YuHeng's blog

Sartre's look is more true than ever now. But if I had to choose between the gaze and the people, either or is fine. Whichever one is better than what's between them. 

The Look: famous example, the peephole. I look through the peephole, observing you without your awareness. Then suddenly, shame consumes me. Maybe the intensifying footsteps suggest that you've found out. I have gone from a voyeur to an object, and all the space it took was your consciousness. I  I have become a part of your lense. If you had found out, only shame  I am only a part of you, reduMaybe the whispers mean that you know all along that I'm eavesdropping. Your power extends to me, and I suddenly rely on you. My actions and thoughts conform to my fear and paranoia of you, of a looming identity that goes beyond me. I am defined by you, reduced by you, and acknowledged only through your existence. That's what the peephole has become. The symbol of power is that I'm only an object in your world. And most of all, diminished so quickly that I lost all my identity.  I am controlled by you I'm the center of my faBut to be honest, it's because you've reduced me. 
i am an object in your world, dream, and plot. I do not own my freedom. i am your people, the lense through which you see the world. ephole, looking through the half empty glass only to see that the same pair of eyes look back at you, distorted and contented at the same moment, forcing another ounce of burden onto the other while all paralysis is resolved in the instance of mutual recognition; if you look at me, I too, can look at you. I am not just your peephole, for a peephole may exist in another peephole, and so on and so forth, like a sinking mirror that collapses into itself when faced with the same thing that is itself. We sink but we also rise in comparison to your collapse based on a relative value. In other words, how much further do you sink than me? The difference is how much I've rised.  

synthesis is like cooking. You put the same stuff together, and  whether by heat or fermentation, something new comes from it. And beneath it all is evolution. it goes from one state to another: the sugar breaks down, the fats emulsify, and the blood denatures. Even gelatin is produced by dissolving collagen. So what can I deduce from this? Production by reduction? To diminish something so that I can gain more out of it? Well, reduction produces the sum of flavors: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, unami. It concentrates each element to a higher percentage, because the space that it once occupied shrunk to a smaller pie. So its as if each element became bigger, but from the visual perspective, it'd be an illusion.  that it occupies has been reduced; it went from a bigger pie to a smaller pie. But as if the size of the elements never changed, it now occupies  such that even the smallest flavour is squeezed out in this tiny space.  i find what produces me, such as the composites of my parts. Just as a painter blends colours to create more colours, so too does a chef create more flavours by playing and editing them. Due to the changes at the atomic level, i consider it as editing, rather than just changing. The sum comes from what was fundamentally there. its not new at all. or at least, we can say that the ingridients themselves are not new, yet when put together, its as if a secondary force is at work. I'd like to quote something here by Georges Bataille: 

in asexual reproduction... the nucleus divides into two equal parts, and from a single entity, two result. the two new entities are, to the same degree, the products of the first. The first has disappeared. Esssentially, it is dead, since only the two entities it has produced survive. It does not decompose in the way sexed animals die, but it ceases to be. It ceases to be, in the sense that it is discontinuous. But, in a point of the reproduction, there was continuity. There exists a point where the primitive one becomes two. When there are two, there is again discontinuity in each of the entities. But the passage implies an instant of continuity between the two. The first dies, but in its death appears a fundamental instant of continuity.

So what does this all mean? for the food? for me? well, something always emerges from the space of evolution. it merges two isolated state by acting as both a buffer and catalyst. it speeds up the process of collision between the two, but as they meet, it buffers against the impact and instead, produces the sum of not just the ingridents, but also the external composities--that is, the heat, pressure, moisture, pH, and conversely, me. or if we expand the lense, then we shall see that these things lead to the sun, gravity, water, and natural compounds. we can see these things, meaning the contraction and expansion of seeing cooking at both a higher and lower level at the same time. this has taught me the unifying compound of me, of the makeup of this world, of what is there all along but which must first pass through me. And so however I see them, with what attitude and with what lense, will determine the potential to which these things unfold themselves to me. there are more beneath them, there are always more, which i once referred to as negative weight. how many  more shadows can i see from what appears to be only a singular, total state of blackness?  What does the shadow of the sun mean, which creates the paradox of a "black sun?" I end up asking these questions just before I sleep, and these are the questions that I think after having gone full circle, reveals what working at the kitchen has taught me. it blends things together as they work in a feedback loop with everything, grounding things together and unifying them through various philosophical structures. and as you combine ideas together--naturally, as evolution would define--new products emerge. the feedback loop reproduces itself.