Every year. I have lived in Los Angeles for fourteen, and in every one of them, I have experienced fires. At times, I pass little fires as I drive. The highway will be shut down and firetrucks ring the struck embankment, cutting the blaze with long streams of water. There are years like this one, when I wake up to my Jeep dusted with grey feathers of ash. My awareness of the fires usually comes from someone checking in on me from another state, asking if I am safe. My reaction is usually, “Jesus, have they begun already?” and then I check the map. My mood darkens, I start to worry, and then I carry on. As I write this, the Bobcat fire threatens Mount Wilson, around which I hike often. The evacuation orders came yesterday.
This morning, on my daily walk, the sun is veiled by smoke. The weather is listed as cloudy, but that is not true. Instead, we live in a haze, the sun strikes the atmosphere to give it a material quality. I can see the air, as the advisories move from unhealthy to dangerous. I think of artists like Anthony McCall, Robert Irwin, Carlos Cruz Diez, James Turrell, and Mary Corse, all of whom want a person to notice light, to materialize light, and all of whom seem to point to noticing light as awareness, as way of being present in the world. I am not sure that this is what they had in mind, this heavy, dark radiance outside of my window. This is California’s ironic light, its tortured light. And this light extends past the horizon and the mountains, into L.A.'s myth-making, its story telling, to the social divisions inside this mild temperature, supposed paradise.
One might say that this smoky heavy light is the real light. The only light that matters -- prisms of pink, purple, yellow, and orange pyrotechnics -- as we pretend we don't live on the knife's edge of ruin.
I have spent the last two weeks thinking of a moment in Egypt when I entered the temple of Esna, a few miles south of Luxor. My wife Heather and I booked a trip to float down the Nile. I had studied about Cairo, Thebes, and our eventual destination, Aswan, but I knew very little about El Kab, Edfu, El Silsila, Kom Ombu, not to mention Esna’s Temple of Khnum, at which our Dahabiya stopped.
Inside the Temple of Khunum, which you find situated in an excavated hole in the ground, there is a series of scaffolding on which people are cleaning. The daylight streams through the columns of the temple, animating the dust thrown by your feet. In this dust, one sees colors being released by the cleaners from thousands of years of collected build-up:
“The Coptic Christians would hide here,” our guide said, “and the smoke from their fires would rise up to dirty the ceiling.”
I thought back to a conversation I had with a friend of mine, a Salesian Sister who had been stationed at missions, first in Cairo and then in Alexandria. She told me that she considered Egypt safe, but that I should avoid Coptic churches. Admittedly, this was the first I had heard of the trouble between radical sides of Egypt and Libya and the Copts, though it is a story that goes back two thousand years. Google Coptic massacres and your computer will conjure a very sad history.
One reads about the attack on two buses in 2018. There is the death of 50 people on Palm Sunday, 2017, and a bombing in Cairo leading to death of 27 people in Cairo in 2016. I couldn’t read without crying the story of the video recorded mass murder in 2015 in Libya. There is the 2011 Alexandria bombing; Nag Hammadi in 2010; Kosheh in 2000; and many more. Attacks on Copts happen often, multiple times a year, and most go unreported in the United States.
The tension between radical Islamists and Copts is felt everywhere in Egypt. The security presence throughout Egypt is aggressive and present, but never so much as in Coptic quarters of cities. This is not to say you shouldn’t visit Egypt. You absolutely should visit, as it is a wonder on so many historical and cultural levels but be aware that the strife between the Copts and Egypt’s radical fringes is very real.
And it is not just radical Islam. The smoke layered onto the ceiling of the Temple of Khnum, for instance, dates back to the Christian purges of the Roman Empire, to specifically the decrees that came under the reign of Diocletian. When the Copts lit their fires, Rome’s Ptolemaic adoption of the Egyptian religion and its reputation for religious tolerance was long gone. The old rites were petering out, on their way to what is considered their last gasp in 394, as the last hieroglyphic inscription of the Egyptian religion was etched at Philae. Egypt was feeling (along with the rest of the Empire), the convulsions caused by the Christian conversion. At the time the Copts squatted in the temple, the world was groaning in particularly nasty clash of change. Diocletian kicked against the current, but he would lose.
I suspect, as the years went on, the fires at Esna were not just Coptic. It is my understanding that Egyptian ruins, prior to excavation, often housed all sorts of displaced peoples. Over thousands of years, the wages and terrors of wars, revolutions, as well as local violence demanded that people live in the shadows, avoid the wider world and seek any refuge that they could find. Thousands of fires, day after day, year after year, covering the ceilings with soot. The floods of the Nile tossed the temples with silt and dirt, so that these places were more like caves than a places of religion. The ruin of an empire was replaced by other empires, and so it all continues to march right up to the tanks, at this very moment, positioned in front of Coptic Churches throughout Egypt.
I write all this now because I wonder where are collected fires of California are leading. It must be significant that we experience this unstoppable ritual every year, as both nature and society join in the heat of summer to oscillate between beauty and destruction, privilege and oppression. I have come to firmly believe that all beauty here is ironic. How could it not be? It is not enjoyed equally, the dream for few is the horror for many. Cathartic experiences of light are brief and perhaps a bit foolish, like an intoxication that eventually fades into a hangover.
I think of Scottish painter David Robert’s painting of Esna from 1838, one of many paintings and etchings that caused thousands of British tourists to descend upon Egypt every year for a tour and would start a mania for Egypt that would catch on around the globe. I think of that ray of light, beaming down onto turbaned people that Roberts handled with his Orientalist eye. The staircase to the left was built to compensate for the collected dirt, which is also seen on the floor. The columns show but a portion of their actual size.
Was this the supposed light of reason, of the Enlightenment philosophy that Roberts’ Scottish countryman had labored so intensely to give the world? Was the light the Enlightenment’s manifestation in the science of Archaeology, in colonial plunder, in excavation, all under the premise of sending those items back to more “advanced” societies to be processed and studied? Was this light, shining into the cave of this temple, any less menacing and misleading that the smoke of a thousand years of oppression covering the colors of the ceiling?
There is more than enough ironic light floating around me right now during the pandemic and during the increased calls for social justice in the world. Light has a fundamental capacity for destruction, to dry the walls and to torch the skin until it all evaporates. It is easy to forgot that sometimes. 
