The Fog Lifted

How Cooking (and Instagram Live) Got Me Through Lockdown

By Carl Phillips
Photo illustrations by Nuance

It was early spring, still. The dogwood brandished those pollen-laden buds that precede a flowering. History. What survives, or doesn’t. How the healthiest huddled, as much at least as was possible, more closely together, to give the sick more room. I was nowhere I’d ever been before. Nothing mattered, or seemed to. I practiced standing as still as I could, for as long as I could.

On March 21, 2020, about a week into lockdown, when Covid and the fear of it had rendered the city voiceless—no human voices, just the routine interruption of ambulances, of helicopters lifting from and descending upon the roofs of the nearby hospitals—I decided to make a batch of scones. And for reasons I can’t entirely recall, except that I often decide to do things just to do them, I turned my phone cam on and started recording different stages of the process, but in one-minute segments, because that’s as long as the phone allows. Here I am, revealing the ingredients, while Sade plays in the background; here I am, pointing with my dough-caked hands at the rolled-out disks to be cut into rough triangles; here I am, removing the first batch of finished scones, and here I’m explaining what we do while waiting for the next batch of scones to bake: dance to Madonna, make up lyrics like “quarantine is not captivity, nope, no it ain’t,” while panning to my dog as he stares at me, bewildered, yet unsurprised, I think, as I do a spin inside the kitchen’s entryway…

I posted a total of six videos on Instagram, marking the stages of my scone journey. Each video got more likes than the previous one, and the likes kept coming. For days. I figured people must have nothing else to do during lockdown; that must explain the popularity. Eventually it occurred to me that, though it had seemed a random whim—my deciding to video my baking—there were truer reasons behind that decision, reasons that likely lay, as well, behind my viewers’ engagement. I was afraid; and though I’ve always in general preferred to be alone most of the day, I felt strangely lonely, unexpectedly close to what felt like despair with nothing specific to be despairing about. Yes, there was a mysterious disease in the world, more mysterious, it seemed, than the ones that have always been here and remain mysterious, and I was living, like everyone else, in quarantine, but I was lucky to live in a house, a sizeable one, with plenty of room for my partner and my dog in lockdown, with a nice backyard, I could work easily from home, I loved cooking, we could eat—why despair?

(And everywhere the smaller birds again noising, filling
steadily all the cracks between spells of rain…)

“Only connect,” goes the famous epigraph to E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, which in the context of the novel seems to mean two things: that we should try to connect our feelings and our thoughts—heart and mind—within ourselves; and that we should cross various differences (but social class, especially, in that novel) to make contact with our fellow human beings. I hadn’t thought that a superficial exchange with a server in a restaurant, for example, counted as a connection of this kind, but I now realize that even that brief exchange is a form of acknowledgment: you are here, I recognize that, we are here together, two bodies with feelings, if we fail and triumph at different times and to different degrees, it’s still disappointment, it’s still the rush of victory; to that extent, though strangers, we know more than a little about each other—is this not intimacy, a form of it? A form of intimacy that, because of my having embraced a life of relative solitude—I think I embraced it, though maybe I’d just gotten used to it, the way habit can just become what’s true—I hadn’t known I relied on, daily, until it wasn’t there.

(As if song could still mean something useful.)

During lockdown, social media showed many people displaying the bread they’d made, the vegetables they’d grown in pots from scraps. The point of my scone video wasn’t to say “here, I made these,” but to say, “here’s how I make them, let’s make them together, even if we’re in different towns—or countries, even; thanks to technology, we can be anywhere, and not be alone.” Thanks to my millennial partner, I learned that it’s possible to do live, uninterrupted video recordings on Instagram, instead of the brief segments I was videoing and then posting after the fact. And thus, my cooking show, which I never did give a name to, but which came to be known as The Cooking Show, was born.

From the start, the theme was how to make do with what we have on hand, and ideally how to make something that might give pleasure, without fancy ingredients. For most people, the ordinary act of getting groceries had become fraught; if the stores admitted customers—where I was living, they weren’t allowed to—there was a genuine panic about catching Covid in those pre-vaccine days, plus the food supplies were limited and therefore unreliable. Having groceries delivered was another option, but not as affordable, unaffordable for many. So I began with simple recipes using ingredients people were more likely to have on hand, recipes for things like a carrot salad, for which there’s no precise recipe, just this:

1 Peel some carrots and grate them into a bowl.
2 See what else you have, and chop it and add it—some stray cherry
tomatoes, the end of a cucumber, the few olives that have been
sitting in their jar in the refrigerator door for months.
3 Drizzle some olive oil over it all and squeeze some lemon juice.
No lemon? Use an orange. No orange? Try some vinegar. No vinegar?
Then just the olive oil.
4 Stir it up, add the spices you like, or just pepper. Enjoy!

While making the food, I did what I always do when I’m alone in the kitchen, not realizing that this is the last thing people expected of me: I danced a lot, I’d sing to playlists I’d made—dancing and singing always make me happy, plus they’re a way to make tedious tasks—like peeling and grating carrots—seem like part of the entertainment, the fun… From the start, though, viewers wrote to me, saying how they’d had no idea I was so fun, so funny, so able to laugh at myself and be ridiculous, and to make human mistakes like squeezing the lemon into my eyes by accident, or putting four cups of flour instead of two into the pizza dough and wondering why the dough wouldn’t work. Viewers of the show (which briefly ran five days a week until, between time and limited supplies, I had to change it to once weekly) were equally surprised by how I’d end each episode: I’d belt out a song—Mama Cass’s version of “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” for example, but each time a different song—and then bring the phone close to my face, look into it, and say “And that’s it for today. Remember: I love you all.” Then turn the camera off.

(Or a kind of pleasure that, like forgiveness, came easily and, summer
storm that forgiveness is, passed quickly through.)

Why should it be surprising that I have a sense of humor, that I enjoy dancing, and that I might care about others and make a point of saying so? To speak to the fun and dancing part, I think immediately of a review I received many years ago for my book The Rest of Love. I knew I was in for it when I read the opening paragraph, stating that a reader would never find words like “boxer shorts” or “Schenectady” in my poems because my poems were devoid of humor (how boxer shorts or Schenectady are by definition funny is another question). The review concluded by saying that I’d be incapable of ordering tacos without turning it into a metaphysical experience… So the reviewer had made the two worst mistakes in book reviewing: he’d refused to read the book on its own terms (not every book intends to be funny, so looking for humor is pointless for that kind of a book); and he’d made an assumption about who I am in daily life, based on a poem, when poems come from a very small and particular part of my life, the part that seeks to make meaning from language and turn it into art.

Remembering that review is helpful, though, in clarifying the surprise of those watching my cooking show. Most of those viewers knew me only from my poems, and my poems are decidedly serious, my attempts to pin down, if only briefly, the various conundrums of sex, desire, fidelity, intimacy; how to be human and animal at once; how to square hope and ambition with the fact of mortality. Stuff like that. Much more than fiction, I find, poems seem to make people feel they know the poet, likely because of the vulnerability that poetry always in some form requires—we win the reader’s trust by letting our guard down—starting with, in my own case, the predominance of the pronoun “I”: we can call it “the speaker” all we want, but it still sounds like the poet is speaking, because it usually is. Meanwhile, I might well be writing a poem from a hotel room in Schenectady while wearing boxers, but those parts are the context for the writing, they’re not the poem itself, not for me. I go to poetry when I need to work out a problem—and yes, it’s usually a metaphysical one. But most weekends I go to Mexican brunch with my partner, I order tacos, and there’s nothing metaphysical about any of it. Just tacos and some laughs over margaritas. Art and life overlap here and there, inevitably, but I turn to each as a distraction and sometime respite from the other. I can’t live superficially all the time, nor can I brood forever.

(And the undersong that has been your own voice saying No—
No I’m not afraid.)

It’s true enough, though, that for all my writing from and about intimacy, I’m not quick to make friends or trust others in real life. Growing up biracial and—though it took me awhile to know it—queer, too, explains a lot of that. Not being let into the group means learning to make a space for oneself outside of it and generally alone, and over time it feels—because it is—like home, all the harder to leave, therefore; harder, too, to invite others in. It’s as if estrangement were the mind’s way of rescuing us from further instances of the rejection that drove us into solitude in the first place. We no longer require others. Or we don’t believe we do. The friendships I do have are for the most part long distance. As if the distance made friendship and trust more possible—if they don’t come close, they can’t hurt me, would seem to be the logic here, though of course we can betray a person from afar quite easily. But at the very least, the day-to-day work of maintaining a local friendship—meeting for coffee, offering an actual shoulder to cry on—all of that goes away. Yes, I’m aware that I’ve described the maintenance of friendship as work…

(What we cannot do           What we cannot undo           All the work we must do)

This morning I tried to think of poems where I’ve made specific reference to intimacy, and I came across this one, where I speak of

The mind protecting itself by shutting down an intimacy
that, most likely, won’t be returned. Why expect it? As if
that were the mind’s chief purpose, to resist a fall, though
falling’s what the body
does best. Is quick to rise for.
(“Storm”)

And thirteen years later, there is this:

all that falling upon the field of intimacy, then
getting up, just to fall back down again, you crying
right there in front of him as you hadn’t before, ever,
and have not done since…
(“Morning in the Bowl of Night”)

I’m intrigued that in both instances I’ve linked intimacy and falling, falling in one case as a thing to be avoided (“resisted”) and in the other case as the means of arriving at intimacy, the arrival coinciding with a moment of extreme vulnerability, crying in front of another person, something that—as if shameful?—the “you” has “not done since,” has possibly (likely?) made a point of not doing since.

But “falling’s what the body / does best. Is quick to rise for.” If this is the case, the idea seems to be that at the very least it’s an instinct to fall, and the being quick to rise in order to fall suggests it may be more than an instinct: a desire to fall, even knowing the vulnerability involved, the possible regret and / or shame later, at having shown that vulnerability, and even knowing the work that meaningful intimacy entails.

(The gray of doves. The gray of doves, in shadow.)

The cooking show involved a kind of intimacy that lay halfway between the kind of intimacy I have with my distant friends and the kind of intimacy that exists more immediately because daily, and locally, with my partner, given our living together. The camera made all the difference. I don’t see my distant friends—we all agreed long ago to forego FaceTime. More to the point, they don’t see me. Turning the cam on for the show was a new kind of vulnerability for me, a one-sided one: viewers entered, as it were, my kitchen, they watched me while I had to imagine who they might be, what they were doing—exercising, walking a dog, curled up in bed somewhere in Europe? I wonder, though, if the one-sidedness helped. I couldn’t see their reactions, I didn’t fear rejection or being seen as silly. Although I knew people were watching—since the phone would indicate when people had joined the session, and occasionally some would respond with a comment or question or emoji—I was too caught up in what I was doing to feel self-conscious about outside attention. I’d entered the same space I exist inside of when writing a poem, when my awareness of audience falls entirely away; there’s a wild freedom to that space, a freedom to be reckless, vulnerable, to take risks, because who’s there to see it, if I should fail? Who’s to say which way’s the right way, and where lies mistake? Each time I looked into the cam, I saw myself, being variously, sometimes clumsily, often laughably, myself.

But the excitement that I felt when doing the show didn’t derive from what might sound like narcissism. The advantage of seeing myself on camera was that it distracted me from the idea of audience. At the same time, though, people started writing to me, and I became aware of a growing audience not just for the live show but for the recorded episodes I’d post after each show, for those who couldn’t make the live version. Some wanted to tell me how much they’d learned at a very practical level, for a large part of what I’d teach was technique—the vigilance required for toasting walnuts, how to preserve lemons, how to roll out a crust. But the majority spoke of the show as solace, as respite from the uncertainty that governed those early days of pandemic, uncertainty and a feeling as well of living in exile. My show reminded them that sheer fun still existed, that communion is necessary, that food—the preparing and sharing of it—remains one of the oldest forms of communion: Here, I made this, for you—eat, and be again restored.

It occurs to me, now, that doing the cooking show was really just a version of what I’ve devoted myself to for almost forty years—teaching, which I’ve tried to do more humanely, more humanly, than I myself experienced from most of my teachers when I was growing up, when to be taught felt more adversarial than invitational, less about enjoying a subject than about proving mastery of it. In all my teaching, but especially when I taught high school, I’ve felt my subject matter was the least important issue; yes, I wanted my high school students to learn Latin, as I want my college students to learn about poetry and the writing of it, but I’ve most wanted to offer, in the course of teaching, one possible model for how to live as a human being among others, which includes how to fail, how to weather disappointment, how to laugh at mistakes, how to care for others and for oneself, how to live fully, in mind and in body. Maybe most important, how to make a point of finding and pausing for joy daily, in whatever small form.

One form of joy, on the cooking show, was dancing, another was singing. The show inadvertently became a lesson on adapting, though, when I was told by Instagram that I couldn’t just play Whitney Houston songs on a show without getting (and presumably paying for) permission—I should have realized this, of course. Thus began my singing a capella, which doesn’t count, apparently, as copyright violation (or it’s just harder to keep track of…). Another pivot, to make up for the loss of recorded music, was that I began reading poems (to be clear, not my own): what, I’d ask, might we do while waiting for the oven to preheat or while stirring our stew? Why, here’s a poem by Ellen Bryant Voigt—let me read it to you. Reading, of course, like the making and sharing of food, is another of the oldest forms of intimacy and communion.

(…if only the leaves would stop moving, if I
could read and know, for once, what?)

At some point during 2020, I learned that my publisher had agreed to publish my next book of poems, and I decided to share the news on the cooking show, and to celebrate by making up a cocktail based entirely on what I had at hand. I named it after the book itself. This recipe makes two drinks (for yourself and a friend, or just yourself—nothing wrong with being your own friend):

Then the War

4 oz vodka
2 oz triple sec
2 oz grapefruit juice
2 oz cucumber juice
A squirt or two of honey
1 oz lime or lemon juice

Shake the ingredients in a shaker over ice, then serve up (i.e., no ice).

I raised my glass, signed off as usual, turned the camera off. I stepped out to my back porch, sat down, and didn’t feel alone at all, as I raised my glass again, this time to an audience of two dogwood trees, an oak, and a stand of bamboo, some of it dead, some still green and thriving. I made a fist with my left hand; with my right, I covered it: the sign for peace, where I come from, though it also can mean a swan, sleeping.

Who am I, the hero says to himself, looking past his reflection on the lake’s surface down to where the darker greens give way at last to darkness. Deep in the early days of a pandemic, I started a cooking show from a small camera phone propped in a window of a small, barely lit, galley kitchen. I shared cooking tips, poems, songs, dance moves, and quite a few opinions. Then it was early summer, then summer, and the pandemic was still real, but we were told we must move on, i.e., leave our homes, return to the workplace, proceed “as normal,” so they kept putting it, as they still do. But nothing will ever again be the same, nor should it be. Like most animals, we humans are designed to change as the world that we live inside of also changes. Each afternoon as I step into my kitchen to make the evening’s dinner, I miss the cooking show that went on there. I miss the community and the communion that technology and a lot of time on my hands made briefly possible. But the fact of missing it all reminds me of what I’m most grateful for, the one change in myself that means the most to me. The cooking show taught me that being myself, my many selves, was enough. That I’m still guarded, but don’t always have to be. That I can say—and mean it—to a bunch of strangers (and just as important, to myself) “I love you.” A light wind stirs the surface. The reflection trembles, without breaking apart.

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