THE FORK

There’s a hesitation about the fork. You hold own the food with the fork in your left hand while you cut it with the knife held in your right. Then -if you’re not only right-handed but also American- you put down the knife, then transfer the fork to your right hand an send the speared morsel up to your mouth.

Grownups throw knives. Children throw spoons. Nobody (I think) would throw a fork. It may be four-thirds of a toy trident, but it can’t be thrown as one. It wouldn’t arrive, spear like, tines first.

The weight is in the handle.

The fork as emblem -emblem of the real. Jasper Johns, explaining something about “my general development so far” said: “That is to say, I find it more interesting to use a real fork as a painting than it is to use a painting as a real fork”.

What would a fork that isn’t real look like?

The fork is the youngest of the three great eating utensils. The Last Supper was set with knives and spoons only. No forks either at the wedding feast in Cana.

It made its appearance when the knife and spoon were well established. Invented in Italy, thought a foppish pretension when it arrived in England in the early seventeenth century: a set of gold “Italian forkes” presented to Elizabeth I by the Venetian ambassador were put on display at Westminster; she never used them.

The introduction of that vital implement, for a long time despised as effete, enabled people to distance themselves from the eating process by avoiding manual contact with the food.

The principle of fastidiousness. New forms of distance, new forms of delicacy.

New rules of finicky behavior at table proliferated. People were expected to manipulate an increasingly complicated battery of utensils.

It seemed hard, setting up and keeping this distance.

Now we take forks for granted.