Travel
to Touch a Chord: Seeking Genetic and Sociologic Ties
by Carolyn Howard-Johnson
The Inherent
Truth of How Similar We All Are to All of Humanity
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Along
about 1956 I fell in love with a song that went:
"See
the pyramids along the Nile.
See a sunset
on a tropic isle.
Just remember,
Darling, all the while,
You belong
to me.”
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That may not
be a precise rendition, but it’s the one that infected my memory banks,
parked there, and incubated. I know. A mixed metaphor.
Back then I didn’t know much or care much about metaphors, mixed or otherwise.
All I knew is that the pyramids were something I had to see.
Since then, I’ve become a writer. Not a travel writer, a novelist.
Death on the Nile had already been done by Agatha Christie so what did
I need with a trip to Egypt? The song kept nagging me, though.
I started clipping articles from The National Geographic in the early 60s
when Lake Nasser began to inundate the temples in Nubia. Later, I
took a few classes in hieroglyphics. When coffee table books became
popular, a veritable pyramid of big, colorful books about archaeology in
Egypt grew on my own table. It got so large I couldn’t see the faces of
my guests over the top of it. My longing to connect with this ancient
civilization was a disease that never went into remission.
This is the
year I finally picked up and went. I went in spite of 9/11, in spite
of the fears of my friends. But that’s another story. This
one is about Egypt dressed as a muse, for her own people and for the world.
I travel to
touch a chord with my past. I choose places to visit, not so much
to see them, but to feel them. I choose cultures rather than places
and seek the genetic and sociologic ties to those cultures. In Egypt,
I found all kinds of things that fitted into my writers’ soul, my writers’
brain. |
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Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s
first novel, This Is The Place, an award-winning story about a young
journalist who writes her way through repression into redemption, was published
this year. A chapter from the novel has been selected as a finalist for
the prestigious Masters Literary Award, and the novel won the Sime-Gen
Reviewers’ Choice Award in the mainstream category. |
Her work was selected
for two anthologies in 2001. The Killing Ground is her first screenplay.
Harkening:
A Collection of Stories Remembered will be released in 2002, and she’s
currently writing her first book of poetry, SkyScapes: A Woman’s Memoir
in Poetry. |
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Example:
There are natural pyramids scattered across the Sahara. Pictures of the
Sahara tend to characterize it as a place that is flat with maybe the highest
point being drifting dunes. I was stunned by the size of these rock
structures, amazed at how similar they were to the famous tombs at Giza
or even the step pyramid at Saqqara. But the most exciting part of this
discovery
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was
that I realized that the Egyptians — even way back then, when culture was
relatively new — needed inspiration. That seems logical and self-evident,
but I had somehow always viewed the pyramids as inspiration to later cultures,
not the other way around. Writers may sometimes get the idea that they've
written something truly unique. It’s always been my theory that there
is no such thing, but I naively credit others with having the ability to
create something from absolutely nothing. Egypt reminded me that
my humble need to experience something before I can write about has been
a process used by humankind since time began. For the Egyptians,
this was anywhere from before 3500 BC to … well, today.
This paradigm
can be extended. Outside the Bahariya Oasis, where The Valley of
the Golden Mummies is being excavated, I took an off-road trip on the desert.
Fellow travelers and I bounced along in an old sport vehicle driven by
a Bedouin with a taste for speed. We marveled that this did |
not fit with our
image of tribesmen leisurely rumbling along on the back of a camel. He
was determined to test both our sense of humor and the relative endurance
of our bladders. This was the bone-crunching mode of transportation required
to visit the black desert — a place where volcanoes spit basalt onto the
white desert sand — the crystal desert, and something called the white
desert that looked as if it had been swept by snowdrifts. The snowdrifts
were not sand but wind-sculpted white rock, perhaps calcite. In the
early February sun, its glitter was as bright as any slope I’ve skied at
10,000 feet. In another part of the same area, there were sculptured
plateaus and free standing formations suited for any museum of modern art.
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more tired, our eyes deceived us — much like desert mirages. These
formations became models for sphinxes. There were phallic structures
that must have inspired obelisks like the ones in the Place de la Concorde
in Paris (originally an Egyptian monument), the George Washington Monument,
and the ones still extant in Egypt in many Egyptian temples.
Toward dusk
the shadows and colors changed. Their splendor outdid even the sound
and light show at Abu Simbel. It occurred to me that even these tourist
attractions may have been inspired by this natural play of light from the
setting sun and the emerging stars unfaded by light pollution. Such
displays must bury themselves in the minds of those who see them and are
likely to influence art of any kind from vibrant colors on papyrus to laser
presentations for tourists.
"Of all
the experiences I had, with sights, sounds and wonderful people, the one
that stands out for me was this affirmation of creative theory. Not
only because I now feel more assured, somehow, about the similarities between
my work and myth, but also because I am somehow connected to the inherent
truth of how similar we all are to all of humanity, clear back to the first
stirrings of creative mankind." |
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