(Im)Permanence: Mike Marshall and Darrol Anger with Väsen on "Egypt"

In New York City, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sits the Egyptian Temple of Dendur. A casualty of the construction of the Aswan High Dam, it was given as a gift to the United States by Egypt and brought to New York in 1963.

If you walk around to the side of the Temple, you'll see a bunch of graffiti from multiple time periods on the side wall. That in itself is the subject for an essay - the human impulse to leave its mark on anything and everything it encounters. Look closely at the graffiti and you'll see the name of a man who lists his residence as Brooklyn, New York and the date sometime in the 1800s.

I thought long and hard about this little irony when I first saw that graffiti at the Temple. In the 1800s, when this man came by on an expedition or as a tourist, he wrote his name on the Temple wall like others before him thinking that for thousands more years the temple would stand alone and that the few others who braved the Egyptian desert to reach that lonely outpost would see his name. Little did he know that one day, an endangered temple given as a gift would put his name in an art museum in the very place that he came from. He affixed his name to what he thought would be a permanent marker in Egypt until the end of time. The impermanence of everything in the universe now has guaranteed that his name will be visible, perhaps in s better state of permanence and perhaps not, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As I am visiting my mother, who is in her early 80s and is in the early signs of dementia, I have been thinking about the permanence and impermanence of things in our lives. Of course there is the issue of my mother's life and eventual death, but also the life she had, full of memories bad and good, which seem to slip away little by little like a slow leak in a bucket. As the poem Ozymandias proclaims, even the mighty end up "colossal wrecks" in "lone and level sands" that stretch far away. But you don't have to be mighty to realize that all that we have been and all that we were are thralls to impermanence. I won't leave a huge shattered visage in the sand to mark my passing, but the result will be the same.

So, with that melancholy thought, a downtempo reflective tune for you today in the form of Egypt by Väsen with Mike Marshall and Darrol Anger. Väsen is a Swedish folk band formed in 1989, who created a different sound for Swedish folk by adding some modern guitar work over the traditional Swedish styles. As they have evolved, they have moved away from playing traditional tunes toward their own compositions. They maintain a busy international touring schedule, have released 15 albums, and often collaborate with American musicians Mike Marshall and Darrol Anger. Marshall is a mandolin player and multi-instrumentalist who has recorded in a variety of genres and has collaborated with artists such as Béla Fleck and Mark O'Connor. Darrol Anger is a violinist who also has performed with some of contemporary music's most accomplished musicians, and currently leads a group called Republic of Strings which uses classical, jazz and folk as its springboard. Egypt can be found on the 2007 CD Mike Marshall and Darrol Anger with Väsen.