Philosophy of Sandwiches | An Introduction

Dear friends,

The hardest part of starting is knowing where and when to, isn’t it? It’s a little like skipping rope, entering a revolving door, or knowing the price you pay for diving headfirst into ocean waves. There is, I think, a presupposition of some sort of fanfare or expectation when crafting the inaugural anything of anything—the first note of a recital is somehow always the hardest one to strike. For me, the problem has always been rhythm, which is to say it is a matter of entering: interrupting, if you will.

My mother often begins a phone call not with a "Hello," but a "你現在在做什麼?"— What are you up to right now? The premise is always thus: she is walking into something that has existed before her arrival and currently exists as she speaks. She is acknowledging interruption, stepping into the current of a moment that flows steadily onwards. When I begin any piece of music or writing, I tend to think of my entry in much the same way: as briefly touching a sliver of the surface of a much larger corpus. It's breathlessly terrifying. Unforgivably thrilling.

Here I am, then, beginning. I could not tell you when I first learned to enter quietly—probably in orchestra—but here I am, at the opposite end: being louder than I’ve been for the first time in a long while. It feels like re-learning (learning?) to be vulnerable.

I have hung up a droll little sign for my blog: "Philosophy of Sandwiches." But what have music and writing and education to do with sandwiches? Very little, and yet somehow very much. Long ago, a friend recommended Anne Carson’s novel in verse, Autobiography of Red, to me and it broke my heart in the very best of ways.

“Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches.
Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt.
He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds.
I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.”

I have borrowed but a crumb of her words here, but really, sometimes I think I could live forever inside her words.

Onwards, then? I don’t know exactly what this blog will become. I want to write prose that plays with structure and form. I want to explore world music. I want to be curious about mother tongues and motherlands. And I want to think deeply, fiercely about how to listen and engage with marginalized voices in literature, music, and education. It’ll be playful and messy, as things often are when you burrow within and pry them loose from the inside out. But that is what I shall endeavor towards: finding the good things on the inside. I’d be delighted if you would join me as I discover what it means to hollow out a little space of mine in this world wide web.

歡迎光臨: welcome, loosely translated.

“Welcome” feels like too simple of a word. 歡迎 – welcome; please happily enter. 光臨 – as the light is near. Please share in this world of light, this world of mine.

Wishing you warmth, hugs, and a bottomless cup of your most favorite tea,

T.

+ this&that: (a post-script section on miscellany that I’m currently consuming, literally and literarily) Park Stickney's Double Tarantella, Trader Joe's Mango Jalapeño Apple Fruit Snacks, learning how to handle soot, Audre Lorde's "Poetry is Not a Luxury," and dramatic fanboys across the ages