Right then. Memoirs, eh? Some blighter thinks his own piffle is worth the ink. Life, it seems, this grand outward shuffle from the nursery puddle to the public splash. Tadpole legs and off you hop. Though the inner grousing, one suspects, just sits there, stewing in its own juice while the pronouncements get louder. Distinctive, they say. Well, everyone has their own way of botching things, don’t they? And some feel the urge to scribble it down. For the ages, no doubt. Or just to kill the endless tick-tock.

This Hemiunu character. Apparently, a proper smart aleck in his day, throwing around fancy terms like nobody’s business. Took some modern brain-scratching to even get a handle on what the fellow was on about. And then to explain his highfalutin knowledge. Not just civil engineering, mind you, but management, logistics, metrics, and, oddly enough, psychology. The whole shebang. Today, they’d call Hemiunu a polymath, a proper jack-of-all-trades, master of a fair few, dabbling in things we now keep in separate boxes – astronomy, theology, civil engineering.

Hemiunu, it seems, didn’t bother with such distinctions, which made sorting through his scribbles a bit of a headache. His diaries, you see, offer a peek into the life of a rather exceptional chap, born with a silver spoon, living it up during the pyramid boom. The jackpot for any self-respecting tweed jacket: a firsthand account of a lost culture, warts and all. Shenanigans, morals, grub, graft, the lot. And as if that wasn’t enough to keep the academics buzzing, these diaries apparently solve a good few of the head-scratchers about those Fourth Dynasty pyramids.

Why the Rhomboidal one was all bent out of shape? Did they use ramps to haul those massive stones? What was the point of all those peculiar bits in the Great Pyramid? Why a pyramid shape in the first place? Why the different angles? A whole list of unanswered questions, all supposedly answered by the very fellow who, it seems, was calling the shots. The ultimate insider’s dope, wouldn’t you say? A right little treasure trove of ancient know-how. Though, one can’t help but wonder if even Hemiunu knew what he was getting into, stacking all those stones. A proper Sisyphean job, one might venture. But there you have it. The man who did it all, or so they say. And now, at last, his version. Make of it what you will.

Last week, amidst the usual struggle to put words in a row, I found myself pondering the profound silence of hot air, the sheer artistry of empty pronouncements, the breathtakingly breathless, soapy, stone-cold… atmosphere. Makes one shudder. Put me in mind of those North Swedes, all icy stares and the pronouncement that talk is strictly for those who haven’t the foggiest notion of being alone. A whole page could be filled with such chilling wisdom, gleaned, mind you, from actual work alongside these paragons of taciturnity. And then one starts to wonder, doesn’t one? Why this peculiar urge to scratch out something new, something not already mumbled, and likely mumbled much better. A precarious spot, this sitting on two chairs. Decidedly uncomfortable, as the Germans so rightly put it – caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, unable to pick one awkward option over the other.

Right then, this inspirational zeal business. Apparently, it’s about dusting off the old virtues – loyalty, reliability, patience, the whole dusty lot – the sort of things that don’t necessarily pay the rent in this grand mess. But, according to this William Strauss, if history wasn’t a bit of a revolving door, these virtues would have long since packed it in. They stick around, he figures, because every now and then, they get a proper airing, rewarding the good eggs and giving the bad ones a good smack. A bit like a cosmic reset button, wouldn’t you say?

Now, this “one touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” Sounds rather nice, doesn’t it? The notion that a shared sniffle reveals our common muck, the basic kinship of us all. But hold on a minute. Some say Shakespeare, when he wrote that line for the cynical Ulysses, meant something quite different. No eternal heart truths, says Ulysses to Achilles. The one thing we all share is a fondness for the latest bauble, the “in” thing, no matter how daft. As he put it:

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,

That all with one consent praise new-born gauds, then marvel not,

thou great and complete man, …Since things in motion sooner catch the eye

than what not stirs . . .

So, a bit of razzle-dazzle, some “anschauung” as they say, can grab the light, fueled by the relentless passion of its pushers. Not quite the warm and fuzzy one first thought, is it?

Then you have Neil Armstrong’s moon landing blather: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Big deal, no doubt. Trouble is, in the talking bit, that little word “a” went missing, so you often hear “one small step for man,” which, grammatically, is a bit of nonsense. A small step for “the” whole shebang? Doesn’t quite ring true, does it?

And now we get into “Gesellschaft” and “Gemeinschaft”. “Gesellschaft”, apparently, is all about looking after number one, the way of the modern world – moving around, mixed up, not personal. Its opposite, “Gemeinschaft”, is a bunch tied together by shared ideas, beliefs about how you should act, and close friendships. Looking after number one takes a backseat to the common good. Reminds you a bit of Adam Smith saying: “To start a big empire just to get customers might seem a silly idea for a country of shopkeepers; but it’s just the ticket for a country run by shopkeepers.” These, it seems, are the very things we have to deal with, these one-name wonders trying to find a bright side in the general mess, our world wobbling between a rock and a hard place, with some other option lurking about. A real balancing act, wouldn’t you say?

Then there’s this Stendhal thing. A French writer, this Stendhal (real name Marie-Henri Beyle, 1783–1842), wrote in his diary about a funny feeling in Florence back in ’17. Surrounded by all the art stuff, especially the paintings in some church, he felt quite sick. Heart going thump-thump, thought he’d fall over if he moved, life seeming to drain away. Only when he got out of the church and sat on a bench with some poems did he feel okay again. And wouldn’t you know it, lots of tourists in Florence every year now get the same funny feeling. So many, in fact, that the shrinks have given it a name: the Stendhal syndrome.

As I thought about how this might look today, right, so this “josh,” this American thing for a bit of kidding around, a bit of fooling. Seems the smart folks think it’s a mix of “joke” and “bosh.” Though, there’s a whisper that some Yank writer might have had a hand in it. Chap named Henry Wheeler Shaw (1818–85), who went by the fancier name of Josh Billings.

This Billings fellow, he wrote his down-to-earth thoughts with deliberate misspellings, mind you, a real show of odd talk, wrong grammar, crazy logic, and the odd pun that would make you groan. Became quite the funny writer in his day, apparently. Now, this “to josh” thing was around some eighteen years before our Mr. Billings started writing in ’63. But his funny sayings likely gave the word a bit more push, a wider showing, like.

And then we have this “greased lightning!” Good heavens. Pure American exaggeration, the sort that had those stuffy British grammar folks in a right fuss all through the 19th century. Americans, a bunch who like to overdo it, no doubt. But the funny thing here is that “faster than anything,” like greased lightning, is a “British” saying, despite what some might tell you. First showed up in some Boston, Lincoln, and Louth paper back in ’33. The exaggeration, naturally, not meant to be taken seriously. No more than “as old as the hills,” “a million thanks,” “haven’t seen you for ages,” or even that bit of Shakespeare where he talks about his hand turning the “multitudinous seas incarnadine,/ Making the green one red.” All a bit of showing off, wouldn’t you say?

A funny business, this art. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? All that beauty, and it can knock you for six. Maybe best to stick to the poems on a bench. Less hard on the system, you’d think. My thoughts then wandered, as they do, to the nice sounds of Mesfin Habtemariam on the radio on a Sunday morning. His stories, full of the real stuff of Addis – Sebategna, Mercato – a real punch in the nose for anyone thinking a Master of Creative Writing is some quiet soul. I daresay, I even found myself copying his way of talking, much to my own embarrassment. A sharp wit, his, for sure, made sharp by a life lived not in fancy towers but right there on the streets. You wonder if you can ever copy such a thing.

The mind, a busy thing, then turned to a quick escape from the boring Business folks, a sneaky visit to Mengistu Lema’s Ethiopian Literature class, a poetry thing at the language school. Ah, those were the days, a real feast of poems! To my mind, he was a top-notch poet, wrapping old truths in a nice way, a teacher who had everyone his age hooked, his students his forever. A special mark, leaving behind a treasure of poems, a real love for poetry lived and written. A dry spell indeed when you think of him and Mesfin… Mengistu, leaving us a life story like a pearl, a precious thing. Jane Plastow, bless her heart, complained about his never-ending search for perfectness, a hard boss that kept his pen tied down. To read his work was a daily thing, a page enjoyed, never quite finished.

Instead of just reading textbooks in high school, I had a friend, see, a chap completely taken with the idea of being an artist. A “can-do” sort, he was, yet his final school project stayed his best work, always studying the bare feet of people walking by. A solo show, that was the dream, his sketches growing like weeds all over his place. But alas, the need for food soon put art on the back burner. Still, he made his mark in town, those bright neon signs, his other big love – lettering – and those quick, but telling, drawings of people. A fire burned inside, that solo show never happened, and he died before he was forty. What sticks around, rather stubbornly, is his stolen wisdom from Art History: Goya, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Raphael, Rubens, and that odd genius Van Gogh, then all of them – Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso – all seen through the strange eyes of his teacher, Seyoum Wolde Ramsey. You mustn’t forget the bigger names of Gebrekirstos Desta and Skunder Bogossian in all this.

To make a long story short, I found Seyoum Wolde’s life story book just last week, thanks to a bookshop customer near my place, an order made way back when the shop first opened. Ten pages a day, that’s the limit, so you don’t enjoy it too quickly. So, thanks to my pushy friend and finally being swayed by Seyoum, I know about the hard work that waits for anyone brave enough to try art.

Thanks to Seyoum’s push, carrying on my artist friend from childhood, the journey I took through Art in general partly led me into Ethiopian art. I, some four or five years ago, tackled an Italian friend, involving the late Fikru Kidane, because he complained on a Face book page we were all on about being told the history of Ethiopian art by a foreigner. Right then, this Italian friend of ours, see, he had this idea, a rather strong one, that Ethiopian church art was practically twins with European or Byzantine stuff. Didn’t much care about what these paintings “meant”, you understand, or the religious fights they were often showing. And the nerve of it! Thinking these Ethiopian painters were always looking across the water for ideas, as if what was happening locally – the politics, the money, the general noise – had no effect at all on their painting.

Reading Art Historian Seyoum, it seems, puts you right there in the daily grind of growing up in Addis Ababa. Worrying about the knife in that long sister fight, pinching coins from his mother’s bag for “pasty” because some pal kept offering the same and expecting a return, the nasty punishment with burning paper smoke and “kosso” being tied and hung down from a tree, and his memory of that face long gone because of the city hall that used to be a spot for “tella” sellers where he’d get sent to buy by tasting. And life inside Menelik’s palace, hearing the gun with thoughts that it meant noon during Menelik’s time, his struggle to get an education that meant not having a decent house or a steady family, and succeeding while reading under a gas lamp, being kept from school to look after his younger brother – all this wasn’t just Seyoum’s story, but also the story of Addis Ababa’s Doro Manekia, Hager Fikir, as it was situated in the neighbourhood with its well-known figures like Nigatua Kelkay, Etagegnehu Haile, and Asselefech Mulat.

Most of all, it was a time when cents mattered, chasing after them by selling spoons and talking about how much you could make with a relative, ending in loud crying on the street that led to hard work with sisal leftovers, fixing them up from the factory to sell paper decorations. Life struggling with a sewing machine, art shows without art school, the many changes of house addresses and schools amidst doing well in school.

As some smart cookie rightly pointed out, before all the capitalist hullabaloo, for ages and ages, work, except for a few special jobs, was the business of the craftsman. The potter made pots, the cobbler made shoes, the weaver wove, the tailor sewed. A funny idea now, as old-fashioned as those once great computers, a similar going-out-of-date in every corner of our innovation-crazy world. The word goes out, far and wide: not only do we have to make our current stuff better, but we also have to do a wider range of things. Our many-sided struggles no longer let us dream up some Land of Cockaigne, where cooked birds fall from the sky, cheese rivers flow, and honest work gets you in trouble.

This all brings to mind a story about a new boss taking over a rather shaky IT giant in the States, some years back. In one of his first meetings, he told his thirty top people to email him their top three fixes for the company’s problems, and, importantly, the top three things he himself should be doing. Monday was the word, end of the week the deadline. “I was curious about what they’d say,” he said, “but even more about when they’d say it. A quick test of how urgent they thought things were, you see.” Ninety percent, bless their slow hearts, waited until Friday afternoon to type out their emails. “It never even crossed their minds to ping me within the hour,” he went on. “Last minute it was. And that, basically, was the message they sent to their own people: Wait until the last minute! And in the end, they mostly piled on what I, the new guy, needed to sort out. Their own to-do lists were remarkably… short.” That, he figured, said a lot about what was going on at the company.

Lance Morrow, wisely, wrote about fame’s “joys and burdens, boredom and – especially – danger.” Fame, he noted, comes with “style, glamour, money, attention; makes strangers suddenly recognize you, gets you comic politeness from headwaiters who whisk you past the regular folks to the best table.” Yet, that old Greek fellow Aristotle, with his idea of -eudaimonia-, preached that the real point of life isn’t some quick fun but a good life achieved by using your full potential. A good life, he argued, includes caring about others, finding satisfaction in your work, and the respect you get from taking part, even in the messy business of economics.

And then there are those funny German sayings. “Nullkommanichts,”–zero-comma-nothing–the speed at which some things get done, in the blink of an eye, as they say. “Eins und eins zusammenzählen,” – Germans add one and one when the proof is there, rather than our “two and two.” “Einmal ist keinmal,” – once doesn’t count. “Auf einem Auge blind”– blind in one eye. And of course, that decidedly uncomfortable “zwischen zwei Stühlen sitzen”. Then there’s the optimistic “aller guten Dinge sind drei”– all good things come in threes, third time’s the charm. The more forgiving “fünfe grade sein lassen” – let five be even, don’t be too picky, keep calm, as we might say. And finally, that mysterious “den sechsten Sinn haben,”– the sixth sense, that gut feeling, that little bit of intuition beyond the usual five. A curious bunch, those Germans, with their number sayings about the ups and downs of life.

(Tadesse Tsegaye is a self-described nostalgia enthusiast with a keen awareness of the present as it shapes the future. Gifted at expressing his soul through writing, he combines his diverse experiences in resource management across multicultural and institutional settings to deliver insightful and captivating stories. Tadesse believes that sharing his tales not only enriches his own understanding but also offers a valuable service to others.)

Contributed byTadesse Tsegaye