Cabbages drying outside an apartment building.
The Vice-director of education at my school saw me taking this picture from her fifth floor apartment. She asked me about it at school the next day: ‘what, don’t people get ready for winter in America?’
‘Nevertheless,’ continues he, ‘I too acknowledge the all-but omnipotence of early culture and nurture: hereby we have either a doddered dwarf bush, or a high-towering, wide-shadowing tree; either a sick yellow cabbage, or an edible luxuriant green one. Of a truth, it is the duty of all men, especially of all philosophers, to note-down with accuracy the characteristic circumstances of their Education, what furthered, what hindered, what in any way modified it…’
– Thomas Carlyle
(Sartor Resartus, II.2 (p. 80f.))
The moulded cabbage-leaf jugs for which Worcester is famous are very plentifully available in blue and white, often with the mask spout, as are also all the vine-leaf dessert and tiny pickle-dishes, pierced baskets, comports, salad bowls, soup tureens, butter-dishes, sauce-boats; there are even such items as knife and fork handles, knife rests, salt spoons, tea-caddy spoons and a pierced variety of the latter which are claimed to be egg-draining spoons. Tea jars take on several shapes, oval, round or square, sometimes with ribbed moulding; and teapots come in many shapes, some peculiar to Worcester, others of universal adoption.
My Aunt Philip’s aunt, Mrs. Pring, complained bitterly to my aunt of the parson of her village (of which she was squire) who had come to see her during a serious illness, ‘and you know, my dear,’ she said, ‘he read the bible to me, just as if I had been any old woman in the village’.
Her gardener, Curtis, had consulted her as to how and where some cabbages were to be planted. Later on the gardener came again with a suggestion which was obviously an improvement. ‘Curtis’, said she, ‘if I tell you to plant the cabbages with their leaves in the ground and their roots in the air you will be pleased to do so.’ And yet, as she said to my aunt, she knew Curtis’s way was much better, but she was not going to have settled questions re-opened, and she was going to be mistress of her own house.
The richer the character, the harder and slower in general is its development.* Two boys were once of the same class in our Edinburgh school; John ever trim precise and dux, Walter ever slovenly confused and dolt: in due time John became Baillie Waugh, and Walter became Sir Walter Scott.
The quickest and completest of all vegetables is – the Cabbage.
* Cf. Plutarch, Cato Minor, (1.3)
So I settled down at once as a full-fledged anarchist.
Figure to yourself a group of naked cottages with bald slate roofs untempered by the years – no moss, no house-leeks – dropped down at random in a sticky clay cabbage-field – and you see our colony. […] Most of these young men were good fellows in their way – very simple-hearted anarchists. I do not credit it that they could have blown up a Tsar, or even dropped a bomb into a suburban letter-box. They confined themselves to cabbages and passionate denunciation of the oppressors.
To abolish seduction is a mother’s goal.
She will replace it with what is real: products.
Demeter’s victory
over Hades
does not consist in her daughter’s arrival from down below,
it’s the world in bloom –
cabbages lures lambs broom sex milk honey!
These kill death.
— 65, catch your cabbage!
Everyone laughed. Mr M’Coy, who wanted to enter the conversation by any door, pretended that he had never heard the story. Mr Cunningham said:
— It is supposed – they say, you know – to take place in the depot where they get these thundering big country fellows, omadhauns, you know, to drill. The sergeant makes them stand in a row against the wall and hold up their plates. He illustrated the story by grotesque gestures.
— At dinner, you know. Then he has a bloody big bowl of cabbage before him on the table and a bloody big spoon like a shovel. He takes up a wad of cabbage on the spoon and pegs it across the room and the poor devils have to try and catch it on their plates: 65, catch your cabbage.
What, bred at home! Have I taken all this pains for a creature that is to lead the inglorious life of a cabbage, to suck the nutritious juices from the spot where he was first planted? No, to perambulate this terraqueous globe is too small a range; were it permitted, he should at least make the tour of the whole system of the sun. Let other mortals pore upon maps, and swallow the legends of lying travellers…
A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.
I remember that not long after our marriage Madame de Mauves undertook to read me one day some passages from a certain Wordsworth — a poet highly esteemed, it appears, chez vous. It was as if she had taken me by the nape of the neck and held my head for half an hour over a basin of soupe aux choux: I felt as if we ought to ventilate the drawing-room before any one called.
There was an odd smell in the passage, as if the concentrated essence of all the dinners that had been cooked in the kitchen since the house was built, lingered at the top of the kitchen stairs to that hour, and, like the Black Friar in Don Juan, ‘wouldn’t be driven away.’ In particular, there was a sensation of cabbage; as if all the green that had ever been boiled there, were evergreens, and flourished in immortal strength.
Amongst herbs I have eaten I find gourds, cucumbers, coleworts, melons, disallowed, but especially cabbage. It causeth troublesome dreams, and sends up black vapours to the brain. Galen, Loc. affect. lib. 3, capt. 6, of all herbs condemns cabbage; and Isaac, lib. 2, cap. 1, animæ gravitatem facit, it brings heaviness to the soul.
… καὶ σὲ πολλὸν ἀνθρώπων
ἐγὼ φιλέω
μάλιστα, ναὶ μὰ τὴν κράμβην.…and of all mankind, I love you most especially — yes! by the cabbage!
… ὁ δ’
ἐξολισθὼν
ἱκέτευε τὴν
κράμβην
τὴν ἑπτάφυλλον,
ἣν θύεσκε
Πανδώρηι
Ταργηλίοισιν ἔγκυθρον πρὸ φαρμακοῦ ……once he’d slipped away, he implored the cabbage—seven-leaved!—which he always offered—potted!—to Pandora at the Thargelion for a pharmakos*…
I am not best pleased—with either Hipponax’s fragment or my Englishing thereof; mind you, I have nothing against beseeching (hiketeuein) a cabbage, but I would like a context (besides the Thargelion). I want to know what this character is slipping away (or down) from, and why the cabbage (or something else) is in a ceramic dish (or potted). Also, if it is the cabbage that’s in the dish, why on earth would one offer a potted cabbage to Pandora? I’d think she’d have her own problems, without having to worry about some silly cabbage; also, I don’t suppose it’s really a substitute: potted cabbage for scapegoat—it wouldn’t be very satisfying to beat it with fig branches, would it? (* Admittedly, the phrase could be temporal—i.e. before the scourging of the pharmakos, but the cabbage as replacement pharmakos seems more amusing.)
There is a book on vegetables in literature—rather, on the literary life of vegetables or vegetables as literary figures. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody, especially not to those who are aware that someone has written about the importance of spiderwebs in Middlemarch (one imagines the scholar thanking her spouse in the preface, perhaps for dusting). There is not, to my knowledge, a book about the importance of cabbages in world literature, and this is a fault which should be remedied. I haven’t the time to compose such a scintillating opus, and so I shall briefly make a case for its importance.
…
Who the hell am I kidding? I hate cabbages—even if they were mentioned by the sixth-century iambic poet Hipponax (who is, incidentally, the earliest Greek source on scapegoating), by Juvenal, by Rabelais, by Woolf and by Forster, and by others I have in the meantime forgotten, always in terms of the mundane, the ordinary, the antithesis of the divine—which is, one must admit, a pretty accurate description of a cabbage.
::
ego hoc feci mm–mmx
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