Day 7: November 16, 2016, #103
Kinship
When I realized that I had drawn an Egyptian gallery, I began to dread my visit. The museum was more or less my trusted comfort zone, frictionless and predictable. Now it wasn’t. I felt remarkably ill-prepared when it came to this art, which really isn’t “art,” but rather a visual intersection of life, language and religion. Mummies and tomb-raiding video games never appealed to me. As I grew older, I discovered I was in the minority. Other kids gravitated to these mysteries like a haunted house. Even now, when I see school kids bolt toward the Egyptian Wing, their aliveness makes me jealous. I grasped the dynastic splendor and the thrill of its intactness– it was a miracle these objects were in one piece after so many thousands of years– but it seemed to me that King Tut, like Cher, had been touring my whole entire life. I got the popularity; I did not get the awe. It was someone else’s religion. But the truth was, this day accomplished exactly what my project was meant to do: send me to the rooms I would naturally avoid.
The Old Kingdom (c. 2649-2130 B.C.) room stretched out like a timeline before me. Metal blinds covered the large Beaux Arts windows that faced 5th Avenue. Plain glass cases ziggurated against that east wall. On the opposite side of a visitor thoroughfare, a couple statues and a sarcophagus completed the installation. The displays looked like they had not been touched in a while. This was history; these were the artifacts; things were set. Something about the blinds made it all look even more official. I was reminded of other archeological museums I had visited over the years and the sometimes odd collision of past and present as cultural patrimony and budget woes met with a fan whirring in the corner. The Met had no guard stationed in a folding chair, but the room shared an affinity with all other galleries displaying sandy colored things.
Close to the primary entrance, tooled alabaster bowls glowed like a chart of full moons. Small cylindrical seals, the size of a pinky, had been rolled into place for an optimum view. A ritual set for the “opening of the mouth” ceremony, a rite that restored life to statues so that they could eat, see, breathe and hear, looked like apothecary tools. A few more steps into the gallery and I saw the source of my apprehension: hieroglyphs. Symbols in their own right, my mind had taken hold of their idea and formed a referent of its own. Hieroglyphs stood for all the things I would never know, all the complexity that I could never hope to grasp, and peripherally, all the smarter people who somehow could. Inside a building that had always affirmed my ego, I had my first encounter with a total unknowing and joined the ranks of visitors who stumbled into that uncertain space each day. The gallery was humbling.
Raised just above the smooth surface of stone, birds, body parts, floral and geometrical motifs took shape as I looked at the slab in front of me. For all the next world preoccupation of pharaonic Egypt, its cults and Book of the Dead, I was not prepared for such a natural attraction to this one. Sometimes the hieroglyphic image dipped just below the surface of the stone through crisply struck marks. This was their language. In other pictorial reliefs– the room had many– snakes, rabbits, cats, lotus flowers, feathers, even feathers with legs, arose as if from the pool of creation. The carving of larger scenes, often processions, included etched details that conveyed a strand of rope or the smallest plait of hair with serene economy. The rear haunches of cattle were captured with a single, self-assured, excised line. The limestone beneath these glyphs looked so polished I could feel my fingers wanting to touch.
No one’s eye, except for the specialist’s, could ever hope to establish the meaning of these glyphs, symbols working as both phonemes and words. What my eye could do was surf across them, like the pointed, stacked ‘W’s stitched together in a single glyph that formed the symbol for water according to a label. Even though I knew next to nothing, my fear, like making the first move, was on me. These reliefs were approachable thanks to nature. Discovering the obvious– an owl here and a human eye there– I felt a kinship, a sensory wonder in lock step with observations from millennia ago. The graphic stacking of glyphs, understood or not, was its own reward. Why did the museum need to remind me that pleasure is not dependent on meaning making and sometimes greater without it?
A calm came as my hour ended. Nature had squelched my initial dread. This is not to say that all was fair and gentle in the Old Kingdom. The gallery included sculptures of captured slaves and it was obvious a wife’s offering niche in a preserved chapel wall had received far less attention than her husband’s. And what was it like to quarry, transport and chisel this stone day after day? But I saw a particular balance in those glyphs and renderings from the Fourth Dynasty (2575-2465 B.C.). Later in the Fifth Dynasty (2465-2323 B.C.), nature per se was not quite enough for the culture. Style ensued. The Egyptian figure, carved into stone, received a smaller waist and a larger eye, the mascara-lidded one we know from the movies.
