SON: Thou liest, thou shag-ear'd villain! FIRST MURDERER: What, you egg! [Stabs him]
It was not common in Shakespeare’s time to insult someone by calling them an egg. But this boy is an egg. Macduff’s son had said he was a bird, that he would live like a bird, on whatever he got. You have to wonder if the murderers had been listening in. You thought you were a bird, but you’re just an egg, and an egg is hardly anything at all.
If you ask an ordinary person what the deal is with Easter eggs, why this time last week the Christians were all painting eggs and hiding eggs and buying big eggs made of chocolate, they’ll probably mumble something about pagan fertility symbols. People like the idea of pagan fertility symbols. These symbols don’t have to bear any relation to any actually existing pre-Christian tradition. Most of them were made up in the nineteenth century. You can make them up yourself, if you like. Filling up your car at the petrol station was originally a pagan fertility rite. Insemination. The black fluids underground. Reality TV is full of pagan symbols: originally, America’s next top model would be sacrificed to the nameless gods at dawn. Paganism just means the sense that objects have natural meanings: plants, sex, and the earth. An egg means new life. I mean, obviously. What else could it possibly mean?
The official Christian explanation, meanwhile, is that you decorate a hollow eggshell, or eat a hollow chocolate egg from M&S, to symbolise the empty tomb found after the Resurrection. This is the great revelation of Christianity. Not a thing, a presence, a swollen belly, the world whispering with some divinity—but a void. The miracle is that there is nothing there. Christ proclaims the emptiness of every egg.
I am not a Christian. These eggs are not mine. But on the Seder plate there’s a charred bit of bone, two types of bitter herb, a green vegetable, charoset, and an egg. The egg is traditionally scorched, or boiled and then baked in an oven. Most of these symbols are clear. The bone represents the paschal lamb. The bitter herb represents the bitterness of our captivity in Egypt. The charoset represents the mortar we used building Pharaoh’s granaries. A grand pseudohistorical epic made of garnishes and leftovers, bits and pieces from around the house. We spend the whole evening explaining what these things mean. But we don’t talk about the egg. Why is there an egg? And why does the egg have to be burned, as if to prevent anything growing inside?
There are very few human universals—but all human societies have some institution of marriage, all human societies produce some kind of music and some kind of dance, and all human societies have, at some point, come up with the idea that the universe hatched from a great big egg.
The Orphic egg contained the muddy chaos of every opposing principle, and also a god, Phanes, who was also called Eros or Protogonos. A hermaphrodite wrapped in the coils of a serpent. The first ruler of the universe, and also its only inhabitant.
Although the land and the sea and the sky were involved in the great mass,
no one could stand on the land or swim in the waves of the sea,
and the sky had no light. Later Taoist texts describe an egg containing the hairy, horned, hermaphrodite giant Pangu. For eighteen thousand years Pangu slept in his egg, and then he broke it in half with his axe. One half of the eggshell became the sky, the other became the ground. The yolk swirled into humans and animals.
Varima-te-takere, the Very Beginning, was also formed inside an egg. Her egg-realm was called Te Enua-teki, or the Silent Land. In those days the universe was so small that she had to sit inside it with her knees touching her chin, carving off portions of her own body to make new life.
If everything began with an egg, you don’t need to explain how the egg got there. The egg does not entirely exist: it’s not the first thing, but a not-yet. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an egg.
It occurred to me that for thousands of years, people had been planting seeds in the soil and watching them turn into plants, while having no idea, absolutely none, how the process actually worked. They lived in that prescientific haze where things seem to simply happen all by themselves, and bad smells solidify into flies. Their entire society depended on seeds reliably turning into plants, and they didn’t have the faintest clue what was going on. Some mud-black goddess, maybe, living underground, touching every seed with her magic fingers. Then I realised that I also had no idea, absolutely none, how seeds actually worked. How does a lump of matter uncoil itself into a living thing? Something to do with enzymes? Something to do with proteins? What if you had a pair of tiny atomic-scale tweezers, and you managed to arrange a big pile of carbon and hydrogen atoms until you'd built an exact replica of an acorn, and then you put that acorn in the ground—would it turn into a tree? Or would it stay there, doing nothing in particular? Is life just what happens when you put certain chemical compounds next to each other? And if so, how do you explain a corpse? The chemical structure of a dead body is exactly the same as a living one. It just doesn’t move. I asked a friend who happens to be a biologist about the synthetic acorn and he said the question didn’t make sense. I asked him to answer it anyway and he said he didn’t know.
In my country and some others, there’s a growing movement to define half the human species strictly by its ability to produce nonmotile anisogamic gametes. An identification that the past, even at its most patriarchal, still balked at. They had their mythic hermaphrodites; their barren goddess birthed out of her father’s head. A woman was a social role: not biology, not an egg. But then it was the same goddess who proved, in the Eumenides, that women have no necessary role in reproduction, and it’s therefore not a crime to murder your own mother.
I met an asset manager from Boulder, Colorado who only eats raw eggs. ‘I started on hen’s eggs like a lot of people,’ he said, ‘which is actually a pretty common rookie error. Duck eggs have more albumen and more fatty acids, more vitamins, more everything. I’ve seen some people talk about goose eggs which I’m interested in, but I gotta say the results from duck eggs have been incredible.’ A duck egg contains everything you need; he eats roughly thirty duck eggs a day. ‘In a line of work like mine you can’t take breaks,’ he said. ‘I’m always on, I’m always focused. I don’t take mealtimes. In the office, at the gym, at home, wherever, I’m just cracking duck eggs and popping them into my mouth, bam bam bam, one after the other.’ Later, he described his egg-only diet as a ‘productivity hack.’ It’s about getting what you want from life, he explained, sharpening your ambitions and pursuing them relentlessly. Everything else is a distraction. ‘I spend thirty seconds in the grocery store a week,’ he said. ‘I fill up my crate with duck eggs and then I’m out of there, while you’re all, I don’t know, fucking around with the different types of lettuce. That’s time you could have spent attaining your goals.’ He grunts and roars in the gym, and he grunts and roars on the toilet. He spends upwards of an hour in there every day, pushing out pale agonised turds as smooth and as rounded as an egg.
Monk Ellison has an idea for a short story:
A woman gives birth to an egg. She goes in for a normal delivery and what comes out is an egg, a six-pound three-ounce egg. The doctors don’t know what to do, so they slap a diaper on it and stick it in an incubator. Nothing happens. Then they have the mother sit on it. Nothing happens. The egg is given to the mother to hold. She falls in love with the egg, calls it her baby. The egg has no limbs to move, no voice with which to cry. It is an egg and only an egg…
The germ of something. But instead of writing the story about the egg, he writes a novel instead, titled Fuck.
What I’ve been trying to say with all of this is that we should probably not assume that the point of an egg is always to hatch into something else. An egg is not always potential. An egg is not always new life. There are currently thirty-three billion chickens: they are most common oviparous animals in the world, and most of their eggs are eaten.
We used to have a slogan: another world is possible. We made banners with our slogan and hung them from occupied university buildings. We took our slogan out on protest marches. And we were right: another world really is possible. It has its possible cities and its possible citizens, who actually write their possible novels and take the possible bus to work. It’s populated by all the girls you fumbled the bag with and governed by all the candidates who had a chance but lost. Maybe that’s the function of that other world: to always be possible, but never quite real.
A while ago, I vandalised the Wikipedia page for Pope Benedict IX (reigned 1032-1044, then deposed, in part because of his frequent lavish gay orgies, then returned to his seat for less than two months in 1045, then ousted again, before regaining the pontificate for eight months in 1047-1048), changing the words he is one of the youngest popes in history to he is one of the youngest popes in the world. I expected my edit to be quickly reverted, but it wasn’t. I guess because it wasn’t technically untrue, even if it wasn’t untrue in a totally cracked sense, even if it felt deeply wrong. Something about those two words, that present tense: he is. Like the other world that is possible. This person died nearly a thousand years ago, but there’s still a sense in which he is: in history, but maybe also in the world, which would have to encompass its past. But I found it very funny. Those two words were like a seed, waiting to sprout weird vines.
The article stayed like that for weeks. I checked again today. Someone’s changed it back.
