Arete

I bake only one thing: pineapple upside-down cake. It's not quite from scratch -- it's based off a yellow cake mix. But by all accounts it's pretty good. (It is sugar and butter.)

I have made this cake over a hundred times. The recipe comes from a kindly churchwoman, Joanne, who once advised me that most cooks find ways to make it easy on themselves. Although accoplished at making things "from scratch", Joanne is a practical person who doesn't value the artificiality inherent in a cultlike worship of authenticity.

Today, after making it successfully and error-free for, say, the last 60 times, I botched it.

While moving the pan onto the oven grate, I accidentally splashed a tiny bit of batter into the bottom of the oven. Perhaps because I'm a somewhat inexperienced cook, I didn't realize how quickly this would turn into a terrible situation. (My mother, who is presumably far more proficient in cooking, saw this and also didn't think anything of it.) I set the timer ( to precisely 34 minutes, as experience suggested), and went to go work on some email.

After about ten minutes, my mother alerted me that smoke was coming out of the oven.

I opened the oven, and was rewarded with a faceful of the worst smoke I had ever experienced in my life. It burned my eyeballs, and reeked like burning plastic. The smoke detector went off, crippling a third sense. After flailing, baking sheet in hand, to shut off the beeping, I fumbled with the vent switch.

The cake was tossed, and now I have to scrub the bottom of the oven. If I'm impatient or inattentive, I can look forward to injuring my sense of touch as well. If that happens, I might say fuck it, and eat some of the nasty half-cooked mess that was going to be my hundred-something pineapple upside-down cake.

I'm not mourning the failure; hell, it's just a cake. The church people will have to put up with a store-bought, substandard substitute.

But it did remind me that, even after a successful track record of doing something incredibly well, it is possible to have a failure. 

This wasn't quite negligence, or overconfidence as my mother so helpfully observed. It was inexperience with this specific type of failure. Maybe a touch of fatigue contributed.

Why does this merit a post? Why does anything? Maybe that cake is life, or work, or anything that we do often enough that we feel like we have this down, and, rightly or wrongly, however insignificantly, becomes a bit of our identity. Even people who enjoy the challenge of pushing their limitations and challenging themselves constantly have things they value and enjoy because they know how to do those things well... special activities that are comforting because they are familiar and mastered. And when those things get screwed up... well, it's unwelcome, and possibly forces us to reexamine the painful, impossibly vast gap between mastery and perfection. If the person is older, maybe it prompts him to think that, just maybe, he is Stevens from Remains of the Day, in denial about the decline of his powers and competence in the twilight years.

Or maybe it's just a damn cake. Mistakes happen, and there may be no more signifcant lesson to take than the vague prescription to "be more careful next time". There is some necessary tension between a pursuit of excellence and a tolerance for human frailty. Jerking back and forth between the two poles is disconcerting; allowing oneself to be pulled in both directions at once is the mental equivalent of drawing and quartering. (Would it be drawing and halving in this case?)

I love how the word arete means both "excellence of any kind" and "a crested mountain ridge formed by glaciers". It's a great metaphor: slow, grinding shaping that, after eons of great force, forms something unnaturally sharp and distinctive. It is natural, but not accidental -- it is slow and deliberate.

I have met no true savants. I have met only people who, gifted, even geniuses, have won their excllence through persistent effort, focus, failure, and, perhaps greatest of all, desire. I'm not sure "hard work" is a useful description, but I suppose it applies, given what most people regard as work. If anything, Edison underestimated the importance of "perspiration" with his famous quote on genius.

If I make this cake well, it's because I have done it over hundred times, sometimes bothering to tweak and adjust, even experiment--yet still retaining the sound foundations of the mechancial processes of melting butter and brown sugar, draining pineapple, measuring (or eyeballing) liquids and solids, mixing to a proper consistency, layering the pineapple, pouring the batter, cooking to a time within the three minutes or so window bracketed by states of undercooked and slightly burnt, cooling an appropriate time (during which it continues to cook) and remembering to flip before  the sugar and butter cool and congeal, causing it becomes irreversibly stuck within the baking pan.

Even with this, I'm not a cooking genius. I just make a damn good cake. People enjoy the end product, and that's fine by me. But most geniuses I know do, at least on occasion, get frustrated with a culture that sees only where they have arrived, not where they've been, a culture that also seems willing to find fault, or celebrate their failings or weaknesses.

I swear, my mother was slightly happy to see this cake fail. "Usually I'm the one who burns things on the stove." For some reason, it reminds me of a time when she expressed joy when I brought home a C on a 6th grade math test -- I think she was relieved that she had some evidence that I wasn't that different from her.

It's just a cake. Except it's not. It's life. I need to do something--anything!--professionally in a way that mirrors the process of proficiency and mastery in making this single cake. It's time to let go of what I think (and what others think) I'm "naturally" good at, and just pick something that I care enough about to tolerate years of slow, unsteady (but hopefully, on average, increasing) improvement.

Of course, maybe the cake is more instructive than I think. Had I set out with the goal of actually improving the cake recipe from the beginning, it would've taken maybe only 10 or so tries before it reached the present state of quality. The process would've been slower and filled with more mistakes, but maybe I would've ended  up with a better cake sooner.

But that wasn't the goal; a hundred-something cakes ago, all I wanted was something that I could do reasonably well. I suppose, in terms of jobs and relationships, that's okay too. At my heart, despite my scientific training, I'm not much of an empiricist. And as I mentioned before, even the most die-hard empiricist needs things that are safe and predictable.

Even then, failure is possible, and should be expected.

I have a better sense of what arete demands at 30 than I did at any point in college or grad school. I just hope I'll be able to work half as hard as I think I did during undergrad, when effort, not brilliance, helped me succeed when other, better prepared and brighter people did not.