Consuming the Past

Abstract

METROPOLITAN M U S E U M in New York: standing in front of the recently installed Egyptian mastaba, a tomb pretending to be a public building, an architectural flourish against biological fate. Hier oglyphs cut like scars?exact, sharp, minute?onto every depictable face of the mastaba's stone. Jackals, papyrus reeds, runners, asps, carts, plumes. (The kind of panoply I stared at in Budge's Egyptian Grammar, when I was a kid trying to crack open the semantic marrow in the figures.) Staring at the scars of meaning I feel cut off from the consciousness (and conscience) carved into the stone. I drive my eyes into the hollow space. I drove them equally, knowing I was not knowing, into the Mayan steles at Tikal, intuiting what I could of some meaning crouching between the spaces of the calendrical figures. I tried to break into another mind's code. There is a thirst for the plenitude of the past's mind, for the juices rising from the stems of ancient perception. This thirst springs from our hidden memory, and its brother?the longing to recover. Are we not physically, passionately drawn backward into the nourishment of that memory? Another sounding, another probe. Hamburg, the huge painting Galer ie. Paul Klee carving his universal geometry across my retina. Trapping me. Nothing would save me from the demand. It was just as he would have it, just as I had to have it. Reaching, was I, toward the center of his awareness? Passing into the cracks in his scratches in the deaf body of pigment? Attempting to decode him? Iconic painting and ancient hieroglyphics. Two hermetic signs of the border between our own remembered past and our perceiving present. How could we not feel a passion to return across that border, to become again earlier passages of what we have meant to ourselves?