40
PARTISAN REVIEW
back into the albumen cavity of the original egg. The process is called
deviling. The same is done with mushrooms: you remove the stem,
spoon out most of the contents of the head, mince it, spice it, cook it,
then place it back into the shell whence it was removed. It's still the
same egg and the same mushroom-but the time schemes are all
warped. The egg, like the mushroom, is not dead, but no more alive
than someone on a respirator.
Egypt is just the grid, the matrix, the cavity into which I "devil" my
life long after leaving Egypt. My present is meaningless unless it is
bedeviled
with Egypt. One could say that all of my impressions of Egypt
are no more than scattered pieces of my life out of Egypt strung together
and
bedeviled
into a narrative thread I've decided to call Egypt. Seeing
Egypt, not America, is how I see America. I see the present provided it's
like the past, becomes the past. When I went back to visit Egypt after
publishing
Out of Egypt,
alii could think of, or kept trying to think of,
was New York-a place that used to loom like a distant future for me
when 1 was a boy but that had suddenly become my present only when
I wasn't present in it! Egypt, however, the Egypt I had for so many
decades dreamed of, was not once before me.
My impulse when I
see
something beautiful or moving or even some–
thing 1 desire in the here-and-now is to throw it back to Egypt, to see if
it fits back there, if it isn't yet another one of those myriad missing
pieces that belongs there or that should be brought back there, or that
should be made to seem to have originated there, as though for some–
thing to make sense to me it has to have roots that go all the way back
to Egypt, as though the act of piecing Egypt back together, of recon–
structing and restoring be it even on imaginary Egypt out of this scatter
of impressions in New York were an interminable restoration project
whose purpose, among others, is to prevent all contact with the present,
so that anything I encounter that strikes me must, in one way or
another, correspond to something Egyptian, have an Egyptian algo–
rithm-or else mean absolutely nothing. Things that do not have an
Egyptian analog do not register, have no narrative. Things that happen
in the present without echoing, be it even an imaginary past, do not reg–
ister either. They cease to exist. They do not count. There are inter–
minable stretches of New York that do not exist for me: they don't have
Egypt, they have no past, they mean nothing. Unless I can forge an
Egyptian fiction around them, be it even in the form of a mood I recog–
nize as Egyptian, they are as dead to me as I am dead
to
them.
