Blue Planet II pulls no such punches. It’s a product of the BBC Natural History Unit’s careful, extensive experimentation to find the right balance between science and spectacle. And it works. The series shows us young albatrosses who’ve choked on plastic, the grim reality of coral bleaching, and the autopsy of a young dolphin. It also makes it clear that these things are our fault. But as the most overtly “political” series ever to come out of the NHU in terms of acknowledging human culpability, it may have alienated a certain percentage of American viewers from the outset.
Suddenly Jim tapped me on the shoulder. “Up ahead,” he pointed. As we drew closer, I began to make out the outcrop’s telltale layers. Up close, the contrast between the vertical sheets of oceanic rock along the bottom of the cliff and the horizontal layers of sandstone high above were clearly visible.
Back in 1788, few people understood the significance of that contrast. It took an Enlightenment thinker – 62-year-old farmer James Hutton, who made this journey around Siccar Point more than two centuries ago – to realise that it proved the existence of ‘deep time’.
My eye trouble started more than three decades ago, when I was forty-one. I discovered that if I closed my left eye, straight vertical lines curved extravagantly, and I could not read. I became sensitive to bright lights. A retina specialist told me that I had a rare genetic ailment, macular dystrophy: the disintegration of a tiny spot at the center of the retina that is responsible for fine vision. I had the disease in both eyes, and there was no treatment. Still, I found an optometrist who prescribed tinted lenses and reading glasses with high magnification, and with those I could continue to read, write, and teach. For years, my good left eye kept me going, and nothing much changed except that the blank my right eye saw grew bigger.
Eight years ago—twenty-five years after my disease started—I began to have new trouble seeing. I made an appointment with another retina specialist, who told me that I now had age-related macular degeneration along with macular dystrophy: a drop of fluid and blood was on the macula of my good left eye, and if nothing was done I’d quickly lose central vision. But there was help. The doctor gave me three injections, one a month, standing at my side, too far back to be seen, putting the needle into the corner of the eye. The shots worked, and we agreed that I was fortunate—though the requirement to rejoice irked me. I was fortunate only compared with someone who was more unfortunate than I.
To publish a recipe can be—especially in the world of rock-star chefs, cooking-themed reality television, and the general atmosphere of cooking as a variety of warfare—an act of self-conscious display of culinary erudition or imagination. It can have the effect of dangling before the reader the lure of the possibility of participating, however briefly, in the ex nihilo genius of a famous chef who somehow thought of putting ingredients together in a way designed to wow and astonish our dinner guests.
There is another way in which a recipe can be written, however, and more importantly, received. It can be written as an invitation into a reality that you did not recognize was possible before, an invitation into a kind of fellowship or communion. A recipe can be the transmission of a tradition, and to cook from such a recipe is not to “try this at home” but to enact a performance of that tradition, and thereby to participate in it in a mysterious and unrepeatable way. This is the way that recipes operate in Michael Twitty’s The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South.
Memento Park is ultimately about the mutability of memories and understanding, and an exhortation to really pay attention — while realizing how much you may miss regardless.