by Claudia Consonni.
Wandering around the supermarket shelves and the pastry shops looking for a chocolate animal to replace the Easter egg, I struggled to find an object that had both the quality and a very high percentage of good cocoa to satisfy my palate, as well as a pleasant shape. I leave aside the external appearance of the object, the graphics and the packaging to focus on the shape characteristics that I can explore with touch. Sometimes these objects, even from famous brands offering excellent cocoa, do not pass a tactile analysis test. Disproportions, approximation of details, marked relief in the conjunction of the melds and in some cases the poor resemblance to the real animal disappoint the tactile perception. The pleasantness of the experience fades. And even if for taste and smell it is satisfying, the aesthetic pleasure is missing.
However, I like to think that perseverance often pays off and blind people know it. Once, I found a beautiful chocolate hen. It was a rewarding little experience that helped me celebrate my lonely Easter.
By now, a lot of people spends Easter alone, like Robinson Crusoe on a desert island or that prince on his wandering planet and catapulted into the desert by accident. Alone because we are single, widows and widowers, spinsters and bachelors, divorced, separated, halved at home and outside. We are the ones who don’t like Sunday! Better Saturday and weekdays. For us, Christmas or Easter is the same. For us, staying with parents bores us; Christmas with your family and Easter with whoever you want doesn’t matter to us. We kind, open, creative and solitary people are a floating archipelago, lazy islands, indolent fickle beings, perhaps because we are alone, separated and without an anchor, we have our rituals. Our thoughts never stop. And the ritual we lack we invent.
Mine is like this.
I bought a hen, a small, pretty hen dressed in gold. I kept it for a few days waiting for Easter, locked in the shadow of a bag. When the moment comes, I contemplate it on the table set with grace and with something extra, the rose in the single-flower vase to honour the holiday. I admire the hen in the centre of a white porcelain plate edged in blue and silver. I spin it around to observe better, as a mannequin would do in front of a wealthy customer. I imagine that, from the effort, it had become thirsty. I take it to peck the blue and silver edge; porcelain is always fresh. Then I undress the gold wrapping. And there it is: all dark, smooth, with an exotic aroma. I examine it in detail: the beautiful proportions, the grace of the thin and arched neck, the lively little tail and the barely visible wings. I admire again, while my taste buds come alive. A Shostakovich waltz come to mind and I turn in time with the music, once, twice, three times, six times in order to disorient and stun it. I take its delicate neck with two fingers and, attention! I put that little head in my mouth. Click! The guillotine comes down.
– Darling, you are delicious!
I drink a glass of water and smile.
The ritual is done, consumed in solitude. No video or even a photo for Facebook, like on a desert island or on that other guy’s little planet.
-But isn’t the ritual sharing and participation?
I seem to hear someone objecting.
The ritual is also this. When sharing and participation are true and heartfelt then they strengthen the ritual, but the ritual is the ritual: it is a deep need that marks the uniqueness of the person. The different components of the soul are involved for celebrating, and they push to invent a ritual when it can be built with a beautiful shape.
After the first bite, the tail and other parts of the hen follow. The golden dress remains, a thin, creaking sheet that bends and shapes as desired.
This is the gift that the ritual offers to those who know how to invent it, to those who, like me, seek a fragment of beauty in a moment of ordinary life.
At Easter like Robinson Crusoe on a desert island
When tactility transforms itself into an aesthetic perception, the world is more beautiful.