I FIND NO ICE-CREAM PARLOR. I TRY TO TAKE comfort in history, or at least, in brochures: The first ice-cream parlor in North America was opened by colonist and confectioner Philip Lenzi in New York City in 1776.
I’m often asked: what’s the deal with this ice cream thread? What does ice cream have to do with the guy who took the first photo of the giant squid? Let’s fast-forward to Part Three of the book, which engages various experiences and expressions of pain across time, culture and species. Historically, one of the reasons that humans have considered the giant squid to be a monster, to be evil (it was known as the “Devil-fish” before it was known as the giant squid) had to do not only with its size and shape, but also its silence; especially how it would remain silent, even after a fisherman cuts one of its tentacles off, for instance (which occurs in a scene in the book). Since the squid didn’t express pain as we’d expect it to (silently, rather than screaming), we told ourselves that it didn’t feel pain, and was therefore the Other, the Monster… We still do this with animals, in fact (fish, perhaps, most especially). In researching cultural expressions of pain, and the ways in which we greet the pain of another, I became interested in the ways in which we try to assuage the pain of others. We write heartfelt cards. We tie balloons to their bedframes. We girdle the tones of our voices toward sounds we associate with sympathy… We bring gifts. In my research, I found that two of the most popular “gifts” the world over are flowers and ice cream. These two things kept coming up, over and over again. I began to think harder about this, to search for my own connections with ice cream, for instance, and how they may serve—however implicitly—to communicate with my obsession over the giant squid. So, I decided to commit. To see if I could pull this off. Even though I realize the connection is tenuous, I had to trust that the repeated appearance of ice cream in my squid research process needed to mean something. So, I decided to walk that tightrope, give credence to digression and associative logic. I wanted the reader to be as surprised and delightfully disoriented as I was when continually uncovering these ancillary bits subject matter and mustering the imaginative alchemy necessary to associate them with the main thread. Our brains are often restless. How is yours restless? What else, for instance, does ice cream make you think of? What particular memories? Who else was there? What else was going on in the world then? Where do those memories lead you? Use ice cream here as a portal into your past…
