Les tricoteuses

All is made of story. Life is but narration which weaved thread can be alternately seen through words one moment to better disappear in silence the next, just to surface again like breath breaking above still waters. He who knows how to tell a story also knows how to slow Death’s both merciless and merciful hands. And so, it is how I have come to recount stories inspired from the most inconspicuous of things, plucking them from the cold «ombres de l’oubli» (shades of the banal, if you wish), and bringing them forth into the golden light of life’s fragile mathematical beauty, making their brilliance reflect back its gilt glint into the casting mind’s eye. All stories are about communion with life. One starts with its birth, accompanies it through its lessons and evolution, and if one is blessed enough, never shall speak its last words.

It is with this predilection for story in mind, coupled with the request to create a canapé for a collective vernissage where I was to show my art, from which stemmed the following story. How could I resist the invitation to reveal, even release, the extraordinary from under the cosmetic veil of the banality of a simple canapé. A good story can make a shy canapé glorious and triumphant in the mouth of a pauper neglected by the murderous blandness of the quotidian. Many opine that a canapé is nothing but a canapé. Ah! Well, is it the same about the pretzel? Indeed no: the pretzel was the creation of a baker who had his life to barter against the innovation of a bread through which the sun could shine thrice. So, my canapés, if not gastronomical salvation, needed to be buoys to the impotence of conversations which wreckage filled the room in cumbersome awkward silences and lifeless limp interests in the weather forecast.

And how about the madeleine? From this minuscule French delicacy, once dipped in tea, sprouted volumes rife with memories in search for a narrator’s lost time. And so if Proust, renown author, dandy and lover of men of his time, were to have his madeleines, I am to have my tricoteuses. For such is how I have named the canapés I have created in order to conjure the past and give flight to nonchalant exchanges devoid of any of life’s thrilling blush.

Les tricoteuses? Terror-era knitters during a post-revolutionary France where many heads were separated from their trunks and others from their crowns. Preoccupied with procedures, executioners needed witnesses to give assent; they hired the time of elderly women who spent all their knitting time giving as many assents to executions as they made slip stitches, sometimes their eyes not even leaving their work to know the face of the one they had sentenced. Just like the Hours, their Greek homologous goddesses, Les tricoteuses determined the fate of many an accused. Since they were attuned with the wishes of those in power, seldom would they refuse the accused the privilege of marrying the Widow. Many young lives perished (as we are all children when meeting with the end) under the cantankerous and crotchety women’s nonchalance as their twisted fingers wriggled woolen meaning out of their cognitive dissidence while bodies were decollated one by one. “Au suivant! Au suivant!”

Recipe for despondent, impotent and self-exonerating witnesses to the actions of authority's excelled expression of mediocrity:

How does one create a tricoteuse? First, one does not create just one: tricoteuses only exist in groupings as their responsibility and sense of humanity and reason are diluted into the mass. Here are the culinary correspondences one will need to create such a tasty installation :

To represent the chairs on which their righteous bottoms sat, miniature melba toast, on which one will spread hot pepper purée.

As for their putrefied foul smelling souls, they can be replaced by a minuscule piece of very blue cheese. In fact, this is not as much a synonymy as it is an equivalent. Dab on some piped creamy goat cheese so as to admit some kind of humanity left, but make sure to moisten it with one drop of tobasco sauce in memory of the disembodied sorrow that accompanied their “devoir d’État”. As for their heads, plop a single blueberry (In French, the term to designate this fruit also means a naïve person who has no real experience in life or valuable competencies). Two thin matchstick slices of dark fig can be speared into the goat cheese mass of the body. Their colour emulates that of old demoiselles cooking in the sun for hours as blood is being spilled before them. And now for the final touch: pipe some more goat cheese strands from one fig stick to the other. This, of course, will represent the threading wool that gave these priceless merciless ladies of indifference their name.

Voilà! Conversation pieces of which one can extoll the virtues while feeding them to those who one feels shares much of the same traits with Les tricoteuses.Whilst their mouths are being fully furnished with taste and texture, it will afford one the opportunity for catharsis as its story will dovetail with the truism that one shares much in common with which one eats. Of course, if one fears immediate ill reactions, one could add that this does not extend to them…yet.
Lessons of life from the Velours Abattoir:
-It is a privilege, not an aesthetic choice,  to have one's stories sculpted onto one's skin and soul. They are reminders of the battles fought, and loves lost.
 -One must question a system that allows its youth to die under its order, or to be devoured by its untamed hunger, be it through its incoherent and self satisfying laws or wars.
-One is always too young to die.
-One who is witness to the demise of the innocent must ask oneself how the system allows them to knit silently in the hearth of their minds, satiated with comforting self affirmations and half-truths.
Vicomte de Velours,

Carte de visite from the Velours Abattoir