Remembrance and Mindfulness and Things Past and Future

A professor emeritus in my department just emailed me to ask whether I had written up an account of my time in Egypt this summer. He'd lived there for a while back in 1952 (!) and retained an active interest in Cairo ever since. It made me wish I had written up an account on my experience there, a wish I may yet turn into a wish come true. All I really have in written form are entries in this blog, all of which recently seem affected some way by the experience of Egypt in this year of widespread uprisings. But these are not really accounts of what I saw, what I heard, what I felt and thought and wondered. These are just components of my life filtered through the experience of Egypt in the winter of their discontent and the spring of their jubiliation and now the long summer of their tribulation and trial, of impatient necessary patience. And I sense that from now on, all my doings will have this filter, my own malaria of memory that will be with me uneradicably.

Perhaps this is what the saying means, "Once you drink of the water of the Nile, you will always come back to its banks." Perhaps one never really leaves its banks. Or perhaps, as in the Libyan poet Mattawa's poem, "The Two River Ledger," the waters of the Nile are the waters of Lethe, of forgetfulness. Another way to put this is to say the waters of unmindfulness, in other words, the exact opposite of the Buddhist exortation to a state and life of mindfulness. Living in the US as I do, I cannot help but think of unmindfulness as being somehow related to the pursuit of The Rapture. Is unmindfulness related to all fundamentalist religions perhaps?

No wonder I am drawn most to the kind and gentle ways of the followers of Buddha. There is no god; there is just the wonderful body, the repository of the compassionate spirit and the light. As Egypt struggles to make practical the ideals that led its January uprising to topple Mubarak, in other words, to make an uprising into a genuine revolution, wouldn't it be nice if mindfulness was kept a part of the progress?

It worries me to see news about movements afoot to ban swimwear on Egypt's great beaches, at least for women and to cover the Sphinxes and pyramids, symbols of an ancient and pre-Muslim civilization. I think of what happened in Afghanistan five years ago, when the Taliban blew up statues of the Buddha for the crime of being un-Islamic. Happily, some reconstruction of those precious statues has begun now. Mindfulness. Like the retired professor, I will be watching Egypt forever now.