BREAKING #42

Chicken and egg

Nicole Ex

Column

January 2021

Nicole Ex

Nicole Ex schrijft elke week een persoonlijke column. Schrijf je in voor onze kunstbrief.

Column

January 2021

In the vast polders of the Haarlemmermeer, Silver Bullet has been brooding in the corner of her coop for twenty-five days. ‘The little creature is all out of sorts,’ says Ries worriedly, ‘it’s the middle of winter and she’s broody. I inspected her eggs and they are not fertilised, I think because that young rooster has yet to learn to aim.’

I have often enough seen a rooster sitting on a flattened chicken – it doesn’t make you want to do it, rather it makes you want to save the chicken from its supposed demise – but never before have I wondered about the way that exercise works: ‘What?’ I ask, slightly frustrated, ‘does that require further education?’

Ries is not waiting for my whining that everything takes practice and never once does anything come naturally. She has Silver Bullet’s winos on her mind. She had even dreamt of it that night: she had arranged chicks and brought them to the manger as a gift, but those lively downs were too big to fool Silver Bullet. Bullet had looked at her sternly and piqued.

Fig 1. Leonora Carrington, The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg), 1947

‘Chickens by nature have a cold look,’ I say, laughing, ‘they lack facial expressions’. But neither my perspective nor the wide, frosted dunes we look out over from the highest point relieve her of her depressed mood. It is time to face the precarious situation of egg, bantam and giantess (see Carrington’s Giantess).

‘The egg symbolises maternal strength and vulnerability, new life and shelter,’ the winter issue reads. And so it is. Laying an egg and brooding on it is not nothing. It is everything. As we both stand at a distance leaning against our car after talking, I feel pain for Bullet’s lost offspring and for the dislocation of the giantess, whose maternal strength is waning under the current pressures.

Dearest mothers, don’t get on top of it too much, it will be fine.

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