Egg.

 

Egg: The Homunculus.

‘The egg is a germ of life with a lofty symbolical significance. It is not just a cosmogenic symbol – it is also a philosophical one. As the former it is the Orphic egg, the worlds beginning; as the latter, the philosophical egg of the medieval natural philosophers, the vessel from which, at the end of the opus alchymicum, the homunculus emerges, that is, the Anthropos, the inner and complete man, who in Chinese alchemy is called the chen-yen (literally, “perfect man”).’

 

C. G. Jung. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious: Second Edition, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge, 1991), 293.

 

I dream that I am looking at a postcard from Florida. There is an image of a neon sign with Florida written on it by a beach with palm trees. I am then by the beach looking at a beautiful sunrise or sunset above the ocean. The Sun and Moon are in the sky at the same time.

I then find myself in a second-hand book shop. I find a large book titled The Homunculus with an image of a lump of gum Arabic below the title. I realise that this is an alchemical treatise, but the book has broken into two halves.

Before I went to sleep, I had asked what my artistic practice was about. I often ask a question before I go to sleep to see if my dreaming self provides an answer. This time the dream was so obscure I still do not know what it means.

Florida evidently means flowering Easter as Florida was discovered on Palm Sunday. Easter is always associated with Easter eggs. Eggs are a recurring motif within my artistic practice, reappearing in different artworks in different media. Sometimes the image is simply that of an egg, translated from a natural history illustration.  Sometimes it is the image of an embryonic chick growing within its shell from Marcello Malpighi’s De Formatione de pulli in ovo from 1673. Malpighi’s illustrations have always struck me as being uncanny, which could explain why his images repeatedly return in my artworks.

Cera Laurence observes that Malpighi (1628 – 1694) was one of the first scientists to use the microscope to observe the development of chick embryos. Malpighi suggested that embryos were preformed, miniature organisms, leading later scientists to develop the idea of preformationism. Lawrence explains that in the era of the Enlightenment, preformationism was linked to the notion of the homunculus, Latin for “little man.” Lawrence observes that,

‘An early use of the word was in the 1572 work by Paracelsus regarding forays into alchemy, De Natura Rerum, in which he gave instructions in how to create an infant human without fertilisation or gestation in the womb.’

Cera R. Lawrence, “Homunculus,” The Embryo Project Encyclopaedia, accessed March 30, 2018, https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/homunculus.

The Enlightenment has always fascinated me with its strange fusion of the very ancient and the very modern. The emergence of science as a discipline was still confused with ideas drawn from alchemy and mysticism. The idea of preformation seems to retain the influence of much older ideas, such as the spiritual development of the inner, perfect man, mentioned by Jung in relation to the symbolic significance of the egg in his ‘The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.’

Exactly how my artistic practice relates to the development of the inner, perfect man I have no idea. I am also puzzled by the lump of gum Arabic on the books cover in the dream. I can only assume that this refers to the alchemical prima materia or first matter. The Sun and Moon in the same sky must mean a conjunction between conscious and unconscious. Why the book is in two halves I have no clue. The dream remains a mystery to me.

Egg: Nothingness.

For me, eggs represent the outer, transient and fragile state of all beautiful semblance or appearance (schein), which Walter Benjamin equated with, in Beatrice Hanssen’s words,

‘…the realm of sheer exteriority and vacant spectrality.’

Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2000), 91

This may explain my strange behaviour in the supermarket. I sometimes lift the lids of egg cartons, just to look at the duck or quail eggs nestled within. I never buy these eggs but am seduced by their beautiful appearance. I just have to look at them. They evoke memories of duck eggs for breakfast at my Grandparents house. I remember being reluctant to try them, suspecting that duck eggs could be fertilised. I also remember being surprised by the rich taste that contrasted with the delicate pale blue hue of the shell.

The fragility of these eggs brings to mind fine porcelain; things that are easily broken. As a child, I would try to save the remnants of eggshells that had been ejected from bird’s nests. There is a surface beauty to these shells but concealed blood adheres to their translucent inner membranes, attracting ants and tiny insects. The thing that fascinates me most is the way that inner membrane tenuously holds the shell fragments together. Once detached from this membrane, they disintegrate at the slightest touch. Something also tenuously holds this fragile world together.

My Grandfather had a whole eggshell, which rested in a glass, on top of a cupboard in his bedroom. This was a large, white Goose egg with a small hole at each end where the contents had been blown out. The egg was a talisman; a shell that remained unbroken, protecting its inner emptiness from the outside world. The small room in which it nestled seemed to be a place of retreat from the world. A temporary protection for those with broken shells. This breaking of shells leads to certain revelations. The self we believe exists is only a shell created from dirt. The dirt we believe exists, along with the rest of the world, is a dream that can be dissolved. The world is a sugar spun nest; a nest spun from dreams in which we believe we reside. It is a nest in which an ancient bird has laid her eggs.

Yehuda Liebes notes that in Aristophanes The Birds, the egg,

‘… is called hypenemion oien; namely, “an egg carried by the wind” or “a wind egg.”’

Yehuda Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth and Messianism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 80.

Peter Cole notes that Liebes, with some reservation, traces a link between the Greek word oion (egg) and the Hebrew word ‘ayin (nothing, nothingness),

‘The latter… is a nothingness of plenitude.’

Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol, trans. Peter Cole (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press), 296.

My grandfather’s white goose egg was a wind egg full of nothingness.

Egg: Perfect Sphere.

Some eggs are perfect spheres. These eggs tend to have a translucent outer membrane rather than a shell. I always associate wholeness and unity with a perfect sphere. There is no rational reason for this association, other than when I think of unity I see a sphere. 

The purpose of Jorges Luis Borges The Fearful Sphere of Pascal was to sketch the history of a particular metaphor, that of the divine as a rounded sphere. Borges notes that Blaise Pascal, author of the Pensées, used this metaphor to state that “Nature is a perfect sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Borges then observes that Pascal began to write, then crossed out the word effroyable, so that it would have read “a fearful sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Borges suggests that absolute space was an abyss for Pascal, who felt like a castaway on a desert island. The same feeling used to swamp me as a child, of having landed in a strange and fearful place.

Jorges Luis Borges, “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal,” in Labyrinths, ed. Donald Yates and James Irby (New York: New Directions, 2007), 189 – 192.

As a child, I had a recurring nightmare. This nightmare involved having to construct a perfect sphere out of millions of metal dressmaking pins. It was an impossible task; the pins were scattered in a deep black void. Some of the pins had already been arranged, but there was no pin cushion, nothing to hold them in place, just emptiness. Each pin had its special place, and there was an order in which the sphere had to be constructed. The completed sphere would be Christ. If the perfect sphere could not be completed, I would be annihilated. I would be absorbed back into that dark void of nothingness from which I came. I always woke in terror of that impending annihilation.

Although I was raised a Catholic, I would have been too young to know anything about Christ, or to have understood the implications of this nightmare in relation to Christianity. In my nightmare the sphere is incomplete, it is also impossible to complete, and yet it has to be completed. Here, divine intervention would spell total and complete annihilation, not completion or perfection.

In Lurianic Kabbalah, the process of creation goes awry, the vessels meant to contain the divine powers and energy shatter, sparks of divinity are scattered throughout creation. The task of humanity, everyone’s task, is to release the sparks from their shells, and raise or return the sparks to their proper place and to complete creation. The dream reminds me of this myth, one in which the return of the sparks to their proper place means the end of annihilation.