, sometimes getting dizzy with the thought of the sweat in his body hair, his hand smacking my face. The way he growled that I make him proud. The serious look in his eye when he tried to fist me and he said “you’re going to open for me, ok.” And I do. I come from these thoughts and from the way that we smiled at each other while we fucked. I want this thing, his body, the smell of him and I know that it is a drug; that I won’t be able to think straight during it or after. There’s this new sensation, something I continue to build with distance cycling, that has to do with endurance.
Bitterness feels like revulsion inside of my heart. Like if the center of my chest could vomit and vomit and vomit.
I feel it with The Carpenter and how, when I panicked, his voice would take on a scolding tone how I imagine the people in his family spoke to him. I am bitter about his wealth, I am bitter about his other girlfriend and her apparent middle class existence. I feel it when I see other people not struggling as hard with their job when I see that they have more than one person to help them care for the dog. The Gardener asks me to renew my commitment to her during a time when all commitments feel suspect and the bitterness floods me– her long term partner, the home she owns, her dogs, her steady career.
To be bitter is to feel an unfairness in the face of how others act, in the face of what others have, in the face of my own lack. It is to not trust others or even myself. It is to not trust the chaos of the universe, it is counter to pleasure. Because everything I eat after having grapefruit tastes wrong for days; even coffee, a bitter I live for.
To feel this bitterness is to feel fear. It’s a nice cloak because no one wants to bite into me and in fact I don’t want your mouth anywhere near me. Perhaps you too have been the source of malocchio, the evil eye, in your self protection the thing others should protect against.
When I was little I put my mouth close to the earth. The first time I tasted it was when I made myself a fake hot chocolate with muddy water. I packed it in a thermos and walked through my backyard pretending I was on an adventure. I was talking to something imaginary, lecturing like I do now still as I wander the house muttering what I might say to someone in some imaginary conversation. And I forgot that the hot chocolate was imaginary and I took a sip. I spit it out and dumped it, afraid that I would get in trouble.
I put hay from around the nativity scene in my mouth not long after this. I ran upstairs and spit in the toilet, that bitterness, that bile.
I watched an Italian farmer taste the earth to get a sense of what it needs. I put some in my mouth too. It was gritty, bitter, salty, not sweet but not rotting.
“Que bella terra,” he said to me.
Bitter draws energy downward. A digestive aid. It warns us when something might be poison and yet it also awakens our digestive juices. In Traditional Chinese Medicine it guides qi to the heart when it’s used medicinally. But there is a difference to what the plant provides for our body through bitter flavor and when the bitterness just exists in us, like a bitter taste rising in the mouth. There is perhaps fire in the liver, or a heat dampening in the pancreas, perhaps your heart fire is blazing.
