1
For many years I didn’t eat chicken. My aversion was the visceral reaction to a bad encounter. I remember the event as follows.
I am sitting in traffic on the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Alone in my car, I am hungry, or bored, or distracted. The truck in front of me is wide enough to obscure my view. A tarpaulin covers its rear, but it’s not tied down and flaps a little. I fiddle with the radio controls, or my phone, or my pack of cigarettes. Then I see, under the corners of the tarpaulin, the truck is carrying stacks of metal cages. Nondescript animal life teems inside them: hairless, knoblike heads, with flippers or wings, jostling busily. If the animals are making noise I can’t hear it over the traffic. The cars are motionless, so I park and stick my head out the window to get a better look. I see chickens: de-clawed, debeaked, mostly denuded of their features, plump and helpless in the cages in which they have spent their fetid lives.
From that moment I stayed away from chicken. I learned to frown when I read a menu. I convinced myself that eating chicken would wreck me. Over the next few years, this restriction became a fixation and I tried to subdue its intensity by turning to abstraction. I focused on the idea of chicken rather than the actual thing. I researched the representation of chicken across history. I took in information about chicken indiscriminately. Chicken came to seem at once too lowly to eat and too lofty to be food. I was spellbound.
There is a well-known photograph on the internet of the Soviet futurist poet and early bodybuilder Vladimir Goldschmidt hypnotizing a chicken. Eyes narrowed, brows furrowed, he makes what we might call ‘crazy eyes’ at the bird, which is unfazed. Goldschmidt thrived in the heady years of utopian experimentation after the Russian Revolution. He survived the Stalinist purges and died in Tashkent in 1957. But his legacy most indelibly survives in this one photo – itself probably a gag – which is posted on every social media platform with moronic regularity, the same moronic comment typed beneath: it looks more like the chicken is the one hypnotizing him!!
A YouTube video, sometimes posted in response to the photograph, shows that it is, in fact, possible to hypnotize a chicken. This is accomplished by holding its head to the ground and slowly drawing one clear and long line away from the chicken’s view.
2
In Fruita, Colorado, in the 1940s, a chicken survived a beheading. In his decapitated state Mike the Headless Chicken lived for almost two years. He tried to peck and crow, but produced only a gurgling sound. The savvy farmer, realizing the good fortune of his sloppy hatchet job, paraded his headless chicken around fairs and carnivals.
Like all American sideshow gimmicks, this one has a perfectly normal explanation: the chicken’s brainstem was left intact, allowing it to keep up its bodily functions. It’s remarkable how little thinking it takes to survive. It’s clear, for instance, that whatever effect chicken has on me involves the more rudimentary parts of my brain.
I had a roommate in Berkeley with whom I played ‘nihilistic games’, which were variations on what’s known as ‘playing chicken’. It was a game of daring to see who would flinch first. Who can stare at the sun the longest? Who can ride their bike down the street with their eyes closed the longest? Why is this game known as ‘playing chicken’? It’s not because chickens are cowardly animals, but because the game is motivated by an appetite for outlandishness that grows the more you feed it. The very idea of chicken is enough to inflict this minor insanity on almost anyone.
The more I learned about chicken, the more I realized that I was nearly alone in my bewilderment. Werner Herzog has railed against the stupidity of chickens, which he finds psychically overwhelming. The final shot of Stroszek features an arcade game called The Dancing Chicken. Herzog’s crew hated this scene so much they refused to film it, so he shot it himself. Game in the Sand, his apocryphal short from 1964, features four children and a live rooster inside a large cardboard box. Supposedly, the children bury the rooster in sand up to its head. Claiming things got ‘out of hand’ during shooting, Herzog has refused to release it. But four years later, in Even Dwarfs Started Small, he made a point to include a scene in which chickens cannibalize one another without hesitation.
Try though we may to avoid it, chicken always seems to insinuate itself into our mouths. It appears on virtually all menus, especially at catered events, and so, like cigarette smoke, it is almost impossible to avoid. Noticing its omnipresence feels like stumbling upon a vast conspiracy to make us eat fowl. ‘Chickens are the most ubiquitous birds on the planet,’ Marie Darriussecq writes, apropos of nothing, in the tail end of Sleepless, her literary memoir on insomnia. Darriussecq suggests that it is our guilt at annihilating animals and their homes that lies behind society’s sleeplessness. Thinking of the collective weight of all the cocks, hens and chicks in the factory farms of the world, including those male chicks shredded for the accident of their sex, is certainly enough to keep anyone up at night.
3
It had been nearly ten years since I stopped eating chicken. My sense of self was stronger than ever before: in my mind I felt at home. I finished a degree, moved to a new country and completed two bouts of therapy: first psychoanalytic and then somatic-experiencing. Because I understood the psychic mechanisms at play, I knew that the root of my obsession was internal and that chicken had no real power over me. I was finished researching chicken. With my dissertation submitted, and not a single chicken in it, I had exited academia. I was poised to become the author of my own life again. All that was left was to take a bite.
So when a friend invited me to eat fried chicken with him, knowing full well what he was suggesting, he easily cajoled me into ending my prohibition. Like a wary alcoholic considering a single pint after a sober spell, I indulged with the kind of trepidation indistinguishable from excitement. My friend and I ate fried chicken at Aldimashqi, The Damascene, a Syrian restaurant on Pannierstrasse in Berlin famous for this dish, which they serve with hummus and tabbouleh and fries. Then we went to a bar and got drunk.
But the next morning I felt no hangover. Real verve pulsed within me: clear visions and wild thoughts at once alien and familiar. It had worked, whatever it might be. Marching to my girlfriend’s apartment I waited at a stoplight, entranced by the signage of a Korean fried chicken joint called Angry Chicken So So Angry. Looking over my shoulder, I realized I had been standing right in front of a bar called Zum Goldenen Hahn: The Golden Cock. I wondered whether all of this was really happening. When I told my girlfriend about my misstep I made ‘crazy eyes’, flashing my irises to convince her I was serious. She informed me she’d already suspected that I’d taken some bold step from the way I’d been texting her. It’s bad, I admitted. So, so bad, she replied. I wasn’t sure if she believed me and she wasn’t sure if I was being ironic.
Whenever I ate chicken my hormones, or humors, or my libido, would go haywire, and I would act out and play it up. Abstaining for so long had turned chicken, which many people eat daily, into something stronger than any drug. I would eat it and start to get the wrong ideas about things: reading eroticism into the gestures of a library security guard, or becoming infuriated by the very ordinary tone of a friend’s voice. I’d lose all sense of proportion. In turn I became very angry and delighted by my anger; cartoonishly horny and prone to oracular pronouncements; quick to the punch and unaware of whether I was being funny or just annoying. Chicken made me get carried away and I wanted it all the time. In the following months I ate more of it than I had in the decade prior. Knowing that I was, on some level, putting it on or hamming it up only compounded chicken’s power. Weird beliefs can easily get away from us: this is why it’s dangerous to nurture any superstitions about which we aren’t dead serious.
Naturally I found myself assailed with bird omens of all kinds. I woke up from a nap to see a crow staring down at me through my skylight. Later, on a walk, another crow swooped me and grazed my head malevolently. Exiting a cinema I stood with friends and silently watched a pigeon fall through a tree, struggling like a drowning man, before falling dead on the ground. Thinking it diseased, we inspected it no further. At home, two days later, I found a sparrow trapped in the stairwell and I released it through another skylight. My boyfriend, my girlfriend and I went to Pfaueninsel, the small island in Berlin’s river Havel, and read James Merrill’s poem about the peacock, ‘It turns, black, green and gold, that zodiac / Of eyes – not these so much / As idiot mouths repeating: I.’ My boyfriend dreamt that he’d caught a pigeon and crushed it to death with his bare hands, smothering it in his lap, and I later determined that this crushed pigeon was me, and that he probably dreamt frequently of my annihilation. But my girlfriend rejected this interpretation and said I was being paranoid: she had an angle, too, being in love with this boyfriend, who was hers, too, and I was totally ensorcelled by the both of them. A few days later I bought eggs, and while making an omelette one morning I noticed that each egg had two yolks. I’d bought the double-yolk variety of egg by accident – but are such things ever accidents? Why even is there a double-yolk variety? What two-headed or doubly-plump hens lay these eggs?
The bird omens took a toll on my love life: all these portents had to mean something, their meanings had to amount to some overarching significance, and so long as I remained perplexed by them I was failing to decode an increasingly urgent message. Where was all this heading? I wanted to know what lay between the two of them, my boyfriend and girlfriend, and though we talked about each other incessantly, we spoke an intricate language of jokes and jabs that increasingly suggested to me something nefarious. There was no script to what we were doing, no yardstick against which to measure our affections, so I looked for my lovers’ real feelings in occurrences that had nothing to do with them at all. I wanted so desperately to find the truth. Was this throuple more like a love triangle? Being able to name the relationship would grant me psychic resolution; in absence of this I pointed to omens and signs that hovered near the vanishing point of things. What did it mean that the Späti purveyor always noted our buying beers in threes? He did his jovial, knowing ho ho! and the brown bottles clinked in reply. But I couldn’t savor this: unable to augur, I wanted to pluck out my own eyes.
Was I the third wheel, or the unlucky puppet of forces I could never understand? Was it all, in fact, my fault? Apart from our compulsive tendencies, the three of us shared a perverse competitive streak that made it impossible to disentangle anybody’s personal pleasure from their satisfaction at spoiling the shared pleasure of the other two. By August the summer fling was spiraling into a romantic imbroglio. My girlfriend went to Helsinki for a weekend to escape her ‘tormentors’, while my boyfriend decamped to a queer music festival for three whole days. Unencumbered at last, I tried to articulate my feelings to myself. But when I sat down to think I could only come up with infernal, edgy jokes that only our group chat would understand. Within minutes they reacted and I realized that I had ensnared them again. Who could resist?
I recently learned the secret about Costco’s rotisserie chickens. Like a banked promise, rotating on the spit or sweating in their plastic cases, the company sells these roast chickens at a loss, just to make a point.
There’s the famous scene in The Birds, when a swarming murder of crows envelops a jungle gym. The film never tells us why the birds have converged on Bodega Bay in the first place, or what their arrival could portend. Rather it’s the proliferation of something ordinary that makes this scene so unsettling. Ditto for omens: there is nothing necessarily supernatural to them, just a great deal of slightly off, but perfectly normal occurrences that you can’t afford to ignore any longer. Superstitious hysteria involves, more than anything else, a compulsion to keep noticing, noting and recording events long after this pursuit has proven fruitless.
4
To get to the bottom of things once and for all I began to incorporate chicken into my diet more regularly. As the omens receded, I considered them en masse. I knew I’d misrecognized their individual meanings, but together they formed a vector field: a story being written in real time for me alone to decipher. This is what paranoia feels like, I remember thinking. Never had life felt richer; never had every single day felt more consequential. These were deep significances that I couldn’t quite parse but needed to record and communicate to others. Patterns in my love life, things I read, my dreams and distant memories together wove plush carpets of significance. Like an old cartoon character, I thought I was carefully unrolling the carpet to inspect its design only to find myself wrapped up in it, being carried away by imagined henchmen.
All madness seems, in retrospect, like a joke taken too far. Chicken made me crazy because I had avoided it for so long, out of fear that eating it would make me act insane. In breaking my private taboo, I had unleashed a torrent of omens that would either reward my daring with romantic knowledge, or punish me by proving me right all along. My circular reasoning was watertight.
But superstition knows no irony: pretending to be crazy, or horny, to have visions, or to see signs is indistinguishable from being or having or seeing any of those things. A memory you tell yourself is deeply significant will become so, and an occurrence you call an omen will turn out to be the sign under which your life changes course. I remember sitting a few years ago, slightly stoned, on the Berkeley Marina watching flocks of starlings carve astounding shapes in the sky.
By the subsequent summer the throuple dissolved into an unlikely pairing and my bird omens into the miasma of ordinary life. I did eat chicken, but only seldom, and always reluctantly. Everyone around me was vegetarian anyway: I was back in the San Francisco Bay Area. I had let go of my compulsion to decode, or it had let go of me. One day, driving over the Bay Bridge with my girlfriend, I spotted three brown pelicans gliding alongside the car. By this point I knew not to read them as a sign. Together we watched them until they peeled away. Then, turning to me, she asked, ‘Did you notice how many there were?’
Vogels op een balustrade, Melchior d’Hondecoeter, 1680-1690, © Rijksmuseum
