Welcome to Antarctica

Among the constant catcalls, badgering and general harassment, both playful and offensive, the occasional wit will see us westerners perspiring under the unblinking eye of Ra and crow, "Welcome to Antarctica!" (Yes, har har. As it happens, the temperature in Luxor is not a single degree higher than the summer climate in Tucson-in fact today it was actually hotter in Tucson, which I have tried to explain to more cheeky Egytpian faces than I wish to recall). But walking home from dinner one night (Perhaps last night? It is impossible to tell, time is odd here, it passes too slowly and indistinctly), the rocky bastion surrounding the Valley of the Kings was bathed with cool blue lights, making the outcrop look almost glacial.

(i've been playing with my camera for hours trying to capture an image that is representative of what I saw, and am seeing. Unfortunately my camera has perfect vision, while mine admittedly is faulty, so the ghostly specter looming on my hazy horizon is rendered with brilliant clarity and little emotional impact). 

While the east bank was hot and full of life and music, the west bank seemed cold and ethereal, the hard reality of the soft white rock made nebulous like a celestial cloud of cosmic dust and ionized gas. It drifted weightless against the empty black desert, where neither light nor life could penetrate. The lights shone out from and illuminated crevices and hollows, gently flooding the vacant immortal houses for the souls of the dead. The Egyptians believed that the winged Ba (the soul and essence of a person) departed from the deceased body each day to partake in a version of life after death, returning to the body shell each evening. It was thus imperative that the bodies of the deceased remained whole and recognizable to their Ba's, or else the souls would be lost eternally, unable to find their corporeal cradles. With the existing sarcophagi and bodies of the pharaohs and royals all removed, many destroyed, with the identifying names etched in stone defaced by time, malice and apathy, with their homes plundered and bare, are the Ba's of all those dead still flitting around the valley at night, untethered and endlessly searching in vain?

Later (earlier?) I imported the few photos that I had taken of the scant remnants of Amenhotep III's temple while we were ambling rather aimlessly down the road (the presence of the U.S. ambassador usurped our priority both in the ARCE office-forcing us to leave without the monument passes on which our plans for the day depended--and incidentally on the road, when the cavalcade of blue, white and silver Chevy suburbans plowed by us but a few feet from the Colossi). Because of my great fear of losing photos (on my first trip to Egypt, I lost over 600), I had still retained on this CF card the pictures I took at the Italian excavation last summer. Image after image from the various museums of serene white marble, the most famous and praised sculptures of those cultures in graceful repose among the baroque galleries and staid halls. Despite what I know about the zestful reality of ancient Greece and Rome (the garish colors, the bawdy humor), the sensation associated with those cultures will always for me be imbued with the contemporary stylings and reverence that pervade our modern nostalgia (and by modern I'm including such recent human periods as the Renaissance forwards). Austere and elegant they posses a certain glory and majesty. But Egypt, Egypt is magic. As a scientist, I know fully well never to romanticize the past in one's analysis and investigation, but frankly I think to completely devoid oneself of romance is a foolish and empty preoccupation. I do not ever want to enter a tomb and not feel a shudder of awe, I never want to weave through a hypostyle hall and not feel anything but clinical intrigue. There's just not enough magic in the world, not enough mysticism and wonder, at least not in my life. As someone inclined towards cynicism and detachment, I can't afford to smother the warm embers of fantasy and sentimental passion, I'm afraid it would leave me too cold.  

Moses is slipping

There was a sudden *whunk,* the baggage carousel froze, and darkness fell upon the land of Egypt the power went off throughout Cairo international airport. Moses must be slipping however, for the darkness did not last three days, closer to three minutes...

Perhaps this is merely a result of the nature of the places to which I have chosen to travel, but I seem to have an uncanny ability for finding myself in the middle of violent protests or political upheaval when traveling abroad. I was teargassed in France, passing through a pack of discontent students and citizens who had the audacity to chuck a trashcan at a chain link fence in front of the deserted Sorbonne (in true French nature, they were protesting a bill which would have allowed employers to actually fire new employees who demonstrated complete incompetence at their jobs, rather than being forced to retain them. Oh the injustice!). While in Nairobi, there were bombings at demonstrations prior to the vote for their new constitution, and I had to be prudent about my fashion decisions while traveling around Kenya, as the haphazard choice of green or red attire could have had brutal consequences if one happened upon the territory of an adverse faction. I arrived in Madagascar just after a military coup. Now demonstrators have intermittently swarmed the street in front of my hotel in Cairo, angered not by the election, but about a ban on the import of old computers from America. An exciting knack, if not the most prudent.

My cameras are packed away, it hasn't seemed worthwhile to unpack them and repack them for potential use in the few hours I've had free in Cairo. Even if they were unpacked, I doubt I would have taken many pictures, because most of my time has been spent in cars (in the legendary, horrific traffic) and I have a strong, perhaps unreasonable, aversion to taking pictures from cars. Aside from often being blurry and affected with glare, reflections and the other hazards of photographing through dingy glass, it just makes me feel like a creep. I love taking candid shots of people, but that doesn't make it not entirely rude and invasive. It is one thing to be a tourist and gawk at the monuments, shutter snapping with almost belligerent eagerness, but to be a foreigner leering out my car window with my heinously enormous lens stealing images of the locals just seems too tasteless.

So, because of these reasons, here are a few of the surely amazing photographs that I failed to take thus far:

-- Three men in pink shirts riding a pink motor scooter. Not matching shirts, just coincidentally all pink.
--Hazy sunset on the Nile
-- An additional two men in purple shirts atop a purple motor scooter. The residents of Cairo seem to have a penchant for matching their attire with their motorized bi-wheeled transportation.
--Protestors in Tahrir Square
--A man effortlessly wending through traffic by bicycle, balancing several long and unruly palettes on his head

The battery in my laptop must have been a firstborn, as it is just about to die...

The Last Rain

The sky is electric, but down here we are sodden. This will be the first and last rain for me for quite a long time, one day of damp between deserts. On one overcast day when I was young, I remember invoking the gods of ancient Egypt, kneeling by an apple tree with my friend who was named for the woods, and pleading for rain. They didn't grant our request, in fact the sun almost immediately came out, which should have come as little surprise to us. Those immortals brought nothing but sun to Egypt, why should they have responded differently for us?

Despite the apparently inapt choice of desert gods for our rainy request, my woodsy friend and I would never have bothered with any more appropriate deities for our playful summons. We were obsessed with Egypt, and at least one of us still is.

Tomorrow I fly to Egypt to dig at an archaeological site in ancient Thebes (or more ancient Waset), a scenario which, as a child, would have seemed as fantastic, thrilling and impossible as conjuring up rain clouds.

Thunder has just announced the abating of the rain, so I need to scramble home while I can...to be continued in drier climes.

In Which The First Leaf Falls

It is one oh seven ante meridian, silence reclined lays a stilling hand on the desert valley and I miss my foggy home. Having called fore, left and below, Hypnos has departed trailing somnolent wake, passing by us nocturnalists here. So then, I am pattering around with grey tights on my legs and Peter Murphy in my ears, doing long neglected housework and feeding the rat-friend.

Brevity is...not my strong suit. I speak infrequently, but when I do, I tend to wax infinite, which vastly inhibits my ability to tell jokes or stay within narrow word counts. Nevertheless, I will try my darned bestest to keep my self introduction succinct and get to the real content.

Above is a snapshot of my life at this exact moment, and that is what I want this blog to be. This year I turn twenty-three. At that age, I am supposed to be a Person. I'm not sure if I'll be able to convey what I mean, but for whatever reason, twenty-three is a designator in my mind. That number is the start of real life, independence, adulthood...in essence, it's when I always imagined I would stop being defined by generic developmental labels (kid, teenager, college student, etc) and start being just...well, a person. I'd have a life, career and identity that was mine alone. An intimidating thought.

With that graduation impending, and a quarter of my life vorbei, I want to savor my pre-person life, look back on how I got here, and forward to what is to come. Right now, I feel as though all is autumn. I'm in a fall, a liminal period of change from the free summer of nonage to the next season of my life. This will be my journal, my photo album, my ledger and time capsule. Maybe this process will help me sort out my selfhood as a real person. At the very least, I hope to preserve my life in these moments so that I can cringe and smile and remember what it was like before the "now." This is for me...and for all of you who care to stop by and visit in this swell season.