Most of us
know that Humpty Dumpty was a large sentient egg who liked to sit on
walls despite his unstable shape. He fell off and was broken and that
is all that is certain about his life. Various apocryphal stories
have become associated with him since his accident. Some people
insist he was a philosopher as well as an egg. Others claim he
invented a new emotion quite unlike any other emotion in the history
of the world, but they are unable to describe what it might feel
like. One professor has insisted that he was not an egg but the hull
of an alien spacecraft from a distant star or a time machine from the
future.
My aim
today is not to add to this unhappy catalogue of fictions. I have no
tales to tell about the kinds of antics he performed, nor can I offer
insights into his character, beliefs or aspirations. Instead I wish
to ponder something that is talked about too seldom. If Humpty Dumpty
was an egg, what thing would have hatched out of him? Had his shell
not been shattered by an external force, we may assume it would have
been broken by an inner one, for the ovoid stage of his existence
could only be brief and something within must have emerged to escort
his identity further along the path of natural development.
No
forensic evidence was collected in the wake of his death and our
speculations remain purely notional. Yet I think it is possible to
construct a plausible scenario using inductive logic alone. First we
must attempt to establish what kind of egg he was, reptilian,
amphibian or avian. One clue is his propensity for sitting on the
tops of walls. It is true that lizards are accomplished wall climbers
but they tend to cling to the sides rather than dominate the summits.
Amphibians have no interest in walls that are not made of water and
while they might congregate at waterfall tops they are disinclined to
balance on narrow brick ledges.
There
is always the possibility that he was the egg of some organism
hitherto unknown on the surface of our world, that he might have come
from outer space, from subterranean realms or an alternative
dimension. But there is no need to multiply entities beyond necessity
and without evidence to point us in that direction, it is safer to
continue to assume that he was the egg of a phylum familiar to our
zoologists. Personally I favour the avian origin as the most
realistic. Birds are constantly perching on our walls and sometimes
they fall off too, when icy winds howl or rascals in the
neighbourhood acquire new catapults.
Most
of us are familiar with impetuosity and impatience. We might be
reckless individuals ourselves or have friends and relations who
embody the blurred spirits of haste and risk. Humpty was eager to
become the bird he was destined to be, whatever kind it was, so keen
in fact that he acted prematurely. Instead of remaining in the nest,
wherever that was located, he left it and engaged in activities that
were too old for him. He perched on walls, yes indeed, but perching
high safely is the prerogative of those with wings. He was an egg and
probably ignorant of the laws of physics. His fall was almost a
foregone conclusion.
Now
it is appropriate to turn our attention to the kind of bird he would
have become if circumstances had been different. He was a large egg,
one sizeable enough to hold audible conversations with human
interlocutors,
so we may immediately dismiss the vast majority of our feathered
friends as candidates. This leaves us with the ostrich, the rhea, the
moa, and that extraordinary bird from the island of Madagascar,
Aepyornis maximus, so
enormous that it inspired the fable of the roc, the bird that swooped
down to seize elephants in its talons. No sentient examples of these
birds’ eggs have been found, however, which is a pity.
All
those birds are based in remote countries, and we are compelled to
wonder how an individual egg might cross the oceans that separate
these species’ homelands from our own, for it was in England that
Humpty had his crisis and those birds are flightless. The ostrich and
rhea are too small anyway, and the others went extinct before Humpty
existed. The more we consider the matter, the less likely it appears
that he was the egg of a bird known to science. Thus we draw the
conclusion that he was the egg of an undiscovered bird. What might
the bird have been like? Because there are no clues there is no
reliable answer to this.
But
there is one solution that has an elegant absurdity about it and for
that reason alone I am inclined to favour it. Some years ago I
happened to be strolling through the city of Cologne. I stopped in
order to check the time on my wristwatch, for I am one of those
unfortunate fellows who are unable to read numbers and dials while on
the move. As I lifted my wrist to my face, a dull but loud creaking
above my head made me fear that an object was about to fall on me. I
looked up. It was a cuckoo clock fixed to the exterior wall of an old
clock shop, one of the largest cuckoo clocks in the world. And it was
striking the hour.
The
hatch doors were opening, ponderously and painfully, and when they
were fully agape the monstrous cuckoo came out. It emerged with a
great deal of mechanical effort on an extendable trellis that sagged
at its furthest reach. Then the cuckoo widened its beak and after an
unsettling pause gave forth a cry of astonishingly dismal cadence. It
repeated this sound three times to indicate that the local time was
three o’clock in the afternoon and then, as exhausted as a
senescent gran, it withdrew into its sanctuary, the hatch doors
slamming behind it and the whirring of internal cogs ceasing as
abruptly as they had begun.
I
was astonished and affronted. I felt an outrage had been committed
against my consciousness, that this clock was an insult to public
decency, and I found myself wishing some other bird occupied the
clock instead of an unmusical cuckoo. And it occurred to me that a
different bird had
once done so. Certainly it must. We all know the cuckoo’s life
cycle. It hatches in a nest not its own and destroys the other eggs
in order to be the solitary recipient of all the attention from the
bereaved parents. If cuckoos occupy clocks then it logically follows
that some other bird once lived in them. A bird of magic. But
probably not a phoenix.
What
bird lived in the clock before the cuckoo? This question is the key
to understanding Humpty Dumpty’s true identity. That is what I now
believe, at any rate. Somewhere in this peculiar world of ours the
decayed remains of a cuckoo clock may be found, a cuckoo clock vaster
by many orders of magnitude than the one I saw in Cologne. The bird
that was its original occupant was the one who laid Humpty Dumpty and
eggs similar to him. A cuckoo invaded the nest and left an egg that
hatched first and rolled out the others. Humpty Dumpty did not break
on that occasion. The start of his life was a rehearsal for his
death.
