Ajran from Hamakom
The title Hamakom is appropriated from Jewish mysticism. I use the word “appropriated” in a sense of a “reductive pilfering”, as I have taken the word, stripped it to its bare essence and used it for my own purposes. I’m aware that this may be bothersome to a chunk of the populace. This speculation does not overtly concern me, however, because I dwell within one of the moons of Neptune (Sao, if you must know specifics) and am aloof to the general wisdom and ravings alike of mankind.
Hamakom is also a character in an unfinished novel entitled Listopad that hangs around lazily amid my electronic archives. Ideas from it surface now and again in my other writings and especially when I sense a tenuous connection between what I might be writing at present and the book’s oppressive imaginative weight. Hamakom is a placeless place or perhaps a place that envelops all places - the contents of a thin film around every infinity of quantum universes, or around the entire breath of God if that more aligns with your thinking. It could even be the Godhead itself - an unknowable aspect that coats everything in that convenient higher dimensional manner. In the novel, Hamakom also manifests itself as a being who interacts with the main characters, unraveling their uncomfortable truths from within them and then coating their surface form with these unraveled truths like a film. He also reappears symbolically as a stoat, possibly even your clairvoyant neighbour’s pet stoat, though that is unclear in the text.
The Ajran from Hamakom is a wholesome beverage that has absolutely no origin in mysticism, the “Godhead”, placeless places, stoats or humans who are tortured by inner conflict. Though drinking this (admittedly obtuse) variation of Ajran may, in fact, maneuver one from concrete placefulness into a kind of mystic void, especially given the raw garlic content. I have always been of the opinion that quality comestibles are a portion of the true path to divinity. So, before the Hamakom of my novel consigns you to be absorbed by a stone on your next traipse under the bridge on Táborská ulice in Nusle, further your way towards culinary enlightenment by absorbing this particular “Ajran” every morning by way of your digestive tract before you are absorbed into the tedium of another day.
Chunks of the culinary cosmos
- 150g so-called “Greek” yogurt, slopped into a beaker
- About the same liquid quantity of water filtered through the system devised by your robot chamber-maid who recently became your wife after an endless courtship that involved capacitance modifications
- An entire, immaculate cucumber, raised from infancy by your clairvoyant neighbour’s pet stoat’s uncle, peeled or not peeled, depending on your shoe size (left foot), and chopped into pieces the diameter of your cat’s tail (including fur)
- A chunk of ginger about the size of your cat’s left front paw
- A chunk of turmeric root about the size of your cat’s duodenum
- Two asteroid shaped chunks of garlic about the size of your cat’s consciousness
- Hromada hnoje of ground pepř
- Enough Celtic sea salt to fill 1/23rd of your cat’s skull, very loosely packed - more to taste
- The cumin seed that your robot chambermaid, who is now your wife, lightly toasted on the heating panel attached to her bosom as she lay supine
Whip and liquefy in the turbine you stole from the synagogue last week with the help of both your cat and your robot chambermaid, both of which consider you their spouse and secretly conspire together to absorb you into the local Godhead surrounding your culinary excesses.
Enjoy with an arugula and spirulina salad.