Justin E. H. Smith
In sixth grade I was made along with my classmates to undertake a project that, we were told, would teach us something about science. Our task was to obtain a large metal coffee can (Folgers or Yuban, most likely), and to obtain an egg (chicken, white), and to find something (anything) of our choice to serve as padding for the egg in the can. Next, at a specified date and time, the principal of Pasadena Elementary School (which was in Sacramento, not in Pasadena), Mr. King, took all the cans up to the top of the school gym and threw them off one by one as the sixth-graders watched from below. Those kids whose eggs remained integral 'won', and those whose eggs broke 'lost'. The lesson had something to do with materials science, or gravity, or some other feature of the physical world whose importance escaped me.
What went into my can? Some flour, some maple syrup, some yogurt, a sock, a dog's chew-toy, some Jell-O, a clump of hair from the bathroom sink, some peanut butter, some celery, some chewed BubbleYum, a bit of bubble wrap, some apple wedges. I would not be surprised to be reminded that I had peed in the can before sealing it up, though I have no recollection of having done so.
I think I wanted the inside of the can to be a sort of microcosm, to duplicate the outer world of qualitative variety and complexity in which eggs thrive. I seem to have believed that if one of the ingredients could not come to the egg's rescue, another surely would, and that that saving ingredient, whether the peanut butter or the sock, needed only to be represented in a token amount. To say that this was a primitive sort of thinking would not be the half of it. It bore obvious affinities to voudun and like practices, but rather than creating a double of some particular person or thing, I wanted nothing less than to bring into being a fetish object of the world itself.