On the prophetic & predictive via David Degner’s Egypt
[ by Charles Cameron — the first O of OODA, as one photographer applied it to Mubarak’s destiny ]
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Angel's Trumpet, Brugmansia arborea, image credit BH&G
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As you all know, I am fascinated by the intersection of the poetic (sacramental, irrational, magical, pre-scientific) and the prosaic (secular, rational, mundane, scientific) worldviews, so ably captured by John Donne with the four words “round earth’s imagin’d corners” in one of his Holy Sonnets:
At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scatter’d bodies go…
One such intersection comes where prophecy meets prediction.
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I was accordingly interested when Erin Cunningham pointed us to these two remarkable tweets, the first from earlier today:
As Mubarak lands at the Maadi hospital I’ll just leave this 17 day old tweet here: https://t.co/WfaWoWSMuu
— David Degner (@degner) August 22, 2013
and the second, to which the first refers, from two weeks ago:
The Military Hospital in Maadi is reinforcing their perimeter fence with sheet metal. Expecting a controversial patient?
— David Degner (@degner) August 4, 2013
I believe that second tweet permits photographer David Degner the (secular) rank of Prophet — but it would take, in my view, an entity with the secular rank of Angel, Recording Angel to be precise, to give us an accurate and complete timeline of mental, communications and physical events here, from the first stirring of an idea in the mind of some Egyptian judge, general or staffer through multiple discussions, decisions and levels of implementation, to today’s outcome.
One might even say that the IC with its all source intel aspires to, but will never quite obtain, such an angelic function… while for those of us wholly reliant on open source intelligence, observation and intelligent extrapolation (in the case of Degner) and keeping one’s eye on appropriate parts of the twitterstream (for the rest of us) seems to be the way to go.
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How foolish of me, therefore, to be unaware of the tweets and works of Degner, whose photographs of Churches looted and burnt in Upper Egypt and current project on Liminal states in Egyptian Maharagan music are both of keen interest to me.
Egypt, from the prosaic to the poetic — our world is rich in both.
