Forgotten Bread

Some more Tartine-style loaves, monkeying with the ratios of WW, AP and Rye flours

The other day my wife and I were cleaning out the basement in preparation for some home renovations: a new cellar office for her. She discovered a couple of love letters from me, to her, that she had kept from when we were dating. I had gone to British Columbia and was staying with a friend, floundering around and trying to decide what to do with my life. The letters show my confusion. All I really had a handle on was that I loved her, and wanted to be with her. That much alone was clear to me.

But the tone of the letters, the way the sentences were put together, everything about them seemed foreign and unfamiliar. I had absolutely forgotten the person who wrote those letters. I had forgotten almost all the events that were described.

Love is a strange seed, isn't it? You don't know where it will take you. In my case, it took me back to Ontario, to build a life with my best friend who eventually became my wife. But seeds crack open, and transform in the growing. I'm a different person now than what I was then. I have new confusions. Love remains, but it is an ever-new seed, waiting to crack open the next phase of life transformation. We move on, and we forget the old confusions, the old self that propelled us onward.

The letters were from someone else. We threw them away after reading them, as we also threw away 3 or 4 trailer loads of trash.

That's my segue for this blog: Memory. It appears that every decision and encounter we have had in the past are the things that make us who we are. But how we choose to order those memories is (always) a present-moment event. I am thinking of David Hume and his ideas of causation. Probably I am misrepresenting his ideas, but it seems to me that he showed, using reason and philosophy alone, that we associate causality with priory, when the association can never be proved beyond all doubt. In the case of our our very self, the thing we call "I" seems to be a consistent entity that endures over time and is affected by external events and also effects change on external objects through interaction. But the affects and effects can never be proved absolutely. We can determine now who and what we are and we do that either consciously or unconsciously. Our brains are like computer RAM that only retains the semblance of consciousness by periodically sending electro-chemical sparks along neuronal pathways that we assume and accept as our 'self', and this network of pathways includes memories, aspirations, and emotions and other as-yet-unnamed and mysterious elements of psyche. We are always picking and choosing who we are.

Forgetfulness is a tool that we use to identify what is most important.

Left: a Tartine-style dough, with AP flour.  Right: Whole Wheat, with 10% Rye

I barely remember making this bread. I remember that it was good. I remember that my friend David chose one of the breads made with 90% whole wheat, and my wife chose one of the breads made with what I think now was 70% all purpose, 30% Whole Wheat. But because I was busy doing other things, I didn't blog about it right away.  I'm forgetting the details.

I ate the bread, the particles of what were bread became the particles of my body for a time.

crumb of one of the breads with AP flour

A 90% WW, 10% Rye loaf made in the Tartine Style with 100% whole wheat wild yeast starter.  A good bread.

Now it seems totally unimportant.  In a week or two, everything I've written here will be unfamiliar.  In a few years, I may even have forgotten that I ever had a blog about bread, ever.

Notes to Myself

• Who the hell are you?
• What the heck is this blog for, anyway?  Is it about bread?  Who cares?