The Heart Laid Bare

Organolepticians Number 61 (August 1st, 2005)

(This is a piece I wrote for the monthly Newsletter {July 2005, online at www.kermitlynch.com} from Kermit Lynch, Wine Merchant. I probably buy more wine from Kermit than from any other source, and I've enjoyed Kermit's writing for a very long time. In recent years he's also published a number of pieces by Jim Harrison, whose writing I also admire very much. When I read Jim's piece earlier this year, indicating that he'd be taking a medical hiatus from his prodigious approach to food and drink, I wondered who could fill such a void? Then I ran into Kermit at the Farmer's Market in North Berkeley one Thursday a few months back, and on impulse, I suggested that maybe I should write something for his letter. Almost as surprising as the fact that I'd made such a suggestion was Kermit's very quick reply that he thought that was a great idea.

If you've been following The Organolepticians over the past five years, the theme of this short essay will be familiar. I think I'm finally beginning to understand that storytellers aren't necessarily telling different stories every time; they might be just trying to tell the same story you've already heard, but maybe rearranging parts of it, because the original telling just doesn't get it done, anymore. And, more than anything else they might be doing, they're talking to themselves.)

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Back in the '50s, way back nearly halfway through the last century, on live TV, I watched one of the very first open-heart surgeries ever performed. I must have been all of 10 or 11, and it seemed like a miracle to me; I'd never before imagined what it might really look like inside the human body, and here it was, right before my eyes! Of course, the only thing you could really see was the heart itself, beating away. It was pretty mesmerizing, though, even on a black-and-white set.

And there must have been eight or ten people gathered around this person, making sure everything was going according to plan. I kept wondering what it must be like to be that person, whose heart was laid open to the world in such a manner. For most of us, our bodies just automatically do what they need to do to operate properly, and we can live "outside" of our own skins and not have to consider all the meat and bone, all the blood and ganglia. All the everyday miracles.

When I got interested in wine, only about a quarter of the way back through the last century, I did so because of the way I found that wine could open up my heart. I'm not sure that's the way I thought of it at the time; I just knew I'd had some kind of profound experience that changed the way all my molecules were arranged, the kind of experience that can't be ignored. I knew, as well, that it might take the rest of my life to be able to find the explanation for what had occurred down at ground zero in my nervous system. I've been working on it ever since, and though I'm sure I still don't have it all figured out yet, I regard the fact that I still feel so compelled to think about it as a good sign.

Part of the reason I'm still compelled to think about it is that the experience continues to occur; for example, when I taste a wine like Phillipe Faury's St. Joseph, with it's textbook rendition of suave Syrah fruit, and smoke, and that spine-tingling perfume of tender berries and violets, I feel the whisper of wildness in it, that presence of not just the human endeavour in that place, and that year, but of something elemental, behind those things, something inviting me to engage with it. Something very hard to name.

And it doesn't have to be an earth-shattering kind of experience that shakes me down to my shoes; it can be something as simple and surprising as the smell of Autumn on the wind, sunlight on a white wall in North Beach at 8 am, the sound of my daughter's laughter, beads of rain on a spiderweb as the clouds part, and the sun breaks through, an old man singing absent-mindedly as he carries his laundry home, up Walnut St. Just something quirky and peculiar that stands up like an Icelandic poppy just as your eyes sweep around to that very spot.

It doesn't have to be an "important" wine to move me in this way. Too often I find that wines that are "important" are thought of that way for entirely different reasons. It's only occasionally that they will have the impact on me that I've described above. Think of what we read. Does everything have to be War and Peace? Or Finnegan's Wake? I read Marilynn Robinson's new novel Gilead at Christmas last year and thought it was just about as fine a piece of writing as I've come across in a long time. Is it great? I don't know, but it got under my skin, and made me think, and feel. I remember reading recently, over the internet, a discussion about whether any of the wines from Beaujolais are truly great wines. Now, I've done my share of coveting the great wines of the world, and I still remember vividly the way a few of them tasted. I don't really care, though, if anybody thinks Chateau Thivin is great or not. When I smell that stuff, I feel blessed by the Universe. If I have the chance to eat a plate of sausages, or some rabbit fricasee with mushrooms and papardelle while I'm drinking it, I feel like Good King Wenceslas.

There's a set of circuits in me that really light up when I smell a wine like the Chignin- Bergeron that Kermit brings in from the Savoie, with its lovely bouquet of wildflowers and honey. Well, at least if there's a light on, maybe there's somebody home.

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The title I originally gave to the piece above was "Doctor! Doctor! (From the song "Good Lovin" by the Young Rascals), but Kermit felt it was too obscure a reference, as a title, and after an exchange of emails he proposed the title it now carries, and I thought it was a good one. The text went to the printers almost immediately, and I headed off to the wild North.

Well, while I was on a trip through the Inside Passage in Alaska, I found myself in a wonderful bookstore in Juneau that had a great selection of writing about the area, and I picked up a book called A Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban, which I've been reading in fits and starts, as the opportunity has arisen. Reading it a couple of nights ago I stumbled upon this account of the cremation of the poet Percy Shelley:

""More wine was poured over Shelley's dead body than he had consumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver. The heat from the sun and the fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and as the bottom of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron for a very long time.

Byron could not face this scene, he withdrew to the beach and swam off to the "Bolivar." Leigh Hunt remained in the carriage. The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burned...""

"Byron wanted Shelley's skull, "but remembering that he has formerly used one as a drinking cup, I was determined that Shelley's should not be so profaned.""

Ahh, the good old days...

Steve Edmunds

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organoleptic: (ôr'ge nl ep'tik, ôr gan'l ep'-), adj. 1. perceived by a sense organ. 2. capable of detecting a sensory stimulus. [1850-55; < F organoleptique = organo- ORGANO + -leptique < Gk leptikós disposed to accept (lept(ós), v. adj. of lambánein to take + -ikos -IC)]
--Random House Webster's
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