The Egg
Everything is brewing here, getting lost only to rebuild itself better. We don't know if there was an egg in the beginning or who might have laid it. We are temporary vessels, carriers of a biological message that transcends us. Life borrows from itself, endlessly recycling its matter in a perpetual dance of destruction and creation.
One only has to observe birds, before them, dinosaurs and reptiles. Shells, chrysalides, ovaries, swollen bellies, waters breaking. Births are impressive. A beginning both mysterious and extremely fragile, yet voluntary, destined to advance toward a common and serene finality. I, too, was once an egg, a small thing propelled by minute proteins. I obeyed the guidelines, became a fetus, a child, then a cry launched into dry atmosphere, far from the nurturing and amniotic waves of my mother.
Nature is composed of roundness. Only the horizon forms a straight line, which is merely an illusion. The gravitational field caves in as a planet passes, revealing its plasticity and curves. Moons are balls in circular gutters.
The entire universe is composed of waves and fluctuating sinuosities. Our bodies and objects contain as much energy as a black hole can annihilate. Yet we are so quiet in our shell-like skins. We, ordinary people, but also the geniuses who disrupt, the mathematicians or politicians who devour our economies, have only a thin shell to navigate our lives. With their right angles and sharp edges, our human constructions are a fleeting rebellion against this natural geometry. Time erodes them, rounds the corners, erases the lines, to return to the aged valleys of the past.
We try, even unconsciously, even naively, to protect our treasures, but also our sins, our nightmares, our dreams, our desires, our symbols, all of them, rounds, bubbles, undulating labyrinths, circular gardens, high hedges preventing us from observing the horizontal nature of our transversal questions.
I conclude that I could be nothing but the thin shell of a feeble madman without recurring passions, that my thoughts have never been worth anything, and that despair is worth as much as hope.
My life will have been but a passage through emptiness, that, although I extracted myself from my first carapace, I only managed to drink the white of my egg and did not have the strength to break through the wall of becoming. I am sitting in my armchair, the pencil sliding on a deceptively flat electronic tablet. I write, then close my eyes. I feel life simmering limply among the interlacings of a biology paradoxically foreign.
My body is my egg, my thoughts are yellow, and my heartbeats are translucent. How do mystics manage to escape the torrent of their neurons? Are they hiding the truth behind their contented smiles? Are they pretending to have reached the spheres of nirvana?
One might answer that this perceived distance between them and the flesh inhabiting them becomes the bridge to a deeper understanding. We are both prisoners and architects of this condition, like the bird which, having pierced its shell, finds itself facing the immensity of the sky and sometimes chooses to remain on the ground.
The tablet under my fingers is just another layer of abstraction. Between my thought and its manifestation interposes this digital filter, this illusory flatness that claims to capture the depth of existence. But perhaps it is precisely in this distance that my truth resides.
Although I feel more the weight of Saturn on the erotic swellings of my now dulled youth, I cannot help but cast Promethean salvos of words onto my white screen.
I know that my enterprise is vain and at the scale of my smallness. Everything brews elsewhere in a cosmic egg so impenetrable that it forces us to kneel and psalm stammering prayers to it.
I do not want to take offence like Job because I do not believe in a divine will. Our incomprehension and ignorance condemn us to move forward and pretend to espouse a straight line.
We are compelled to admire the spectacle, to nourish our hours with the fruits of our consciousness. We do not know when and how our lives will stop, right away or in thirty years, by an earthquake, a volcano, or simply from well-deserved fatigue.
We've been told throughout time that there would have been a beginning, an egg, reasoning stemming from our intertwined logic and intuition. Yet this same logic and intuition make us go in circles since the equations do not resolve themselves, containing the pretentious germs of their axioms within them.
To be silent to find one's voice better. To stop thinking to imagine better. To stop dreaming to smile better. To be obstinately human.
