Crispy Bits of Every Day

by Renata Pekowska

There are moments and fractions of experience which flash with energy. Moments of feeling more alive, more awake. Moments of heightened emotional response. Moments of intensity. I believe these moments readjust and reshuffle our sense of self, and are necessary for a good journey of life. In this collection of thoughts I call them “crispy moments”, the crispy bits of every day, as I attempt to name at least some of the intangible ingredients that make them happen. As I do that, I try to make sense of my own experiences, and I look for answers there.

There is happiness and there is pleasure, but my idea of “crispy moments” is not quite either of them - it is more akin to encountering and experiencing beauty, to flares of condensed feelings, intensified occurrences. Sadness and discomfort can be there too; great, immense beauty brings with it the deep sense of sadness; not stifling and immobilising, but the stirring, enlivening kind.

There is readiness, openness and attention, the states of mind which can enable the moments of aliveness. Crispy moments can happen without any forethought, but their anticipation can also become a liberating and dizzying mode of being, like a golden glass of sparkly fizzy mix of fear, excitement and openness to the unknown.

There are re-lived experiences, like embodied memories of childhood summers cycling. If you have them, getting on a bike will always bring with it the sense of freedom and light-heartedness, even more so on warm days, with no heavy clothes on and sun and wind in your hair. Your cycling summers come back to you, not through any particular memory, but as a directly recalled feeling of exhilaration and the unrestrained sense of being free and invincible; possibly because on the bike you first discover your sense of strength and independence, first time moving around on your own, free to go wherever you want to go.

There are “Madeleines”, uncanny triggers of deep memories, coming from secret memory storage places. Many things can be Madeleines - taste and smell are well known Madeleines which perhaps shows that real moments of feeling alive involve a set of senses. Memories and sensations are stored away in places in our bodies, and places around them, their parts or aspects, like secret stashes of nuts left by forgetful squirrels. An accidental stomp can bring them out, or they can sprout into big trees of ideas and things we know, but don’t know how we know. They can also rot away, never triggered back into existence by a piece of pastry.

Invisible fingers click: click! And the memory is back in its full three-dimensional self, the place, the feeling, long lost, but: surprise! Seemingly not lost at all, only hidden. You are standing in the middle of a crowded street when a subtle trace of a fragrance note plunges you without warning into a flash of a distant moment, intense and unfaded. 

There is detachment, a surprising ingredient, since normally the idea of detachment would not immediately spring to mind when thinking of moments of aliveness. You are supposed to be in the moment, completely. This might be true, but the awareness of the moment happening, and the conscious effort to experience it fully does not diminish its beauty. You can have a memory of a big campfire exploding into golden sparks, because you very intentionally made every effort to remember it when you were nine years old, and you thought it was so incredible and the biggest campfire you had seen so far in your life. And yes, that warm and golden red memory is there, because you so carefully created it and you can recall it now, over and over again.

There are indelible memories, firmly inscribed in the repository of things remembered. Some events, which are supposed to be pivotal, do not leave these deep cut traces; events like the Leaving Cert, or other hollow milestones. The indelible memories are created by profoundly experienced moments, like losing the ground under your feet in a lake at night, and a friend pulling you out just when you panicked and lost your breath.

At the same time it seems that some moments are so intense that the memories that we have of them end up being vague and ghostly. It might be that some experiences, like intimate encounters with other bodies, are so ultra-somatic that they can only become extrasomatic, not belonging to us, so that we can keep the audacity to venture again into places where our emotional and carnal desires intermingle. 

There is timing, the secret ingredient of all intense encounters. Timing is everything and everything is about timing. Coincidences, entanglements, serendipity, coming across a relevant book just after you became interested in something, or meeting someone on a train at the precise moment when both of you share the same particular mood for an all-night long conversation. Sometimes I think that it almost does not matter who you meet or what you see. What matters is when you meet them and when you see it. 

There are faces of others. Other people's faces tell us things about ourselves. Things which are, or are not, in agreement with what we think we are. Things which can cause flare-ups and overflows of understanding, even if not always immediately recognised as such. The dialogue of facial expressions might sometimes pass under conscious recognition, but that does not make it in any way less potent and consequential.

With no faces around us this inaudible exchange fades and dries out. On the other hand, continuous presence of the others’ faces causes the never-ceasing stirring of our own self-picture which as a result never rests and sets in place. Time spent away from the faces of others is the time of coming back into ourselves. Like going away to an unknown place and coming back home, both fulfilling, tidal, mutually enabled. It might be that each one of us has an idea of themselves in the form of a giant jigsaw puzzle. Our crispy moments of feeling alive happen when that self-picture is shaken and disturbed, so that the pieces are displaced, lost, or sometimes made entirely new.

There is music, which sometimes can help explain the idea of a special, lifted moment. We can only ever hear one note at any given time, so our experience of the melody is that present note, the previous notes we remember, and the future notes we anticipate. I am here, music, take me with you. I am here, in my special slice of time.

In music and in life, there are also unexpected deeper chords. They sometimes appear barely there, a shade darker. They can thrill and awake, throw off the comfort path of “I know what happens next”, give new depth and dimension, a tingle of delectation. In jazz they can change the whole angle of the listening flow. The unexpected chord moments in life are often so subtle, they pass beneath our conscious thought process, and are perceived by our whole self without being mentally recognised and grasped. The tonal feeling of a situation can change through a slight hand gesture, tilt of a head, and can retune our senses with new, unnamed understandings. There is also the joy of an unexpected glitch. Like an interrupted song on the radio, a reminder that this is a live broadcast, and really all sorts of things can happen.

There is sensual absorption: It is good to take off the rubber gloves sometimes and feel the gritty soil of the garden, the leaves, the warm grass, the soft overripe scented rose which disassembles in your hand into a hundred moist off-white layers. Even the accidental sharp warning from the hidden nettle: so much to sense, so much to learn. On the other hand, two or more overlapping sensations can sometimes clash and stand in the way of one another, and “rubber gloves” in some shape or form are needed, like when cutting off undesired, loud sounds when enjoying good food.

There is appreciation: As we grow, we can cultivate understanding and awareness of all properties of things and occurrences, like the taste, the smell and the look of the food, and even the sounds it can make - sizzling, bubbling. But there is also the sensation of different textures, surfaces, consistencies and shapes, of crusty bread, bites of an apple, and of points in time and space. As we learn to appreciate the properties of our experiences, we can actively seek out the crispy moments, enable and chase them. A shift in approach is possible which, when found and developed, can make it possible to find intensity in everyday encounters with new people, in paying attention to the changing colours of the sky, in attentively listening, or touching materials in order to understand them.

 Bite into your crispy moments and let everything else go quiet.

Renata Pekowska is a visual artist and researcher based in Dublin.

Images: Renata Pekowska, Memory Landscapes series, digital illustrations, 2022