I dreamt that I was preparing to paint another scene from the extraterrestrial world I started drawing and painting more than a decade ago. One thing from that world that I remember sketching in free hand on a big piece of paper looks like an egg with two yolks—one considerably bigger than the other. The “yolks” were black and the area around them was white. The line outlining the “egg” was rather thick. That thing was to be the centerpiece of my new painting.

Addendum I (August 13, 2000)

When I returned to Reading this morning, after I escorted Lauren and the children to Heathrow, I ate a boiled egg while talking with my mother about the three weeks we had spent apart. The egg had two yolks of roughly equal size. When I cut through the egg with a knife, the section was remarkably similar to the thing I saw in my dream. “Imagine,” my mother said, “in my ninety years I have not seen two yolks in an egg!” She was even more surprised when I told her about my dream and when I showed her the sketch of the “egg” in my notebook.

Addendum II (August 15, 2000)

Gordana and Milorad Ristić, my parents’ dearest friends from Belgrade, who are visiting their son and his family in London, will be visiting my mother tomorrow. She baked a cake she knows they like. For the cake, she used the eggs from the same carton from which came the boiled egg I ate upon my return to Reading a couple of days ago. Among the eggs she used, she told me today, she found another one with two yolks. “Twice in a lifetime!” she beamed at me. Chances are both eggs came from the same hen.

Addendum III (December 16, 2001)

Yesterday I finally painted my egg with two yolks. I have long planned to do so, but one thing or another got in my way until yesterday. The composition is based on one of my sixteen symbols, which looks a bit like an egg cut in half. The black circle in the middle of the painting is surrounded by another circle. In the new composition, a smaller black circle is next to the larger one, and the circle surrounding the larger circle is now extended to embrace the smaller one, as well. It thus looks a bit like an egg. Come to think of it, one impulse to paint the egg with two yolks, for lack of a better descriptive name for the composition, was the comment made by one of my colleagues from the university who came to one of my parties. She just stared at my paintings for a while, and then muttered in amazement: “No curves anywhere!” I pointed one of my eggs with a single yolk, but she was not convinced.

Addendum IV (December 18, 2001)

A day or two after I made my painting, I let my friend know about it via electronic mail. “You must come to my party celebrating the first Friday in January to see it,” I concluded my message about my exploration of curves. She responded the next day: “I hope the exercise has brought you closer to your female side, not that I know what this is supposed to mean…” Only this evening I realized that she might be right. As I was eating my dinner, a delicious mix of fresh shrimps and my spicy pasta sauce, I noticed that my new painting looked very like a vagina and anus in close proximity. That is, the military-industrial complex, as I like to call these two. I bet this association would never have crossed my mind had I not been brought closer to my female side by all those curves.