7. Culina The kitchen is now for many the center of the contemporary house. In Pompeii it counted as among the most private parts. The culina was hidden away and unseen, in a labyrinth of rooms that also included the single household latrine, and any possible combination of religious niches, storerooms, secret passages for people to slip out unnoticed, bakeries, stables, baths, and even empty rooms with lockable doors decorated with erotic scenes, which can only be construed as hideaways … Part of Pompeii’s enduring fascination is the way it becomes a receptacle for fantasy, a site of projection. For me, having married a chef, these private parts churned up an uncanny, all-encompassing vision of the culina as a site of passion: the room that holds the flame. What sort of fire is this? One of appetites, needs, emotions. Consumption. Excess. Waste. Body parts. Desire. A hunger. Let’s not forget taste . How can painting ever come out from under that fixation? In an ominous foreboding of the coming eruption, the culina was always dark and filled with smoke, lit by an oven hearth and open fireplaces for roasting and boiling; the only form of ventilation being a small hole. Yet the grueling conditions were in sharp contrast to the special attention given to utensils, kettles, pots, and other kitchenware. Pestles in the shape of a thumb. Pots with curvy legs. A face of a mythical creature or sacrificial animal at the end of a pan handle, a woman bending as the grip of a water vessel. Conspicuous consumption, or the everyday tool transformed into a conduit for the otherworldly? What else rises here? The light of devotion. The fire of sacrifice. In Pompeii, every house contained a lararium, a household shrine filled with paintings, statues, and other offerings, dedicated to select gods and goddesses, dutifully worshipped to protect the domus and its inhabitants. It is no coincidence these have been found by the culina . This sort of flame for being saved … … is equally the heat that makes you want to rip off your clothes. “At the beginning I was utterly at a loss,” Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents , “and the first clue that I had came from the philosopher-poet Schiller who observed that the mechanism of the world was held together by hunger and love.” The flame of passion, the urges of the body, the obsession with the separate parts that inspire attraction, incantation, or curse. All that circulates within a boiling heart. —AK
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