Gnosis, Repression, and the Return of the Unnamed: Psychoanalytic and Gnostic Themes in “A Strange Hatching” A speculative cosmogony in which consciousness emerges through exclusion, repression, and the return of what has been banished. “A Strange Hatching” presents a revisionary creation myth in which the origins of human consciousness are inseparable from exclusion, violence, and the persistence of an irreducible remainder. Drawing simultaneously upon Biblical narrative, Eg

All the World Was Broken: An Ecopoem On weightless air, the cocksure ravens flew. Wild sheep chewed grass; deer And bison chewed too. On a slanted hillside white mountain goats Enjoyed a lofty view. In forests, eucalypti, fresh-minted, grew. And fire-green firs with purple cones, Did too. For the silver-studded starfish there were oceans Wet with green and blue – And oceans for the whale and dolphin too. On blackest soil, the man called Adam grew His

A Strange Hatching Once there were other gardens, other plots, Other clots of clay. The old gods remembered. Cast from their temples, stripped of tribute and gilt, They kept their camp beside the pagan Nile. Then they beheld a land of light where nothing hissed, Nothing slithered or slipped, Nothing crawled or slunk through sedge and reed. The old gods smiled darkly. The maker had forgotten scales, Forgotten fang and feather, Forgotten fin, fluke and claw, Forgotten the sly

Expecting nothing but laughter and applause, Adam hears on all sides sounds of derision, Harshly sibilant. All were transformed to serpents

The Original Sin Our DNA a polymer implant from our worldly creator, Blake’s Urizen. Backbone sidechain nitrogen phosphate And a plastic oesophagus for when you can't swallow Reason. Bonding one attribute to another: the adhesive Epox is on the horizon. One mind becomes many minds Separated in competition, growing bodies to maintain Separation. Protesting, Adam fiddles a stringtaut wire, A thin-sliced reproduction of human forest life: gunfire, Gas, batons, guillotines, barbe

Adam (1951-52) by Barnett Newman Barnett Newman and the Art of Not Making Graven Images Barnett Newman was born in 1905 to Abraham and Anna Newman, Jewish immigrants from Poland who came to New York City in 1900. Although not religious, Barnett’s father was a passionate Zionist and a supporter of the National Hebrew School of the Bronx. As well as attending Hebrew school, Barnett and his brothers and sisters were educated at home by Jewish scholars from Europe. He went on to

Pictures of Eve I Adam cultivated Eve by swelling her belly with something so potent that it could only have come from the stone of a forbidden fruit. II Eve was striding the earth when Adam emerged from a black gap. Six days passed and earth was reduced to a pile of newsprint. And Eve tore her clothes and made for herself a garment of lamentations. But Adam, sated and pitiless, scoffed her beneath the absent apple tree.

The Family Way Eve lay down and trembled. Her belly grew fat like the moon. Her womb conspired murder. Cain was gloomy at heart. Abel and his animals inflamed passions on all sides. Cain looked up and the sky shivered grey. Sin flew out the door of heaven. It stuck in Cain’s gullet like Aaron’s rod. Cain slaughtered his brother like a goat. He trembled as wiped the gore on his father’s coat of skin, which still carried the aroma of grandfather God.