Alchemy, the Egyptian method, turns out to be neither metallurgy nor a range of symbols generated by a universal subconscious mind. Alchemy is a consciously created system of coding for the invention of time, the creation of written language, and the yogic practices of Ta-ntra, “the holiness of the earth itself,” the oldest religion in the world. This method of coding, of hiding and probing the dimensions of profound realizations in elaborate constructions of words, is the origin of poetry.
When I first went out to the Western Desert to work as an archaeologist in the summer of 1980, I brought with me a single book that I had purchased in Matbouli’s the night I arrived in Cairo, a tattered used Faber edition of The Four Quartets. I turned to its pages over and over, and I go back to them now:
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Pursuing Eliot further into The Sacred Wood:
If this tradition is to survive what is needed are more educated poets who know Greek.
Eliot and other poets seem to be reaching in the dark toward Egypt with its “locked rooms, and books that are written in a very foreign tongue.” Hence it is only appropriate to dedicate this book to Egyptian poetry, old and new, to the Mother of the Eyes,
the eyes with hard words and sad smiles and say to her,
“O friend to those who wander
Your friend who has loved you
Year after year has returned.
And by life—a night of longing,
By dawn and those who cannot sleep
By morning and those who hope
By noon and those who sweat
By evening and those who are tired
By maghreb—and what is it
But a punishment for madmen?
Do not abandon a friend
Who was never false
And never—though love was lost
Cried out—
And never said, ‘But I...’
May the earth and sky be my witness.”
•
And around the shanties and the hovels,
Heart, when you go—
Don’t go as a nightingale or as a bat—
Go as what you are,
A heart
With a thousand eyes
And a thousand ears
And a thousand thousand tongues.
Crawl on your belly on the pavement in the dust,
And if it is the cowardly month of Tuba, the brutal,
Listen and see what rises in the wind,
O heart, o million.
Say to those in a house of tin,
“Wake up,
Your lost friend returns.
Your friend who wandered too far,
Forgive him.
I am not Christ,
But I’ll tell you something,
And I swear it to you,
I swear to you—
The world is lie upon lie
And you alone are true.”
—Salah Jahin
CHESTER BEATTY PAPYRUS IV
If you learn this profession you will become a writer
Think of the writers of the past: their names have become immortal
Even though they are dead, and their descendants are gone.
They didn’t make themselves tombs out of copper,
With tombstones of iron from heaven.
They didn’t think about leaving heirs in order to perpetuate their names.
They made heirs out of books they had written themselves.
People they will never know are their children, for a writer is a teacher to all.
Their children are buried, their houses are gone, their graves are forgotten,
But their names live on in the books they made while they were alive
Be a writer. Take this to heart,
And your name will be like theirs.
A book is better than something carved in stone,
Than a solid tomb, for it lives in the heart.
A man decays
His corpse is dust
His family dies
But his books live on
Where got I that truth?
Out of the medium’s mouth
Out of nothing it came
Out of the forest loam
Out of dark night
Where lay the crowns of Nineveh
~
We hope you enjoyed this book.
For more information, click the links below or use your device’s Go-to menu:
~