Swirling in the Cosmos on Friday 02-11-2011

Swirling In the Cosmos


"...if you have not lived through something, it is not true" - Kabir, Indian (1440-1518)



 I continue to watch the events taking place in Cairo.

Yesterday after waiting for hours for Mubarak to go on stage, I listened to his speech translated by an interpreter. I hung on to the pauses between his words, and the archaic verbiage he offered, parsed through this modern day pharaoh’s lips. I was stunned. Macbeth came to mind.

Hosni Mubarak seemingly lives some place I can't put a name to. As he continued delivering his ultimatum to the crowd who had endured a very prolonged bating of breath until he arrived, I thought this man is crazy. I mean seriously. He’s out of touch. I am not sure where he got off the train, as I have never witnessed someone who has carved out his own universe so precisely that he’s here but not here. 


This morning I woke up and turned on the news. I am so deep in this revolution. Egypt right now, is the most alive place on the planet. Each day women, men children babies the old, the physically challenged and people, from other countries come to Freedom Square and even those like myself who watch the human swell and its undulating movement toward the 'light” are part of this phenomenal quest for peace which reminds me of the people who fought in the France’s Revolution or the March from Selma to Montgomery.


I see the architecture changing in Cairo, (the most populous city that sits in the center of the world). giving new meaning to the term “power of place”. I watch with great curiosity the ingenuity of Man, reshaping and altering Freedom Square with new architecture – the out houses and shelters being built on the spot, forever altering the face of the city. I see that in the future Tahrir Square being similar to the Jewish People’s Holocaust Museums dotted all over the planet, or the site of the Berlin Wall in Germany and the Memorial for Vets who died in Viet Nam, in Washington, D.C, or The Bastille in Paris, and the site of the World Trade Center in New York City, or the monument in Oklahoma memorializing the fallen heroes and just ordinary people. 

So, as I continue to keep pace with this, the most wondrous  of events taking place in our world at the moment I  keep revisiting Egypt in my mind and my first  sighting of the Sphinx, the curious looking  guard dog protecting the pyramids, as I think it to be.    I imagine that right now it’s watching the spectacle of these revolutionaries in Egypt.

I shift from this memory of my first time visiting Egypt, to what I saw on the tee vee yesterday. That from the perspective of the camera's aerial view, what is actually occurring in Egypt, from afar appears to be a stream of consciousness swirling in the cosmos.