DUCK SOUP: PHANTOM GOURMOND VISITS MAISON DE MOTYL

Alexander J. Motyl. Imperial Ends. The Decay, Collapse and Revival of Empires. New York: Columbia University Press, c. 2001.

A couple of weeks ago the reknowned Continental chef Magda de Motyl picked me up at my luxurious East Side Apartment above 82nd Street, a mile north of Bloomingdale's, escorted me to the subway and accompanied me under the river to emerge in one of the many grimy, decaying neighborhoods of working-class Newark, New Jersey. She held my hand feverishly as we ascended a low eminence to enter at last a majestic, Viking-style eating hall ("Maison de Motyl") at the peak of the low-browed hillock ("Freedom Heights"), where the eyes of all men could feast upon us in repressed envy.
APERATIF
At the gentle urgings of my solicitous escort, widely reknowned as a witty conversationalist, I resolved to try the Canard au Motyl, modestly named after herself. As we dallied over the Bloody Marys and indulged in footsie under the table, the chef (famous in Newark) explained duck anatomy to me. Duck, she explained, was now back in fashion after a long absence. It is a migratory fowl with a central torso and peripheral limbs that sometimes act independently. "Theorizing about duck," she breathed confidentially, "may be a challenge but it is not insurmountable." Duck disposes of a hierarchically organized nervous system with a brain at the center and a rim of peripheral ganglia that feed information to the center, which in turn parcels out commands to the limbs. Decay is caused by a weakening of the brain; decline is a weakening of the fowl's physical prowress and a decline in prestige throughout the barnyard pecking order; disassemblage represents a rotting away of the extremities; attrition is manifest when rodents in the hen-house appear to nibble away at the weakened and near-immobile corpus; and revival is made manifest by the re-emergence of a healthy brain and torso, possibly after a vetinary's injection to restore the fluid circulation in a desiccated body which has lost confidence in its capacities.
The chef's appreciation of the duck is focussed exclusively on its anatomical structure. She denies it free will, and ardently believes that "agency-oriented, choice-centered and intentionalist" behavior is beyond the capacity of a dumb bird.
Recalling the assiduous observations of a hospitable Baltic guide for Hamburgers and Frankfurters touring from Germany, Rein Taagepera (the "Latvian Flash"), Ms. Motyl notes that the ideal trajectory of a falling duck imitates a parabola. In the tenebrous background of the refectory a hand-wound grammophone began to grind forth a recitation of "Parabolic ballad" by the famous Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky., who wrote:

Each gets to the truth with his own parameter
a worm finds a crack, man makes a parabola"

Evidently the same holds true for ducks. The same would be true for all ducks, should other factors not intervene. All ducks have the same morphology, and this identical structure holds the key to understanding the relationship between brain and limbs, head and wings, core and periphery. Nevertheless, Ms. Motyl's sample is delimited to the swamps and shores of eastern and central Europe, without regard to the Mediteranean, the Atlantic, or the slanted morphological characteristics of Oriental ducks. She is pessimistic regarding the survival of a single endangered species, le carnard russe or Russian Duck, predicting its increasing isolation within a restricted habitat.

ANTIPASTO

Dissecting the torso of the fallen fowl at our table with a ceremonial flourish of rhetorical scalpels, my loquacious chef pointed again to the brain as supreme in the hierarchy of avian organs, communicating along ganglia to subordinated control cells in the extended limbs which cannot communicate or signal to each other. But as she looked momentarily askew, I whispered surreptitiously into my cell-phone recorder that she seemed unaware of the radically differing morphology of the corporately-dominant Oriental species, the Japanese Kereitsu and the Korean Chaebol. The Japanese duck has its stomach as the center,or energy bank, with all the other organs feeding from it or contributing to it. The Korean Chaebol takes the heart as the structural center, pumping red blood cells around the corpus including the subordinate stomach with its bank of digestive energy, and used to enjoy a distinctive 5-year feeding cycle for both its northern and southern sub-species. Both of these spreading species slant quite markedly away from the "straight-and-level" European duck structure with which my companion is, apparently, exclusively familiar. But with all species, when the peripheral organs begin to communicate directly with each other, by-passing the Center, disassemblage occurs as the corpus disintegrates.
Kitchen theorists of cuisine take "stability" of the anatomical structure of duck as their base-line. They are uniformly troubled by change. A spark, or a shock, such as a shotgun blast, is requisite to down a ruptured duck. But "One could," Chef Motyl ventured with a wink, "just as easily start with change, and puzzle over stability." But as a trusted employee of the trans-Atlantic Kitchen Condominium, she wouldn't dare. For it would be a form of culinary treachery to entertain the concept that a duck could expire from internally-generated causes. It must always be downed by "shocks from outside," such as errant stones flung by a blindfolded Fortuna, or a wicked boy. Theories of change, to the loyal kitchen crew, are as incomprehensible as "theories of anarchy."
Nevertheless, after darkness falls, the kitchen scullions mutter sotto voce that anatomical theory alone cannot explain the timing of life events in a duck's aging, that rational choice theories erroneously attribute a capacity of ratiocination to an avian brain which lacks the capacity to embrace it, and that anatomical structuralism downgrades both the ideology of avian supremacy shared by all birds and the species-specific cultural quackery of duckdom, just as practitioners of haut cuisine do not transcend the blood-red lines of their own practice. Even Chef Motyl concedes that structuralist or morphological theories of duck anatomy are partial theories. But she simply prefers them (or finds them more accessible) to "agency, choice, and intentionalist" theories, which are self-contradictory, quite confusing,and and above the capacity of the average dead duck anyway on its way to the cutting board.

PASTO

The health of the edible fowl begins to decline as the brain, or center of the normal avian nervous system, begins to expand within the cranial cavity (or "brain bunker") and sucks ever-increasing electrical stimulation from its mobile peripheral extremities, resulting in mass inflationary pressures exerted against the bony protective templates surrounding it. In Riga, Latvia, the hunter Taagepera has photographed the trajectories of countless falling ducks over the decades as they splash down into the chilly waters of the Gulf of Finland, and can graphically demonstrate that the defunct ducks fall in a consistent parabola. Chef Motyl maintains that take-off, cruising, and controlled descent are common characterists
of this feathered species, but that terminal collapse (or "crash") can be explained only by the hammering of outside variables (or, to prefer a botanical image, by a gardener's sickle cutting off a dying blossom). Ducks flourish when blood cells carry nutritional resources to the central brain, which "shares the wealth" by returning a portion to the peripheral organs again. But the voracious maw of the Central Core manifests increasing obesity as it gratifys an uncontrollable appetite until, to speak crudely, it "busts a gut." As the overstretched core corrodes and the "gut" of the Core explodes, globules of partially digested informational nutrient spatter the walls of the cranial cage until rodents prowling around the kitchen perimeter snatch them up with their jaws and carry them away to gnaw in their separate holes. The entire anatomical structure of the doomed duck progressively disaggregates from the head down, rather like the fall of the World Trade Center in New York.
While asserting that "agency-implemented, rational-choice and conscious-intentionalist" explanations of duck behavior patterns attribute far too great an intelligence quotient to the flighty feathered paddle-footed biped, Chef Motyl (somewhat inconsistently) argues that the brain-and-extremities pattern (or "hub-and-spoke" structure) of the duck inherently produces decay, i.e., that stability produces instability, structure unlooses disorder, the rock of ages disintegrates into a Katrina of collapse. The imaginative chef's recipe in this cookbook appears positively Orwellian: "War is peace, freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength." Structure is chaos.
While ducks in the prime of health will win in all barnyard battles with encroaching rival birds, ducks in declining health will both win some and lose some. In psychological imagry, the duck's rational Center plays a delaying game against inexorable decay. The symptoms of this decay are unmistakable: the central brain falls play to illusions (such as power illusion, e.g. flying unopposed into a future expanse of unending grain fields) and the rational or literati cells progresively lose coherence; centrifugal impulses lead the active loci of physical activity toward the peripheral organs; the appetite of the musculature grows as the nutritional intake declines (see the strictures against "hypertrophy of the central nervous mechanism" by Professor Pavel Miliukov in the early twentieth century); and sometimes, as the peripheral limbs attempt to break the control of the overgrown Central Intelligence Apparatus, a systemic pattern of "liberationitis" may be observed afflicting the minor extremities in a kind of "restless legs syndrome."
It would be superfluous to emphasize that the progress of this decay increases the probability that the afflicted duck will lose prestige in the henhouse pecking order and increased attrition of its physical capabilities will be observable. Chef Motyl has commented with regret that anatomical theorists have no way of predicting how far this process of attrition will proceed as the life-cycle of the decaying duck descends along its inescapable parabola. But this conclusion simply demonstrates the restricted applicability of morphological theory to a duck's vital physiological process.
At this juncture, as we jointly devoured a magnificent repast, the Maitre d', Monseignor Caeteris Paribus, seconded to the Maison de Motyl from the Cardinals'Kitchen in Rome, emerged through a white kitchen door shouldering a broad tray laden with the smouldering carcasses of two fallen fowl who reportedly had fallen foul of the blazing marksmanship of Herr Taagepera, camoflauged unbeknownst in a salt-laden clump of Baltic sea-side shubbery. Thrusting his great bald noggin through the white power-door, Joe the Sous-Chef mouthed a penetrating whisper, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of my kitchen!"

MEAT

Although the chef determinendly rejects the view that ducks die from internally-generated system failure, he rather paradoxically insists that a duck's decay is generated inexorably from internal causes. As the peripheral limbs begin to convulse and gyrate on their own (symptomology of "flapdoodle"), attrition must necessarily follow. But the final, fatal stroke, as from a headsman's axe, is an unpredictable factor. Again, the ducks he studies are all denizens of the east European or Baltic regions (e.g., the Pripet Marshes). In these fertile swamps, "easy feeding" permits the ducks to side-waddle or overlook their inherently declining physical resources. In a rather anti-intellectual exercise the chef quacks that the factors leading to duck attrition cannot be predicted; that attrition cannot be predicted; and that any fatuous attempt at life-cycle prediction would fall off her kitchen writing-table like water off a duck's back. She does, however, asservate that ducks on the upswing of their life's trajectory are sometimes inclined to "adopt" and shelter enfeebled and weakened ducks, well along their downward parabolas, to parody a variety of man-boy love relationship, save that the roles are reversed, and that the child (or chick) is father to the man (or dying duck). The notorious scandal involving the overweening Wilhelmian German drake and the inverted Austro-Hungrian cross-bred bird is cited, but he discreetly forbears to allude to the current scandal in which the common Potomac duck reams the tailfeathers of swans from the Thames. The extended feeding-ground of the voracious Peking Duck is totally beyond her range of vision.
In terms of cruising range, the low-bred or "honky-tonk" Potomac duck enjoys a favorable geographic feeding ground around the waters of Chesapeake Bay, but distance from foreign predators, like an oceanic Maginot Line, cannot permanently shield the North American avian from external conflict and internal decay. Be that as it may, it is unquestionable for Chef Motyl that some form of powerful external shock will be necessary to de-feather a high-flying broad-beaked grain-gobbler permanently. Unfortunately, morphologically-inclined theories of internal structure are in principle incapable of predicting future events. Different forms of shock or shot wound ducks differently along various loci of their life parabolas. A duck in decline may unconsciously effect a re-arrangement of its internal organs in a form of anatomical perestroika, but in the end it wll fall prey to the shot of a Great Marksman. (Here the Chef, all unconscious of the fact that she is a victim of internal contradiction, shifted the Leit-motif of her explication de cuisine from anatomical or structural determinism to accentuating the role of Great Men, or Great Shots, thereby endorsing in practice her previously discarded theory of "agency, choice, and intentionalist" activity as the final "decider" in duck-hunting history.) A further weakness is her failure to consider the history of the Canard Fasciste flying around the Mediterranean in Spain, Italy and France, or to acknowledge anecdotal testimony to its re-appearance in Austria.
At this moment Monseignor Caeteris Paribus shambled forth once more, looking like a Teutonic caricature of the Dickinsonian character Uriah Heep, bearing two Schnapps-doused dessert dishes piled high with Canard Flambe, a specialite de la maison.

DESSERT

As my earnest companion's logomachy continued, she reiterated her view that anatomical structuralism cannot predict when or if a downed duck can revive from a severe external shock to reclaim part or all of its previous avian empire. But as she defined "revival" to mark a return to the status quo ante, it became clear to me that her "counterobservational hypothesis" had developed into an Alptraum, or alcoholic's fantasy. Chef Motyl reached for another cognac while she continued to unwind her explantory vision. Her azure eyes appeared to glaze over slightly as a wooden coo-coo clock from the Schwartzwald began to throatily sound its hourly call, "Pee-do-dnya, pee-do-dnya, pee-do-dnya."
If one were to contrast the gigantic European goose to the modest, peace-loving Eurasian duck, it would become evident that the European barnyard is surrounded by formidable institutional fences, akin to the ghetto walls construced in mediaeval Europe as a form of "fortified hamlet" to contain minorities. But the chef regrets that the neighboring lesser Slavic barnyards would probably not be annexed to Euroland Farms (or, in Cryllic lettering, HATO-LAND)"when it matters most." The development gap between Euroland (HATO) and and the inoffensive, peace-loving, collective-minded flocks of the Canard russe could only grow broader with the passage of time. (Regrettably, the recipe tables 4.4 through 4.9, which attempt to quantify taste, are largely nonsense. De gustibus non est disputandum.)
Be that as it may, the course of history predicts a continual expansion of the feeding ranges of various European avian species because of "...a spinoff of untrammeled capitalism and rampant modernization" in duck farming, including force-feeding. As Eurofarms (HATO) expand through globalized inflation of refined fiat-feed, Eastland (Slavgloryfarms) will stagnate, follow a unique path (Sonderweg) toward duck development, or simply degenerate to another Animal Farm as depicted by George Orwell. In any event, the Chef explained with a radiant if twisted smile (though hiccoughing), the eastern ducks will fall off the main flight-path of history (presumably in a declining parabola). While some zoologists view the Canard russe as merely another species of paddle-footed fish-grabbers with their own flock-minded culture and regional veneration of the Great Duck flying over Red Square, the Chef rejects this common-sense view in favor of a darker vision, inclining toward a prognostication of a march of ineffable evil across tundra, taiga, forest, steppe and desert in a perpetual Long Winter of perpetual avian animosity encompassing eleven time zones. Queerly, she neglects to comment on the extended feeding grounds of the Euroland (HATO) sea-birds now goose-stepping through Afghanistan and the "long march" of the omniverous Houston duck from North America to Baghdad, Iraq (not Bagdad, Florida).

DIGESTIF

Her face assumed a gloomy mien as she described the fragmentation of Eastland's barnyard and the consequent constriction of the feeding ground of the Carnard russe, clearly in her mind now an endangered species. She clearly had "misunderestimated" the prudent management of the new owner, Vlad the Farmer, acclained by the ducks (and other fowl forms), as the Re-gatherer of the Russian Barnyard. In his view the Eastland farm managers could hold their unstable farm together only by requesting financial aid from Euroland (HATO) or "...the assistance of solicitous Western meat stores." In this kitchen scenario, the Muscovite ranchero would have to play the role of a "weak sister" dominated by foreign financiers issuing sub-prime ruble mortgages, and exhibiting an increasing suseptability to shocks. Only an aggressive policy of annexing small ranchlets in the "near abroad" could preserve Eastland Farms from decay, further bankruptcies, and collapse. At this point, of course, the farm's assets would be divided among its international creditors, although Chef Motyl was too far gone with Schnapps and Weltschmerz even to allude to common business practice. Should these events transpire, Eastland Farms at the terminus of Slavgloryroad would dissolve into an awkward amalgam of squabbling petty mortgaged farmers assailed by increasing social distress, economic dislocation and distracted by perpetual cock-fighting tourneys behind the hay-mow.
To conclude, Chef Motyl rasped with a raucous rattle in her throat, if Euroland (HATO) continued to buy up farms formerly belonging to Eastland Farms, the stability and security of both Sunriseland and Sunsetland might well become mutually exclusive. At this moment of existential dispair, her faculties abandoned her, and the little chef slid under the table. At a loss as to how to proceed at this unexpected termination to the liquid portion of our elegant repast, I looked around the Maison de Motyl until my eyes struck the exhibit at the
Capitalist Corner of the kitchen where a Praying Wall had been inlaid behind a small statue of the Golden Cockerel. Beneath the pedestal was carved the Latin motto, Coquero ergo sum. On a small table had been had been reverently laid volumes by Brillat-Savarin (Physiology de Gout) and Julia Child (Masterihg the Art of French Cooking), together with a cheap reproduction of her OSS ID card. Above this Corner of Culinary Patriotism was displayed a silken US flag crossed with a black flag to commemorate MIA's lost in the Quest Eternal for a really good duck. I lowered my head repeatedly back-and-forth before the corner prie-dieu, making the requisite gesture of waving a spatula in a broad circle, while repeating the ritual formula to overcome the White Monkeys' mind-body duality, "I duck, duck you." Then I carefully demounted the American flag from its wall-snaps and covered the recumbant body of the now-snoring little chef-let, inebriated with the exuberance of her own elegant ingenuity, and tiptoed out of the Maison de Montyl to return demeurely to my own abode, where the manuscript of a lengthy essay explaining the internal physiology of global duckdom and refuting the sterility of stagnant anatomical structuralism lay waiting to be lashed into order by the vigorous strokes of my little quirt of a pen.
Ensconsed in my domestic carrel, I had initially queried myself, "But who will take care of the recumbant little drunk?" Then I ceased worrying.
Ceaeteris Paribus, of course.

--Esther Khlysta

Literary note: The names of "Esther" and "Magda" are borrowed from a favorite novel of my youth, The Gallery, by John Horne Burnes (1947), who assigned these pet names to two US Army Supply Sergents in occupied Naples after World War II. His oeuvre, cut short by premature death, was appreciated by Gore Vidal.