In my early teen-hood it was briefly fashionable to refer to one's birthday as the egg-cracking day. Little as we were aware of it, the reference was deeply rooted in mythology, or history.
Mythology and history are akin. From one of the very first books I owned I heard about the Chinese genesis. Mother read it to me in her sleepy dreamy voice--the world used to be an egg of Chaos. Pangu, deep asleep in the Chaos for tens of thousands of years, woke up one day, cracked open the egg and separated the heaven from the earth. Chaos was cleared. The world was defined. History was accorded.
Apart from the Chinese egg of history, I learned, a couple of decades after, about the Greek egg of history. It was about carrying, about mourning. I read about it at a time when I was desperate for closure. Closure for a blood relative that silently passed away when I was an Eurasian continent apart. I read and mourned, as the phoenix mourned for his father.
Hekataios narrated: "A phoenix makes out of myrrh an egg as big as he can carry. Then he tests to see if he can carry it. After that he hollows out the egg and lays his father inside and plugs up the hollow. With father inside the egg weighs the same before. Having plugged it up he carries the egg to Egypt to the temple of the sun."
The phoenix's flight must be feeble. Feeble in a way, I imagined, like the flight of the Angel of History. The Angel of History, attempting to make whole what has been smashed, was irresistibly propelled into the future by a storm, with the pile of debris before him growing skyward. Benjamin calls this storm the progress. I identify the pile of debris as the cracked egg shell.
The phoenix breaks open the egg and carries, flies and mourns. We alike are all incarnates of The Angel of History, each of us endowed with the weak messianic power of carrying and cracking open the egg. The egg of chaos, of hollowness, of broken relations, of the past, wronged or justified, of our palimpsest of history.
In my early teen-hood I wrote down on a certain yearbook, egg cracking day, 7th of August. Don't forget to send flowers.
More than a decade from then, the exact same date called for egg cracking. My share of history, my share of personal genesis.
On this day, it was Ophelia herself who left a rose in her egg-shaped grave. For Hamlet had already departed, carrying his egg to crack.
