You - The Diner
Dining out changes people’s lives! A confronting notion, but true. Whatever our motives and inclinations, we can’t avoid the insights that dining out brings. And with these, the temptations and opportunities that will tug and prod us in new directions. How does it happen, and why?
These are questions worth exploring. Take them on as your own — then like some hidden character-puzzle you can look for yourself in the answers.
W
illiam James once likened habit to a natural water course. With time it hollows out a channel through the nervous system, and any future flow will invariably take “the path traveled by itself before”. In that sense almost anything we do leaves some mark on our future. But this is not the sense of change we’re talking about with dining out. Nor are we talking of a butterfly flapping its wings in a rainforest… The impact dining out has on our lives is more direct, and observable. Some of the effects are immediate. Others are delayed — latent eruptions primed by an evening’s events and waiting their time to break out.
How to examine all this, if not 'in situ'? So, we become observers of an evening’s dining.
... in any fine dining restaurant the world over, on almost any occasion, you will find the same tables...
Curiously, in any fine dining restaurant the world over, on almost any occasion, you will find the same tables. Call them dining archetypes if you like — each with their own preordained and characteristic undercurrents. From experience and observation we have re-created four of these — four classic and diverse tables.
A foursome of gals, out to indulge. As the ever-cynical Ovid put it "the women come to see the show, they come to make a show themselves". Close friends all, eager to explore each other's company and confidences, with the assurance that friendship allows. Still tolerance has its limits, and underlying brittleness a way of asserting itself.
A trio of guys, out to do business. Testosterone rules this party as they pick apart the advertising game, in search of an angle. But in this deal who is selling and who is being sold?
We round out our quartet with two couples: a fresh relationship, and a fading one — the battle of minds for a body, and an anniversary in crisis.
How will the diners at our four tables deal with the consequences of dining – the feelings of satisfaction and dismay that come from better understanding of ourselves and searing insight into others? And what of the various dining stages? These provide more than just a chronological sequence to the evening. With the expectations they arouse and their sometime rituals, we can be sure they will add a distinctive momentum to developments at the tables.
For those who’ve never played the roles described (and that’s unlikely) you can do so now vicariously. For those who have, there’s the promise of viewing a parallel universe. Here things that have happened to you will be re-played to the same or different endings (whether worse or better only you will know), while the psychological reasons are examined and laid bare.
Perhaps by the end of the evening your dining experiences of the past, and their aftermaths, will take on greater clarity and meaning. Who knows where this may lead?
NOTE: The narrative of You, the Diner commenced on June 30, 2008 with The Foods of Love and Lust, and will continue for four episodes. A book on this theme will be published as The Psychodynamics of Dining.
