Bernays et Bearnaise

A homonym that interrogates the intersection of a continuum that is enculturation– the collective and the corrective domains– the representation of a sauce that is at once one of embellishment and one of emulsion. A homonym whose form and praxis differs little even as its contours assume the deliberate topographies of a collective imagination and an intimate dinner– a sauce that rests suspended in a dynamic tension of egg and oil as well as a public imagination that rests suspended in a dynamic tension of desire dining upon itself.

The collective enculturation of the bearnaise is a heritability of the dinner table, the lineages of familial gastronomies, a discrete taxonomy of imagined traditions. This collectivity is the sauce as embellishment, the sauce that obfuscates and abstracts the banality of death we consume to give us life – an integument to the virtual representations of a former virility– a set of ingredients naturally selected to transmit and recreate the multiple conceptions of what we eat and what we imagine.

The corrective enculturation of the bearnaise is the emulsifier, the maintenance of a public inertia, the deliberacy of presenting a more singular conception of reality – where droplets of oil are like tiny public spheres on the verge of being broken, where tensile strength derives from a ceaseless appetite of desire.

Bearnaise, an enculturation, a sequence of code written with a grammar of effervescence that is periodically re-imagined by a Baudelaire, a This who sweep through the simmering chambers of illusion and dream to sublimate ulterior means of mending a broken sauce.