The Curse

Long ago in the ship she asked, "Why pyramids?"
He said, "Think of them as an immense invitation"

~ "The Curse" - Josh Ritter
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Josh Ritter's "The Curse" is playing on a playlist of some of my favorite songs on iTunes right now. Every time I hear it, I fall a little more in love with it. It's just an impossible little jewel of music, perfect in every conceivable way. I don't think I know of another one like it.

Of course, I was bound to love it, I suppose, because it has Egypt in it.  Since the first time I opened the first illustrated book about Tutankhamen in the tiny cramped library behind the fire department here in Podunk, I have been in love with Ancient Egypt, with the mummies and the beast-headed gods... The pyramids then for me have always been an immense invitation.  They are on my "life list," such as it is, of things I must see with my own eyes, go to, be at, lay my hands against the ancient surface of.  One day I must stand before them, inside at least one of them before I die so I can say that I have no regrets. 

As children, I remember L. and me learning to write messages in hieroglyphics, reading Budge's translations of the tales of the gods and The Book of the Dead.  There was a time when I wanted more than anything to be like the woman in this story, spend my days digging in the shifting sands looking for the past.  

That phase passed as childhood "careers" do, but my love for Egypt didn't.  I guess I've read or watched dozens of variations on this same story....Anne Rice's lush novel The Mummy, the Boris Karloff Universal Horror classic of the same title, the modern film trilogy that takes the same theme and spins it again and again eternally around.  Of them all, though, even though at its heart there is still the same supernatural predator, there is still something undeniably poignant and somehow more delicate in this version.  

And that, of course, is coming from Josh Ritter.  That's his hand at the wheel.  He's taking something that has been told as a horror story, as a blockbuster action film, and he's making it somehow as sweet as an old-fashioned waltz.  I don't think anyone but he could have done that, and even if I had never heard him before, I would have loved him for that one song.  It has everything, longing, imagination, musical magical realism.

The video is fantastic, too, perfectly in keeping with the feel of the song and the story as a whole, sweet and sad.  If you haven't seen it, take the time to watch.  It's well worth it.