28 Dec. 2000 - 3 Jan. 2001
Issue No.514
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 28 Dec. 2000 - 3 Jan. 2001 Issue No.514 |
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Straddling the vantage point
New Year always appears something of a spurious celebration, at once too arbitrary and too neat a packaging of time. A certain vantage point, yes, from which to survey the passage, but time is irresolute in its playing of tricks: the months that have passed, however hard you look, refuse to unravel themselves into any useful pattern. You have been here before, on this particular cusp, and whatever the contortions adopted it affords, as always, no particular view ahead, though behind the landscape may tilt gently (or otherwise) away, depending on your mood.
The temptation is (the word that suggests itself here is naturally, though this is not quite, if at all, what I mean) to use the occasion to take stock, ignoring the accidental placing of a caesura that may serve to distort rather than clarify, so wanton, so unwarranted is the interruption. The once greater temptation -- to expect from the past some confirmation of the future -- is perhaps the first illusion to be shed, though it lurks, embedded deep somewhere, a declamatory atavism that rears its head in a knee-jerk aspiration to clairvoyance.
So Christmas, at least for those embroiled in Western rites, is gone, though the tail end of its twelve days remain, brutally punctuated by the arrival of another year. It was marked, too, by a rainbow arching over Bethlehem -- as savagely mordant a piece of pantheism as one could hope, madly touching, and literally so. The ephemera in which one wishes to invest hope: it will not work, but the hope remains, looking this year, as last, for a home.
The post, meanwhile, brings news of a different sort: a yellowing, slightly foxed and undated page from the by now ludicrously titled Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion. It contains an article, Scenes in the Interior of Cairo, and an engraving, Lake Near Rosetta, the latter the reason for the unexpected gift. No doubt it will be framed and hung in time for next year. And there is the possibility that the page will prove relatively easy to date, approximately at least, for the information contained in the article is precise, though not necessarily accurate. The two are often confused.
"In this net-work of passages, crossing each other in every direction, two streets, two principal arteries, cross Grand Cairo in Egypt, as it used to be called, from south to north. One is the great Moristan Street, the other leads directly to the citadel. Let us scale the rock on which it is built, in order to obtain a general view of the marvelous city of the living we have just traversed, and that no less beautiful one of the dead, its neighbor, on one side, while on the other extends the valley which feeds it. From the terraces of the kiosk the pacha's residence (it is too simple a dwelling to be called a palace), the eye embraces the whole country: to the left, the mournful and arid desert, where rise the tombs of the Mamelukes and those of the caliphs... in fact the city with elegant minarets and cupolas. To the right, the ruins of Heliopolis and its obelisk, witness of French military glory; yonder the venerated sycamore, where, according to Coptic tradition, the virgin reposed. More to the right is old Cairo, where the holy family hid themselves during the massacre of innocents; then, finally, the broad, verdant plain, bordered by yellow sands, like an emerald set in gold, gladdens the delighted eye."
It is someone else's nostalgia, and from another century, a second century ago. Yet amid the strained setting of the scene there are some hard facts: the traveller is admonished "to try to comprehend the plan of this curious city, which counts 412 mosques and tombs, 500 minarets, 300 cisterns, 60 baths, 34 fountains, 140 public schools..."
The list of statistics continues, historical meat, a simple counting by which one might place this note from the past. The story itself is cut in two by the engraving of an artist's (unknown) impression of the lake near Rosetta, though it is convention, rather than any observed topography, that appears to have dictated the setting of this scene.
In the foreground two egrets browse among aquatic plants, plants I suspect the more botanically minded would be able to identify easily. A palm, twisted as an ancient cedar, bisects the pictorial space more or less vertically -- this is, it appears, a classical French landscape on steroids -- while all around lie kiosks and colonnades, garlanded with creepers, picturesquely tumble-down but remaining firmly on this side of dereliction.
Do not be fooled by age. Yesterday's journalism is no more accurate than today's. And travel writing, in particular, wreaks havoc with the places that you know. This lake, for sure, never looked like that. The longer view lends no greater veracity: that wisdom comes with age is a folly of the old. The young have other foibles while the middle aged, as Mr Blake, our safely octogenarian music critic once remarked, must spend most of their energy avoiding the pitfalls of the merely bourgeois. Cairo was never, "after Venice, the most labyrinthine city in existence," but room can be made for such hyperbole, and it is in the making of room that we allow for meaning. The views, after all, are tempting, and as valid a point of observation as the changing of a year.
Unquestionably, imagined pasts are the most alluring: there is, I know, no sagacity in the point being made, it is simply a function of what one hopes is a healthy imagination. And somehow I know, too, that New Year's Eve will once more find me imagining a rather better year to have passed than was actually the case: such are the eccentricities of hope, the magnetic force that keeps the compass from ever really pointing to the north. We each make a stratagem to leapfrog the forced celebrations of the end of the year -- making a working hypothesis, I suppose, of hypocrisy. It is one of those rare cases when one should not knock the stratagem if it works.
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