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November 29, 2004
Scientists Off the Deep End
A group at the University of Western Australia, calling themselves "the Tissue Culture & Art Project", have grown--yes, grown, out of disembodied mouse skin cells--a tiny leather coat with two inch sleeves. They call it "Victimless Leather".
They started up a website to show it off, but declined to include any information as to the scientific processes which produced it (which practically shouts HOAX, and they could certainly have CGI'd the few pictures shown a lot easier than growing them, but let's ignore that for the moment since this time I can't prove it and it's going to be a lot more fun to assume this thing is real). Instead of wowing us with their mad cell manipulation skills, folks at TC&A (T&A?) seem to want us just to accept it as a concept, an artistic concept no less, and a springboard for social debate. They call it "an ambigious and somewhat ironic take into the technological price our society will need to pay for achieving 'a victimless utopia'".
Let's take them up on the offer, shall we? Ambiguous, indeed! "Somewhat" ironic? Any utopian vision whose primary tenet is minimizing the pain inflicted on cows in order to produce cool clothes for motorcycle gangs is in for rough waters. Wouldn't a victimless utopia require that people stop killing each other? How exactly are undead garments supposed to help achieve that?
Step back for a minute and consider the possibilities of a form of disembodied skin that does exactly what we tell it to (we being not so much the dupes whose flesh it will eventually utterly fail to protect from the elements in order to gain autonomy, but rather the oblivious psychos who grew it in a lab). Have these people never played Resident Evil? Have they never heard of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Do they seriously expect us to believe our society will ever evolve a victimless utopia, let alone be led to it by a sci-fi genetics experiment gone horribly, horribly awry in which sentient doll clothes attempt to take over the universe, when they themselves assert they "would like [their] work to be seen in this cultural context, and not in a commercial context"?
Step back even further and give a little isolated consideration to the concept of disembodied skin. Aren't we opening up a Pandora's Box of epic proportions here? If two-day-old fertilized human egg cells are cause to treat doctors like witches, what's to stop idiots from killing anybody they catch wearing a living leather coat?
Is this the best thing they can think of to do with these oh-so-sought-after, so-called "immortal" stem cell lines? Whatever happened to curing alzheimers? I am all for art, in any shape it wants to take (hence the line at the top of this blog about "at all levels and in all forms")--until it starts stealing resources from things that might actually benefit humanity and aligning itself "ironically" with Evil. The Joker is the world's first homicidal artist. I appreciate that. But I'm not about to let him use my blog.
"By growing Victimless Leather, the Tissue Culture & Art (TC&A) Project is further problematising the concept of garment by making it Semi-Living."
Way to go, jerks. That's what we need. Problematization. Where's Michael Purpura with his Academics Anonymous labcoat and loony wagon when you need him?
Posted by mjd at 09:10 PM | Comments (0)
November 28, 2004
A Restless Night of North Woods Gothic
I went to Maine to visit Dan and Emily's new farm. It looked a lot like the house in Brownfield. I wore out my welcome watching horror movies late at night, and went out the next morning looking for other entertainment.
I explored a huge, used bookstore scattered with Maine boondock hip kids. There was something wrong, something eerie that I couldn't put a finger on. The bookstore occupied a warehouse made of galvanized metal, on the shore of a wide, empty lake, surrounded in cedars and scattered with reeds, a la the Carry Ponds, north of Mt. Bigelow on the AT. The shelves overflowed with seventies paperbacks; more surrounded them in cardboard boxes on the floor. The walls were adorned with vintage horror movie posters. Every time I turned around, I spied a nook I hadn't seen before. I wanted to stay, I wanted to keep looking, but I was afraid.
Then as I passed by one of the horror posters, it opened up and engulfed me. Suddenly I was inside a ghastly black and red cartoon where ghouls tore open bodies spilling sheets of blood and screams, and just as suddenly I was back in the bookstore, shaken and pale. One of the hip kids, a black-haired, much-pierced girl with a pile of art books in her arms, stared at me darkly. The fog was lifted. This place was haunted. Either this girl was a slave to the ghosts, or she was one of them.
"Keep away from me!" I shouted. "I'm getting out of here. How do I get out?" I whirled, and for just a moment could see a row of windows in the near distance between the shelves, with the lake beyond. Then someone walked past them carrying a box of books, and in their place was nothing but wall. "No," I whispered. I whirled again. An exit sign gleamed sickly orange. I started towards it, but the room was so vast, it was so far away. Before I had gone ten steps there were three of the hip kids between me and the door.
They closed on me. The cartoon wash of blood and blackness rose, the surroundings faded, and charcoal-rendered ghouls replaced the hip kids. I stopped. I took a breath. "This isn't real," I said. "You have no power over me!" I lashed out with my will, expecting them to fall away like torn-down curtains. Nothing happened. They laughed, and rended each other with their claws, gushing watercolor gore as if to mock me. I growled and struck out again with all the force that I could muster. I was free.
I stood astride my bike, one foot on the pedal, at the end of a road through a pine forest. Before me loomed the doors of a sprawling victorian manse made of brown stone. There was no one in sight, and no sound either.
The doors were open; I rode through a cobbled courtyard, up a steep, curving ramp into a long hall, and on along broad corridors into other rooms. The place seemed a museum; there were plaques on pedestals and things with dates in glass cases. It was almost as if it had been designed for a bike--nowhere were there more than three steps at a time; at these I merely stepped off the bike for a moment, hoisted it up by the bar, and rolled on.
I heard a voice somewhere among the corridors--a man's voice, angry. Suddenly I knew I wasn't supposed to be here. The house wasn't open today, and in any case if the caretaker caught me riding a bike through these ancient halls I would be in more trouble than I wanted. I dug into the pedals, jumped effortlessly down a flight of steps, popped up over a threshold and rolled effortlessly out through a pair of french windows onto the grounds. The sky was overcast. The house curved away from me, thousand-gabled and brooding, like the house at Mandalay from Hitchcock's Rebecca.
The man was still coming. I could hear him ranting about trespassers. I sped away into the wood...
...and found myself walking the grounds of the Tufts academic quad with notebook and pen in hand, surveying the assembled troops, reviewing our assets and preparing strategy for the defense of the Hill against the siege of an undead army.
I called together the leaders of my allies: Michael Purpura, Andy Lucas, David Purpura. Among us we commanded perhaps five hundred, against a number twice that many. Our assets included an eight-foot celtic cross of solid bronze we called the Sacred Talisman--a magical artifact with the capacity to turn living men into zombie servants, or to seize control of already-animate dead. Michael warned we shouldn't lean too heavily on its use, as it only had a percentage chance of success. We had also acquired a supply of black-wrapped recurve bows, along with sheaf upon sheaf of bronze-headed arrows--so recently, however, that nobody had had the chance to practice with them. These we agreed to reserve for the second wave, so as to be familiar with their style of attack, as well as to allow our archers what time we could for target shooting.
The siege began even as we clasped hands to part. Our enemies were skeletal men carrying spears and clad in black and red; each unit was commanded by a robed figure with blazing eyes, somwhere between the Skeletal Mage of Warcraft fame and the Lich from Final Fantasy 1 (8-bit Theatre). Our own forces fought with short, greek-era gladia, and were clad in muted green.
Battle ranged all across the upper campus, among the gothic archways and ruined cobbles of a Tufts more akin to the ancient manse I had left behind in the woods only moments ago than to the place of learning I had known in waking. We drove them back with heavy losses; in the lull before they came again I took up a bow. I notched an arrow (it clicked against the string, as modern plastic notches do), lined up my eye with the shaft, as the bows were not sighted, took careful aim, and let fly at a dark spot on a tree the men had used as a target. A near bull; perhaps an inch below the center. My next shots were more hurried, not nearly as close: I had heard the shout that the second onslaught had been sighted. I gave orders to my archers, but before we could get in position the enemy appeared. In the chaos I pierced one of my own men through the shoulder. He looked back in anguish--I knew him. Someone from high school. Jake McDonnell? No time for guilt or memory, they came on thick.
Just as we gained hope of casting the first group back, another appeared along our flank. Through a doorway they poured, like ill-made puppets, shambling--I could see their leader in the rear, his smile ghastly, his staff agleam with unholy light. I shouted warning; the men faltered, not knowing who to face. I notched an arrow and fired, deathly calm, holding the bow flat, the string at my hip. The arrow caught the first of the newcomers square in the chest.
Then I realized my mistake. They were not attacking. They had been turned! The talisman was working!
I cursed my own incompetence, and woke.
Posted by mjd at 09:38 PM | Comments (0)
November 22, 2004
"The Walls were Sturdy but the Floor was Rotten"
Assembly of Dust, as most of my readers are likely unaware, is the fortuitous and long-anticipated conjunction of two of the most dedicated and gifted musical and creative role models of my barefoot New England jam-scene roots: Reid Genauer, former lead singer and storyteller-through-song of Vermont folk-funk favorites Strangefolk, and Nate Wilson, organ virtuoso and composer-behind-the-throne of New Hampshire's prog-pop Traffic-reincarnate, Percy Hill. Very little could have garnered greater anticipation on my part than the prospect of these two gentlemen coming together to write music. Nor was I disappointed. Case in point: their very first collaboration, a song called Circles of Circumstance, a live version of which is available in mp3 format from the a/v section of their site.
"Down and out among the wolves again..."
At their best, AoD are like The Band with heightened gospel influence and reduced self-importance; at their worst they are a Strangefolk cover band. Don't get me wrong--that night when Nate and Percy Hill joined Reid and Strangefolk onstage at the Portsmouth Music Hall for a ten-piece big-band cover of "Goin Down the Road Feelin Bad", when the balcony was bouncing to the rhythm of a hundred wiggling hippy booties and threatening to yank down the walls, was one of the formative experiences of my ill-spent youth. There was a time when I considered Strangefolk the Greatest Band on Earth, the obvious inheritors of the much-hyped, mostly-worthless jamband crown, and my personal idols. And the terrifying thing is I wasn't the only one!
But thankfully I've grown up since then, and thankfully so has Reid Genauer. And that isn't what they're doing here among my annals of the real fantastical. No--I bring them up here because in the course of reforging his flagging career into something both he and I could respect, Reid constructed around himself the yard-thick, translucent granite lintels of an all-embracing, joy-heavy, nigh content-free, illusionary neo-druidic pseudoreligion the likes of which make the tripe that passes for paganism in this age of cellphone-induced brain cancer look like full-on velvet-clad Catholicism. Take a look at StoneChoirTablets.com, the site chronicling the dubious discoveries of Dr. Earnest Wonderbound, from which Reid's new band took its name, and you'll understand what I mean. Even with the contents of this website as my sole, thoroughly mediated and utterly unprimary source, I am quite convinced there never was any "Dr. Earnest Wonderbound III, of the University of South Whales" [sic], and that furthermore all the research and archaeological discovery attributed to said fictional figure are equally bunk.
This Wonderbound, they claim, uncovered evidence of a "ritualistic and deeply spiritual community" called the Assembly of Dust, that "existed in an intricate network from southern Europe to the Middle East" during the waning of the Roman empire. For feck's sake, the discoverer of this incredible missing link among the long-fragmented celtic religions of cultures as far removed from each other as Asia Minor and Gaul, this religion lacking any precepts or doctrine besides getting together to make music and dance in the name of joy, is named Earnest Wonderbound--earnest wonder-bound! For feck's sake! They might as well have called him Gullible Happyhippy!
My first thought on discovering this site was that Reid had been taken in by it himself. He had always struck me as a lovable guy with spirituality and joy to spare, someone generous with trust and friendship, who might be more interested in a new way to foster community among fans than scrutinizing its source for hidden truth. As a matter of fact I'd say a lot of the Strangefolk fans I knew, back when I was one of them, were the same way--and that ought not to reflect badly on any of them. I want to make it clear that despite my current disillusionment with them, the jamband scene, and in particular the Strangefolk scene, is a whole hell of a lot healthier both emotionally and functionally (though perhaps not intellectually) than, say, the metal scene.
Were I still the typical Strangefolk fan I once was, I might have stopped there, not perhaps agreeing with Reid's odd spiritual precepts, but certainly not grudging them and willing to let him go on keeping my hippy booty shaking without thinking much more about it. I am, however, no longer that typical Strangefolk fan. I am a shrewd, calculating, Mad Fantasist, hunched among the shadowy ranks of Abdul Alhazred, Herbert Quain, Don Juan Matus, and even perhaps, under all that lovability, Reid himself. My interest in the subject of this mysterious Assembly and its precepts heightened by my newfound theory, I began to study the Stone Choir site more closely--and an entirely different and still more fascinating theory began to present itself.
"Earnest Wonderbound died in 1982 at the age of 102. He was survived by wife Hannah and 10 children; Sorrel, Otto, Gabrielle, Rachel, Rebecca, Ester, Otis, Walker, Reuben and Ann; many of whom were named after the 19 original Tavern Walkers."
Reid couldn't have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old in 1982. Strangefolk itself didn't form until 1991. What kind of crazy coincidence is it then that at least five out of Wonderbound's ten children's names mysteriously correspond to the names of Strangefolk songs? The site doesn't mention which of those ten names belonged to the original Tavern Walkers...but I'd be willing to hazard a guess.
Add to this the fact that the Stone Choir site wasn't created until 2002--the same year Reid and Nate formed their new band.
But which came first? Surely, you may say, Reid based his songs on Wonderbound's work, not the other way around! According to the Stone Choir propaganda, he made his discoveries way back in 1928! And it's possible, I suppose. Remotely. But I am not normally a betting man, and I'd give you high odds that the opposite is the case.
Somebody--maybe not Reid, maybe not Nate, but somebody surely connected with their organization, and likely in cahoots with the web designer for AoD's own site (given certain stylistic similarities)--fabricated this whole whacked-out ball of pseudoreligious fluff and bad research as an excuse to...what? Pull in some new fans from the neopagan crew? Cement the dedication of existing fans from mere fanaticism to religious zealotry? Doesn't sound like half a bad idea when you put it that way, though I wonder how well it worked. If you're inclined to laugh at the notion of equating a band like Strangefolk with religion, let me help--go read the review of Reid's last Strangefolk show on JamBands.com. And make sure you've got some tissues handy!
I don't know. Maybe I should have kept all this under wraps. After all, I'm always in favor of a little fiddling with reality, especially along such interesting lines and for the benefit of a fine creative cause as this. I'd pay these guys to make music myself if I had any money. I'd start a label just for them, and if pulling the wool off has hurt them in any way, I'm sorry. It's just I've never had a really good excuse to cry hoax before. It's quite thrilling--try it if you like:
Hoax! Hoax!
"Dr. Wonderbound is buried under a tremendous oak tree on a hill in Spokenville, England. His gravestone reads: 'Here lies Earnest Wonderbound III - Beloved husband, father and keeper of magic - We Will Remain.'"
--StoneChoirTablets.com
"And we live in and of each other
We will remain..."
--Strangefolk, So Well: the last words Reid sang with Strangefolk before taking his leave.
Posted by mjd at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)
November 19, 2004
Collective Dreams of a Sentient Mountain
I climbed a desert mountain of red sandstone and black-needled cedar, like the gate to the land of immortals. My family climbed behind me among strange tunnel-like formations, trenches carved by wind in the stone, but I outdistanced them, and soon was all alone.
I met a young man on the slopes, descending. His eyes were an eerie, deep green without shadow or depth, and his gaze was of such great intensity I couldn't but stop and listen when he spoke. He told me he had conversed with the mountain, that the stones around us were the flesh and senses of a living being. He was...in ecstasy, as though he had met his God, and moved now in a waking heaven. I believed him, and it frightened me. I thought not of Moses and the burning bush, nor of Noah on Mt. Ararat, but of something other, shadowy and sinister beneath my feet. I thanked the young man for his warning, and climbed on.
I came down the mountain just the way that strange young man had--leaping from stone to stone without care for twisted ankles or bloodied knees, grinning like an idiot and singing. What was left to care or worry about now that I knew there was this greater power? I thought how I had so scorned the religion they had taught me, and rejoiced now that I knew the true god was no human construct. I met my sister, Diana. I told her what I had heard and seen. She said she knew; she too had met the mountain, and agreed what we had encountered was no threat or malice, but a gentle and benevolent being. We parted with a joyful embrace.
I found the rest of my family together not far from the entrance of a wide-mouthed cavern full of afternoon light. They seemed surprised to see me, and relieved. "Where have you been?" they asked, and "Are you all right?" I understood. I had been gone a long time, I thought--and they didn't know what I had seen.
I tried to explain. There were massive, ancient carvings on the cavern ceiling, and I fell on my back in the dust to observe them as I spoke, breathless with awe and the relief of sudden understanding. When I was finished, my father sat down beside me. My mother and sisters said nothing, but looked very pale. I notice for the first time that Diana was among them, and wondered idly how she could have made it back so quickly.
"Isn't it amazing?" I asked.
"Yes," said my father, gazing up at the greek symbols. "Only we never saw any green-eyed young man. And Diana says she never met you on the slopes. She has been here with us the whole time."
"What?" I asked in disbelief. I sat up abruptly and turned away. What did it mean? The mountain had decieved me. It had taken forms I would trust, and tried to turn me to side with it against humanity--for what purpose I knew not. All I knew for sure is that we must leave this place, and quickly.
We went home. Our house wasn't far away--practically in the mountain's shadow. Our neighborhood was as it always is, only beyond the ring of houses on the outer edges of Lanark and Wessex there was nothing but forest--deep, old cedar forest, dark as the slopes of the mountain. I took to wandering these forests, full of disquiet, trying to comprehend the mountain's motives or its plan. At first, I could not.
Then one of our neighbors disappeared for several days. When he returned, I glimpsed the telltale flash of green in his eyes.
We sat and discussed it over dinner that night. "What could have happened to him?" my mother asked. "And why doesn't he remember?"
Diana and I exchanged a knowing glance. Already I had forgotten I had only dreamed her on the slope that day. It seemed she too had forgotten. "We know," we said. "But if we told you, you wouldn't believe us."
The mountain was taking over our minds.
Posted by mjd at 09:39 PM | Comments (0)
November 13, 2004
Post-Election Depression Digression
Sorry for the delay; it took me this long to get over the shock.
As the longest election the nation of my residence has ever known drew into its last days, I was reading the final pages of the Epic of Gilgamesh: one of the world's oldest surviving works of literature. Like all works of such age and cultural remoteness, interpretation of the tale of Gilgamesh is largely open-ended. We can never completely understand the story's context because so little else has survived from that ancient time (and if we keep up like this in the Middle East, pretty soon what little there is will be reduced like the rest a fine dust of shrapnel and human bone fragments). But that same age and ambiguity is a large part of what makes Gilgamesh so fascinating. I read it and wonder what the culture of storytelling was like in the city of Uruk in the year 3,000 B.C.E., and I wonder how such incredibly vivid and savage imagery could have come from a time so remote and retain all the impact it does. Uruk, by the way, is where the word Iraq comes from.
I ought to warn you if you haven't read Gilgamesh you won't get much out of this. Go read it, if you haven't; it's quick, and it really is a foundational text of human civilization. Matter of fact, go read Genesis too.
"So at length Gilgamesh came to Mashu, the great mountains about which he had heard many things, which guard the rising and the setting sun. Its twin peaks are as high as the wall of heaven and its paps reach down to the underworld. At its gate the Scorpions stand guard, half man and half dragon; their glory is terrifying; their stare strikes death into men, their shimmering halo sweeps the mountains that guard the rising sun. When Gilgamesh saw them he shielded his eyes for the length of a moment only; then he took courage and approached."
--Gilgamesh IV: The approach to the Gate of Heaven.
Gilgamesh is Man before the Fall; he is the antediluvian giant, the methuselah. In three days he can walk as far as it would take another man a month to travel. His sword and ax and bow together weigh six hundred pounds. He can interpret dreams and fell monsters like David; he is two thirds god and one third mortal. Yet he fears; he is petty; he hates and desires.
He watches his blood-brother die, and vows, "This shall not happen to me." He sets out to seek eternal life, and fails.
Awed and intrigued by the Epic's conclusion, by the quiet, anticlimactic succumbing of the mighty Gilgamesh to old age after the land of the immortals showed him no sympathy, I made my usual recourse to the commentary of the human torrent. Yes, the internet, that great equalizer of esoteric and ubiquitous, intellect and idiot. What had my contemporaries to say about this least contemporary of wonders?
As it turned out, almost nothing--except for a torrent of paranoid and superficial arguments attempting to dismiss utterly any meaning or value that the primitive flood myth contained in the Epic's fifth part might have possessed.
In the flood tale told by Utnapishtim to teach Gilgamesh of the folly of desiring eternal life, we are presented with the near-perfect inversion of the biblical flood's moral message, yet with near-identical story structure. The legion literary moguls of the internet, shrewd as they are, appear to have long since picked up on this subject and babbled it into meaninglessness, so I won't bother to go into the Classics 101 compare/contrast rant. Suffice it to say that Utnapishtim's gods see no particular merit in their chosen savior, and rather than punishing the rest of mankind for their lack of faith, bid Utnapishtim lie to his fellow men outright in order to avoid their wrath. Later, instead of the dove of peace that leads Noah to safety, Utnapishtim finds his salvation following a raven in search of washed-up human carrion. And finally, when the powers that be arrive to congratulate Utnapishtim on his fortitude, he receives no promise of prosperity and safety to come, but a rather weak apology for their hasty decision to destroy most of the world.
No wonder the Satanic cults of inverse Christianity chose to shape their pantheon out of Sumerian myth. No wonder the early Jews jumped on Babylonian religion the way modern Christians jump on Islam. And no wonder the vast array of modern Christians now in control of our government seem so desperate to ensure no possible dependence can be established of the Noah myth upon that of Utnapishtim. Boy are they chipping at rocks with a feather! After all, the Babylonian myth predates the Biblical one by a thousand years. And yet somehow they all seem perfectly capable of concluding with utter certainty that the Epic of Gilgamesh had no influence whatsoever on the Biblical flood, and that all these incredible structural similarities, in the face of the tales' obvious moral divergence, can be nothing more than an astounding-yet-easily-dismissed coincidence. Why is that, I wonder? Could it be they're only trying to reach the conclusion their seminary school professors all expect, or just that they're too lazy or don't care enough to consider the problem any longer than the minimum required five pages double-spaced requires?
Yet what is astounding coincidence but the unfaithful man's tedious recourse for explaining away a miracle?
"The uproar of mankind is intolerable. Sleep is no longer possible by reason of the babel."
--Gilgamesh V: Enlil to the gods, entreating them to slaughter man.
Babel. Now there's a clear and glaring anachronism. The word "babel", as used here to mean nonsense, the chaotic, meaningless din of a thousand human languages all spoken at once, made its way into the English language via the Biblical tale of the Tower--God's punishment of man for aspiration to heaven. "'[B]abel' sounds like the Hebrew word for confused", according to BibleGateway.com's footnote to Genesis 11:9 (my emphasis, with derisive snort). Yet the Gilgamesh story predates even the earliest versions of the Bible, and indeed the great tragedy of the Epic of Gilgamesh is the title character's failure to attain his own apotheosis.
This artificial reference to the Tower, inserted at the very formative moment of a tale so utterly alien to Christian morality, only makes blindingly clear that morality's own historied dependence on anachronism, misinterpretation and misdirection. My copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh is the paperback Penguin Classics 1972 edition, cast out with a damaged cover at a library booksale and picked up by me for a whopping fifty cents. This text, the introduction informs me (which introduction incidentally is half again as long as the Epic itself) has been reassembled piecemeal from twelve other secondary sources, each of which in turn depends on dubious translations from fragmented, oft heavily damaged originals. The compiler, N.K. Sandaris, admits readily to her complete unfamiliarity with the original languages of the text, and to the tenuous nature of any Gilgamesh translation. Yet she lets the aforementioned anachronism slide, though she could easily have replaced it with any of a heap of less-weighted synonyms, from "nonsense" to "gibberish" to "jabber" to (my personal favorite) "idiolalia". Hmmm. Negative publicity works handily for some, but I'm sure Penguin is quite aware that getting your newest publication thrown on the banned books list as an advocate of Satan isn't the best way to make money.
Does all this shameless doctoring of spin remind you of anything? It should. The Bible was written in a language no living human can comprehend. It was translated into Ancient Hebrew at a date no one knows by a scholar no one can identify. A thousand years later the Hebrew was translated into High Latin. For another fifteen hundred years, nobody was allowed to read it but priests. Five hundred years after that there are literally hundreds of different translations, each of which was made at the behest of a sect with its own agenda, trying to force-fit the square lessons it teaches into prefabricated moral round holes. In the Beginning was the Word. Then we played telephone with it for four thousand years. Now, at the End, it's just words. Babel, if you like. The Bible is Babble. Matter of fact, from that perspective, the Qu'ran is actually a hell of a lot more accurate.
It seems ridiculous to try to force such a weighty interpretation on what is so likely a mistranslation, but isn't that what religion's been doing all this time?
So what does it mean that the gods are angry at man for Babeling, even though in this case Man, in the representative shape of Gilgamesh, will not begin to Babel until who knows how many generations later, when this story is actually being told? Are we to interpret Utnapishtim, the only man to have achieved that apotheosis that Gilgamesh so ardently seeks (albeit only by way of the gods' apology for their own catastrophic blunder), as stand-in for Christ, passing on the parable of the flood tale as a warning to a wayward sinner that the gods have short memories and aren't to be trusted? Are we to wonder if there isn't another ancient tablet, buried somewhere under the rubble of a shattered mosque, that bears the Sumerian version of the Babel story, wherein the gods simply got bored of having everyone comprehend each other's views? Or are we meant to connect the walls of Uruk, which we are told "shine with the brilliance of copper" and "have no equal", and which were erected by Gilgamesh himself, with the ambiguously blasphemous bricks of Babel--and thus equate Gilgamesh with Nimrod, its unholy architect, the Bible's "mighty hunter before the Lord"?
In fact, I think we may conclude all of the above. Utnapishtim is a man outside of time, a walking anachronism, and a ready vehicle for the moral subversion of his culture. Dragged forward in time by those Christian conquerors, the pseudoscientific perpetrators of Sandaris' "heroic age of excavation", he is become for us like Dante's Virgil, accepting with relief and gratitude God's relegation of his fellow pagan philosophers to the first level of hell as punishment for his own God-given ignorance. And doesn't every one of those old Bible tales of crime and punishment share this same structure of inevitable sin and inevitable retribution--the expulsion from Paradise, the branding of Cain, the obliteration of Gomorrah, the murder of Christ, the massing of mustard gas by Saddam and John the Baptist's head on Herod's platter?
Stop for just a second and think of our contemporary Towers, and their subsequent Fall. Wouldn't you say the world is a far, far more divided place now than it was? Interesting that in our modern vernacular a "nimrod" signifies both that fat white man in the duck blind with the shotgun/mortar/tactical nuke, and the fool so intent on having a soothing smoke he doesn't notice the cracked oil pipeline at his feet.
Let's try to drag this back into some semblance of relevance, shall we? Before I bring the fundamentalists down on my head like the Sabaoth of Almighty Bush?
The pundits have declared the horrible results of this election to be the fault of something they call "moral values". They mean it, I think, as a conciliatory statement--pointing out that despite our newfound fathomless, gaping divisions, ours is still fundamentally a "united" nation--a nation driven by values. Ignore, for the moment, the materialist and capitalist implications of that term, and look at the whole thing, as Utnapishtim and Christ might, from a distance. These values that so divide us, it seems to me, are entirely dependent on one's religious experience and upbringing for their substance. The individual's interpretation of the fate of Sodom has in past weeks been raised to a central and deciding aspect of this country's future course. The whole reason the internet moguls are so intent on distancing themselves from Gilgamesh is so they can point at the Bible and say, "This is us," and then at Uruk, or rather Iraq, and say, "That is them." But remember: the story of Babel, of mankind's disharmony-as-punishment, is itself entirely predicated on a pun, on an ambiguity of language. Ha ha, their word for the "Gate to God" sounds the same as our word for incoherent, babbling idiocy! Aren't they deserving of help and pity! But oughtn't we let them decide their own fate nonetheless? Certainly not!
Bah. Read it closely enough, and the Bible, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, is only warning us that gods and religions aren't to be trusted, that man--every man, and every woman--is doomed to his flawed, mortal lot. They're just like us. We're just like them. Why can't everybody just let everybody else do their thing?
Posted by mjd at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)
November 07, 2004
The War on Words
I've been trying to figure out how to produce a rant of my own on this subject without going totally off the stated topic. Philip Pullman has done it for me.
But not to fear. I'm not copping out. I'm just stuffing his rant into the hull breach so the atmosphere drop doesn't kill me while I finish up my own. Hopefully when it's done it'll blast this ship apart, and I can float home.
Posted by mjd at 04:15 PM | Comments (0)
