exhibition of drama-related paintings
POEM: THE NEVER ENDING TRAGEDY OF AN APPLE EATER
TRAGEDY OF A THREATENED SPECIES
PROMETHEUS TURNED INTO MANFRED AND OSIRIS IS KILLED IN THE MINDS OF MEN
Imhotep receives a solemn Osiris WARNING
AN ABSURD COMEDY"CHOCOLATE" OR METAMORPHOSIS FOR SURVIVAL(to be published)
ISIS AND RAA: THE DOUBLE CURSE OF THE DISPOSSESSED FEMALE
betrayal and tragic death of the Matriarch.
REVENGE OF THE WRONGED MATRIARCH
OEDIPUS
EXTRAPOLATION ONTO THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY
Mozart's Don Giovanni and the fear of freedom
Homo sapiens or Homo militaris?
A tough dream in response to September, 11th
Is the concept of cold war an expression of self-damaging Euro-American egocentrism?
MUSIC
to download
or stream-listen to Imhotep's anger for piano quartet, you need sound
card and real player click on the arrow to go to another music web page
6 megabytes, also accessed from bottom of link the blues of osiris the
green
for broadband users
slow movement from cello sonata
slow movement in eastern mode from the piano quartet dedicated to Marianne von Grunigen
Man's destiny, salvation and security?
the Ghandi path or the Machiavelli path?
Homo Sapiens or Homo Militaris?
Death of Osiris oils on special paper by Tarek Ali Hassan
follow the Osiris trail and answer for yourself:
An Introduction
by Tarek Ali Hassan,Professor at Al Azhar University Cairo,Founding Chairman of the National Cultural Center (new Cairo Opera)
The moment of first virginal consciousness opens up a gut knowledge that is frequently the most spontaneous, the most penetrating and the most true.
One of these inestimable moments in history, revealing in an unadulterated form the real drama of human conscious life, took place some ten thousand years ago along the borders of the river Nile. There were undoubtedly parallel moments of virginal knowledge along fertile banks of other great rivers populated by Homo Sapiens on mother earth.
Several thousand years before the life-to-death-to-life journey of Jesus of Nazareth, Osiris dared to become the embodiment of uncorrupted human nature and consequently chose to undergo to the full the passion drama imposed upon uncorrupted human nature by fellow humans who had made themselves into agents of a socio-political evolution hysterically engaged in rationalising the rejection and the denial of the unique human biological potential namely: intelligent creative nonviolent survival. Homo Sapiens was being destroyed and replaced by Homo Militaris distancing itself progressively from the greatest achievement of human biological evolution namely the potential for nonviolent interactive survival in harmony with all things internal and external.
The time and the environment 10,000 BCE, operated savagely against the apparently impossible and suicidal Osirian knowledge, it emerged repeatedly as impractical and Masochistic-suicidal. Very quickly and via systematic violence and torture of mind boggling viciousness throughout the ages, humans were to be inculcated systematically in the inevitable naturalness of the unnatural: self preservation through unlimited violence to all "other". They were inculcated to believe in the eternal impossibility, madness and impracticality of the Osirian dream of interactive nonviolence and consequently pursued a blood bespattered history in supposed pursuit of rights, justice, prosperity and security which were to remain incomprehensibly elusive. There were a few notable exceptions in the twentieth century namely Ghandi and later Martin -Luther King. As the pitch of mad violence rose and rose to unprecedented heights and misguided leaders magnetised large chunks of the human race to believe in peace, security and prosperity through violence the whole perverse brainwashing was instiutionalised and rooted with a vengeance. It should be noted that Ghandi and Martin Luther King were murdered violently adding their own unique vibrations to the eternally relevant Osiris drama. Bewildered blood splattered humanity reached the end of the twentieth century without curing itself of the savage denial of the Osirian message even though the arrogant anti-Osirians had plunged the World into unimaginable horrors during two unprecedented World Wars preceded and followed by a continuum of violence and destruction against "other", the last tragic stage of which was fought in the South with millions upon millions of innocent victims. Well known to the Southerners as the third World War of fire, displacement, death and destruction, yet in typical Euro-American egocentric stance called in the North the "Cold" War pursuing the historically flawed assumption that Western civilisation is the only Civilisation.(Article).
At the dawn of the twenty first century, Osirian dreamers,who had somehow escaped the perception-perverting systematic physical and mental brain-washing torture throughout the ages inculcating the need to submit or be submitted or to destroy the "other", could see clearly that at last all the fundamentals needed to realise a harmonious, just and unthreatened nonviolent existence for mankind and for mother earth became possible and were clearly within reach.
A truly deep tragedy is unfolding as at the height of our incredibly promising century, ignorance and anti- Homo Sapiens venom and heritage is releasing energies in support of the now unforgivable hegemony of the Homo Militaris adaptation, helping to destroy yet again the interactive win/win I and "other" Osirian vision.
Still the Osirian passion drama has been recorded and retained for posterity by the great Physician/healer IMHOTEP. Thanks to the courage of people like IMHOTEP, the drama of Osiris has survived incessant attempts to falsify it and to justify and rationalise this falsification. Knowingly and unconsciously the Osiris drama has remained the generic seed of all relevant drama in human life, death and rebirth. From the great Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonas of Sophocles to the Bacchae of Euripides to the drama of Jesus of Nazareth to the great dramas of the surviving Middle Eastern and Far Eastern religions that had tried to transcend the "I" salvation through the merciless destruction of all "Other"enshrined in the ruthless violence of the raw Old Testament and the understanding-or rather the misunderstanding- of its raw violence to "other" in the literal sense. Through all the important milestones of human development we are witnessing variations of the forbidden Osiris passion drama. The darker side of these variations, is the blood bespattered history of human social evolution towards supposed justice, prosperity and security for the "I" without the "other" for the "US" without the "OTHERS". A path which, like Osiris and Imhotep and all the great far-sighted witnesses to the drama taught: salvation of "US" without the "other" is a blind alley leading to cummulative injustice, deprivation,insecurity and violence.
These pages lead you along multi-channel multimedia material uncovering the forbidden Osiris passion and its drama in poetry, political analysis, music and aggressively challenging paintings that certainly do not belong to the drawing room or bedroom, they belong in public domain galleries designed to explore the deepest recesses of the human subconsciouss for to understand our blood and torture besplattered history and find avenues to causal resolutions:
You will gradually understand why the real Osiris Passion Drama had to be hidden, forbidden and classified as you discover illuminations and reflections emerging from deep antiquity onto our present with uncanny accuracy; ARE WE CIVILISED? or has our faith that "Might is Right" never changed from the days of the club to the days of the computerised missile and the atomic bomb? Are we secure because we live in a just and balanced environment or are we secure because we carry the biggest stick/gun in a savagely disbalanced environment?
You will discover why and how human social evolution to cover-up and hide its rabid denial of the God-given unique human potential for Species successful non-violent harmonious co-existence with all things, had to systematically destroy with unspeakable violence and elaborate stratagems, anyone, anything. any evidence that bears witness to this dramatically anti-socio-political-institution 'threatening' potential of man.
Contrary to what we think and repeat parrot like, LOVE and harmony, are dramatic threats to almost all socio-political institutions and to almost all socio-political history. All will need to be re-written through a lens of interactive analysis lit by universal and equal love for all interactants. Oh what a THREAT to all!! It is this threat that explains why we hate MOZART so deeply! We can not deny and amputate him like the Hapsburgh empire attempted rabidly during his short life, but we express our hate and denial in our obstinate refusal to take him seriously and in "praising=denying"him as child-like, polished, superficial, perfect!
The criminal shall no doubt be torn to pieces by all from all sides of the elusive circle of truth.
Mozart like Osiris was ruthlessly destroyed by institutions and priesthoods purporting to follow his 'divine' message, like-as Jesus was -and is- systematically and ruthlessly destroyed by institutions and priesthoods purporting to follow his divine message,Ghandi and Martin-Luther King both met violent and cruel deaths perpetrated by institutions for the social and divine 'good', absolutely certain of their "goodness".
Osiris like
Prometheus after him, loved the human race and sorrowed for their
infinite pains, suffering and folly.
He determined to enlighten them about their own
forbidden potential, thereby allowing them to refine their lives and discover
the liberation of agriculture and nonviolence as an alternative to the
tribal hunter killer existence prevailing before him.
He thus helped humans discover agriculture and uncover their own
hidden but limitless potential in the sciences and arts. He taught that
the essence of all this flowering was nonviolence. Nonviolence to self,
to others and to the environment.
The priesthood developing around Osiris and his teaching, gradually
came to find the living Osiris a menace and a threat. Everytime he came
to life impersonated in some son of man, he was captured, tortured and
killed by the very priests that puported to worship him. Finally he was
dismembered and the parts separated and hidden so far apart that they
would never come together.
Rejected and hated by the powers, in life, he was exalted and glorified,
dead and safely banished out of the real world, to the highest pinnacles
of adoration and worship.
The priests absolutely forbade enactment of the real Osiris drama
and invented a false drama instead. The Osirian drama of conscious life
was metamorphosed into a decoy story about the battle between good and
evil in which we the powerful and ruling "good" always triumph,
while all others are destroyed, enslaved, tortured and ground to a pulp.The
circle of deception was complete when the Roman Empire introduced organised
violence with a vengeance as the normal, and apparently highly successful,
way of life, leading to peace, glory, empire and infinite riches to the
privileged.Osiris and his conceptual twin Maat (essence of justice) faded
out of human consciousness into oblivion so did the consciousness of the
feminine component of creation.
In these pages, and in the text of the drama yet to be published,
we have the last link to the forbidden passion drama which comes back
to us in a dream as though transmitted by ancient Egypt's greatest physician/philosopher/Architect,
IMHOTEP.
That great benefactor of humanity, IMHOTEP, a God of healing in the ancient world, was, according to the West's mass media propaganda machine typically maligned as an evil spirit bent on the destruction of civilisation in the blockbuster films " the Mummy" and the "return of the Mummy".
Who is the protagonist of civilisation one wonders and which is the side bent on sensless destruction?
The real IMHOTEP -radically different from the evil creation of Hollywood's paranoid imagination- was amongst the very few who would have had the courage and vision and knowledge to have this forbidden drama enacted in the magnificent funerary complex at the step Pyramid in Sakkara reversing all the win/lose values so deeply ingrained and entrenched after the great success and glory of Rome and of Empire.
Full of symbolism relevant to our times. The twenty first century?teetering on the verge of relapse into the hitherto catastrophic ruthless win/lose values which spilt so much blood in the twentieth century, hoping somehow for the miracle of a new/old Osirian interactive win/win matrix which incorporates at its core the Osirian nonviolence and the Osirian sanctification of life and of nature
After
contributing to civilisation the greatest dramatic story of all time,
drama was imperceptibly but decisively driven out of the life, culture
and religion of Ancient Egypt . That banishment was so decisive,so terrified,
so venomous so intense, that it cast its awful shadow down to the present
and into the future of the whole World. While drama ennobled man to seek
flowering, interactive communication, fulfillment and salvation in the
present as well as in the afterlife, without drama the hope of fulfillment
and flowering was transplanted totally into the after life. Without drama,
the human imagination was to be occupied with dreams of Utopia and nightmares
of Hell to cover up the inevitable poverty and sterility of their present
life. Without osirian/mozartian/sophoclean drama, mankind was to be deprived
of the safety valves protecting against the adoption of absoluteTruths
in life. Without drama there can be no living interactive pluralism and
no integrative peace based on harmony and communication, rather than
on submission by force and or fear .
If Osiris was the secret loved one in the hearts of men and women in
3000BC, he deserves to be a real loved one in 2001AD; in the open! Osiris
is one of the last calls for sanity. Pluralistic, interactive non-violent
harmony.
Understanding Osiris' real passion drama is key to us breaking out of the terrible magnet imperceptibly and tragically pulling the twenty first Century into the disastrous win/lose patterns of the twentieth Century diagnosing "us" as absolute and unquestionable good and "other" as absolute and unquestionable evil. A rare window of opportunity now exists for the rebirth of civilisation based on nonviolent dynamic interactive pluralism in a dedicated win/win matrix encompassing all the global community, but will anyone listen?
My Info: (follow cv link)
I am a Physician from warm and sunny Nile-hugging
Egypt. I believe in the right of humanbeings to personal and societal
health.
The right to gain your genetic potential in a healthy growth-promoting
societal environment is one of the inalienable rights of human-beings
of either sex anywhere, everywhere..
This means recapturing the initiative about
life's right to grow, about health and about prevention.
Through interactive discovery of self and the world. With the help
of the expressive explorative arts especially music, painting, drama and
dance , human beings need to continuously discover and rediscover what
growth and what potential means to everyone at a given time and place.
It is a continuous interactive process through which they can re-orient
themselves as controllers and directors of the march of capital, science,
technology and application rather than being just passive recipients
and many times helpless and bewildered victims of a march that has become
more connected to clandestine dynamics of money and of power rather than
to life and to growth.
No wonder real people everywhere are becoming more and more disenchanted
with politics and political process. Somewhere people even in old established democracies,
realise that the real master is not their voices and perceptions any
more! The turnout in the 2001 British general elections was the lowest ever.
The march of escalating speed, power and violence is not people-connected and
is certainly disconnected from the great Osirian vision of life and of
Earth, explored in the coming pages. We seem to be in the grip of a counter
Osirian momentum very well summarized in the story of mad-cow disease!
In parallel with my commitment to Medicine and human health, and
my work in an NGO charity, the ZKH FOUNDATION for human development,helping
to empower the disempowered,I practice musical composition, painting
and drama and would like to share all with you.
THE ZKH FOUNDATION FOR HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
founded 1993 in honour of Zenab Kamel Hassan: A defiant Egyptian Moslem Girl who defied everything to get access to an education at all, then to get a University education which in the early twenties meant travelling alone to London, joining Clapham High School to get the matriculation, then joining London University, Bedford College to study Science and duly graduate in Chemistry1929 to become the first Egyptian girl to graduate in Science in modern times. Her story of constructive defiance and struggle to set a different role model for Egyptian women and women in the Islamic World is summerized in the foundation booklet (published 1996:"Responding to the Challenges of the twenty first century"). She went on to fight her way into becoming the first woman to teach men Chemistry in Cairo University! The progressive marginalisation and disempowerment of like-minded and enlightened "rebels" represents a fundamental fulcrum in the study of the mechanisms of relapse of the extremely promising and developmental leap in the whole of the region as led by Egypt after the 1919 revolution and its highly fertile associations and offshoots. How was this great promise dismembered, marginalised and disempowered with the rise of unitary totalitarianism in politics and in thought/culture/religion, is worthy subject for several doctoral theses? The Foundation believes that the key to development is re-empowering the disempowered whether these are the poorer, the younger, the non-attached or the feminine. The establishment of dialogue with all "other" is yet another commitment.
tarekaliha@aol.com
doctor@tarekalihassan.com
follow the links