Entangled in Touch: 1/4

a philosopher gets lost in sensuous baking

Time for a deep dive.

Over the last decade I’ve spent years researching the philosophy of touch. Sadly, a lot of this work is stored away in academic language.

No more!

Here’s my experiment: I’ve written out absolutely everything I know about the sense of touch in a long-ish (4500 words) narrative essay. Every time I began to rely on theoretical accounts of touch, I paused and sought out a story instead.

I’ve broken it into six parts and included audio for each. Listen! Read! Touch is something we can’t not do and the over the next weeks I’m sure something will spur you to reflect on the ways you’re connected with the world.

<3

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Photo by Adam Bartoszewicz on Unsplash

It’s natural law that when human parents get close to the birth of their child they become quite obsessed with some new and unnecessary project. As our son’s due date approached my husband spent the evenings desperately trying to straighten an unruly trellis. And me? I was elbow deep in sourdough.

I’m a philosopher of the poetic ilk rather than the logical kind. I’m drawn to whimsy and poetic ways of being, which aren’t quite contained enough for precision in the kitchen. So when the pandemic sourdough wagon rolled around I waved it on, assuming that bread was beyond my capabilities.

But this year a neighbour asked me to babysit her sourdough starter and the bubbling jar got me curious. Some preliminary internet research suggested that sourdough was different than other bread making. Apparently working with it successfully relied more on relationship than meticulousness. Now this sounded like something I could do!

As soon as I squeezed the dough, years of philosophical research on the sense of touch came to the fore of my mind. Right there in the mixing bowl was proof that getting touch “right” required deep understanding of context. I needed to discern and attune to the particularities of each flour, the kitchen temperature, the water, and thickness of the bowl.

And there’s also a microbial exchange going on the whole time that’s proof of my porous boundaries. It wasn’t just me touching the dough nor the dough touching me, but the two of us in a dance of mutual-affect at once active and passive, and thus neither active nor passive but some other way of being more spacious and mushy than binaries allow.

Vanessa Kimbell, the high priestess of sourdough, writes that making bread is a sensuous experience that connects you to your larger community and politics. She encouraged me to mix with my hands, so that my cells merged with those of the dough’s. In these moments of fusion, I was also connected with the millers that produced the flour, the farmers that harvested the grain, and the soil that made all of this possible. As I moved water and flour between my fingers, I dreamt that space-time collapsed and I was standing in the field where the sunlight danced atop the swaying wheat.  

Yes, perhaps my tendency to fall into these musings is why I’m not an adept baker. I once had to pivot from loaf to focaccia and even that turned out flat. I reread Vanessa’s instruction, then in desperation turned to Reddit. The collected advice? No dough is the same. You must know thy dough. But the dough wouldn’t reveal itself to me. Time and attention, it turns out, isn’t all that’s needed to develop the special touch. You need competency, too.

I lacked the tacit knowledge that guides the baker’s hands without conscious thought. While I mutter “Do not fear the dough” before setting into a round of stretch-and-folds, the expert baker simply begins and knows when to stop. She adapts her pressure to the needs of the hour, never replicating tomorrow what she did today. Though she mostly moves habitually and without conscious thought, one day spilled water or achy hands will cause her to stop and consider her next move. Disruptions are something of a gift because they thrust us into active attention and demand that we re-consider our next move.  

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Next week in Part Two: the disruption of COVID-19, a touch-impoverished culture, and a dream of regenerative touch.

Update: the sourdough drama is mostly over. Turns out that I was underproofing the dough. A few weeks ago I spent a lovely day with the baker at our local mill and, would you believe it? He didn’t have any exact formulas for me to apply. Instead he shrugged his shoulders and said, “You just have to keep baking and adjust”!

Sophie Strand

also writes about touch in her typically beautiful way. Like with hands in dough: “Every time we inhale, we somatically affirm our desire to transform through contact: with scent molecules, oxygen, carbon-dioxide, viruses, bacteria, fungal spores.”

And please meet my sister-in-law, who thoughtfully bakes cakes that are also art.