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Seeing a donut is a brain state.
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A brain state I rarely aspire to. Can we substitute cheesecake? And not the American variety, which is all well and good, but cannot hold a candle to the Polish variety, which is made of potatoes. This confection created a battery of brain states in what I have to call 'me' during the mid-sixties, when "I" was a law-clerk working in Fetter Lane, and discovered cheesecake in its Polish form in a Jewish delicatessen where we used to take our afternoon tea.
There may have been, in my relationship to this suite of cheesecake slices, a series of associated and networked brain states. But it seems to me that there was also a series of associated and networked confectioners of cheesecake, servers of cheesecake, and makers of pots of tea, and that these associations and networks reached back into Poland, and from Poland made their way across the centuries during which cheesecakes were fashioned and perfected.
That is to say that this "I" or "me" which thinks of itself as fixing a cheesecake - rather than a donut - in its regard, is, at least in so far as cheesecakes rather than donuts are concerned, an artifact of interconnections in which "my" brain plays an important (to what "I" think of as "me") but nevertheless minor part.
And the cheesecake which my wife served us after lunch - which was neither Polish nor American, although, I think, closer to the latter - is part of an informal contract that links both her and me to a multiplicity of worlds, cooks, and
writers of recipes.