The Egg

How long will I be in bed today? It is not noon but almost. I am not dressed and there is no need. I have had my tea and eggs. The kitten is twitching in its sleep, curled up with his ears touching my nakedknee. The ears are the twitchiest of him. He is covering his eyes with his tiny paws, which is always too my instinct when I fall back asleep after the whole sun is in the sky.

In the bedroom here the walls are white, the headboards and footboards are white, the drape is white, my sheets mint-green and white and the blanket is sky-blue. If I remember: the sky is blue because the color blue has the shortest lightwaves and so blue gets refracted first when it hits the atmosphere, before all other colors. Thus the blanket is the first thing we see when the sun comes in through the window in the morning; the blanket becomes blue before we even feel the light change and open our eyes and see it: blue. The other blue thing, my eyes, I cannot see because when the sun comes in and makes the blanket blue they are still closed, but if the light that makes them blue is morninglight, my eyes are morningeyes.

The color white has the loudest soundwaves, but they are only audible to our unconscious, like blood is only blue until it hits the air. This is why when we rustle awake we think we have heard the morning happen and wake up and see the blue blanket instead. “Did you say something?” we ask each other, and we are able to fall back asleep by covering our eyes or shielding them with the back of the other’s neck or armpit because now we are semi-conscious; the morning falls silent. This is also why we have and hate alarm clocks: they mimic the sound of morninglight in waking life.

H.C. is writing about C.L.’s egg:

“For gathering the song of things, their wordless call: for saying ‘egg’ as I say ‘love’… And seeing an egg is impossible, with ordinary seeing. ‘In the morning in the kitchen I [Clarice] see the egg on the table.’ This sentence is impossible. Clarice writes it only to take it back, in the beating of writing. ‘No sooner do I see an egg than I have seen an egg for a thousand years.’ Seeing? Isn’t it always already having seen? Seeing is itself the egg whose shell is going to burst. Clarice teaches us superseeing. ‘I never learned to look without needing more than just to see.’ I cannot write ‘I see’ while seeing, without having gone through the long labor of passion carried out in every text, at every now, to come to Seeing: the promise of one day coming to ‘see’ the egg, this is the Passion according to C.L. One day: there will be the egg, and ‘my eyes ended up not being separate from what I saw.’ So this day, there is egg. This egg-day, in the present of an instant.”

The week I am alone with everywhere I have neverseen to walk to, everything is closed, empty streets. I have postcards to send but wherever the unfound the post office is, it is closed. I have a check to deposit but Citibank is also closed. It is on the other side of the island where I’ve never been, on the far side of 26th July St. Telling me that is like saying to me, someone who believes the earth is flat, ‘Oh, it’s just on the other side of the horizon.’ You are saying, ‘Oh, it’s just over the edge of the known world.’ I have laundry to do but the. Oh, wait. The bathroom sink in our apartment is open today.

Now it is noon. “What time is it?” Noonow.

“Let us take a rose: from the very first second, a rose takes us. In our rashness, it seems to us as we are taking it. Because we are the ones who bear hands.”