Venus Ex Machina: Sushi in E8
Nonto and I met in December, in Dalston. She used to live around these parts. She was back from her new, temporary home of Rhode Island (where she is researching for a PhD in Music) for the Christmas period.
Friday, December 16, 2022
We were in Brilliant Corners on Kingsland Road. It was full. It was loud. We were competing with the hoards of people around us in order to be heard. We were also competing against the imposing soundsystem beside our table tucked away in the corner. Nonto liked the soundsystem. That’s why she brought us here, she told me.
Edamame and salmon taquitos had just been served for starters. It was dark. A lowly golden hue simmered above Nonto’s short, magenta hair. I leaned over the table slightly, my chin almost touching the bowl of fresh, salt laden edamame. You could see the grains of salt flickering like stars in a green galaxy. I sucked a bean out of its pod and I raised my voice. “Do you enjoy being idle?”
“Oh, yeah,” Nonto replied, her volume matching mine. She had a soft Scottish accent.
“You do enjoy that?”
“Big time. I think being idle is important, no?” Nonto stopped to pick up a fresh pod. Pinching it like a Frube, a green bean slid out of its pouch between her pursed lips. One bean down.
“I do agree.”
“I believe in idleness.” Two beans down.
I laughed. “Yeah.”
“We can have a long talk about idleness.” Three beans down.
“Yeah, let's talk about doing nothing,” I shouted, throwing an empty pod in the discard bowl and picking up another from the fresh bowl. “I can get behind that.”
Nonto threw her pod down. “And the reason I believe this, is my friend told me this: In Tao, there is the story of the useless tree. Do you know it?”
“No.”
“I don't know it off by heart, but, it's just the tree that sits there doing nothing.”
“OK.”
“But, obviously,” shouted Nonto, “we know that no tree is useless and it's got all of this life and these roots and it's connected to the entire world. It's doing all of this work, but it's just standing there. And I've always just noticed that the people with the most do the least. This makes sense, right?”
“Yeah.”
We both dumped a pod and picked up another in tandem.
“My favourite Tao allegory,” I shouted, “is the one of the Chinese farmer.”
“I know it,” Nonto shouted.
I didn’t hear her. “I'll try get this right.” I stopped to get the story right in my head first. “So, the Chinese farmer, one day, his horse ran away and the whole village rallied around him and they said, Oh, that's a great shame, and he says, Maybe. The next day, the horse came back with five other horses, and then everyone said, That's amazing! You've got more horses now. And he said, Maybe. Then, one day, his son was riding on one of the horses and he fell off and he broke his leg and the whole village rallied around him, and they said, That's a crying shame. The worst luck. And he said, Maybe. And then the next day, the conscription officers came around to rally up troops for the army and his son, because of his injury, was ineligible for the army, and everyone said, That's great! And he said, Maybe.”
I was acutely aware of the bits of chewed green beans swirling in my mouth as I spoke. The waiter came over and took away the bowl of disposed pods. She checked if we wanted drinks as she piled the plates. Nonto ordered a Flatbush cocktail. The waiter left and we waited, with chopsticks in hand, for her to return with the mains.
“Would you say, as well,” I shouted, “with your mathematical background, do you think your main obsession is with uncovering all the possibilities of sound or is it ever an emotional catharsis?”
“I had this conversation and I think it's both,” shouted Nonto.
“Are they symbiotic?”
“Somehow, I feel like mathematics and art are the same.”
“Yeah?” I prodded.
“Because you just do them and you don't know what the outcome is gonna be.”
“Yeah.”
“If you get to a high level, then you're just studying a problem and you don't know what the answer is and there is no way of knowing the answer until you get to the answer.”
“Yeah.”
“The only thing that can push you down that path is faith.”
“In what?”
“I'm not sure. I'm not sure.”
I laughed.
“But I had a very heated conversation with someone,” Nonto shouted. “I'm not religious at all and I didn't even have a religious upbringing that much. But, I do believe in — There isn't really a word for what I believe in. I just believe that the world has a mystery and you have to understand that there is something beyond what you can see and perceive in order to go down that path of pure mathematics or music. For musicians, it's very natural, because a lot of us, you know, we hear music and then you wanna find the music here —” Nonto pointed at her chest “— and that's what pushes you. I guess it's the same with mathematics. I never got to PhD level or anything, so obviously the deeper you go into research, the more that I find that you're in the woods and something has to drive you to persist . . . Anyone who has ever seen the light, they're the ones who go down that path.”
“Who came to that conclusion?” I asked. “You or the other person?”
“I mean, I do believe it, but I don't want to frame it in terms of any existing dogmas. It's not a religion. It's not even spirituality. It's not anything.”
“Ok.”
“It's just —”
“Isn't faith in something inherently spiritual?”
“I don't think it has to —”
“If it can't be seen?”
“I mean, I guess it can be. I'm just very worried about using words that are tied up with — because once you say Tao, Buddhism. This or That.”
“But are you saying that because it's an Eastern philosophy and you're seeing it through the prism of a Western world?”
Nonto was playing with her chopsticks. She held one between her thumb and index finger as it rested on the bridge of skin between. She flicked it on the beat of every word: “There's a Buddhist saying: The finger pointing at the moon, is not the moon.”
I took a sip of my water. “That's a thinker.”
Nonto laughed. “I have no idea how this is going to look. The finger pointing at the moon, is not the moon. It also exists in platonic philosophy, the idea that more exists in some other dimension in some pure form and we can only ever approximate it.”
“Ok.”
“So, I'm trying to get at that thing that is outside the dimensions that we live in.”
“Ok.”
“You know,” shouted Nonto, “spirituality is already something that when you say it, it leads the mind somewhere.”
“Yeah.”
“I'm trying to get in that space of doubt where you don't really understand what I'm talking about.”
“I don't think I do,” I confessed.
“It's like the meaning or the signifier.”
“Yeah.”
“And I mean the thing, not the signifier.”
“Ok.”
“The thing.”
“Yes.”
“The moment you've already called it spiritually, you've filtered it.”
“Ok.”
“Because even if someone is an atheist — like a European, white-male atheist — they can still have that faith that drives them to do the physics or the mathematics.”
“Because they live in a world of logic,” I shouted. “Would you not agree?”
“They think they do,” Nonto shouted. “They think they do.”
“Oh,” I shouted.
“But I wouldn't say that they do.”
“But how they present themselves, is that they only deal with facts.”
“Yeah,” Nonto shouted. “My stepdad is an atheist.”
“So, do you not identify as an atheist?”
“As an atheist?”
“Yeah.”
“I'm being very cautious with the language,” Nonto insisted, “because if you use the language that comes from a certain tradition, then you're already — because all of these words have origins, right?”
“Of course, of course,” I shouted. “So, how malleable do you think language is?”
“You're toeing the line between being understood and connecting, because the whole point, I think, when the baby speaks — it's been hearing everybody around it speak, right?”
“Yeah.”
“It makes its first utterance and it's trying to connect and join the conversation, right?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“So, you don't wanna be the person who's speaking in tongues where nobody around you understands you.”
“No, fair.”
“So you have to have certain consensus before you can enter any conversation.”
“Yeah.”
“What's the consensus today?” Nonto rhetorically asked. “English only, right?”
“Yeah, unfortunately.”
“Yeah,” shouted Nonto. “Do you speak any other languages?”
“No,” I shouted. “I'm quite ashamed of the fact that I don't speak Irish.”
“I'm curious. I was wondering if you did.”
“It's quite degrading to my sense of identity, to not have the Irish language.”
“So, the thing that I was trying to say about the thing not being the same as the signifier, is like trying to express what Irish culture is, but not speaking the Irish language.”
I looked back with an understanding smirk. The corners of my lips squeezed each side of my mouth. “I always find that interesting when there's no direct translation. So, essentially, that thing doesn't exist in that culture. If there's no direct translation, then it's null and void.”
“But the thing I was trying to say, is that it does exist, because you feel it and you get that frustration: I wish there was a word for that.”
“My favourite example of that is in Portuguese. It’s a word that basically describes a nostalgia and a longing and a yearning for a place.”
“Oh,” Nonto snapped. “Saudade.”
“Saudade,” I repeated, as to ensure I would never forget it again.
A server shuffled over with the main course. A selection of dishes were placed on the table. Two aisles of eight tuna maki lay between us on the round table, a rustic green leaf salad sat to one side, while sashimi moriawase sat on a bed of ice and chicken kara-age sat in front of me. Nonto couldn’t have the chicken kara-age. She clarified which of the dishes weren’t pescatarian. She made sure it was only the chicken kara-age that wasn’t.
“So, then, when was the first time you fell in love?” I asked, grabbing a sliver of raw salmon from the sashimi.
“Eeeeehhh, that's an interesting question because there's different —” Nonto hesitated, clenching a piece of tuna maki between her chopsticks. “You know, I think I can't talk about love.”
“Why not?” I shouted.
“I don't know anything about love,” shouted Nonto.
“Why not?”
“I can talk about falling in love with a song.”
“Fair, but why are you saying that you don't know anything about falling in love?” I asked.
“Because I feel like every time you experience it, you think, This is it. This is it. This is it.”
“Yeah.”
“And then five years later, you're like, That wasn't it. This is it.”
“But you can tell me about —”
“Like, historically? The first time I fell in love?”
“Well, yeah.”
“That's the thing. When I was a teenager, I had a boyfriend. But I don't know if it was love, the way it hit me at a certain later stage in my life, where I was like, Woah, this is intense.”
“Yeah.”
“But,” Nonto shouted, “to everything that I knew at that time, it was love.”
“Our definition is constantly evolving,” I shouted.
“Yeah, I think it evolves your entire life.”
“So, surely that brings into question the absurdity of the hegemonic practice of getting married in your twenties.”
Nonto looked back cautiously.
“If our perception of love is always changing,” I shouted, “then why would we ever get married?”
“I think everybody who has married has made a wise choice and I'm happy for them.”
I laughed.
“And I'm not going to rib on everybody married,” Nonto shouted. “I'm happy for everybody who is married.”
I tended to the pieces of fried chicken in front of me. They were tender. “When was the last time you fell in love?”
Nonto looked up from her dish, confused as to why I was still on the topic.
I laughed. “You were saying about falling in love with music, but surely, when you love a song, you connect it to a person and you connect it to a place? And I do find it quite funny how — I'm surmising now — that your understanding of my question, To fall in love, is inherently romantic.”
“Well, I mean, probably your first love is your mother, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Or your father.”
“Yeah.”
“If you're that lucky,” Nonto laughed. “Because your mother, you've been living in her body. Whereas, your father, you meet him and you somehow bond with him and that's two different kinds of love. Maybe. I don't know. But love is a chemical, isn't it? Oxytocin.”
“Oxytocin, yes. They call it the cuddle drug.”
“So, there you go,” Nonto shouted, dropping her chopsticks and clapping her hands. “That's my answer.”
“Love is a chemical?” I tried to confirm.
“My answer is, the last time my body released oxytocin, that was the last time I felt love.”
Nonto looked down at the platter of tuna maki. She was certain that she had eaten her ration and was now intruding on my half. I was still busy with the chicken and sashimi, which Nonto wanted none of. I swivelled the platter so that my half was now facing her and implored her to continue. She obliged and picked up a piece. She implored me to help her. I obliged and picked up a piece.
“How do you respond, mentally, to Christmas time?” I asked. “Do you like the winter? Do you like the doom and gloom of it all?”
“Christmas has grown on me,” shouted Nonto.
“Ok.”
“And now I really like it. I was thinking on my flight, two days ago. Christmas is all about family, isn't it?”
“Yes.”
“I was talking to someone. You know with adolescence and early adulthood, you go through that phase of defining yourself as separate from your parents.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“And then at some point, you're like, Ok, I know who I am and I love my parents.”
“I'm currently going through that,” I shouted.
“Yeah.”
“It's weird. But, it's nice.”
“But,” Nonto continued, “I was speaking to an older lady, Nancy, and then we were talking about how me and my Mum, going back now a while, we've always maintained contact and had a good friendship.”
“Yeah.”
“But, during Covid, we started speaking every single day, and then I said to Nancy, I'm worried that I've turned the clock back. Because, you know, the whole point of becoming separate from your parents is so that, when they're no longer around, you can cope.”
“Yeah.”
“And if you're still enmeshed with them, then you won't cope.”
“Yeah.”
“And Nancy said, As long as it happened the first time, it doesn't matter.”
I looked back, chopsticks stuck in my mouth, confused.
“Like, the separation during adolescence and early adulthood. You separated from them,” Nonto clarified.
I broke my stillness and tilted my head back. “Ahhhh.”
“And now we're speaking everyday, but it's not the same as never separating.”
“So, once you've experienced it, you're now ready and capable of living without them?” I tried to ascertain the meaning of what Nonto, or Nancy, was saying.
“It's always hard to lose a parent.”
“No, of course.”
“Probably the hardest — one of. Of the things we'll go through, it's up there. Top three. Being born is the first.”
I gave a hearty laugh. “I concur.”
“You know, just being hit with air for the first time. I've heard that it's very traumatic.”
The server shuffled back over with a card machine. We split the bill. Nonto was shrewd enough to notice that they were removing the tables from around us and converting it into a dancefloor.
“There's one more place down the road. It might be a bit too noisy there,” shouted Nonto.
It can’t be noisier than here, I thought.
“You know The Haggerston, don't you?” Nonto asked.
“I don't think I do,” I shouted.
“Ok, let's go there.”
We stood up, about to leave. One piece of tuna maki was lying alone on the platter.
“Are you having that last one?” Nonto asked.
“No.”
Nonto slipped on her coat, reached down for the last piece of sushi, and quickly chewed it down.
We walked out of the restaurant and stepped back out onto Kingsland Road, the noise and heat briefly escaping before the door shut behind us and trapped it inside again. A drunk passerby was muttering into his phone about a toxic partner as we walked past him, before we found ourselves in front of The Haggerston.
“Hi there,” Nonto said, with aplomb, to the bouncer.
“Hello there, coming in here?” the bouncer affably replied.
“Yes, please.”
“That's absolutely fine. I'm just going to check your bag quickly.” He began digging with his hands. “I really need a torch for this bag. Literally, I know there's not much in there —”
“It's a big bag, yeah,” Nonto laughed.
“But, I literally feel like I'm looking into the abyss.”
“Black hole,” I laughed.
“There's literally only a purse in there,” the bouncer exclaimed.
“Yeah, there's nothing,” Nonto said.
“I couldn't even see the purse, either. Nothing.”
“Buried in there,” I said.
“It was just dark,” the bouncer said. He turned to me and began rooting through my bag.
“There's more in here now,” I said. “It's more compact.”
“That's fine. I'll just get a quick search as well.” He quickly tapped my pockets before brushing his hands down the sides of my torso and legs. He stood to one side and let us in.
We walked in. It was louder than the restaurant. It was slightly darker too. It was small. Booths flanked the dancefloor. The rattling bass quaked the wooden floorboards. I bought a round of drinks and we relocated down the back of the bar away from the speakers, where we stood.
“Have you been having any recurring dreams lately?” I asked, shouting down at her.
“Ohhhh,” Nonto shouted, looking back up at me with a grin. “Did somebody tip you off?”
“No.”
“If I tell you the dream, you'll be like, Oh, yeah, I know what this means.”
“Ok.”
Nonto readied herself momentarily. “I have a dream where I can't open my eyes.”
“How does that translate to the dream?”
“No, in my dream, I'm like —” She squirmed to force her eyes open.
“Ok.”
“And I'm peeling my eyes to open them.”
“But what do you see in the dream?” I asked.
“Good question.”
“If you can't see, then what are you seeing in the dream?”
“Myself trying to open my eyes,” Nonto shouted.
“So, it's a third person narrative, where the camera is on you?”
“I think so.”
“Ok, wow,” I shouted. “My recent recurring dream is that I'm on a plane and it's plummeting down.”
“I've had that one,” nodded Nonto.
“It's plummeting down towards the sea and I can see straight through to the cockpit and through the windshield in the cockpit and I see the sea coming imminently.”
“You know, when I moved to the US, I flew from London to Boston. And on that flight I had the dream that the plane had nosedived.”
“On the flight?”
“And we were floating and the water was rising and everybody was frantically trying to survive. While I was on the flight, I fell asleep and I had that dream.”
“That's crazy,” I shouted. “And then when you woke up, were you relieved?”
“I was like, Oh, I guess I still have to live.”
I laughed. “But in this dream that I have, everything around me is frantic and frenetic, and then I have this inner calm and full acceptance of my demise. This is it.”
“This is it, yeah. But that's what people say when they die, no?” Nonto enquired.
“Yeah? There's a calmness to it?”
“I feel like I've heard a lot of stories like that.”
“Ok, fair.”
“Death isn't scary.”
“And these people are now dead?” I asked.
“I don't even know who I can point to, but I just think a lot of people who have been at death's door — I mean, I had a major accident five years ago, almost to the day. It'll be six years in January. I was almost dying.”
I leaned my head further down, and put my ear closer to Nonto’s mouth. “What, sorry?”
Nonto raised her voice again, into my ear. “I was trampled by a horse and I was lying on a mountain, internally bleeding, you know? And I thought I was dead.”
I raised my head back up. “Were you on your own?” I asked, and put my ear back to Nonto’s mouth.
“There was a guide with me. This happened in South Africa.”
“Ok.”
“And I didn't feel any panic that I was gonna die. I mean, I felt a sadness, but it wasn't like, Oh my God, I'm dead. My life is over. What have I done? It was just like, I guess this is it. It was a nice way to die. On a mountain in the sunshine in South Africa, my life has been alright.”
“Did you take in the scenery?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was beautiful,” shouted Nonto.
“And where was the guide?”
“With me. Next to me.”
“And was he nursing you?”
“She,” Nonto asserted, “was holding me.”
“And there was a calmness to it all?”
“The calm came before that,” Nonto explained, “and then there was the, Oh, I'm not dead. Ok, I guess we're doing this. Whatever we're doing. Grievous, grievous pain, physical pain.”
“Yeah.”
“Once you realise that you're not dead. Ok, it looks like I can survive. I don't know whether I had any control over it, but I slowed my breathing. I had a collapsed lung, so I think slowing my breathing did help. Right?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“And then, I was in intensive care for five days, which is long. Most people are in intensive care for two or three days. Five days is long.”
“Ok.”
“I couldn't walk. I'd been in bed for so long, that my muscles had withered, so I had to learn to walk. I remember the first day that I was able to have visitors. They put me in a wheelchair and took me outside in to the sunshine. I didn't cry, but this hot water just came out of eyes.”
“Different from tears?” I shouted.
“It was my body being so happy.”
“When something like that happens, I'd imagine when you come out of it alive, you then start to belabour all of the things you haven't done in life yet, because now you know how quickly it can go.”
“I don't know if it was as explicit as that.”
“Ok. But, were you thinking of all the things that you want to do or achieve, that you haven't done, and that became the thought process thereafter?”
“Four months after the accident, I cycled from Paris to London.”
“Wow.”
“So, I would like to say no,” Nonto shouted, “but I think there was an element. But also, maybe that was just the way that it was meant to happen. I didn't die. The cause and effect. You never know. The chicken and the egg. You don't know.”