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

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

The Darkness of This House Making his advances in tall steps, Davie marks Suzie standing small at the kitchen sink. She drops something, holds still her breath. ‘No-one’s gonna listen to you, Suzie, and that’s a fact’. The ugly brown voice of a drunk scrapping for a fight. From him bad odours rise, smells of fish and river foam, tobacco and beer. He picks up a carver, puts it down. ‘So don’t even think about it’. It is evening, it is hot, and a dead carp’s eye looks up at Suz

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.