BRETON'S SPOON

In this excerpt from Andre Breton's book entitled, Mad Love Breton elucidates the complex trajectory of a wooden spoon and its acquisition. Giacometti, who accompanied Breton to the market where he found the spoon, purchased a mask. Breton's narrative remains vibrant in my mind as I think of it often, inevitably when I study the spoons at Mirth. 

"Some months earlier, inspired by a fragment of a waking sentence, "the Cinderella ash-try" and the temptation I had had for a long time to put into circulation some oneiric and para-oneiric objects, I had asked Giacometti to sculpt for me, according to his own caprice, a little slipper which was to be in principle Cinderella's lost slipper. I wanted to cast it in glass--even, if I remember rightly, gray glass--and then use it as an ash-tray.  In pite of my frequent reminders to him of his promise, Giacometti forgot to do it for me. The lack of this slipper, which I really felt, caused me to have a rather long daydream, of which I think there was already a trace in my childhood. I was impatient at not being able to concretely imagine this object, over whose substance there hangs, on top of everything else, the phonic ambiguity of the word "glassy." On the day of our walk, we had not spoken of this for some time.

It was when I got home and placed the spoon on a piece of furniture that I suddenly saw it charged with all the associative and interpretative qualities which had remained inactive while I was holding it. It was clearly changing right under my eyes. From the side, at a certain height, the ittle wood spoon coming out of its handle, took on, with the help of the curvature of the handle, the aspect of a heel and the whole object presented the silhouette of a slipper on tiptoe like those of dancers. Cinderella was certainly returning from the ball! The actual length of the spoon a minute ago had nothing definite about it, had nothing to contradict this, stretching towards the infinite as much in great size as in small: in fact the little slipper-heel presided over the spell cast, containing in itself the very source of the stereotype (the heel of this shoe heel could have been a shoe, whose heel itself...and so on). The wood, which had seemed intractable, took on the transparency of glass. From then on the slipper, with the shoe hell multiplying started to look vaguely as if it were moving about alone. This motion coincided with that of the pumpkin-carriage of the tale. Still later the wooden spoon was illuminated as such: it took on the ardent value of one of those kitchen implements that Cinderella must have used before her metamorphosis. Thus one of the most touching teachings of the old story found itself concretely realized: the marvelous slipper potential in the modest spoon. With this idea the cycle of ambivalences found an ideal closure. Then it became clear that the object I had so much wanted to contemplate before, had been constructed outside of me, very different, very far beyond what I could have imagined, and regardless of many immediately deceptive elements. So it was at this price and only at this price, that the perfect organic unity had been reached."

-Jessica for Mirth