To the extent that we were excessively using hashish &/or tobacco together or separately, one might assume there were periods when we lived in a thick dullness abiding the intensity from our brand of liberty, to its other extreme-a void, whence the harsh Arabesque sun of Iffriqqa shone past the clarity and into the mishap of confused reflections e.g. at the Tea house, presuming as I was, some dot of angst would color an otherwise unhealthy unknowing.
There is a boulevard stretching toward the train-station, our admittance to this village, and to the other side our pension, which we'd hoof down away from every day wondering at what non-paying wonders we would have divulged to us in our hikes around the village. It had a Banque there on it, at which one Sunday we had our travelers' cheques cashed. Everything seemed off from the current of modern access, as if 80% of all you could see was submerged, but seethed. Toward my freedom of youth I'd admonish myself self that big fish authorial entities would in fact show me how little they cared what sensitivities I contained in contra-distinction like the others bearing in my path. Like the Governmentally controlled bank we passed each day. The mosque on the other side of the side of the village where we stayed was another such place. A Midnight Express scenario played out in my mind, as much as I could think about it, while considering entering the mosque, which we did-and formidably w/ SHOES. We actually looked around for some object to pilfer from it, however there was nothing within and still I wouldn't have gone through w/ it. By the coffee/tea house before the boulevard & closer to our youth hostel, the place was called Television-Cofe (sic), Magdi the owner told us Jimmy Carter had been right by his place one day only a few years back from then, and then commenced to scatter a few glasses full of water out into the sandy-ridden road? to keep? the dust down. (Hosnei Mubarack had only been in power maybe over a yr at this point--Sadat's power expunged & bureaucracy work-a-day as usual) Far from re-allaying a sense that this was memorialized space, it seemed as if this little African man looked to the promise of an immense cosmic polity that would help people and lift them up-and this is part & parcel the power spot we sought & could sanction (merely his humanity, that is, not the content of his beneficent admiration:- "J. Carter?") No, rather: Power spot is supposed.
The roseate-colored neoned mosques; the US Air-force emblem on the pack of gumless rolling papers; the call of the muezzin, but mostly from radio programs-all a theophany from Higher Ground, is predominant in my drawn experience, there in Cairo, knowing that the smells of the reeking first Egyptian, we met, if sensed in a moments hesitation-brings on the corporeal-reality of the struggles in a desert life--the plain heat. Adel was just then embracing Islam and the quiet message of my Jewishness seemed broadcasted across the dark experience of this translation to a view of their ministry.
Backing away from excesses-whether it be pop-imagery or a volatile self, pushed visualization into mean moments, thinking back to '86 in the Sinai desert on the Red (Reed) Sea. Illustrating my cause was a continual inversion of attention otherwise un-authorial 'til I reckoned green-tiled mosques as an arbiter toward self-actualization. I glanced upon the pedestrian giants at whose feet I sat-the ones in the sky friendly and cognates of those relations whom I already knew.(having nothing to do w/ giants, but everything to do w/ illusion) I don't conceive of hashish use as criminal, but when a scarf selling early-teen Bedouin girl came to our hut, probably offering something other than garments, I felt un-averred from weird thoughts that my American-advantages could have any relevance here. Rob over by someone's car-door mirror trying to shave, accumulated my dissonance, as if nothing could be put-together to make whole a sense of activity recognizably as adventurous. There was no balance between his lackadaisical contentment & my sole motive=motive. Typically at this point it was just denial of release from release, meaning the travelogue becoming my narrative was liberating to the extent I could contain this vision in the New ancient world, & in this case again this young girl as any Egyptian would do gave me the keys to the reckless kingdom of herb-smoking. She took us where we could get a couple of handfuls of bud processed down to shake, into the heart of the Bedouin compound and facing our torments of strangers in strange lands, where we could only somewhat enthuse for our sanction.
My good buddy dates an African American chic & from some evening talking to her it seems, she doesn't ascertain identity consciousness anymore than someone who only has an immediate family thru adoption--meaning her projection into where she's come from is stunted outwardly, & inwardly she identifies with a community at-large--a reprieve in contemporary zeitgeist as if it applies. Anyone may or may not care about distinct relationship ties--yet I glean a good vibe off of Black America thru his/her adversity...following the conscious party into music and literature. This satisfies yet leaves me wondering where the terminus of her conscious map begins & ends. This is not a slam on the adopted obviously, this is rather how we plug in, & to whom would represent blood ties, as that, in the end we are all related.
I just know I have to let the knife cut me. Walking across the street this am. groggy from staying up last night, that measure of peeking morning light, & peaking coolness in the air layered in inclement stratum--I often wonder how at some point all the movement in the fray is actively construal in my convalescence: meaning I walk amongst the tall trees of a day's energies, and I presume it at the center of my graph=at once, & then other times it's merely a goal, & not even an objective one. It makes our minds blink Right? makes our gait in our stride more certain or more haunting. So mind is made up of thought tools which are cars abound, making my stride ambient in its current. And just as I see these recurring experiences, same person or bldg before me--things, yet I have the presumption of its conveyance...so I push, rub up, just as things do me. It hurts a little, but we are "of" the world possibly lessening reasons to be IN it--therein lies the dubious identity thing. That we believe we are in EXILE, sometimes makes us ill-define ourselves as "objects" with no choice but to move from here Point A to there, Point B. Yet we just proved everything else is in flux...we have only the right to observe. What can be more than that?
Black bubble bouncing ryddim (Linton Kwesi Johnson, a Brit Black Panther) still in a white hiss in my head from Fazed Cookies last night (a Rolling Stones cover band), now here at work, I push up in the folds of thought, where I had ducked yesterday talking to a Sudanese fellow--his Mom, Egyptian, and the distance he thinks others should go to see his sense of One-world, has me wondering why he thinks anyone is missing out anyway. You have to care, & I do--I'm there. Dude was a little weary of the consumerism relegating haggle to what we don't participate in. He thinks about the auspicious query he has which we supply with a track toward cyber ubiquity. He knows of Hamza al-Din (oud player), probably well--IS Nubian like him... has the shade of desert acacias seared like tattoos an Urban world like ours manifestly lost in its ploy toward independent identity, we lost in our theodicy to find deist nature the One G-d people of N. Africa, themselves attenuate because of lonely-actionable resourceless struggles into possible privation makes this man & that woman measurably worship Him.
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