Between 2020 and 2024 I developed a body of work that culminated in a feature film, Songbook (2024, 55 minutes). Images here are from this film. It excavates the archive of my great-great-aunt, Ruth Lynda Deyo, who was a composer, spiritualist, and synesthete living in Cairo from 1924 until her death in 1960. With the help of a spirit lover notated as TAA in her diaries, she composed a grand opera, The Diadem of Stars, which was never produced. It centered on the lives of Nefertiti, Tutankhamun, his wife Ankhsenpaten, and her father Akhenaten.

The following are excerpts from Ruth Deyo’s diaries which feature transcripts of spirit communication, my own diary entries from a research trip I took to Cairo in 2021, and a session with a medium in which we contacted Ruth’s spirit.
—MG, 2025

MONEY

Ruth Deyo’s diary
Cairo, 1930s
Conversation with Tutankhamun’s spirit (TAA)

TAA You’ve been terribly worried my love, do not be, I beg of thee. Your concert will be a glorious, astounding success tomorrow. You will be surprised, very surprised.

RD  The concert was a great success. I played better than I’ve ever played. Was happier than I ever have been. The dress was a dream …

(the next day) Exhausted utterly. Slept all day. Apparently, I’ve made no money from the concert.

TAA Listen well my beloved. I know you are terribly disturbed and distressed and dismayed at apparently having made not sufficient money at your beautiful concert. But darling, this is not the case. It has not all come in yet. When the accounts are all in order, you will find that a sufficient sum was made last night to pay all expenses. Every phase of society is hearing you and appreciating you, and you are not demeaning yourself by having done these things, beloved. On the contrary, you have risen in the estimation of everyone, and they are putting you on a pedestal from which you will rule Egypt. Forget not this darling, blessed wife of mine, whom I adore beyond anything in the universe, I am coming to thee soon, soon. The waiting is terrific for us, and it is more trying for thee perhaps darling because you are surrounded by these earth currents. The physical body is being prepared so that I can come to you in that and be with you constantly and always, always.

Oh my adorable queen! You know not how intensely I long to be with thee in my physical form. And now our combined longings are accomplishing this thing. I know that it sometimes feels as if you are going mad and you don’t know what to do or what to think. I shall come to thee. Trust this, believe this, know this. Goodnight my ever-blessed queen. I am with thee constantly.

Mariah Garnett’ diary
Cairo, 2021
Café in Zamalek

We sit outside at a sidewalk cafe. Western countries are closing their borders because of the Omicron variant. N says Egypt used to be the West. On some monuments there are inscriptions proclaiming themselves to be the “Greatest Dynasty in the West.” Why are maps the way they are? Because the British drew them and put themselves in the middle.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see a cute small rodent jump and run into a bush. “Was that a weasel?” “Yes, we don’t have rats here, we have weasels.”

R walks up and joins us. He had to meet his landlord, who is selling the building to a woman who is buying it as an investment for her son, who lives in Spain. “Don’t you love it when people talk about your home like that?” He replies, “Living in someone else’s investment.”

In reconsidering this archive, which is steeped in New Age Orientalist fantasy, I’m asking: What does being an artist living in precarity mean today? How do we find the spiritual fortitude to continue? How do ancient technologies (spirit communication) and modern ones (AI boyfriends) reflect each other? Is it queer to love a spirit? How am I similar to Ruth and how am I different? What resonates in archives, and how can we transform cycles of history as we move forward, collectively? Is death the end? -MG, 2025 

BRAIN

Cairo, 2021
Informal session with spirit medium channeling Ruth Deyo (SM) and Mariah Garnett (MG).

SM Well she’s here now. She’s with me now. I’m saying “Wow, you had quite a life.” I’m telling her and she’s like, “Whoa, dizzying.”

[pause]

So tired when she comes, I mean not me, I’m not complaining, but I feel this heaviness you know? It’s like, whoa.

[pause]

She’s saying her mind didn’t work. She’s trying to show me, and from what I can see it’s very different from how my mind works. It’s very quick and the connections are very … “Genius,” she says.

“And it’s genetic,” she says [laughs].

“Have you been?” she’s asking?

MG Have I been what?

SM I don’t know. Labeled some kind of something or another?

Ruth Deyo’s diary
Cairo, 1930s
Conversation with Tutankhamun’s spirit (TAA)

The less you use your brains the better. If you leave it all to us you can’t go wrong or make mistakes. We know the whole story, whereas you can only know part. And what may seem strange to you is not strange at all. Please trust us entirely. We have your Destiny in hand.

BODY

Mariah Garnett’s diary
Cairo, 2021
SUV in Heliopolis, night.

Y can’t find anyone to sleep with. I tell him I know a witch spell. “First you identify someone you want to sleep with and then think about them when you masturbate.”

R asks if I’ve ever tried it and I say yes.

He asks what happened and I say, “I ended up in a three-year relationship.”

He is shocked. “You did this one time and ended up in a relationship for three years?”

I admit it was probably more than once, but yes.

“You are a witch.”

“No, I’m not.”

I don’t tell them I get my period every full moon.

I say, “A big, big part of me just wants to be a boy who has a boyfriend.” R says, “But that’s witchy.” I’ve never thought about it that way before.

Ruth Deyo’s diary
Cairo, 1930s
Conversation with Tutankhamun’s spirit (TAA)

You did not want to be a woman in this last incarnation. You’ve been in a disturbed state of mind for some months. This is a reflection of psychic conditions on this earth. The earth is not in a normal state at the present time. Great changes are taking place to make way for immensely better conditions.

America is sick and people do not know their own minds.

DEATH

Mariah Garnett’s diary
Cairo, 2021
British cemetery.

Ruth’s headstone looks standard-issue. The inscription reads

In Memory of Ruth Deyo Dalton,
The Great World Famous Pianist and Composer,
4th March, 1960.
Beloved Wife of Charles Dalton.

Charles is buried at her feet. His inscription reads

In memory of The Great Poet Charles John Dalton
December 5th, 1954.
Beloved Husband of Ruth Deyo Dalton.

It doesn’t feel like she’s here, but I feel like I am supposed to do something. I search my bag for something to give her. Hand sanitizer, a few masks, my phone charger. I find a 1 pound coin. I bury it up against her headstone, touch the top, try and fail to have a moment, and am ready to go.

F wants to stroll. One headstone reads “a man who loved Egypt.” Another says something about “our beloved Egypt.”

“These people really loved Egypt. It’s easy to do when you are white,” she says, “imagine what their lives must’ve been like.”

“Way better than they ever could ever have been at home,” I say. She nods.

Cairo, 2021
Informal session with spirit medium
(channeling Ruth Deyo) and Mariah Garnett.

SM She’s very willing to come in and merge completely with you as a spirit.

MG Ummm …

SM She merged easily with human and with music and with spirit. You don’t want that.

MG No.

SM You want clarity. “I’m doing this work, I will do my best with it, to honor you but to also honor myself.” Like your vision, your artistic vision. Your input. That’s equally important. So this work is in partnership, it’s not about just her.

MG Right, OK.

SM You’re the one here, in this physical manifestation. It’s really important to know that. To know that you can establish a boundary and you can say, “There’s inspiration from you, and I’m coming in.”

MG OK.

SM You can even improve on the work. And that’s a word coming from spirit. Improve on the work.

MG Wait, she said that?

SM No.

MG OK, I didn’t think so [laughs].

SM It came from someone else. But it was very clear.

Ruth Deyo’s diary
Cairo, 1937
Communication from Tutankhamun’s spirit (TAA).

In every human being is a spark of the Divine. As you were told long ago, this creation is designed to touch and re-awaken dormant and sub-conscious selves. How can this be done? When the mass of the world is so dull-witted?

The world is dissatisfied and out of joint. Every form of government has failed - money has failed - the Church has failed. Then what? 

Mariah Garnett’s diary
Cairo, 2021
Café, downtown.

I walk into a cafe to meet G and he recognizes me immediately. I keep forgetting how obviously foreign I am here. We talk about my film. I tell him I am a person who doesn’t believe in ghosts but also totally does. He says that he is the same. He shows me a Russian book about computers from the 80s called Cybernetics. There is a chapter in there about death, and how at some point in the future, computers will be so advanced that they raise the dead, and everyone who has ever lived will inhabit the earth at the same time. I hope this doesn’t happen.

Cairo, 2021
Informal session with spirit medium
(channeling Ruth Deyo) and Mariah Garnett (MG).

SM What is the aim of communication? Spirit communication? That death is not the end.