#2 - 'A Brief Essay on Interpreting Soup' by Aiden Clarkson and Drew Grant

“I have a lot of Soup experience.”

A Brief Essay on Interpreting Soup.

Written by Aiden Clarkson

Illustrated by Drew Grant

People say Soup is too thick to see life through. Broth, they say, is thin enough, but still colours whatever you can scry. But you can see life through Soup. Soup is the perfect representative and reflective tool to help us better understand the melange and milieu of our fractured, post-modern lives.

I will provide two brief examples, although there is a potentially infinite amount of ways to interpret Soup. It is something you can and should do - as a meditative tool, as a way of centring yourself in our increasingly hectic world, or even simply as a fun game to play with a fat child.

Example:

Soup is salty. Soup is made from experience. You cannot make Soup without having experienced Soup at least once. Soup is made from ingredients cut up and shredded and boiled. Life is experience. Life is the process of being cut up and shredded and boiled. Life is the process of being made to cry. Our tears are salty. Soup is salty.

We thicken Soup with cornflour. When you mix cornflour with cold water it becomes thick and white.

If I was to make a short film in which I needed to show semen, I would use cornflour as fake semen. If I made a short film it would definitely involve semen.
We pour cornflour mixed with cold water into salty Soup to thicken it up. Soup is our tears, cornflour is semen. Life is the process of pouring semen into our tears, and then eating scalding litres and litres and more scalding litres of the resulting liquid.

Though this may be a very masculine way of looking at Soup and life.

Example:

Soup contains many objects and particles floating suspended in it. These objects are open to interpretation. We can interpret the way they represent parts of life.

I make a fine Soup involving a whole pucker-skinned chicken, and vegetables, and a lot of whole peppercorns. The peppercorns float in the Soup and startle you when you bite into them. Let us interpret these peppercorns.

The peppercorns can be seen to represent our relationships with other people. They are small and delicious and painful. After you have finished one your mouth hurts and hurts but you want to eat another. You want the pain of that burning excitement forever. You want to have a split peppercorn on your tongue everyday for the rest of your life until you die die die. You want to keep that split peppercorn safe in your mouth like how alligators nurture their young.

This is do-able, but it takes huge effort and a change in life-style. More often than not you must swallow or spit.

Conclusion:

In conclusion,
as I have previously stated,
Soup allows us to see life.

*I apologise if this Brief Essay on Soup has a negative tone and expresses negative attitudes towards life.

I know, and I hope that you understand, that Soup can be used as a positive tool, which represents (and can be used to examine) the multitude of incredible and joyous facets of our one-time-only lives.

Aiden Clarkson

Aiden Clarkson writes shaking in his bed because the rest of his house is x100 haunted.
He contributes to www.foreveryyear.blogspot.com and www.twelvefortyfive.blogspot.com. The address for his blog/multimedia-communications-interface-portal is www.spookyactionspookyaiden.blogspot.com.

Drew Grant
'I have spent the majority of my existence creating things, leading to a dark and perverse love affair with illustration. The best way to describe my approach is taking a chunk of reality and moulding it into something totally unexpected. My passion for design is only matched by my hatred for coleslaw.'