How did it feel to cook before me– to eat? Years ago I became moored on a dessert island– not a desert
island, you see, but a place where I got up at midnight in a stranger’s home and padded downstairs to
bake. At night my cupcakes were gastro-astronomical– as it is, we use our gullets to look down dark
holes into the starsphere and putter around the acidic, the gelee; I have always had a taste for the finer
things and for the meta-intestinal. The removal of skin as you turn on the deep fryer. A look at my own
meatbag. A hand for cutting flesh and teeth for picking. This is always an act done alone. It is the
cleaving and carving of the slaughter ram, it is silence in the shape of smoke. When you make a tray that
is sweet and flaky suddenly the appetite is gone and the thoughts return through the thin lining of
empty bowels. We never eat what we make, that is our rule. The cookie and the temple have very
similar scents. They are our sacred places. This is why I visited them only at night. The rules are tinted
white with flour and written on baking stones.