Leaf 190 – Senryu (or witty, tom-foolery)
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| Frauke Stebner - Mosquito in Amber |
This poem was loosely inspired
by the fact that Tutankhamun, like many of his contemporary ancient Egyptians,
is known to have suffered from malaria and that this mosquito-borne disease may
have contributed to his early demise, although the actual cause of his death is
still debated. The poem’s playful suggestion that a drop of the young Pharoah’s
blood (and, with it, his DNA) may well have survived him by the simple chance process
of a mosquito which had bitten him later becoming preserved in amber, inadvertently
guaranteeing him a kind of naturally mummified afterlife, was something which
appealed to my wry sense of irony – given the extreme lengths which the ancient
Egyptians went to in order to preserve their dead. The idea of the great
Pharoah and the lowly mosquito each finding their place in eternity in this
manner, with their fates combined together as one, seemed to me to be a neatly
rounded one – embodying that old, ancient Egyptian Hermetic Gnosticism: “as above, so it is
below,” as it were.
Pharoah’s bloodline,
embalmed in amber –
mosquito’s afterlife assured.
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| Howard Carter examining Tutankamun (1925) |
