I can play the first page of Debussy’s Premier Arabesque to an amateur level. I approach the piano usually within the first hour of arriving at my parents’ house and immediately my fingers move to a position that I would not be able to explain to you, yet when my hands hover over the ivory keys, they find themselves poised, ready to dance from left to right. It’s clumsy and often interrupted. Two days ago, I stopped half way through as if my memory had been wiped of this piece, something I’d learned for my Grade 7 exam when I was 16. I set my fingers down and tried again. It returned, unconsciously, although I still can’t remember how to play the second page, so I simply practise the first one over and over again, until it begins to feel smooth, ironing out the little bumps, going slower in places, my foot at the pedal, my eyes closed.
I cannot claim to understand the neurological ins and outs of muscle memory, but I do know that it’s sparked when our bodies perform repeated actions, creating new neural pathways between the body (the muscles we’re moving) and the brain (our central nervous system). I am a woman well-versed in repeated actions. A creature of habit intent on doing the same thing over and over again, at times harmless, at times to my detriment.
Today is Sunday. I cycled to Stoke Newington for 9.30am, where I met my friends Kelli and Sam for a bacon sandwich (brown sauce) and a black coffee at The Clarence Tavern. We do this most Sundays. Having arrived bang on opening, the place was empty, and we hesitated about going in when no one was even behind the bar. Kell suggested another place; I refused, wailing “but we always get bacon sandwiches at The Clarence.” We waited outside in the cold for five minutes, peering through the window until we saw someone, paused for another minute then headed in.
The coffee tastes the same. The sandwich tastes the same. It is glorious.
In one of my favourite scenes of one of my favourite plays, a doctor in a strip club looks up at the stripper, her face familiar, pleading with her to tell him her real name. She obliges, he refuses to believe her, and he says, “everything is a version of something else.”
This is how I approach cooking. A set of repeated actions, a set of repeated recipes. Small, subtle differences, mainly because my muscle memory is a little off in a the kitchen. I’ll forget how much oil I used last time, or I’ll have missed out an ingredient only to replace it with another. But really, everything is pretty much the same. It’s what happens when you cross perfectionism with unbreakable habit and probably a dose of depression. The same means comfort. The same means nostalgia. The same means control.
In Rebecca May Johnson’s book, Small Fires: An Epic In The Kitchen, she repeats the same Marcella Hazan tomato sauce recipe a thousand times, writing about her performance of it, the spattering, its transformation, the agency she holds and the desired (or the undesired) outcome. Johnson puts into words what I cannot: that the repetition is a breaking down of the whole, an intense learning of each part, an intimate performance, a form of connection.
For me, I think it’s most likely laziness. Or a stubborn resistance against change.
I perform these repeated acts in almost every aspect of my life. I tell myself I’m going to read a new book yet always return to the same four. I’m usually late to a new television series because when I’m alone at home, which I often am, I find it tiring to receive new information, to process it and form a critical opinion about it. Instead I watch Friends until midnight and cry when Chandler and Monica get engaged. I tell myself I’ll leave the neighbourhood and catch a friend’s exhibit at a museum 40 minutes away on the tube. Instead I hoover the flat and remove the chicken stock from the freezer, set aside the beans, salt the chicken, watch the rain fall against the window, pour bleach on the stove top, wipe away the oil that spat from the pan when I made the rice crispy and cracked the eggs on top for the millionth time.
Of course, life is really one big repeated action, a survival mechanism of sorts. We become far more aware of it as we grow older, although what is that? This need for comfort and security? I was looking for so many things when I was younger, but was always far more willing to search in new places, aware of all the risks (failure, disappointment, pain) in my mind but not my body. The repeated actions of these three things start to become more instinctive, more bodily, and I’ve come to realise that my mind and body are truly distinct entities. I can logically understand one thing, yet bodily feel another. I thought as I got older, I would become more in sync, but instead I feel the separation between the two far more deeply. The actions are repeated but the muscle memory is not quite catching up.
I drove down to the post office yesterday, placing the car in reverse and gently turning a corner, my dad in the passenger seat. “Driving’s funny, isn’t it,” he said. “You start learning and it feels impossible, and then decades later you wonder how you ever didn’t know how to do it.”