Notes on the Wheel

To "reinvent the wheel" is to duplicate a basic method that has long since been accepted and even taken for granted.- Wikipedia



For years I have been carrying around with me a deep aversion to wine. Not drinking it. But speaking about it beyond the simple "Yes, another." Similar to the icky feeling when you have to explain your emotions, I never had a common language for it. I went even further than that, I feared it.

"What are you drinking? Is it dry?"
"I don't know. I don't care. Yes?"

This was my quick and transitional response. Inside logic barometers flying off kilter. Melt down. How can a liquid be dry? Oxymoron. And wine tastings. Whoa. I felt like I had been tossed into Fellini's 8 1/2. The characters, the soft buzz, the foreign language and the truly foreign language. This was all before Sasha and the word mandalas.

Mouthcoating. Mouthfeel. Sulfury. Phenolic. Worty. Empyreumatic. Mousey. Horsey. Phenolic. Aroma taints. Groundy. This is like a language poet's bad dream.

What the wheel does is provide complex contexts. It is in its essence a radial land of language. Simple words clutter the outer layers: wet paper, dusty etc. These words are then enveloped by larger concepts. In one coffee wheel wet paper is a component of woody, woody a piece of loss of organic material, that loss a piece if taste faults, one of the variable final four: Taste Faults, Aroma Taints, External Changes, and Internal Changes.

This interests and inspires me. A kind of soduku of the senses. Do I taste this? Or this? Or anything. What I had identified as an inadequacy may have just been an issue of confidence. Any new language is exciting, especially one native and lurking right below our linguistic surface. -Anna



I like the mandalas. A lot. There was a long time in my life when I thought and feared that I just was not creative. Worst assignment of all time- that came up throughout the early years of elementary school- was absolutely this: Write a story.

A story? Yes, a story- just two paragraphs, one page, three pages.

About what? Anything you want.

Nightmare. When faced with all the possibilities in the world I can't function, something short circuits in my brain. I do not have an artist's mind at all. My brain completely freaks out when it sees a blank canvas but has no problem entering an exploratory conversation because within conversation there is an exchange. There is something to ping.

Noun:
1.Ping -

a river in western Thailand; a major tributary of the Chao Phraya Ping River Kingdom of Thailand, Siam
Thailand - a country of southeastern Asia that extends southward along the Isthmus of Kra to the Malay Peninsula; "Thailand is the official name of the former Siam"

2.ping -

a sharp high-pitched resonant sound (as of a sonar echo or a bullet striking metal)
sound - the sudden occurrence of an audible event; "the sound awakened them"

Verb
1.ping -

hit with a pinging noise; "The bugs pinged the lamp shade"
hit-collide with, impinge on, run into,
strike - hit against; come into sudden contact with; "The car hit a tree"; "He struck the table with his elbow"

2.ping -

sound like a car engine that is firing too early; "the car pinged when I put in low-octane gasoline"; "The car pinked when the ignition was too far retarded"
pink, knock sound, go - make a certain noise or sound; "She went `Mmmmm'"; "The gun went `bang'"

3.ping -

make a short high-pitched sound; "the bullet pinged when they struck the car"
sound, go - make a certain noise or sound; "She went `Mmmmm'"; "The gun went `bang'"

4.ping -

contact, usually in order to remind of something; "I'll ping my accountant--April 15 is nearing"
contact, get hold of, get through, reach - be in or establish communication with; "Our advertisements reach millions"; "He never contacted his children after he emigrated to Australia"

5.ping -

end a message from one computer to another to check whether it is reachable and active; "ping your machine in the office"
computer science, computing - the branch of engineering science that studies (with the aid of computers) computable processes and structures
contact, get hold of, get through, reach - be in or establish communication with; "Our advertisements reach millions"; "He never contacted his children after he emigrated to Australia"

Apart from the Thailand reference all these things sort of articulate how I feel about it. My brain works like this in most respects- I'm constantly defining things against other things whether it is events in my own life (comparing them to the lives of others or my own past) or things I'm eating.

My first cheese tastings were absolutely like that. The woman who taught me how to work in the cheese caves would have me taste cheeses and describe them. I immediately defaulted to texture descriptions like gooey, ooey, creamy, decadent. Near meaningless in the realm of taste and flavor but I didn't know how to create a description from thin air. The only flavor references I could make were to other dairy products- this is milky or buttery. Until I saw the cheese mandala.

It opened up many possibilities because there were words on it that I didn't even associate with food. Honestly it felt like this bounty of ideas to get my brain going. And when I think about mandalas for real- they are usually circular motifs and often used as aids during meditation. Maybe the circle is partly about narrowing the focus- something that seems like it should hamper the mind, but in my case actually frees it up to sort of free associate.

Once you've done many tastings the wheels become useful in a different way- more like a professional tool to hone your skills that make you fit within your industry- but really, you need them less because now you've got a whole host of sense memories about tasting similar and different things... -Sasha

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