There's only one book here so finally I bought it, lucky it's got everything except when I open it, first thing missing is any letters from the alphabet. Makes for slow reading, after a few weeks here though you learn to give up and slow down. It does take weeks to quit splashin at the surface of your cerebrospinal fluid, quit looking for amusement and just let the particles and fish feces seesaw back to the bottom. Until then, touring the minimalism of muslimdom, I didn't too much get what was going on with the few million people around me.
It's kind of the same as first hearing music in quartertone scale. A westernear gallops in, dazzled by the exoticks then slumps in the saddle bored just as fast... because it's too complex to follow? or too boring with repetition to sit through? Or maybe something even more basic than that... So you do the galloping snooze a few times and finally give up, set your tell gallon hat on the fire and only later start hearing people humming bits of those quartertunes, that gets it in your ear small by small and unprepared, and also maybe you start wandering into more places, letting yourself into buildings where you have no business and climbing darkened marble staircases worn so smooth by shoes they seem to sag at the middle where really the edge gets so sharp it'll cut you
through your pants. Way above you hear a two-twenty volt buzz trigger a steel bolt and through the echo the groan of a two ton elevator dropping down from the dawn of elevators to take you up.
It stops a stair and half above the floor compacting the trash beneath it. Steel double doors that could easily crush your arm pull back on noisey hinges easy enough to open but once tipped past their springlocks come slamming shut. Fit yourself inside and after a sickening cachunk you're clattering toward the roof. Some older buildings still have elevators with no doors and no stops, a conveyor belt that if you don't hop off rides you over and back down the other side. Escape out onto any floor and you're facing enormous doors ten feet high fronted with paragraph-length plaques that even when they do include english don't give a clue about what ever or even still goes on there.
The air wells that let light through interior windows you'd expect not to notice really, but in Cairo they're the most beautiful frozen falls of soaked trash piled and baked onto vent fans and ledges for decades lit by flickering green flourescents. Cairo has a centuries old tradition of throwing trash down instead of out and one wall of the city's old fortress has a trash heap fifteen stories high.
Inside every building just like in every ancient tomb, there's at least one living person that inhabits the place usually on the second floor either asleep or at prayer. We got at odds about whether it's a caste position with decent money or a shit job like begging around buildings and tombs as if guarding them.
"Guard" isn't the right word since the state sends its conscripts to stand up and sleep three deep behind heavy bullet-proof shields on every corner, inside buildings, and at checkpoints on completely desolate highways. I'm wrong about there being castes, there definitely aren't, not like in India, but there is a defined patterns of roles you start to recognize: the bareheaded
shopkeepers as distinct from the turbaned shop owners who drag one chair into the road in front of their shop to live large and puff the sheesha, or the little kid who blows the stove and pulls tiny wood charcoal with tongs to balance them on the bowls of sheeshas packed with tobacco stewed in molasses and apples. Hes not to be confused with the street kid staying out of his way asking for a bit of money til someone will think up a runner task that sends him truckin across the bazaar and back, or the guy without any shop who sells six hundred tangerines off a donkey cart where he sits cross legged next to a fulcrum scale, these the basic types of robes and roles, you see em over and over the same in Cairo as in any small town..
There are maybe six types of shop: food, coffee & sheesha, clothes, pharmacies, appliances and shops of each kind are stocked identically to others. Oh there are workshops where one thing and one thing only is made, and the bureaucratic highrises. A few days of this variety and you give up looking for entertainment and just puzzle the tanglings of a society that never really had a plan, just happened and kept happening. Cairo is so overpopulated families sleep in shifts.
I asked a cabbie how anyone got anywhere before they built this two mile elevated highway, he said "Highway? Oh you mean the bridge. No it was better before." And sure enough we come to a standstill on the "bridge" stranded above buildings. There are plenty of impressive mosques but really everyone gathers in cafes to smoke and sip. It may be an ancient way of living, probably permanent, there are no elections and no shifting ideology, the military runs things on
the totaltarian model ensuring absolute peace through a limited set of rock hard rules. The things that'll get your hands chopped off are plenty clear, and no one does them. Zero crime nationwide. Mobility, likewise zero.
In a lot of ways everything seems at first exotic then just as fast, too boring with repetition although it isn't boring like the mall. In fact to compare Egyptian cultural minimalism to American homogeny is kind of helpful. In homogeny there's an appearance of variety and change but every effort clings harder to conformity, emulation, rocksumers bangin heads on thin air. Which superstar, which cliche, is all that passes for variety.
In cultural minimalism the spectrum of material possibilities is cleavered at the wrist. So what actually plays is personality, style, skill. Variety appears in character: how hungry how funny how raspy how lucky how mean. Against a lat surface of sand and same, idiosyncracies pop like noise you never heard before. Instead of just another horse drawn carriage careening past your eye catches the young kid in a cobalt jelabiya and white head wrap sitting one knee up on
his seat easily snapping a length of string one inch from his horses' ear or you spot the badass in a red and white turban, tan scarf, full length black jelabiya with a fist against his knee jetting white smoke across a backgammon board. It's small, it's everything.
.
Retro 80's v retro 800AD. No one here needs convincing that progress is impossible, its how you survive the unlikely tangle of social accumulation that wins respect, but not reward. Efforts to overthrow or escap the heap are as meaningless as belief in progress. Whatever comes next won't replace anything, it'll buckle, ruin, stack, split, anything but replace what came before. 'The past isn't dead, it isn't even gone yet.' you might say. It is kind of an amazing comparison though, cultural minimalism v cultural homogeny. Where a purely materialist culture tries to sweep away the "old" to witness where the new comes from and sorta situate the void, a tidyless culture steeped in "not-so-fresh" feelings etch far fewer, far deeper cuts into a void they have no trouble detecting.
One thing I noticed early on but couldn't make sense of were so many men with big cigar burns on their foreheads. At three a.m. every night a dented bullhorn outside your window pointed at your pillow throws a few sparks and sputters the call to prayer at 200db. Unconsciousness is no excuse, God can't sleep, but really you can do your praying anytime so long as it's five times a day. That means five times dropping to knees to set your cranium against the ground then back to standing then back to your forehead over and over all the while whispering prayers into whatever absence gaves space for the matter you currently animate. Five times a day, it turns out, will leave a big prayer pad like a mono paw print on your forehead. Visiting idiots will think it's a cigar burn.
'Etching into' is a another idea worth ponder, etching is different from drawing whether its Koranic texts or heiroglyphic friezes, carvings don't depict a thing so much as they are an aspect of the thing itself, the footprint of. I'm not saying there a stronger connection between ancient Egypt and Islam than any other art or religion, but as examples of carving both Islamic d ecorative relief and ancient Egyptian friezes describe something Malinowski called the coefficient of weirdness in ritual acts as distinct from secular work such as Renaissance perspectival drawings. The stylistic difference between naturalism and classicism may express a conceptual difference and shows something about why irony, layering, and feedback matter in iterative western art but don't have much play in accumulative eastern art. The context of iterative art becomes stylistic development itself, for cumulative art context is the physical world. Western culture turns to fascism using progress as a lie for containing and controlling people's behavior, justifying its "progress" as manifest destiny or social evolution. But to do without notions of progress, sense requires another description of what happens when the world mutates and we age. Answering that the world "decays" is just the kneejerk rejection so not actually a different concept . Instead, if change is neither progress nor egress, it might be a cyclic stasis, that's
what science came up with to describe physical equilibrium, mathematical indeterminacy, stochastics, etc but that was centuries after the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Vedas described nonphysical or ontological change as the flow from genera to specifics and right back again.
Instead of "progressing" away from animal states Ancient Egyptians figured that consciousness in humans gaves them the unique role as conduit between things material and non-material (or temporal and atemporal, same diff). Human actions, they figured, inscribe the divine on the world that in turn spits out thinking humans. Except where do those principles come from and why do they repeat? Or, where did matter come from and why won't it go away? What is the world that it can be perceived by people, and what are people that they perceive subjectively.
Anyway, some sense like that is helpful if you're going to get at all happy about running around ruined temples not as pretty places or impressive objects of skill but as site specific locations of generic metaphysical principles. When you're standing inside the hypostyle hall at Karnak with more than a hundred stone pillars eighty feet high raised and perfectly aligned by no technology
discovered yet for raising that kind of mass you'll slump pretty quick unless you consider the temple doesn't just simulate the place where matter first jutted up from nothingness then started to grow and mutate as papyrus then paper then recorded thought, instead it really is that place, the beginning of the universe brought into being as sentient action. That matter exists at all is one thing, that it lives is another, that it's self aware and can pretend is just completely
fucked up.
However old or ugly, the hypostyle hall at Karnak is amazing as an attempt to model subjectivity. Spend an hour wandering in there looking along or across or up the rows of columns and you start to perceive a single tableaux of your perspective perforated with blind alleys. Carvings from one column appear side by side with carvings from another because of your physical position, then other people can be seen stitching through though you can't see what they see and they move and are occluded an you move and see a changed vantage carrying your memory of the previous place marked by seconds. You're free to roam and remember, but what path would it take to see the whole thing, sight every surface and every distance there? A stretch, an abstraction, parallel processing.. I'm sure I'm wrong about what it meant back then, it'd be uncanny to guess it right. Evidence is slim, but that is what it's like there.
Egyptologists stare down the tiniest clues but it seems like their credo is not to pounce at what they find, they keep a far away view. Shrankenass got us special contacts with his Uncle Edicktologist's old friend, Mahmoud egad thanks! who drove us around to see first dynasty mastabas and third dynasty pyramids at Saqqara ending with the Djoser pyramid that's the very oldest man made structure known. 5000 years, that's exactly halfway between cave paintings and Caroliner and it stands between the pyramids at Giza and the bent pyramid at Saqqara.
Pharaohs wanted to to be physically proximate to earlier pharaohs and their priests who were buried in underground corridors near each pyramids would have extra tunnels dug to tap them into the tombs of other priests sort of suggesting a belief that physical connections created nonphysical connections as well. One thing our guide explained was how the pyramids used to have highly polished facing stones (that since slid off) acting as mirrors that reflected the sky,
sun, and clouds. You can still see the fast changes in light and shadow even on the rough surface and see how it would've been like movies before cameras.
Seeing a photo of the pyramids is just about useless, going there though... you're aware of your exact position on the face of the earth like no place else, move a few steps and it's like those portraits that seem to watch you but these ain't portraits, they're portals through the bottoms of your feet, it's completely goofy. Then you climb up and into the Cheops pyramid, the biggest one, and the opposite happens; you're instantly vanished from creation, dead, lost climbing up instead of down into the ground through a steep narrow shaft that opens into another corridor with a stepped ceiling that gets narrower at the top and you haul yourself up to another passage at the end of which you then have to duck under a huge stone then slide a few feet before you can stand a three foot space where the roof is high again but forces you to duck down and shuffle into the
burial chamber where a thick sarcophagus was built in place impossible to take out. The burial chamber is huge, built on the proportion of the golden mean and above it out of sight are several granite slabs with a couple feet of space between them that never would've been discovered except for a strange natural reverb that tipped someone off. Something maybe messed up happened to us in there, I'm not sure but Porest convinced me later that it was pretty fuckin
odd. We had the burial chamber to ourselves and everyday we'd been traveling with these walkie-talkies but mine started picking up interference inside the chamber where there's no way a radio signal could penetrate. I thought for sure it was him leaning on his transmit button but his was picking it up too, and after switching off one radio the other kept picking up a pretty mean sound, it was really really faint. Porest swears there was a voice, I think it was
a static tone, I did boot up my recorder so once I get back I'll amplify and ask for ears.
inside_pyramid_video (9MB)
outside_pyramid video (2MB)
Anyway, wrapping up human history here, the condition of ancient ruins in Egypt is really surprising. Besides the statues, jewels, sarcophogi, displayed in Cairo and Luxor museums the ruins themsleves are in amazing shape. Free standing temples did tend to tip over in earthquakes but the pyramids and tombs dug into mountains have perfect superfine relief carvings with paint still in tact. Even so, every tomb sorta seemed to show the same exact thing. There's a lot of repetition, but if carving serves to show how one living person belonged to and acted within a timeless unchanging context, then repetition makes sense, and you learn to seek the details in that repetition. But that's true whether its a row of fifty exact sphinxes or minimalism in music, repetition tunes in subjective sensibilities by overloading the function of intellect so that it can't locate an object for its lethal rational analysis. Which reminds me to shut up. Finally got photos out of my camera to supplement this phlegmy rant as photoproof of zero progress hundred percent crime.
zero progress . . . hundred percent crime
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