SUPERNATURAL UPGRADING

You've got this thing about the natural and the anti-natural, not to mention the supernatural and the anti-supernatural, which you equate with moderate right and left wing, extreme right- and left-wing respectively. Being something of a poet, you like to melt away the borders between subjects and make them overlap, interpenetrate, relate, in a synthetic, and hence theocratic, perspective. You believe, in accordance with the prevailing Zeitgeist, that everything can and should be politicized, not just sport and religion but ... well, sex, clothing, watches, spectacles, and ... what would appear to be your latest concern - namely food and drink. You claim that there is an ideological significance to everything, every little aspect of our civilized behaviour conforming to some class and/or ideological position. Only the philosophical poet would seem qualified, with his supernatural bias, to penetrate the surface of our customs and reveal their ideological depths, their inner essences. You are such a being and you dig deeper than most in your quest for the essence of things. Now you are claiming that food and drink should also be scrutinized from a supernatural, or theocratic, point of view, since eating and drinking habits are no less revealing of a class and/or ideological position than ... well, sexual and sartorial ones.

These days you favour meat derived from birds - turkeys, chickens, capons. You claim that such meat appeals to a transcendental taste, birds being flying creatures (though doubtfully very gracefully so, in the case of the above-mentioned ones!), whereas lamb, pork, and beef, extracted from sheep, pigs, and cows respectively, suggest a more down-to-earth or stolid quality which you apparently fight shy of in your transcendental wisdom. For the past year you have eaten virtually no other meat but turkey and chicken, with the notable exception of a little lamb, pertaining to your doner kebabs, on Sundays, and some cod - if fish be meat - on Fridays. Usually you eat small roast potatoes with your winged meat, not particularly ideal, you claim, but tolerable all the same, since suggestive, in contrast to large roast potatoes, of a petty-bourgeois as opposed to a bourgeois equivalent. At any rate, still recognizably naturalistic - unlike chips, which are made from lacerated potatoes, or spuds sliced into elongated segments, and which appear, in their fried skins, quite divorced from the natural - indeed, bearing in mind their genesis, positively anti-natural, so many 'proton' segments cut from the 'atomic' unity of a potato, a progressive devolution to separate pieces. Why, you're so convinced of their anti-natural and hence left-wing status, these days, that you've seriously contemplated giving them up altogether, even though you only eat them once a week, in conjunction with cod. You feel that, while they may be relevant to industrial proletarians, they're something of a slap in the face to you, a man who is very consciously transcendentalist in his ideological integrity. You would rather eat something more supernatural, like mashed potatoes, which, in contrast to chips, suggest an 'electron' whole of undifferentiated unity. Probably mashed potatoes are theocratic, whereas roast potatoes are democratic and chips ... anti-democratic in one degree or another, depending on the size, e.g. length and breadth, of the chips in question. Clearly, while some are arguably democratic socialist, others, more slender and elongated, could be described as radical socialist, conforming to a kind of Marxist equivalent. You can abide the former to some extent but not, apparently, the latter. And not those which have been indented in a wavy fashion either, suggestive of solomonic columns! You tend to endow them with a Marxist-Leninist equivalent, the waviness bringing them closer, in your estimation, to the supernaturalism of mashed potatoes, as if a theocratic (Leninist?) dimension had been infused into a fundamentally anti-democratic constitution, making them superior to the purely Marxist, or plain, chip, but still inferior, for all that, to mashed potatoes, particularly the most synthetic pre-cooked mash which comes in a plastic packet and only requires to be heated in some boiling water before being eaten. Now you feel that such take-away mash is the best form of potato, superior to both the natural and the anti-natural in every way. Eaten in conjunction with frozen food generally, it would constitute a significant ingredient in a theocratically-biased dinner, suggesting a dematerialized spud appropriate to a supernatural requirement, the antithesis to the subnatural, autocratic spud of a jacket-potato menu. Not for you the jacket potato! You would probably prefer to eat wavy chips than that, even if they are communist, albeit on seemingly right-wing (Leninist) terms. Rather the democratic roast potato than the autocratic jacket potato! Though better again the theocratic mash. Nevertheless your eating habits don't always keep pace with your ideological development, probably because you tend, in spite of your theocratic ideals, to regard the personal and public selves as distinct, and to a point where the more progressive the latter becomes, the more regressive or reactionary appears the former, as if to compensate you for your professional extremism. Can you never break away from relativity? It seems doubtful.

However, now that you've 'come clean' about your food preferences (at least with regard to meat and spuds), you might as well continue by recording your preferences in drink, attempting, as you proceed, to outline a class and/or ideological position where drinking habits are concerned. For instance, it is known that you won't drink beer because you equate it with an anti-natural, though specifically Protestant, bias and are inclined, by contrast, to see in wine a Catholic alternative ... suggestive of a natural, or early natural, constitution. You prefer grapes to hops, the sweet to the sour, a positive taste to a negative one. But even beer is preferable, in your opinion, to the more extreme anti-natural drinks that seem to derive from it in some way, like ginger beer or shandy or tinned lager. You find lager even more distasteful than beer, the analogy with fizzy piss always coming to mind when you're induced to drink it. For you, wine is right wing and beer ... left wing, the one stemming from or endemic to a conservative tradition, the other liberal, if not, in its extreme manifestations, radical socialist. But you don't much care for cola either, probably because it also suggests an anti-natural constitution, if one that transcends the anti-natural in some degree and which could, in consequence, be accorded a partly supernatural status on the strength, for instance, of the fizzy upsurge of air bubbles.... Would the notion of an anti-supernatural equivalent be totally irrelevant here? You don't think so, since it seems that some 'super' element, like the fizz, has been brought to bear on a fundamentally anti-natural taste, the artificial concoction of the actual cola drink. Of course, these artificial drinks are morally preferable to lager and beer, not to mention shandy and ginger beer. But, ideally, you would rather have a supernatural drink, a natural drink upgraded, as it were, to the fizzy status of the theocratic, like, say, a lemonade or some alternative fruity drink that would seem to have succeeded both lemon and orange squash, which, on account of their naturalism, may be accorded a democratic equivalent.

Yes, you don't particularly mind these squashy drinks, but are prepared to regard their fizzy counterparts as morally and ideologically superior, suitable to those with a distinctly supernatural bias, for whom lemons and oranges would presumably be taboo. And that, you would claim, applies to raw fruit in general, apples and pears included. You always prefer flavoured yoghurt, particularly a strawberry or a raspberry one, which has transcended natural fruit on a supernatural basis. You don't care too much for anti-natural fruit pies, where the filling, particularly in the case of apple, has been cut into tiny segments, reminiscent of chips. There are, however, certain contemporary apple pies that appear to be supernatural in some degree, on account of the filling being liquefied, and you regard them as reflecting an anti-supernatural bias, superior to the chunky apple pies. But while you used to eat such liquefied apple pies, you now eat only yoghurts, which you regard as more suitable to a transcendental taste. Similarly, you prefer liquefied cheese to either cheese slices or chunks, though you're still occasionally to be found eating slices, as when you buy a doner kebab with cheese.

But that brings the subject back to food, and you were expatiating on drink, with especial reference to the supernatural and, in the case of cola, anti-supernatural, which you equated with a right-wing communist bias. You don't care for spirits, like gin and whisky, since they suggest, in their unadulterated constitution, a subnatural and virtually autocratic integrity, beneath the pale of a theocratic taste. Yet you do like milk and drink it regularly, though it's the most natural of all drinks and somewhat inferior, in consequence, to milkshakes, those supernaturally flavoured milk drinks that you used to guzzle as a boy. These days, flavoured milk can be purchased in supermarkets, large and small, and you would do well to buy some in future, to complement your yoghurt-eating habits. It won't be shaked though, so if you want a truly supernatural milk drink, replete with bubbles, you'll have to visit a milk bar or get a mixer in order to shake your own flavoured milk. If you start to drink lemonade and orangeade, you might as well drink milkshakes too, and so bring all your drinking habits into line on the supernatural level. Yet you had better avoid the anti-milk drinks like tea and coffee, which dilute the milk to such an extent that it is no longer recognizable as milk but subordinate to the tea or coffee - the actual hot drink. Most such drinks are anti-natural and, hence, left wing in one degree or another; though whipped coffee (with cream) is partly supernatural and therefore of an anti-supernatural equivalent, preferable to plain coffee. Hot drinks predominantly made from milk are, of course, less anti-natural than those in which hot water predominates. A cold whipped coffee may also be partly supernatural, like a coffee-flavoured milkshake. At any rate, the chances are that it will betoken a right-wing communist, as opposed to a left-wing socialist, integrity, preferable to a plain (unwhipped) coffee, but still inferior, for all that, to a genuine milkshake, whether or not coffee-flavoured. For a cold whipped coffee is still a coffee, i.e. a drink in which milk is subordinated to, and thus diluted by, the coffee, whereas a milkshake is a flavoured milk drink. You can't fail to perceive the distinction, which is, after all, between the anti-supernatural and the supernatural. Though it is admittedly less apparent than between the anti-natural and the natural, such as you have been referring to with regard to coffee and milk.

Certainly, it seems that you prefer the natural to the anti-natural, while reserving a place of honour for the supernatural. You don't envisage people gravitating from the anti-natural to the supernatural; though it's just possible that the anti-supernatural will bring anti-naturalists closer, in due course, to a supernatural position, from which a transcendental upgrading may be effected ... compliments of the supernatural themselves. You are probably right about that, as about most other things, Mr. Crosby.