Starvation

While we are posting things written by others, here is a short piece by someone I met in Prague, in the lovely Café Blatouch. J. writes parables and, I suppose, you could say that he composes pictures which can be inspected. After I returned to London, he would send me his short prose pieces accompanied by a rough translation. Sometimes I would take this rough and smoothen it into lean unlovely English. Here is a little piece called ‘Starvation’. Those of you who don’t like this kind of thing (i.e., ‘literature’& all that), who have Charlotte Street filed under ‘Political blogs’ for example (which is your prerogative), look away now.

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'He is starving. He sits and dreams of food. But he has placed himself in such a position that the prospect of finding food is very small. Shadows line his ribs. One day, a day like any other, a day without augury or expectation, he is brought a fabulous feast on a silver platter. His reaction is two-fold. First, disbelief: why this sudden miracle? No, he thinks, starvation acts like an hallucinogen and the feast is only the product of his desperate fancy. But secondly, realising that there is indeed food infront of him, he begins to question whether his stomach can cope after such long abstinence. The woman holding the platter of food looks at him, expectant, waiting. Embarrassed by the extremity of his need and with little confidence in his chaste and withered stomach, he mumbles something about indigestion, politely shaking his head. As the woman walks away with his meal, he thinks he catches on her face a look of disappointment. It has been so long since he ate that hunger itself, defeated and ignored, had left his body. Only occasionally would its memory, like an empty word, flicker through his insides. But as the woman departs, he feels, foreign yet familiar, the recrudescence of hunger – a pain, a rodent pain – stirring once more in his anorexic stomach.

Perhaps it is slightly different. Yes, the starving man dreams of food. But his dreams have grown fantastical with desire. Fat ripe fruits bursting through their own skin, meats swollen with succulence, breads, gooey puddings and rich and steaming delights of all kinds. Indeed, so inflated with fantasy are these dream foods, so replete with want, that when real nourishment does arrive he simply fails to recognise it. As his starvation continues, so does the food of his dreams become even more rare and extravagant, more and more remote from the shapes, colours and textures of anything real. Finally, in the last days, he yearns for things which are entirely the product of his imagination, which have altogether lost contact with the world; things which, were they suddenly to materialise before him, would, of course, be inedible.