The thing about making rotis is that there is no direct way of teaching someone how to use the rolling pin such that the roti automatically turns itself whilst being rolled and takes on a circular shape. This is something that comes with time and effort in the handling of the rolling pin. That special distribution of pressure by the wrists is something that can only be built up through experience. Of course there's no real reason why a roti should be circular (at least I tell myself this when serving up an assortment of trapezia and rhombuses which have been somehow stretched un-uniformly in the x-y plane). Maybe it's just that much of life, whether in work or thought, excel formulae or deeds done towards others, somehow just tends asymptotically towards circular references.
You see, I am even beginning to wonder if the shape of anger is circular. And I probably also have a different opinion to you about its colour and its temperature. To explain, the kind of anger I am thinking about has travelled beyond the red and boiling hot stage, and entered into a plasma state where the senses can no longer distinguish between hot and cold. This anger is the temperature of a deep deep freeze, and the colour is the crisp cool hue of Omo-washed white linen billowing on the washing line on a bright hot and breezy day. It can all look very very deceptive.
What?
How can this be?
Well, it is the anger of a storm that has shaken a little ship so badly, that when it reaches calm water the ship thinks it can handle anything the deeps throw at it. And then the storm just quietly and gently comes back, and rips the ship up. It is a calm sort of anger infused with an incredible insensitivity and lack of feeling. To know it, it has to be experienced.
Yes indeed, I spent most of my week in a state of getting progressively more and more pissed off. No major discernible reasons, maybe just the lunar cycle or the position of my constellation in the equatorial hemisphere. Until an apex on not-quite-a-Friday afternoon, driving home in that plasmic state. Icicles on a hot Nairobi January afternoon. A truck turns at a breakneck speed and, on my right of way, the three aggressive guys in the truck yell at me to get the fuck out of the way or we all would die. My eyes narrow, and I arch a (nicely-tweezed) eyebrow. I stop right in the way, truck bearing down rapidly. My arctic "well, what are you going to do about it?" gaze faces them head on, frost exuding from all my being.
This, rafikis, was a totally different level to the daily game of chicken with a head-on matatu in the wrong lane.
"Oh! Please do take your time. We'll wait. There's no big hurry on this road with no traffic on a fine not-quite-a-Friday afternoon, and it is a slightly confusing corner isn't it? Here, you can pass through this gap, we'll just reverse a little for you. There now, how's that? That's the way. Have a lovely remainder of the day. Byeee." Words not quite spoken, but inferred from action.
And for an instant, just a little ditsy-wisty instant, I experienced the mighty power of freezing cold anger. To have subverted another's will simply through aura, to have turned action simply by a look.
Auras. The power of human conscience. What can it not do, if experienced, and practiced, and harnessed, and focused towards good things? What are people on this globe really thinking about?
So then I came across a startling fact. Google has done a survey of the globally most common search term used on their brilliant engine. It is not, as you might possibly think, anything to do with religion and spirituality, or the Upanishads, or comparative costs of wars for oil versus wars against poverty, or a little bit of loving, or quantum mechanics and Shroedinger's befuddling cat, or anger management through meditation, or even Aunty S's techniques for rolling the perfect roti. No, my rafikis, the world's powerful collective conscience, as evidenced by the most common worldwide search terms on Google, is focused on......
Britney Spears.
Good Grief. Big stack of rotis waiting to be made, here I come.
9 January, 2004
