Ehab's Homepage

Everybody is doing it !....... Filling this electronic wasteland with useless webpages, homepages, petpages, campages , and whatever . So brace yourselves I'll take my plunge and try to create a place for me in cyberspace although I'm a rather old fashioned romantic guy! ......sometimes I feel 19th century Europe was the right time and place for me to be alive ........ when existential angst and wining about how much we suffer under the sun was actually fashionable .....I would have lived to the full , constantly filling the cup of Bacchus ,constantly falling in love with every pretty face then tragically dying from consumption at an early age .

Weird ? perhaps , but that was the world back then and despite the mediocrity of all those heaving bosoms some of the greatest artists of all time lived in that era and some of the greatest works of art ever created sprouted throughout Europe.........so it was a special century indeed , it's called the Romantic Period.

Which brings me to my favourite activity , which is listening to the music of romantic and late romantic composers such as Berlioz , Bruckner , Richard Wagner (1813-1883) and Gustav Mahler .........Especially Wagner , who commands a special place in my mind and heart , I always return to him after many wanderings through the music scene to find him still fresh and commanding , a shattering life changing experience that never wears off. Mahler is a close second although not as inspired as Wagner . Sometimes I'm in the mood for classical music and Beethoven was my favourite (and in a certian way still is) for a long time , but most of the time my senses are not apollonian.

One of Wagner's most tender and romantic compositions is a cycle of songs called the Wesendonck lieder which has words written by Mathilde Wesendock ; a married woman whom Wagner loved and who is thought to be the basis for the sublime and sensually passionate "Tristan und Isolde" . Click here for a translation of the German text.

I'm currently a student at UCF starting my Ph.D. studies , basically trying to survive academia . The other day in my Advanced EM class I had some yellow paper to scribble away my notes in a fashion that displays my deep understanding of what the seemingly intelligent Doc was saying ...... and it just gripped me , that funny feeling that engulfs you when you're confronted with yellow smelly paper , you know ? ah ....perhaps not. But that grainy awful yellow paper sitting on the desk yearning for ink and tears that rip through it's emptiness ; how can anyone resist ! On that yellow paper dreams should be exposed , dew of the heart should enrich the gritty fiber with the fragrance of the infinite yearning of a single human soul...... all alone in the chill of dark shadows where it lurks for an eternity and a day floating between patches of sparkling glow of whitish colour. Then my thoughts wandered .......... to die , to behold beautiful pain no more , to cease the throbbing of one's life muscle in it's boney cage , so to know peace at last ? Real peace ? Long sought for redemption .... is it so to die ? Can it be that easy ... a moment of infinite regret that resolves into that delicious content of finally letting go ....breaking free from the brute cycle of desire ! Is death the necessary sharp pain much like the one experienced when ripping out an arrow deep in flesh and bone. Life is like an insidious vine of sharp steel that has dug itself into every fiber of our being encircling every vein and nerve , sucking our mirth yet ardently refusing to release unless the price of excoriating pain is paid. This pain is what keeps us floating for a while before ultimately our feeble feet give in to the pounding of fate .......and one blow after another finally it comes ....that which crushes us towards darkness tearing us away from life's strings ....

Then it is peace ? peace forever ..... Forever........Forever.......Ewig......Ewig........

That pretty much sums up my chances of getting an A in that class ... if I stop bringing in yellow paper I may get a B.it's gonna be a Loooooooong semester.

Favourite Films

O moon high up in the deep, deep sky,
Your light sees far away regions,
You travel round the wide,
Wide world peering into human dwellings

O, moon, stand still for a moment,
Tell me, ah, tell me where is my lover!
Tell him. please, silvery moon in the sky,
That I am hugging him firmly,
That he should for at least a while
Remember his dreams!
Light up his far away place,
Tell him, ah, tell him who is here waiting!
If he is dreaming about me,
May this remembrance waken him!
O, moon, don't disappear, disappear!

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

What can I but enumerate old themes?
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride?

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
The Countess Cathleen was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

--The Circus Animal's Desertion ( By William Butler Yeats , shown below )

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows What he talks about,
And there's a politician That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again And held her in my arms!