Quenelle

incongruity in 2023

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.

Mark Twain

I have an American Parks edition of Liquid That Becomes Foam Hand Soap (capitalized for ease in reading) in my Barbie bathroom (not that “Barbie,” the movie that everyone is talking about, incongruously joined with the one about the men who made the bombs in Terrible America back in the good old days that raped the land and the people who lived on it and then destroyed a country of people a million miles away to win a War, the Greatest Generation, but “Barbie” meaning small, very, very small, no bigger than a bathroom in a Barbie house) on a tiny shelf. This edition of liquid soap has a picture of the Grand Canyon in golds and browns, a plastic sheath-like thing with a sage scent, I think, some marketing ploy, I guess, because who isn’t drawn to the Grand Canyon, to the American National Parks, to the idea of them, anyway, of getting away, of traveling to some beautiful place, a place as close as a bottle of soap, sitting just under your chin on a small shelf below a mirror that reflects your face, a face that you have stared at and avoided in this particular bathroom for twenty-six years? After I’ve depressed the pump with one hand, received the soap (it resembles the quenelles we made in the nineties in the high-end kitchens, namely Lespinasse, a quenelle such a beautiful word that means a smooth, oval-shaped scoop of soft food, I made so many of them, whipped cream, creme fraiche, got so talented at the useless) with the other, released the pump and offered both hands to the faucet and the water, it moans, the soap bottle moans as the pump rises to its full height, a low moan rising up out of a canyon, perhaps, that I can hear even over the water, my fingers twisting, wringing, the quenelle disintegrating, a sigh and then silence.