Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities

Cairo

Cairo In Egypt I asked why words exist we cannot pronounce. Asked as Egyptian people mispronounced words like: Egypt. Pyramid. Sphinx. Where are you from, the young tourist-police official asks me at the gate of the Egyptian Museum. The guard looks so young—he’s a boy of seventeen or eighteen, a black machine gun slung over his shoulder. I am Indian, I say, nervous by how close his face is to mine. If you are Indian, he says slowly, leaning closer, putting his hand on my bare upper arm, where is your elephant. I do not know any of the rules of communication here. Is he flirting with me. Am I danger. Or is he trying to be funny or friendly. In the one place everyone looks like me—has my name—I am the most foreign. An eternal sense: ever since there’s been history—a telling of what happened, there have been people who have lived at this river, at this place. The city as we drove from the airport seemed to become monstrous—from the plane it stretched horizon to horizon. The cities of the past—all built geographically on top of each other, but also historically, culturally, linguistically. There is no such thing as a “present” moment, nor of “this city” | 29 The people I see walking down the street exactly resemble the figures in the papyrus paintings, in the carvings. As it comes close to opening time, the workers begin to disappear to their jobs—the security guards, with black-irised eyes, and long lashes, dressed in bright white, hefting their black guns casually, unbelievably young, remain on every corner. This book is sewn together. I am without language. The streets are so busy how will I get across the river? The week before I left for Egypt I took the fast-boat from Boston to Provincetown. The boat was going so quickly it skipped on the surface of the water. I’ve come to forget the years of joy. You’re a thread lost in a labyrinth. You will drink from the river. In the labyrinth the creature becomes not itself. You’ve forgotten the thread, bull-man, wolf-man, fox-man . . . There is a river in the labyrinth, Nile or Hudson or anything else you can name. In Clarence once, at the height of winter, the snow two feet deep, seventeen wild turkeys picking their way through the yard, heading towards the house. A labyrinth of time ties you back to the streets of Cairo, months after 52 men were arrested on a floating nightclub, taken to jail for crimes against society. Their trial will stretch out. For years. 30 | Such is the wandering and searching for the shining thread. You will not forget the way out. You will forget the way out. In Paris I first saw the work of Nicolas DeStaël. In Egypt I wished I thought of him. “One simply cannot think of any object whatsoever, because there are simultaneously so many objects that the ability to take them in falters and fades,” wrote DeStaël. I never knew if a bird or history or pharaonic. Never knew pyramid or the glass lid of the bottle. Held at the center of the hotel like a prisoner. What willful or wander waited. Evening. At Stonecrop Gardens. Marco and I had dinner at Café Maya. Earlier we walked through the gardens, down the Himalayan Slope, to the bamboo grove. How can I pick poems other than by heart? What do I really want to share with people? Not of my methods but of myself? It’s strange to look at what I’ve chosen for the manuscript I’m calling “the Far Mosque,” sliced up, divorced from all the hundreds of other pages that went along with it. It feels like an excerpt of a book that never existed. As if I ever existed. Egypt was a concept or a country. I never saw it, never took the bus down the river to Alexandria, never wondered. | 31 After The Far Mosque was published I learned about the controversy: whether the actual Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem is the “far mosque” of the legend, being described only by its adjective. It didn’t matter according to Rumi, who said something like, “the farthest mosque is the one within.” Days I wandered on my own; Salah, the driver assigned by...