Rebecca Nemser

These ancient bronzes, which have long since lost their gold­en gleam, are still numi­nous frag­ments of a van­ished world. One stat­ue of young man was recent­ly pulled out of a riv­er; his pale sea-green body is scratched and scarred; but he is still a love­ly appari­tion, remind­ing me of some lines from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”:
“Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suf­fer a sea change
Into some­thing rich and strange.”

For the ancient Greeks, the­ater was a Dionysian rit­u­al, and in the amphithe­ater of Perg­a­mon, you can still feel that myth­i­cal inten­si­ty. The steep incline of the stone seats cre­ates a tremen­dous focus of ener­gy on the stage. When I stood at the cen­ter and sang, I felt my voice ampli­fied, sound waves vibrat­ing in the air.

All that we know of Greece has come to us in ruins–armless, head­less, fad­ed, fall­en, bro­ken, bat­tered, lost in trans­la­tion. What we have are frag­ments, frag­ments that have lost almost everything–except their poet­ry. But, gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion, that poet­ry has nev­er lost its thrilling, vision­ary gleam.

Red Sea shells and pol­ished stones from the pyra­mid tomb of Queen Khen­sa — “great of charm, great of praise, pos­ses­sor of grace, sweet of love” — and oth­er trea­sures from KUSH, Lost King­dom of the Nile. A med­i­ta­tion on Art, Time, and the ancient river.