"All 5 Fingers Are Not the Same" --Sasha

Woke up this morning and listened to my usual morning podcasts.  I always start off with 365 Tao.  They read a poem, and give words of wisdom.  A quick 2 min pep talk each morning.  I had skipped a couple of days, including my birthday, so I listened to it first.  For my birthday they talked about: birthdays!  No kidding!  The guy said that Masters of the Tao don't celebrate birthdays, because the Tao is a constant stream and there is no need to mark any occasion or festival.  However, he concluded, until we are as practiced and as wise as the Masters, that it was a good idea to mark our milestones as we saw fit.  :-D  I'm just keeping to the Tao, letting things come!

The Master observes the world

But trusts his inner vision.

He allows things to come and go.

His heart is open as the sky.

--Tao Te Ching (12)

Today I went and sat by the Rapenburg canal and wrote.  I don't know that I can describe how wonderful it felt.  Today was painfully beautiful.  The sun was shining, and actually had heat to it, not just warmth, not just light.  Heat.  I rolled up my pant legs, I took off my sweater, I wished I had brought my sunglasses.  All along the canals there are little steps that lead down to the water (which is always a few feet below street level) so that people can get on and off of boats.  I sat on one of these to enjoy the sun.  The sun shone on the leaves, making them shine orange.  Reflected in the water they were gold, and stunning, and powerful.  For a long time I just watched the golden leaves in the shining green water tremble.  Every time the wind blew a shower of orange would fall from the sky like paper, and disturb the water into almost imperceptible, but ever expanding circles.  I wrote and I listened to American Gods on my iPod.  And I had some thought that I considered writing about in my blog tonight.  But I have forgotten it now.  I have something interesting to say anyway.

Iñigo and his sister stopped by for a while to chat.  Eventually I had to go to the Common Room for a meeting with my committee about the FAQ book we'll be writing and publishing, and the old  surveys we're compiling and the new surveys we're writing, and the interviews with the advisors we still have to arrange.  

Then I went to my Mastaba class.  I haven't been since the first class meeting, so long ago.  The professor went to Egypt, I think, and rescheduled the class for a time when I already had another class.  Then, during that class, they discussed a change of room, and no one told me.  So last week I sat at an empty table, waiting.  And I searched, and never found them.

I love this class, and I love the professor.  I just want to hug him.  He actually brought tears to my eyes in class today!  He's from India, or Pakistan, or somewhere like that.  Somewhere between the Middle East and the Far East.  And he talks like a guru, like a spiritual teacher, in metaphors and in poetry.  And the things he talks about!  The class is about a certain type of tomb used by non-royal elites in the Old Kingdom.  Today we talked about ideology.  He wants us to look at these tombs, and ask why they are decorated in the way they are, and to understand this, we must understand ideology.  

And so he began to talk to us, not about ancient Egyptian concepts of this or that, and not about what some old dusty man said once in some old dusty conference.  No, he started talking to us about veils and masks, about fear and power, about Europe and China, monarchs in Spain and England, and dictators in Korea, about American cemeteries and Dutch advertisements.  

"Ideology is never transparent, it's opaque.  You have to look behind the veil; see behind the mask.  And the mask of Ideology is very nice, like the mask of Tutankhamun, it's very nice.  But when you take it away, the skeleton underneath is not so nice."  -Sasha

I love the way he approaches this stuff.  He openly says that most of what we will learn will be based on his opinion, his interpretation of things.  Because of this he wants to show us the primary information and let us form our own opinions.  He's not here to teach us what to think, but how to think.  Unlike a lot of Egyptologists (and other ancient historians) Sasha doesn't believe we know (or can know) what the Egyptians were really thinking.  We can, however, understand their ideologies.  We can get a picture of how they wanted to see themselves.  :-)

"Egyptology," he said, "is not something far away, it's here.  To understand Egyptology, you have to understand what's going on in the world today."  And tears literally came into my eyes, and it was all I could do to not rush to hug him, or simply stand up and shout AMEN!  It was as if the questions my crisis of motivation has been asking were starting to be answered.  We talked for a bit after class, about liminal places, and about identity, and how difficult it is to put abstract concepts into words.  :-)

Maybe he'll be my advisor for my thesis. 

Lolpod:  A bird (not a duck, but something beautiful, with a small crest of brown feathers on its head, and a white neck) was swimming down the canal towards me.  Suddenly, he dove beneath the green water (I could see him for a moment, shadowy beneath the water, then he was gone.)  I watched, and waited.  Nothing.  Then bubbles.  Then nothing.  I watched a red candy wrapper float slowly down stream. Waited.  Then, unexpectedly, with a splash, the bird that was not a duck emerged from the water, a tiny fish in his beak flapping its tail furiously, the candy wrapper now on his head.

"How do we understand other cultures?  I have this advice for you: Apply distance and sympathy.  Don't look with your own ideologies, and don't judge. Be distanced from these things, and be sympathetic."  --Sasha