Like many, I often go to bed too late, reading by the bedside lamp, then awake, groggy, to an alarm clock, drink too much coffee, eat too much sugar, and, during the day, pay too much attention to those athletes, movie stars, and musicians whom we pay tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars to distract us, for an hour or two, from our actual lives. And, like you, I live in a world that for the past hundred years or so has erected curtain-walled towers that reach toward the sky and that consist mostly of air, a world that has learned to fly and then raced to the moon.
Our feelings of heaviness, of tiredness, which we combat with levity, with stimulants, with distraction, and with structures and endeavors that soar (yes, the dream of flight is ages old, but not in the context in which we experience it now), present a configuration unique to our age. Undoubtedly those hundreds of historical generations that lived before the electric light, the professional musician, the can of caffeinated sugary soda, did not suffer as we do (not that they didn’t have suffering of their own).
Take the Egyptian pyramids, almost five thousand years old, built in a creative burst of no more than a couple of hundred years. They are virtually solid mountains of stone. Imagine standing in an inner chamber, any shaft to it sealed off, in the blackness. Above, below, and all around you are hundreds of feet of solid stone. Feel the weight, the claustrophobic pressure. This is not a modern structure.
Or look at an Egyptian sculpture or relief or painting of a pharaoh. Notice the too-large, flat feet, almost pyramid-shaped, loving attention given to each toe.
The Egyptians, too, created much of their artwork for the afterlife, to be sealed in tombs, not to be seen by human eyes again; they did not open museums and galleries and invite the public. They mummified bodies and sealed them away. (We, apparently, plasticize them for display and ship them around the world.)
Perhaps the Egyptians, like young children, felt, relative to grown-ups of today, too light, too disincarnated, too disconnected from the world around them. Not too heavy and tired, but buoyant. So, rather, than seeking levity and stimulants, they sought gravity and weight. Rather than a focus on the here-and-now, a focus on the hereafter.
The Egyptian experience, I propose, was the opposite of our levity, our tiredness, our materialism and our concern for this life, now.
Perhaps it’s no accident that, a short while later, Greek drama was born as tragedy.
No comments:
Post a Comment