January, 2001

“‘We take life three seconds at a time.’ ‘Because light travels at a finite speed, to look out is to look back.’ Choose one or both as the basis/inspiration of a 500-1500 word meditation.

This was the writing assignment Marwa’s AP English class received the day they returned to school in the first week of January, 2001. When she read the words, Marwa saw Sharif’s face flash in her mind, which startled her, and then she heard, in the silent inner voice that is nothing like a voice at all, ‘The second largest city and main port of Egypt, Alexandria was built by the Greek architect Dinocrates (332-331 BC) on the site of an old village, Rhakotis, at the orders of Alexander the Great.’ She’d read that recently someplace online when she was trying to find something to show her parents she cared about Alexandria.

Her classmates were wrangling with the teacher about taking life three seconds at a time.

“Who said that?” one demanded, and his skepticism was quickly echoed.

“A brain researcher at the University of Munich, Ernst Poppel, and Einstein, respectively,” their teacher answered.

“I’ll have to ask my father about this Poppel guy,” Judy said.

“You might begin your essay with that dialogue, Ms. Yamaguchi.”

Judy enjoyed being called Ms. Yamaguchi by Mr. Haddam.

“Is it a meditation or an essay?” That was Marcus.

“It’s 500-1500 words,” a classmate said, and everyone laughed.

But Marwa felt herself at a great distance from the classroom cheer in a different place and time altogether.

“Our guide in time is memory,” Marwa began writing.“My older brother Sharif returns next weekend to New York City from Alexandria, which my mother still calls “home.” Before Christianity and Islam, Hermes was worshipped in Alexandria as the incarnation of Thoth, the Egyptian god of the Moon. I am so torn since I removed the hijab. This is the beginning of my meditation on time, which I believe is the assigned topic. The quotations presented to us do not reflect the current scientific assertion that at the subatomic level,time as we know it does not exist.

‘The second largest city and main port of Egypt, Alexandria was built by the Greek architect Dinocrates (332-331 BC) on the site of an old village, Rhakotis, at the orders of Alexander the Great.’ The original Egyptian village evolved on the Mediterranean shore, buffered by the island of Pharos lying directly north. Once Dinocrates built the causeway Heptastadion to connect Pharos Island to the north-African continent, the waters between the island and land became two harbors, the Great Harbor to the East and Eunostos Harbor to the West.

It was the eastern, Great Harbor, which mattered most in the ancient and medieval world. The Lighthouse at Pharos was erected on the easternmost point of the island as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; it guided ships for a thousand years before two huge earthquakes destroyed it early in the 14th century. There have been underwater discoveries in recent years in the Great (eastern) Harbor believed to be remains of the Lighthouse.

Cleopatra’s Palace on the northeastern shore looked across the Great Harbor at the Lighthouse. This must be where Shakespeare imagined Antony saying, “I am dying, Egypt, dying.” Julius Caesar is blamed for the catastrophic fire that destroyed The Great Library at Alexandria which had contained all the knowledge of Western antiquity, the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, lost mathematical problems and solutions, ‘Aristotle’s own library,’ as Stoppard said in the play ARCADIA, which we read.

Alexandria can be seen as a model or emblem of Greek reason. To later historical view and visitors, the intersection of the two main thoroughfares can look like a slightly right-tilted Christian Cross, and the extending promontory curve like the Muslim Crescent, but to Greek Dinocrates, it could have looked like axes upon which mathematical coordinates could, should, and would be graphed. The east-west Y axis, now Al-Horreya (Tariq abd el-Nasser) was Canopic Way, and the X axis, now Sharia el-Nebi Daniel, was called the Street of the Soma, leading to the south to Lake Harbor on Lake Mareotis. The Canopic Way went from the Gate of the Sun at its eastern end to the Gate of the Moon at the western end.

It could have looked like that to Greek Dinocrates if graphing had been invented in his time, but mathematics was only forced to grapple with time for the first time at the end of the 1400’s when Europeans started building wheel-driven clocks, started using artillery in war, and circumnavigating the globe.

We read a chapter in math class last year called ‘What Are Graphs?’ It said, ‘The same social context produced a clock…, revolutionary wars…, exploration which enriched the merchant classes…, and a mathematical invention which could measure the movement of the pendulum, the path of the cannon ball, the position of a ship at sea and the courses of the heavenly bodies.’ When Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Kelly put our math and history class together, she showed us how Euclid left time out of geometry and how Descartes put timein. By 1637, Descartes had written ‘Discourse on the Method for Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences’, in which he virtually founded co-ordinate geometry, the geometry of the axis inspired by longitude and latitude.

E.M. Forster called Alexandria ‘the capital of memory’ even though everyone has forgotten its Egyptian origin as Rhakotis, and no one remembers whose names it had long before that. Maybe proto-Neanderthals had a name for this protected location between the great Sea and a large lake as they fished and bathed on their way west to the landbridge at Gibraltar, then north and east into European valleys?

Alexandria certainly is the capital of my parents’ memories. My brother Sharif goes each winter break to visit my mother’s family there, my grandparents and three aunts.They live in a spacious apartment in the Maamora district right on the seacoast. It gets more crowded in the summer, but it is very nice and quiet in the winter. My mother is the only one of her family who lives in America, but my father has three brothers and four sisters here. My father has two more brothers, one in Egypt and the other in Qatar.

My mother’s family doesn’t like my father’s because they left Alexandria and because my father took my mother away.Even though everyone thinks Muslim society is so patriarchal, in my mother’s family it seems like the women run everything. It may be that it is that way just at home, or the way I hear it from my mother and grandmother and three aunts. My mother is one of four sisters, and my grandmother had no sons, but she always says that every one of herdaughters is a Fatima even though only her firstborn has the sainted name. This means that my mother and her sisters, like Fatima, the only child of the Prophet Muhammad, had sons to continue his heritage. It is clear to all of us that no one has forgiven my mother for leaving Egypt.

No one believes this more strongly than my mother. I think it is why she is so much on my case about being a true Muslim, to make up for what she and her family consider her betrayal and abandonment of them. I don’t see that she did either because she keeps in such close contact with them, feels so guilty all the time, and puts so much pressure on me, especially.

But I see that Sharif is adored for being a son, her first born, and someone who goes ‘home’ to visit twice a year, speaks fluent Arabic, and probably will repatriate to Alexandria. My mother’s oldest sister, Auntie Fatima, says this is how it should be because my mother can have one American and one ‘real’ son.

My mother hasn’t said a word to any of them about my not wearing hijab since school started this year, and frankly, it made it easier when I said I really didn’t want to join Sharif in Alexandria when he went ‘home’ this time. The summer looms. Unlike my mother, who is tall for a woman (like me) and slim, Auntie Fatima is also very fat.

The Greek worship of Hermes conflated the Egyptian worship of the god of the Moon, Thoth. This happened originally in Alexandria. Elements of Greek philosophy and Egyptian mysticism combined to create Hermeticism. These teachings of Hermes created a path to gnosticism that became the foundation of the Western mystical traditions and directly influenced Gnosticism, alchemy, the Jewish Kabbala, Muslim Sufism, Christian mysticism, and can be seen in Tarot cards which were brought to Europe by gyp-sies (from E-gyp-t).

Basically, the idea is that Hermes is the guide to death and then past death to rebirth. Hermes, or Mercury, which to us is the small planet with the fast, closest orbit around the Sun in our solar system, was seen in the world of ancient and mythological astronomy as a fast Messenger. He’s the Western Union logo wearing that World War I helmet and carrying the snake-wrapped staff called the caduceus. The caduceus is also the logo for doctors and medicine, associated as it was with death and life.

The caduceus itself is the image of Hermes as the snake of eternal life and Aphrodite (Venus-goddess of love, read sex) as the snake of time (birth-death) wrapped around each other on the tree of life. Our classroom guru-Hindu, Biren, says they are copulating, but then again, Biren would say that, and it is clearly illogical as the sexual act is insufficient, by definition, for eternal life and the knowledge which is beyond death, which I have told Biren without much effect except his continued teasing which he thinks qualifies as enlightened debate.

The astrological zodiac that people still check in print and online for their horoscopes was believed to be like spiritual envelopes around the Earth, like time zones the soul had to pass through. From each time envelope, a person gained characteristics, but the point was to get past each limiting membrane into a state of realization that time does not actually exist. Not much of this makes more sense to me than reading about multiple universe ‘branes’ in Scientific American. Maybe in time one or another or both will.

The important thing about Hermes and Alexandria, Egypt, is that it was the place in time where and when Alexander the Great created a new world, where Dinocrates planned a city along rational lines, and when the human mind really tried to rationally use the principle of analogy as a thinking tool. So the Egyptian moon worship of Thoth got joined to the Greeks’ Hermes. This is called ‘transcultural syncretism’, and Alexander the Great systematically encouraged it.

I think it was his teacher, Aristotle’s, influence on him, to think logically and methodically about various ideas, to see their common characteristics and to want to join things together in a reasonable way. I learned in AP European last year that the Greek ideal of Pericles, of the city, the polis,evolved in Alexandria into the ideal of the cosmopolis.

We can also see this is NYC where we have so many different nationalities, in effect, nations, living in the same civil union, with the rights of the individual citizen recognized as balanced with the privileges of the powerful. At least, that’s the ‘idea of the ideal’ as Mr. Sullivan used to exhort us last year. It started in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 4th century, B.C.E. I don’t know if I’m actually related to anyone, Egyptian or Greek or whatever, from that time. But I’d be proud to think so.

In my mind, also related by logical analogy, is Galileo’s formula to describe the motion of falling bodies: v = 32t; the velocity of a falling body equals thirty-two times the timethat it takes to fall. With such mathematical formulas, scientists show that widely separate phenomena, such a ball falling to Earth and the orbit of the Moon around the Earth, obey the same law. But isn’t this the same as the basic principle of magic and religion: as above, so below? Don’t Christians say, ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven?’

I can see from my thesis in my introductory paragraph that I should develop two more ideas, about not wearing hijaband how all the current reports about subatomic particle movement deny the reality of time. Quantum particles are supposed to be able to spin clockwise or counterclockwise at the same time. ‘Entangled’ quanta are even “spookier,” according to Einstein. If one is spinning clockwise, its mate must be spinning counterclockwise.

However, in the interests of time, I also see that I have written much more than assigned. It is late, and I am tired. I have no conclusions or answers, only questions. This meditation has revealed to me that I do not know how to think about time now. I am feeling all stressed out using timewords and verb tenses. Vivian Cheng says the Chinese language doesn’t even have verb tenses, which always makes me nervous. I am thinking of people who are born in the wrong time and don’t fit where they find themselves. Maybe I am one of them. Some people are described as being ahead of their time. They are visionary. Others are called reactionary, which means they are behind the times.

What if we could, like in a dream, travel about in time as we can in space? What if a great-whatever grandmother of mine (as a teenager) could’ve opened a door in Alexandria and seen me sitting here at my desk, typing on a keyboard with the words printing out on a 17” monitor in my nearly dark bedroom? Would she’ve even known what she was looking at? Could she’ve recognized her granddaughter? And me, given the same freedom, what could I know of the girl or boy whose great-whatever grandmother I may be? What are they doing now?

I am most curious what book this meditation was intended to prepare us for.”

Marwa’s AP teacher, Scott Haddam, read his students’ meditations and returned them with comments. Marwa received her paper back the following Monday morning (after Sharif had returned from Alexandria the night before to a dinner he was too exhausted to eat) and looked for what Mr. Haddam had thought she’d done wrong — but he’d handed out excerpts from her essay that he’d scanned and cut and pasted, omitting her name. The room was suddenly silent as the class read. Then Mr. Haddam handed out and they filled in the book cards for the overture volume of the seven novels making up REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, SWANN’S WAY by Marcel Proust.

“What do we write down, all of that?” Biren Ramanathan asked, “How about just SWANN?”

Mr. Haddam nodded and directed Biren to begin reading aloud.

“For a long time I used to go to bed early…”