Prior to 1988, prior to this cruise, I'd reached a place of creative inertia, that would eventually prove the prelude to the end of my time of living in London. I had reached my thirties and wasn't at all happy or content with where I'd got to in life. My engagement with living, my job, the lack of any meaningful relationship, my performance art work, my culture vulture nightlife, were one by one wizening and drying up in a biblical style creative famine.
Visiting Egypt, the fulfillment of a lifetimes ambition, was a conscious attempt to remove myself from this feeling of being submerged in the murky terrain that is a dead end. The holiday was meant to cheer me up, through reconnecting with a childhood love affair of mine. Here might be a way out.
A lot then, emotionally rested upon this trip. It couldn't possibly hold all the fantasies and expectations I was presenting it with. And a few days into a fortnights Nile cruise, was the moment it literally collapsed under the weight of them. In this beautiful place I felt the ugly disatisfaction of my existential position in heightened relief. Hence this tearful eruption, a cathartic release, whilst floating gently up the beautiful wide expanse of the Lower Nile.
I can't remember when my enthusiasm for Ancient Egypt had started. Though it appeared to capture me from a very young age. Nor what specifically set alight my fondness for Egyptian culture in my imagination. It presents itself to me as if it has always been there.
As a child I lost interest in reading fiction, and proceeded to voraciously consume non fiction books on ancient history I could find in the Library. I thought they were way better than anything 'made up'. Egyptian, Assyrian, Aztec, Mayan, Inca, whatever the civilisation, these intrigued me. To my young boyish imagination, they were an entirely magical other ways of seeing and interpreting the world.
So there I am standing in the flesh beneath the enormous range and monumental size of the Egyptian pantheon of gods and goddesses. Having watched the perfectly staged Son e Lumiere in the ruins of Luxor, Karnak and Philea, this trans-formative performance I found utterly breathtaking.
Melding human with animal form, the Egyptian world of their deities begins a representative shift from animistic gods to archetypal human hybrids, which encompasses the cycles and dramatic forces at work in the natural world. Rich with an incomprehensible language, symbolic forms and mystical amulets. Here could be found the origins of Alchemy, a vast cosmically drawn life cycle and dramatic stories of deviousness ,murder and resurrection amongst the god realm, that predates the Greek, and the Christian story, by centuries, if not millennia.
Egypt beyond the fertile strip immediately bordering the Nile, is largely an vast desert. A lot of it, though low and flat, is not lacking in theatricality. Dawn over the Nile is an awesome sight as you see the first shimmers of sunlight rise up and over the desert bound reed banks of the river. At that moment the Ancient Egyptian's complete obsession with it, makes self evident spiritual sense. Why wouldn't you want to worship this enormous glorious deity as it arose and descended so majestically in and out of the dark impenetrable swamp of the netherworld. Why wouldn't you worry that one day the Sun God Amun Ra might fail to return the following morning. The spiritual anxiety of our own mortality becoming transposed onto the burnishing bronze of our solar companions trajectory. Will we wake to experience another day, or not? Two existences become intertwined. Sun rises, like awakening in the morning, are sacred events.
On a temple visit, I was wandering around. I wanted to explore this temple on my own. Quite consciously separated from any tourist guide. I found myself quietly fascinated by its many side shrine alcoves and their wonderful acoustic properties. Just intoning, nothing too dramatic, for the space just took whatever my vocal chords threw up and hugely amplified it anyway. These vocal experiments attracted a guide, who gestured to me with his finger to follow him. He took me several flights of steps up to the very top of the temple. To one corner where there was a small cubicle like chapel. He obviously thought I was the sort of tourist who'd appreciate whatever this building contained.
The guide gestured up to its ceiling, where carved into, and stretched over and round it from east to west, was the cosmically vast form of Nut, the Egyptian sky goddess. Guardian of the daylight sky and the deep blue astrology of the evening heavens. Dressed in watery clothes, her nurturing pendulous breasts and outstretched arms, spanned a sky bedecked with the asterisks of stars. Nut protected everything beneath them, forming a womb like cocoon around earthly humanity. I was stunned, totally silenced by it, this was just one of the most deeply thrilling thing I'd seen the whole trip. I felt an instant sense of a bond forming between myself and the symbolic arche of love that Nut formed over the terrestrial world. As I've subsequently found elsewhere, female deities, they just get to me like nothing else does.
One evening the dry desert air led to a magnificently clear night sky, the sharpest I have ever seen. The Milky Way spreading out its cloudy band of stardust across the middle of it. In the last ombre of dusk, I took a trip on the Nile in an Egyptian felluca. Sliding without a sound across the flow of a gradually darkening river. Grand rivers like the Nile act as the geophysical metaphors for life. From the lively vibrancy of the Blue Nile at its source, to the sluggish dementia of the Delta veins. Yet I was transported on it to an altogether calmer and less emotionally ruffled existence, beneath the bright sparkling jewels of the Canopy of Nut.
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