Imagine an egg, or if you will, a chicken that was destined to be. This chicken/egg emerged in my thoughts later that year; I realize now that it was my original flirtation with the excitement of imaginary things and it came into my mind suddenly upon seeing a pile of garden soil heaped in a great brown pyramid in my father's wheelbarrow in the spring of 1960.
It had been my Mexican grandfather's wheelbarrow before, a barrow built to outlast several generations of ranching men, a real workman's barrow, formed of solid iron, heavily rusted, a dangerous thing if it fell on a kid. What made it worse was the fact that the rim of the barrow's bed was coated with several layers of old mortar, which made it even heavier, and in that caked state, it roared when it rolled, a mighty bass voice of industry and honor.
I remember dashing around the sides of this wheelbarrow barefooted in the grassy lawn in our backyard; it was early May and the winter rye grass already drooped from the longer hours of intense desert sun; the blades of grass felt limp under my toes and didn't spring back when I stepped on them; upon close inspection, I could see individual green blades in the lawn which had shriveled, blackened and wrinkled like tiny whip snakes; when enough of the green blades had shriveled, the overall lawn would slump and look trampled and in a few days nothing would be left, bar a few patches of brittle yellow ghosts snarled together in shady corners.
"Squish the grass. Squish it with your feet!" Meredith ordered.
We, her minions, dutifully ran on the grass pounding the wilting stalks with our heels, grinding the withering blades with our toes.
"No, no, stop that. What are you doing. Leave the grass alone. I want the grass to last, doggone you," said Mother, cranking open the kitchen window and rapping her knuckles on a pane when she saw what we were doing. Piles of bubbles dripped from her head. She was using the sprayer at the sink to wash her hair. "Some ladies from the church are coming this week to teach me bridge. Don't you dare do that damage to the lawn."
"Don't squish the grass with your feet," Meredith instantly countermanded her own order.
When I had finished flouncing around in the dying grass, I plunged my hands into the mound of soil in the barrow and twiddled my fingers in the cool dark. The sensation was like exploring with your hands some other region of the world which your sight could never reach because once you pried open the earth that world would change, things would squirm away that had been there before and your very act of digging would move the particles to different places and rub them against each other; I touched tiny pebbles and balls of wood, hunks of gravel and twigs in the earth; then the earth from above caved onto the backs of my hands, streamed down the side of the earth pyramid and trickled over the back of my wrists. The stimulation of the earth was direct on my skin, direct to my senses. I could feel the heat of the surface of the dirt pile, the coolness of the inside. I could smell the dirt grit, the fustiness of parts of it.
I pulled my hands out of the earth and paced around the wheelbarrow, studying the dark soil and the way the shadows of the afternoon sun cast a crisp black line at the back of the barrow; the surface of the pyramid was not entirely smooth; I noticed several balls of earth, which were nothing but dirt clods, of course. The clods cast round shadows backward on the pile.
I picked up one dirt clod. I examined it closely with eyes that wanted to note and remember every detail of the soil that made up my earth. The firm outer surface of the clod fascinated me; on this surface there were thousands of intricate drawings, teeny nonobjective themes. Though uniform and compact from afar, each dirt clod had flecks of bark, tiny logs with splintery or rounded ends, and shining orbs of green and yellow sand, silvery mica bits, and sand rubies on them when you examined them closely. In fact the clods had mountains of gems capturing light. And the teeny flea-like bugs, hopping here and there, the trails, canyons, rivulets. Miniature millipedes with dragon-like heads wiggled in agony at the sun and they were reddish-colored and retreated in squirming fashions from the light as I turn the clods into the brilliant rays. The sheltered moisture of the sunless world received light perhaps for the first time.
I picked up a few of them and turned them around in the sun. They possessed me strangely, those dirt clods. They were alien things to me; I came to the conclusion that the clods scattered about on the brown pyramid with the afternoon sun streaming on them and the shadows cast diagonally across the brown expanse of dirt were actually cases or shells enclosing future living beings. I was convinced there was a rolled up baby inside. I named the mysterious beings, which were both the case itself and the being inside, The Itty Bitty Cocky Babies, which I shorten to Cocky Babies.
These future beings were not likely to ever be ordinary animals; the obstinate Cocky Babies never agreed to hatch, preferring to stay slyly curled up inside their brown dirt clods; I imagined the small feet of this animal tucked under its chin inside the brown egg; each egg was smaller than my fist and rounded on the ends; on closer examination, the wheelbarrow of dirt yielded two or three more clods which contained these baby beings; I could see the Cocky Babies inside and detected their presence by the heft of the clod; I took one of them carefully into the house, cradling it in my two hands, and I sat it first on the shelves of a tin toy kitchen dresser and then on the shelf with my dolls.
I sat listening to the sound of voices outside, communing with my clod; there was a pleasant time each year in our desert, a season when the small high windows of my room could be cranked open, when it was neither winter, chilly in the desert without plants or wet air to hold in the heat, or blazing summer; the linoleum felt smooth and comforting to my bare feet. When I set the dirt clod on the shelf beside my prim dolls there was something soothing about the clod's lack of features; something of promise about its brown, obdurate, no-nonsense nothingness.
I sat looking at this dirt clod for ten minutes or more and after a while I was sure I could detect life-like forces stewing inside.
"What do you think you see in that?" asked Meredith, after I brought it back outside and she happened to notice me cradling it.
"Itty-Bitty-Cocky Baby," I said.
"A what?"
"A Bocky Caby."
"That is not a real egg, kid," said Meredith, her voice dripping in sarcasm.
"Cocky Baby. Cocky Baby, Cocky Baby. Ha!" shouted Jack. He was pretending to shoot it with a machine gun. Meredith and Jack were wearing surplus Army helmets and our Mother's Women-Marine shirts. "Hold it over this way and I'll blast it with some machine gun fire. We must release the demon."
"No."
"Then I'll chop it with my bayonet," said Jack, running the plastic bayonet point at me.
"Won't." I swooped the dirt clod away from the menacing toy bayonet.
"Ah, you and your Cocky Baby," said Jack. "Whatta nut."
I was certain that my excellent vision could somehow penetrate the soil casing of these dirt clods and reach the inner sanctum where the invisible sentient beings developed. I also knew scientific facts about these dirt clods. I had a sort of mastery over their destiny which I knew no one else was privy to. It was the idea that I alone had mastery over the facts of the Itty-Bitty-Cocky Baby that so intrigued me. These beings growing inside, I understood, would remain in there forever without agreeing to come out, thus, nothing came first, neither chicken or egg and this strange Cocky Baby was always in a state of almost-being, or ripe readiness.
In form, the Cocky Baby, should it ever have decided to emerge, which of course it wouldn't, but if it had, it would have resembled a feathered platypus crossed with a furry rooster, though I was never certain which parts would have been the feathered platypus (perhaps it was the hindquarters) and which part the furry rooster (perhaps the head); I was not sure whether I intended the whole result to be cute or ugly; maybe at age three esthetic judgments were vague; but my eyes burned into the heart of the clods that I propped on the shelf and I began to believe profoundly in the Itty-Bitty Cocky Baby, almost to the point of worship. At the same time I am convinced that, should it be ex
cavated, a nest of these egg clods will be found under one particular brown square of linoleum under the floor of the small bedroom I shared with my sister; this infestation of imagination, this fertile, teeming nest of beings, was in a state of always not being, right under the linoleum block, though unseen and unknown by the rest of the world.
The potential art is an art itself; the incipient beginning is art; the thing is always, yet never; the Cocky Baby emblematizes the excited feeling an artistic being has inside her when the art she wishes to depict for others is growing inside her, but has not yet been revealed to the other beings, and may not have been fully revealed to the artist yet. The feeling is mysterious and hopeful, leading up to the time when it is going to be born.
The Cocky Baby was an almost-being which never reached the stage of hatching, for the Cocky Baby would never emerge from its shell and, in fact, is created to be only the egg with the potential of a life story inside of it. The Cocky Baby includes the fascination with the future when the egg will finally reveal what is inside, and yet that moment which will never actually come, but always be in the future a second forward in time from the moment in which you contemplate the egg. The Cocky Baby is a being that is always about to come into his own, yet never quite gets the chance. This baby could at any moment pop out of the linoleum square, straight from the ground, maybe the way animals aestivate during the hot summer days. In the same way that the secret world of art, unseen, lurks in the minds of creative people.
But there is something rather reptilian about this mind of the artist, something a little too scheming. Lizards hatched from eggs and snakes do, too. The need to take care of the Cocky Baby intrigued the child/woman in me and at the same time that the suckling nature of my art rather repulsed me. How was I to get rid of the responsibility of this being that refused to be born? How would I ever discharge my part in its life? Would I forever have to watch it develop if it refused to do that?
It is the writer, the artist, the musician that has to see and hear accurately the eggs of the circus acts of the world and be prepared to collect them. Time will kill the art, though. Time makes everything a phantom and before it does, the artist must steal images away with them and preserve them somehow. The artist must pray the art decides to be born.
The Cocky Baby withholds himself from the world. He refused to be pinned down. I'm never certain if this is willful or if he is unable to hatch, whether he is afraid of the world or if he fears that he will frighten the world. He is not too good for the world, but always in a state of readiness, yet not arriving, but willing to arrive eventually. It is possible the Cocky Baby fears criticism, that he is hypersensitive and suffers from feelings of inadequacy; in that way he may be the precursor of my own interest in destroying my art, in teen years grating away at my poems, for example; or he may only have stood for the creative genius behind work, the lurking substance that has to exist for art to be constructed. But the Cocky Baby was also a monster that spliced together awkward, unconvincing lies into one abhorrent animal for display to the ghoul-loving public, wishing for their bread and circuses.