Dine With Me

To eat with someone changes your experience of them. It fosters a level of intimacy that allows us to be comfortable such that we let our guard down upon future encounters. There are exceptions, people who are so paranoid/self-conscious about their eating habits that they cannot allow themselves to dine with others, but they're just that, exceptions. When you eat with someone, you get to know them in a way beyond just conversation alone.

To dine with someone gives us something intangible. To share food is a communion, which has the obvious religious overtones -- and here I would say Christian, but there is also the sense of religious in that communion can mean something more akin to the joining of minds or spirits, a comm(unal)union between two people.

It is for this reason that the traditional model of a "date" in Western society is dinner and a movie. Short of sleeping with someone or meeting their family, in the sense that dining is this kind of communion, it is probably one of the quickest and best ways to look for that connection, that spark of potential romance.

Food, it gives you a cause and a distraction.

How does it do this? In the example of Ashley, since having breakfast with her, our interactions have changed, but why?

It's like how sleeping over with someone changes things. There is no denying that sexuality changes the relationship, but even sharing a bed without sex still breeds that kind of familiarity. I've mentioned intimacy before and it very much applies in both cases.

To sleep with someone, to eat with someone makes us vulnerable. We expose our hidden habits and drop our guard. Being unprotected as such opens the channels of communication, not only verbally, but of the heart as well.

To return to a previous post, to share this communion with someone is to be willing to share silence, which is to test the relationship. It is to allow ourselves to give power to the silence and rather than using it, let it use us.

Because silence is in opposition to sound, and sound is us: we are sound, we are the creators and creations of sound, so silence then is the power of the Other. We are only truly silent when we are dead, when the beating of the heart stops.

Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise. - Attali Noise: The Political Economy of Music

*thump thump*

*thump thump*

In that respect then, Kacie's comment "silence=violence" is exceptionally true. To create silence is to end the sound. But there is also another kind of silence a gentler progression towards this end, which is why I'm very careful to say sound these last few paragraphs. It is the kind of silence of entropy and MAAR (the Mark All As Read feature on plurk) that is created by the contextual exclusion of sound and relegation to this place of noise. And I differentiate noise here by counting it as the sounds undeserving, the sounds that have lost their meaning and no longer warrant any attention.

These sounds that have become noise are silenced. They are the ignored and the habituated, the white noise that blends into the background, the black dot on the black paper. They are there. They have not gone away.

This is what happens in that communion. The sound is allowed to be relegated into that silent realm of noise so that we can draw our focus elsewhere. And the outcome is not always good.



Sometimes what we see and experience makes us uncomfortable. But is this a bad thing? Why must we be comfortable for things to work? Perhaps this is the test of communion. In Catholicism, communion as the Eucharist is the symbolic cannibalism of Jesus' flesh. At the Last Supper, he turned to his disciples and giving them bread, said, "This is my body." And giving them wine, said "This is my blood."

We dine with Him and dine on Him and so come to know Him. We take Him into our hearts and are one with god, the greatest source of Other there is. We internalize.

And perhaps this is why it means so much to eat with another, we find the God within each other. Let's test this. Dine with me.