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April

April 2nd, 2004
    This day I went over to the Egyptian museum again. I visited all of my favorite statues, and found some new things as well. I spent quite a while in the archaic period room on the upper floor, examining the copper tools and stone vases. How did they carve these perfect and symmetrical vases out of stone? As seems to happen so often in museums, I soon began to feel unusually tired and weak. I fet woozy and my head was swimming. I made some efforts to look at further exhibits, but soon had to stagger home with a crushing headache. I collapsed into a series of necrotic morbid nighmares and woke up in serious pain. Next I laboriously prepared a meal and began to cook it, only to run out of cooking gas. I now seriously believe that some sort of heavy curse lies over the Egyptian museum, as I always enter it feeling fine, only to come out seriously ill a little later. This has happened in repeated and dramatic fashion. Considering that the place contains the violated funeral goods and disturbed bodies of thousands of persons from a society overwhelmingly concerned with the sanctity of the dead, and learned in magic, the phenomena is not really surprising. It just had to happen too many times in a row before I realized what was going on. Even now I still feel a sharp pain in the left side of my head about 4” above my ear, the exact spot where I always get headaches. If I ever dare to visit that place again, I think some sort of appeasement ceremony will be very necessary.
    The photograph pasted in on the page above shows a very good view of Cairo’s central square, Midan TaHrir. The big building in the background is the Mogamma, Egypt’s citadel of Bureaucracy. The mosque is still there, but the columned structure to the right has disappeared. Nowadays, the square has been totally taken over by cars, and anyone who dares to attempt a crossing on foot is a brave and foolhardy soul.

April 4th, 2004
    It is in the watches of the night that impressions are strongest, and words most eloquent –Koran 73:5
    I generally listen to the radio on my walkman at night. Mostly I listen to the wonderful BBC world service, but sometimes after hearing the same news summary 27 times, I diverge and listen to the Arabic stations. There are some strange things on. A certain laxity characterizes that bands that each station occupies, producing many strange combinations of two or even three broadcasts. My favorite is Koranic recitations with a hip-hop beat going in the background. Many stations broadcast Cairo pop music, every song of which has the same beat, and the same weird clattering rhythm on top. For a while when I first moved here, I mistook this entire genre for a single popular song. Often the airwaves are polluted with drawn out crooning and warbling on the eternal subject of the habeeb (lover). There is a certain intonation audible in both these songs, and in some Koranic recitations which I think is intended to convey longing and yearning, but which comes across as interminable whining and bitching. I feel like slapping the singer and saying “OK, if you have a problem, get up and do something about it, don’t just sit there yodeling on and on about it!” Jeez.
    You can also hear a lot of older classical Arabic music from the 20th century. This is pretty cool, and sounds somewhat like surf music, but with ouds instead of guitars. Generally though some fat dude starts up with his warbling lamentations before too long. There is one station that broadcasts in English and plays all the cheesy pop hits. Its only redeeming feature is that it plays house music on Thursday and Friday nights. In general, on all the radio and television stations, the lack of advertising is very notable. American sports like football and baseball semm to have evolved especially to allow for as much advertising as possible. Last night I listened to a beautiful sermon on the Koran channel. Although I could only understand a few scattered words, I really enjoyed the speaker’s eloquence. His cadence was slow, melodic, rhythmical, and seductive. Every so often the soft thread of the discourse would suddenly convulse into a burst of passion, then return to its soothing mystical flow. The faint twittering of small birds could be heard in the background, along with the occasional murmurs of the listening men.
    Tonight the rising full moon is so beautiful I can hardly take my eyes off it. Certainly one of my favorite times of month is when I can watch it suddenly appear orange and magnificent on the horizon beyond the clutter of antennae and satellite dishes. My flat is well suited to lunar worship, as the view commands the entire Eastern part of the city, and my windows are elevated above the surrounding buildings. Before the sunset, many birds wheel and gambol high in the distant reaches of the sky. In the evening, these are replaced by bats. At night, in my dark apartment I can hear their sonar noises mingling with distant chanting from a mosque, and the dull roar of traffic punctuated by horns and whistles.

April 5th, 2004
    Alllllllaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahu Akbar!
    AlllllllaaaaaaaaAAAaaAAAAaaaaahu Akbar!

    On every mosque, and on many buildings is mounted a big low-fi stadium style loudspeaker. Five times per diem, this broadcasts the overwhelming call to prayer. All thoughts of Roba and Nussa Guineas, of errands and automobiles, are blow away, and the mind is involuntarily abstracted towards infinity. The call happens at regular times, so before long, so before long one begins almost to anticipate it’s beginning. First only the faintest humming is heard. Then a dim and rising mystic clamor, growing deeper and wider as each of the city’s 10,000 speakers takes up the call, then your local speaker bursts out with the name of God, impossibly loud. The sound of all the loudspeakers saying “Allah” across the vast city, before the closest ones starts, is a most beautiful and haunting sound.

April 9th, 2004
    What a strange country America is. People are so rich you can live luxuriantly off of their trash. Lately I’ve been thinking about its history. There ha always been something dark about America that is lost to most foreigners in the glare of our enthusiasm and naiveté. Our best or most popular authors work in the vein of Gothic horror: Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Lovecraft, Sylvia Plath, P. K. Dick, Stephen King and so on. Our history is burdened with atrocities: the genocide of the Native Americans, slavery, and dropping atomic bombs on civilian populations. Somewhere along the way, things seemed to get darker in ways that could not be explained away. I think this started in secret around 1947, when America inherited part of the demonic force animating Nazism. It began to assert itself more openly with the assassination of JFK, which almost certainly involved cryptofascist cells within the government. Around the time of the Vietnam War, patriotism really became inexcusable. Even soldiers threw away their medals in disgust. In later decades, our government’s support of avowed Stalinists and fanatics, such as Saddam Hussein and Bin Ladin, as well as repeated criminal interventions in South and Central America served to remove any last vestiges of honor or virtue which may have adhered to our country’s name. Even people with minimal political awareness will tell you that “something changed” with the 2000 presidential election, or that “it all started with that botched election.” Clearly, the dark forces descended more heavily then, when another Bush was appointed to office. Events since then have plunged us into the abyss with frightening speed. Now any type of patriotism is synonymous with over fascism. Questioning the September 2001 Reichstag fire places one in the lunatic camp.
    Running alongside these dark undercurrents in American history, a quieter path of light may be perceived. Thoreau and Emerson, Whitman and John Muir recognized the grotesque atavistic forces operating behind the forces of society, and sought elsewhere and alone states of ecstatic bliss and freedom. An underground counterculture came into existence, and perhaps first spread widely and came into public view in the late 1940’s when Ahrimanic forces arrived from Germany. This movement, a desperately needed antidote to the crushing, mindless conformity of the 1950’s, flowered in the latter part of the 1960’s, and struck an almighty blow at the forces of war, tyranny, and conformity, from which they can never hope to recover. Those who dismiss the social revolution of the 1960’s as a short lived hippy dream fail to perceive how the ethics and ideals of that time continue to support every aspect of the struggle against the corporate state. I think the social revolt of the late 1960’s was the most seminal period in the history of our nation. During this period, things like civil rights, gender equality, and environmental protection emerged from a long gestation underground to become basic parts of our society. Today, even the most bigoted imperialist corporate android dare not speak against them, and that is a great victory.
    Other things too came into being after the second world war, grew and flowered in the 1960’s and became part of our culture. The ecstatic dance tradition of blues music became rock and roll, and permanently swept away the superficial abomination of big band music, and the last decayed fragments of the classical tradition. In the very darkest days of the Nazi horror, the divine molecule LSD was first experienced in the heart of occupied Europe. This and marijuana partially replaced the alcoholic haze of the 1950’s with more gentle and reflective recreations. The fact thatb these drugs remain illegal confirms my belief that there is something inherently subversive to authority about them. All of these changes remain to us as carefully honed and guarded weapons passed down by generations of heroes. Now we must put them to the test.

April 10th, 2004
    Around now is an Egyptian holiday to celebrate smelling the spring breeze. Families go on picnics. It supposedly dates back to Pharonic times, but in urban Cairo, pollution has rendered its name somewhat of a joke. This Sunday for once the Coptic and Roman Easters coincide. I happened to flip on the television, and they are showing the Coptic Easter celebration or service. It’s quite a spectacle. Lots of old guys with very impressive beards, thick glasses, and weird varnished, corrugated hats chanting and swinging smoking censors. One very old man, perhaps the pope, is seated on a huge gold throne, crumpled under the weight of scarlet and gold robes. His cool domelike hat, or crown, has enameled pictures of Jesus and others embedded into it. Sometimes they march around carrying an image of Jesus. The guy holding the image walks backwards so another guy in super fancy robes can look at it. Lots of other people walk around carrying video cameras and microphones, making a confused scene. I really have to give these Copts credit, preserving their religion and sacred language through all these centuries of Islamic rule. Apparently the Coptic language is descended from ancient Egyptian. They also have their own Coptic calendar that dates back to Pharonic times. I think it has 13 months. Some of the monks or bishops or whatever carry staves that look rather like the serpentine caduceus. Others wear taller pointy hats that might be related to those weird Pharonic conical helmets. The men listening to the service sit on one side, the women and children on another. The walls of the church are covered with paintings and stained glass. The setting contrasts with mosques, which usually have blank walls with a few geometric designs of Koranic verses. There is always a lot of light and air, as opposed to darkness and incense. Some mosques, like Ibn Tulun or Sultan Hassan in Cairo are open to the sky. In fact, the Islamic weekly service, Friday prayer, usually occurs outside on the street. Green mats are rolled out, and hundreds of men kneel in the street, listening to the Koran and rabid eloquence. Women and children definitely do not participate in this, although they may lounge around sitting on steps, listening during the sermon. I think women may have their own section of the mosque, although I’m not sure about this.
    Now the pope is reading out names and speaking in Arabic. Its difficult not to laugh at his garish costume, but he does have a certain venerable aspect. I wonder when the Copts broke down and started speaking Arabic at home. He mentions America, Iraq, and computers in his sermon. Now the service is over. I can’t her church bells ringing outside though, even though it’s after midnight.

April 11th, 2004
    Today is Easter Sunday, so we can hear a combination of church bells and the Islamic call to prayer. The bells sound dull, mechanical and ancient, like perhaps there is something wrong with them. I really get the sense here that Christianity is the Old Faith. Its aesthetics and ritual clearly date back to the Roman period, when grotesque displays of opulence were particularly admired. With its overt polytheism and iconolatry, it seems to be in manifest error, and its persistence is remarkable. Perhaps its compelling myths of virgin birth and resurrection have preserved it, although I would think these stories introduce room for doubt not found in Islam.
    At its root, Christianity seems to have teachings in a way that Islam doesn’t. The inscrutable parables of Rabbi Yeshua leave room for a lifetime of pondering and discussion. The Koran seems to focus more on commands set into beautiful poetry.  How much farther can you get from “turn the other cheek” than “retaliation is decreed for you” (Koran 2:178), or “fighting is obligatory for you, much as you dislike it” (2:216) or “If anyone attacks you, attack him as he attacked you” (2:190).
    Then we have the issue of heaven. Now what is this kingdom of heaven you keep going on about, Rabbi Yeshua? Its like a mustard seed and we have to act like little babies to enter it? It’s like grain spilling from a jar? Mkay, whatever. Let me tell you something, space hippy. In our heaven we get hot babes with high bosoms and dark eyes! Not only that, but we get nice cushions and stylish embroidered robes. And we get to drink non-alcoholic wine. What do you say to that? In your heaven, do you get to look over the edge and laugh in triumph at your enemies burning in hell? I don’t think so!
    All these attributes of heaven, which are repeatedly and lavishly described in the Koran, would seem to exert a heady appeal to all normal twelve year old boys, but anyone else, say a woman, or a man who didn’t want to spend an eternity eating, fucking, and watching people burning alive and drinking rotten blood, might be impelled to look elsewhere.
    Then we have the issue of the old top dog himself. In the Koran, God is repeatedly described as compassionate and merciful. In fact, compassion and mercy seem to be attributes reserved for the deity alone. But calling Allah compassionate and merciful is a sick joke. The Koran repeatedly portrays Allah in attitudes that can only be described as gloating. He clearly relishes in inflicting suffering, and in inventing torments of the beings he has created. This gloating behavior and jealousy, this reveling in tortures and concern about what people think of him combine to give this god all the attributes of some minor demon strolling about in borrowed robes while his master is away. He is a mean god. Perhaps like insecure men he wears cologne.
    Time and events take unexpected directions here. I remember a typical event that occurred on the flight to Egypt, even before I arrived. The in-flight movie was some sort of marginally interesting action movie that I was half watching. It had finally built up to the climax, where the hero and villain were battling it out on top of a tall building. The kung-fu was actually pretty good at this point, and a lot of other guys started watching it. Then, right at the most climactic frame of the whole film, when the hero kicked the villain off the building, but grabbed his hand as he fell, the screen went blank. The landing procedure had begun. We looked at each other in total disbelief, and a few Egyptians tried to protest, but there was nothing to be done. We were arriving in Egypt now.
    A similar event occurred today when I tried to buy a replacement fluorescent light bulb. I went into the store, and found at least nine men employed there. They were all lounging around looking peeved and bored, occasionally slapping each others face, then staring in catlike anger. I went up to one guy and explained what I wanted. He sent me off to another guy, and I explained again. This guy was apparently unusually dense, and it took me a long time to get the idea through. He was staring at me angrily, as were all the other employees. When the idea finally penetrated, the guy produced the light bulb and asked how much I wanted to pay for it.  After some discussion we agreed on a price. Next I was sent to yet another employee who inscribed in triplicate an imposing receipt, and sent me off to the cashier woman. For some reason, the cashier is almost always a woman. After at last reaching this point in the transaction, I brought out my cash, but… she had no change. Her change drawer was empty. I had just this one 20 pound note. I asked the lounging employees if any of them could fuck a twenty. One bulbous man produced a wad, rifled through it, replaced it and said no. The multitude of sessile employees stared at me exactly like cats- with arrogance, jaded disinterest, and a drop of fear. I realized that some sort of very negative aura prevailed here, so I walked outside and away. The result of all this explaining, bargaining, receipt inscribing and shuffling around was absolutely nothing.

April 15th, 2004
    Suddenly, all the askaris are wearing white uniforms. Apparently this is a seasonal change, as I can vaguely remember when they changed from white to black shortly after I arrived. The white suits give them an oddly buoyant, boyish air, whereas in black they appeared to belong to some fearsome secret security einsatzgruppe.
    The other day I possibly saw a dead man in a café. He had collapsed and looked very peaceful. A crowd had gathered. Someone was holding his head. A few cops stood by, doing nothing.
    Today I walked out to the edge of Islamic Cairo to buy some spices. I took a different way back through some very deep and old alleys, past a few nice crumbling mosques. I passed an interesting scene going on behind the Cairo jail, which is located near the spice shop, near the eternally closed Islamic museum. You can always see prisoners being trucked in there. Behind the prison is a narrow old alley. Tiny shops and lumber merchants line one side, while on the other is a concrete wall patrolled by guards with machine guns. Beyond this towers the prison itself, with dark, barred windows. In the alley a few groups of tiny women in black stood yelling up at the prisoners, who yelled back from the high windows. It was a rather sad and poignant spectacle. It sounded like they were trying to find out about their husbands or sons. Boys wheeling huge blocks of ice passed. At other times you can see large numbers of mangy and bedraggled women and girls sitting around outside the prison, waiting for something. Probably around 25% of the population of Cairo consists of old women approximately 3 ½ feet tall wearing all black and carrying enormous bundles under their arms, or on their heads.

April 16th, 2004
    I’m listening to FM radio and opera music is bleeding into all stations on one half of the dial.

Corniche Characters
There’s something a little crazy about all these Corniche characters. Perhaps the lunatic magnetism of flowing water has collected them here. The yellow bean vendor talks to himself a lot. Perhaps this is because he is six years old and must spend all day and night sitting in one spot selling botulized beans. The extremely persistent flower vendor seems to be some overblown beauty who wears the black cloak of the pious Muslim, but lets her wild red hair flow free. The limping flower vendor is an icon of pathos. The various mangy characters whom I call ascetics remain nailed to the benches, staring across the water. Farther down the river, one massive bear-like ascetic shambles up and down his chosen few meters of Corniche, and sleeps at times in the reeds growing by the trash-ridden banks.

April 22nd, 2004
    I for some reason fell victem to the hype surrounding the movie The Passion of the Christ, and shelled out ten pounds to see it. It had not one redeeming moment, just ninty minutes of a guy being tortured to death. I remember that Hitler ordered his would-be assasins impaled on meat hooks and tortured to death, and that a film be made for his own viewing pleasure. That film probably represented the closest cinematic equivalent to The Passion. Christianity is a sadistic cannibal death cult.
    Now this fellow is truly anomalous. He is to be seen everyday, sitting on an overturned crate on the sidewalk, between a parking lot and the back of some government building. Before him is a bucket of hacked off, pickled looking animal legs in blood. I can’t figure out what exactly he is doing to them, but it looks like he is peeling them, or shaving them down somehow. Sometimes a small crowd of bedraggled acolytes gathers around him, conversing in animated fashion. Horrifically, these severed limbs seem to fulfill some culinary purpose. One time, I met one of my ancient neighbors on the ground floor. The elevator was atlan (out of order), so, as I was going to be walking up the stairs anyway, he asked me to carry a heavy bag up to his wife on the 8th floor. I took the bag and started up. Around the 6th floor, I glanced at the bag’s contents: severed limbs, weirdly pickled and dripping nauseating fluid. I shudder to imagine my neighbors gnawing these in the dark at night.

April 23rd, 2004
    This day I went out to have a ramble around the pyramids. It was a very beautiful day- the sky deep blue, and the afternoon sunlight brilliant. Bright scattered clouds drifted across the sky and shelved away at the horizon. It was so clear that I could see the step pyramid at Saqqara, and other pyramids too, as well as all of Cairo spread out below the plateau. As it was afternoon, few people were visiting the pyramids. I walked out into the desert and sat out there on a high rock for a while, observing the pyramids, the sky, and the city. I watched the cloud shadows rush across the sand. I found a small rock with a hole in it-a very good thing. When I came out of the desert, the area around the pyramids was deserted, and I had the place to myself. Looking up the East side of Chephren’s pyramid, I found the first sliver of the new moon as four birds flew across it- two white and two black. I think the angle of this pyramid looks particularly fearsome, especially near the top where the casing survives. I also noticed weird sound effects around it. If you step around its corner, the sound of the wind suddenly disappears, and you can hear echoing voices and prayers from far away that seem to be coming from within the pyramid itself. With all the tourists gone, it was just me and the plastic bags. And the magpies. Eventually I left and took the bus back to Cairo. In the intense, clear orange light of the sunset, the endless concrete buildings and narrow, tall streets of Giza looked particularly amazing.



April 24th, 2004
    Today is another fine spring day, but hotter and without clouds. I went down to the Manial palace museum and looked around. The place is a large complex of wildly ornate buildings set in lush gardens, the former home of Egyptian royalty. It was fairly interesting, but required baksheesh, and I wasn’t equipped with enough small change to drive off the parasitic swarms. Most of the buildings were filled with twiddly rococo doodads and other effete rubbish- fourteen pairs or ornamental scissors, gilded teacups, 93 oil portraits of Muhammad Ali (not that one), and so on. There were quite a few beautiful Korans from the middle ages. These were written in gold and deep blue colors, and decorated with intricate and fascinating geometrical designs. There were also a few interesting old photographs of ladies smoking sheesha, or old harbor scenes. This part of the museum had a beautiful courtyard garden. In another part, a guard drew me aside and unlocked the upper level of a palace. We went upstairs part horse skeletons to look at some absolutely garish rooms. There was a bed of solid silver weighing 500 kilograms. For a small fee, I was taken across a velvet barrio to inspect a “piano,” which was a harpsichord on which a single key still worked. The rest were fused together. I was permitted to play the single key that worked.
    The weirdest part of the museum was doubtless the hall of embalmed animals. This was a very long, narrow and dark hallway filled with dilapidated, moth-eaten stuffed animals. Along one side were the preserved victims, including 200 antelope heads, each labeled with date and location. Their hacked off legs were also preserved separately. Numerous other dried out corpses were arrayed there, including bats, chickens, snakes, lizards and eggs. There was also a table made from an elephant’s ear, and an absolutely horrific display of leg traps. Along the other wall was a series of the weirdest dioramas I’d ever seen. Small compartments jammed with indiscriminate mixtures of birds and snakes, with their respective eggs rolling around on the plaster ground. The backgrounds were painted in a range of freakish styles, and were so peeling and decayed as to be rather mysterious. As in the Agricultural museum, I began to get a feeling of the dead being here. The animals were dead, those who killed them were dead, those who stuffed them, arranged them, who cared about their display were all dead. Considerable effort had been exerted once, long ago, to put together this assemblage, but now it lay like a disjected husk, like an abandoned school project left in a broken locker over summer vacation. Here, and in such places, I feel the presence of Death more forcefully than in any cemetery. Along this diorama wall also there were occasional windows that let in a dim light through layered dust and overgrown vines. At the very end of the hall, the dessicated husk of a lion was propped up, emerging from a cave, gazing with colored glass eyes down this embalmed corridor. I enjoy lingering in such places, where I can really feel the pull of the other world. But to come out into the sunlight and walk back up the corniche was better. I felt that if I had stayed in that hallway of death, staring at the peeling backgrounds of the dioramas, listening to the silence, I could well have dissolved and been drawn out of the world of the living, into some dim past where the hopes and efforts of the dead still persist.
    Living here has led me to a certain appreciation for the chivalric code of conduct followed in the West. I’m talking about things like offering ladies your seat on the bus, or trying to generally tell the truth. Men here have absolutely no compunction about telling the most outrageous, bald-faced lies right to your face. On the touristic level, there are the common lies, such as your hotel is closed, the museum is closed, the museum is closed, come with me and I’ll show you a special entrance, or the main entrance is right this way, through my perfume shop. The site is closed for the next hour, come have tea in my house, which happens to be a papyrus shop. Come visit my “art gallery,” my sister is very beautiful. (What? What kind of Egyptian man would talk about his sister like this to lure people to his “house”?) But also there are other more overt and staggering lies. Like I’m looking through a pile of dessicated and mouldy ginger root, and the guy keeps telling me “Very fresh, veeery fresh, no rotten.” Or my favorite- when I’m walking through the market, some guy latches onto my sleeve and persistently repeats “No hassle, no hassle, you come my shop” while tugging repeatedly and pushing his face near mine. This disregard for truth can lend life an almost magical or childlike aura.
    While men are very protective of their wives or daughters, they have no problem shoving women and girls out of the way to be first to the door, or to a free seat. Women need their own carriages on trams and subways. Sexual harassment is constant for any women not wearing modest dress. According to guidebooks, “Egyptian men are the creepiest on earth.” And while I’m complaining, I think I’ll move on to the subject of “brusqueness,” which is the best word I can find for a central and pervasive Egyptian characteristic. There is a certain hurried brusquery to Egyptian movements. In crowds, people bump into each other constantly and hurry on. People’s bags smack into other pedestrians. Drivers show no regard at all for those on foot, except for blasting the horn, or flashing the headlights. Things you buy made in Egypt break almost immediately. Radio stations all bleed into each other across the dial. Egyptian food seems to be thrown together and stuffed into the face as rapidly as possible. Packaged food contains sand and shards of granite. The TV stations will show random sections and fragments of old films, interrupting them by painfully slow computer graphics of the stations name. Life seems fast and cheap. The details and subtleties are swept away. Much of this is probably due to the size of Cairo, and its crowding. To their credit, I must say that in some ways Egyptians are more friendly and generous than Americans or Europeans. You always must offer food or water to others if you are eating or drinking. Beggars actually do get a lot of money here. Street urchins who ask for change or ice-cream generally get it. People are also very eager to talk and make friends.


April 25th, 2004 Sinai Liberation Day
    Today is another obscure public holiday. Some shops and stands were closed, and the corniche was filled with ambling families and couples. I went out there around sunset to read my book Life by Richard Fortey. The moon and Venus were very bright. Another note on the subject of Egyptian products breaking easily- a common name for men here is Shoddy. Thus you have gems such as the “Shoddy Construction Company,” or Shoddy Products Ltd.” Sometimes the name is also transliterated Shady. There is a “Shady Bookstore” near Midan Opera. Also on Midan Talat Harb is the “Madbulli Bookshop” High on a colonial era building near my flat is engraved the mysterious word “NNOISE”. My guide yesterday to the hall of embalmed animals was fully conversant with the English word “shoes” possibly because he was a mosque doorman too. He pointed to the nailed up, hacked off limbs of the 200 dead antelope and said “shoes.” He also had occasion to employ this term when indicating the leg traps. One of my favorite Arabic words is Atlan, which means “out of order”. Every time I say it, I think of Atlantis, or the Atlantic Ocean. There are many other such weird linguistic connections, or rather disconnections, between Indo-European and Semitic languages. The word for change Fucka is probably the best one. Is there some inscrutable connection between salami and peace (Salam)? Between a pomegranate (Roman) and Rome, or novels? Between cows and bananas (mooz)? Between cream (Ishta) and Ishtar? Between idiots and beans (fool)? Between the goddess of illusion and water (maya)? Also I’ll never look at the most common American brand name of applesauce, Motts, in quite the same way, for its name means “death” in Arabic. All this reminds me of the sublime passage in Borges Library of Babel, when the librarian asks his readers if they do indeed really understand the words that they are reading. There is no set of syllables that is not a great and mysterious word of power in some language.

April 26th, 2004
    As I was walking along talat Harb Street just now, I accidentally bumped into a man behind me, and he said “watch.” We continued walking, keeping pace with each other. I felt there was something special about him. A block onwards he started to talk to me about my beard, which is attaining Islamic characteristics. He asked about my nationality, and when I told him I was American, he was shocked and silent for a moment. He said he liked American people but hated Bush. I agreed and we talked about this for a while. This led on to an epic conversation about religion, reincarnation, spirituality, knowledge and evolution, which lasted maybe 45 minutes. Actually, it was more like a monologue. He spoke in simple but effective English, facilitated by some quantity of Alcohol. His main points, which he summarized before we parted, were that God, or something, had given us incredible powers and that when we die, we will in some way be called to account, or asked what we have done with life. He compared this Questioning to an exam at the end of Primary school. I think he hinted that if we pass, we proceed to a higher level. He also remarked that occasionally he recognized people from former lives, or somewhere else, that he was half Palestinian and half Egyptian, that he had been married three times and had a son, and hinted that he practiced elements of Ancient Egyptian religion, entering underground sites unknown to tourists. Strange smells could be sensed there. He had traveled around Egypt from Sudan to Sinai three times, and gone on a haj, spending the night inside the middle pyramid at Giza, smoking bhango and listening to music. I asked him what he thought about evolution, and he said that he did not believe it. “Do you ever see a monkey making computers, or saying ‘Hey, I’m human?’” He suggested we move to a café, but I said I wanted to go. Before he left, he said that humans can be higher than angels if we do our best, and lower than animals is we do our worst. I was somewhat surprised to hear this coming from him, as it was an idea I’d only come across in Neo-Platonist Theurgists like Iamblichus. It’s probably Platonic at its root. Throughout the conversation, I had the feeling that something special was happening, and that it was something brilliant, fascinating, and far more important than many previous days and months of everyday life, but at the same time, I desparatly wanted to get away, to be out of it, to be anywhere but there. It’s the same feeling I get anytime I’m getting intimate with another person, or experiencing something beautiful or sublime.

April 29th, 2004
    This day I began the exhausting and shameful labor of cleaning out the 200 +/- Stella bottles from my flat. I found I was able to carry about 50 at a time in my backpack, and in one of those ubiquitous palm stem boxes. On my trek to the beer store, some persons looked disapprovingly at my burthen of flagrant sin. Others laughed and nodded knowingly. One man shook his finger and said “No, No” emphatically. Another tried to get me to give him the bottles. At the shop, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that each bottle carried a massive 50-piastre deposit. Two trips netted me more than 50 pounds. I little suspected that I was amassing such an investment. The bottles were absolutely black with the Cairo grime. The table on which they were kept now displays an interesting honeycomb dust pattern. It’s weird how circles pressed together form hexagons.
    At night, I took a walk out to Bab Zuweila and Khan Khalili, trying to think about what I will show my sister when he comes to visit in about a month. The narrow streets out there were crowded and hectic, but at times the obnoxious mopeds and micro=pickups would pass into the distance, and the street, although crowded, would become quiet, calm, and pleasant. You could hear the clack of backgammon pieces and the burble of waterpipes. It’s really terrible that the government lets people drive cars into these narrow medieval streets. What kind of asshole chooses to transport his personal bulk in a huge box of steel and plastic filled with explosive supercarcinogens? It’s bad enough out in the open, but absolutely inexcusable in these ancient passageways. At one point tonight, I came across a scene of hellish terror. In a narrow street, alongside a medieval mosque, a large puddle of water had formed, and various microtrucks, taxis and mopeds were backed up for about 50 meters around it. Pedestrians, many carrying immense burdens, attempted to weave through the stalled cars, choking on leaded exhaust, as the machine drivers pointlessly gassed their toxic conveyances forwards in spasmodic jerks. Idle cops spectated. Often the cars left only 6 or 8 inches on each side for the pedestrians to squeeze by. Mopeds tried to weave through. The air was black with clouds of hot leaded exhaust, and filled with the braying of horns, alarms, and curses. A scene from hell. Yet only a few yards past that mess, the streets were quiet and calm. Humans walked there. When there are no machines nearby, the streets are so quiet you can hear a man urinating against a wall from 30 meters away. It is especially in the old quarters of the city that I realize the full horrors of the car, and how much it has degraded the quality of our lives, how we are pointlessly enslaved to it.

April 30th, 2004
    Last night I bought two cassettes of oud music. The music shopping experience in Egypt is of course unique. In the states you enter some tiny shop covered in posters, and the black-clad, ultrahip employees might give you a disdainful, blasé gaze. In Cairo, the music store is a tiny booth set into the wall of a crowded alley between the pillars of a concrete flyover and an oleaginous micro-restaurant. Although the shop fills only a few cubic decimeters, it contains approximately 75,000, 389 cassettes, You must push past the other customers, a large man wearing a galabiya, and a crowd of Sudanese guys. You ask for what you want, and the shop owner plays a few seconds of it over the sound system. You can decide if you want to buy it or not. The cost? 5-10 pounds.
    Our building has a new bawehb or doorman who locks the front door at night and sleeps on a bench in the foyer. He sold us all keys for two pounds. I’m not so sure about the whole bawehb thing anyway. It seems suspiciously like part of the Egyptian masterplan for maximal useless employment. It’s probably a good thing that I can’t say in Arabic “So, what are you going to do if I don’t pay you? Not sit on a chair all day and pester me for cash? Oooh please no!”
    At this point, something should be said about stores that are entirely filled with crap. There are certain shops that basically consist of a door with a wall behind it. The entire interior of the door and the wall behind it are covered in racks full of items like minute hardware and tools. At night, the door is closed against the wall, and the shop basically disappears. There is a variation of this arrangement that provides about a square decimeter of space in which to wedge the shopkeeper behind a cluttered counter. Actually, in most shops there is no counter as such on which to put the stuff you buy. The space is filled with candyboxes. There is also a tire store near my house that consists of a room almost entirely filled with tires. A narrow corridor like two tires wide is left free with a cluttered desk at the end. Outside the shop on the street more tires are stacked. At night, these are brought in to fill the narrow corridor, resulting in a solid cube of tires, plus one desk.


May Journal


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