Black cake

I place a piece of the black cake in my mouth and close my eyes to summon that ancient wisdom which says that tasting is the swallowing of truth, yet my tongue meets only a dense void, the very taste of nothingness, a nihilism held in the hand and melted upon the tongue without leaving a trace. We believe the eye sees things from a safe distance and the ear hears them without being tainted by them, but the sense of taste alone forces you to open your mouth, swallow the object, and dismantle it within your gut to know it. Thus, the ancient Latin roots taught us that SAPERE = to know, is the very same as = to taste, but what happens when the wisdom you swallow is mere ash? here I' m not tasting ingredients mingled with heat and time instead I'm swallowing collapse, swallowing the very fissure where all meanings fall and dissolve into a tasteless black mass

And the blackness of this cake is not the blackness of romantic grief nor the blackness of final death, but rather the blackness of the soil where things decompose to reshape themselves, the blackness of collapse wherein the comfortable boundaries between the raw and the cooked, between the nature that devours itself and the kitchen that mimics it, disintegrate...the cake before me appears as a complete form but as I chew it I feel this form is merely an illusion it collapses in my mouth just as matter collapses in the belly of the earth, and I too collapse with it, for I am not an independent being standing outside this circle to judge or contemplate it, but rather a part of this wretched material transformation that swallows its own form to reproduce nothingness

And in this blind swallowing, a kind of inverted synesthesia occurs not colors dancing with scents as in the rituals of primitive tribes, nor as in kitchens that deceive the brain by mixing chocolate and spices, but rather a synesthesia of melancholy where my tongue tastes the flavor of the color black and my ear hears the sound of the dough losing its soul in the oven It's a shared sense born from the womb of neurological and biological despair  like the state of consciousness resembling that liminal moment between waking and sleep when you fall into your bed and no longer feel your body, only falling and falling into a blackness devoid of taste, scent or sound, merely a weight that fills the stomach and burdens the soul.

So If true knowledge is to digest the essence of things and absorb them so they become part of your blood and flesh, then what am I to become after having digested this black cake? the matter that entered my gut granted me neither energy nor wisdom, but rather a subtle weight of nothingness/ I have eaten the void and the void is now eating me from within...the (black) cake wasn't merely a food that ended with its swallowing, but my personal ticket into that material continuity where nothing remains as it's and nothing is worth tasting...thus, we eat collapse and become collapse, orbiting the sphere of this cosmic kitchen that cooks for us nothing but the ash of our lifespans... In the end, this layered sensory experience leaves a bleak, unresolved impression, where the tongue is rendered inert and the stomach burdened with a dense, unassimilable void, as though the mind had tasted the supreme truths of its own perishing and its transmutation into solid matter...the black cake either refuses to yield any flavor pointing to its vegetal or sugary origin, declaring the sovereignty of a material darkness that transcends human naming and perception, reminding us that the deepest wisdom may lie not in grasping and understanding the world, but in swallowing its unknown silence and submitting entirely to the nihilism that envelops its core and it's not merely a dessert that has been burnt or dyed, but the most painful and stripped down metaphor for matter returning to its primordial origin and for the moment when tasting transforms from a means of survival and pleasure into a profound Xstential act wherein man tastes the flavor of nothingness, realizing that the comfortable boundaries between his self and the nothingness surrounding it have collapsed forever in a single bite

DIGITAL PAINTING* BY ME*