Beyond School

[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero, Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Dawn of Man ~ 7. A Goddess Prays ~ 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets]¹

Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic. Stephen Mitchell's fine 2004 adaptation.

A good thousand years before the Israelites were putting the final touches, in their scriptures, on the God of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims,² the Mesopotamian gods of Gilgamesh were already ancient. And a good thousand years before Adam and Eve committed their first sin and brought death into the world by disobeying that God³, the “Adam” of the Sumerians – Gilgamesh’s sidekick, Enkidu – had committed his earlier “original sin.”⁴

In this lecture, I’m going to argue that Enkidu’s “sin” — which had nothing to do with disobeying any god, nor with his epic and far-from-shameful sex with Shamhat — cost our race far more than Adam and Eve’s. And we’re only now, in this generation, really able to appreciate that truth. Call it a 4,000-year-old prophecy that we’re now seeing unfold all around us.

It happens in Book V of Gilgamesh, and for the life of this modern, scientifically-minded skeptic, this “prophecy” is far more true and far more disturbing than anything we see in Eden, or perhaps in the whole Bible. If it doesn’t haunt you a bit by the end of this lecture, then one of us has problems.

The funny thing is, it happens in such a subtle form that it’s easy to miss. And it’s that subtlety that makes me want to state, for the millionth time in this series, that the poets who wrote Gilgamesh were among humanity’s finest ever.

Funnier still, it happens in the very suckiest episode in all of Gilgamesh: the slaying of the monster Humbaba.

Predictably, the well-meaning sadists who produce our suckiest literature textbook anthologies seem to always inflict this episode on our high school students. These out of touch souls seem to think teens will find monster-slaying scenes really cool. Between movies like Harry Potter that let us see and hear monsters like the Dementors almost sucking our souls out, and video games that let us chop the bastards’ heads off ourselves and be covered in their blood and gore, this Humbaba scene in Gilgamesh doesn’t stand a chance. It ranks about as high on today’s adventure scale as an exposed Victorian ankle ranks on the scale of modern sexiness.

So fear not: this English teacher isn’t going to insult your intelligence by arguing that this this chapter is good for its scary monster. There’s terror enough in this chapter – reality-based terror, at least in my reading of it – for us to need no supernatural special effects.

Background: Before the Divine Divorce

Adam and Eve’s original sin reflects a recent, radical stage in the evolution of Israelite religion: the separation of the divine from the realm of Nature. It’s the first religion we know of that saw God outside of Nature, transcending it. Unlike all the other religions in the Near East up to that time, the Jewish religion saw God not as created within Nature, but as creator of it. So it makes sense that the “original sin” in the book of Genesis is disobeying that God. He’s the King, the Lord, the Master of the Universe. He ordered Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of a certain tree, and they disobeyed. That’s the sin.

We can play with some of the depths of this myth some other time, because there’s much more beneath the surface of this seemingly silly “I told you not to eat that fruit” story. But the point I want to make here is that this myth only makes sense within the revolutionary worldview of a certain set of Hebrews around 1,000 BCE. It doesn’t make sense inside the older Mesopotamian view of the Gilgamesh poets.

Their gods are not divorced from Nature. They live in it, they have natural bodies and functions, they even have divine animals like the Bull of Heaven (which, as we see later when it takes what the British might call an “epic shite” on Enkidu, has divine-but-natural bodily functions).

As importantly, there’s no “Master of the Universe” god in the Mesopotamian worldview, so there’s nobody to give absolute “commandments” like “Thou shalt not eat that fruit.” One god might be stronger than another, but that doesn’t make him or her all-powerful over all the others. Remember from Lecture 1 that these gods, additionally, don’t seem to think the Biblical god’s authoritarian commandments are the best way to deal with humans anyway: they didn’t punish Gilgamesh for deflowering all his subjects’ brides, and they didn’t command him to stop – or, as so often in the Bible, declare he be stoned to death. Instead, they pulled that totally mysterious and totally cool trick of creating Enkidu to somehow, wtf?, give Gilgamesh an experience that will wise him up and make him stop being such a royal ass. In short, they weren’t punishing “sin” – they were curing stupidity.

And yet I still claim that Enkidu, in Book V, commits an “original sin.” So what gives?

A Question of Balance

Let’s recap Enkidu’s story, because Enkidu is more interesting than Gilgamesh in this episode. It ain’t about the hero here.

As we’ve seen, Enkidu starts as a sort of “wild-man Adam,” created out of dust and outside of civilization, to be the “balance” who will “bring peace” to Gilgamesh and his city.⁵ Unlike Adam, Enkidu lives in a nature that we recognize as realistically Darwinian: animals prey on other animals in Enkidu’s Nature, and Enkidu seems one animal among many in the way he drinks at the watering hole with them and runs as fast as the gazelles. The only difference we see between Enkidu and the other animals is his role in defending animals from predators. So Enkidu seems compassionate, and in a very specific and important sense: he’s compassionate toward natural creatures. His most outstanding trait, in this stage of innocence, is that he’s a defender of Nature.

Then along comes the prostitute Shamhat, you’ll remember, and her civilizing mission: she seduces him into civilization with that epic six-day roll in the hay (and boy, how Enkidu must have needed, like that later god in Genesis, to take a day of rest on the seventh). Similar to Samson, Enkidu loses much of his physical power after this epic sex scene, can’t sprint like he used to, and so forth – but he gains language, the ability to share ideas and conversation, the need for friendship, and the desire to follow Shamhat into the city and meet Gilgamesh. Still, though, Enkidu seems not to have lost his character as the compassionate defender: he wants to fight Gilgamesh after hearing of his bride-stealing ass-hattery.

Remember the “double that balances” motif? The “balance” seems to be thrown off when natural Enkidu leaves the wild, and crosses the gateway into civilized Gilgamesh’s city. It’s like both guys are now sitting on the same side of the see-saw – the city side. Nature’s left hanging in mid-air now.

Then they fight, Enkidu loses, and he and Gilgamesh become fast friends. Enkidu likes clothes and bread and beer, and life is good – until Gilgamesh gets that royally wild hair up his royally dumb ass to go kill Humbaba, who he calls a “monster.”⁶

Enkidu, Defender of Animals, tells Gilgamesh it’s a really bad idea to kill Humbaba, and reminds him that he’s not just a monster: he’s the divinely-appointed Guardian of the Cedar Forest. Enlil put him there to keep the forest, which is sacred to the gods, untouched by man, and off-limits to him.

Gilgamesh cares no more for the virgin forest than he cares for the virginity of his brides. Whether he’s taking his metaphorical axe to the virgin brides, or his literal one to the virgin cedars, it’s all the same to this swaggering dumb jock of a king: if it redounds to his glory and gives him an heroic notch for his belt, his name won’t die and he’ll achieve everlasting fame.

After Enkidu loses the argument, he tries to get the city elders to talk sense into Gilgamesh with their religious “knowledge” and urgings to fear the gods. At their pious warning that no human could succeed at this task against the gods’ will, Gilgamesh laughs possibly the first heretic’s laugh in history – or literature, anyway – and off he and Enkidu go to slay the monster.⁷

Off they go, straight through the gate from civilization, and back into Nature. Our “balance that doubles” motif has now seen both men jump onto the Nature side of the see-saw. Now it’s civilization that’s left hanging in mid-air – and hanging, the way I see it, fatefully.

The Original Sin – Literally

By the logic of the “double that balances” motif, everything hangs on Enkidu now. He originally balanced the civilization-symbol Gilgamesh by being the Nature-symbol “defender of animals” in the wild. He threw things out of balance by “crossing over” to civilization. Now we’ve got Gilgamesh crossing over into Enkidu’s original realm with him, balancing Enkidu’s earlier “crossing-over.” We know Gilgamesh has predatory motives for this trip: he’s going to kill the Forest Guardian, and chop down the “highest cedars.” So the question is, is Enkidu going to stay true to his original role, when he was “innocent” and Adam-like, of defending nature’s creatures against predators – even if the predator is now his friend and king?⁸

(to be continued)

1. This series based on the fine 2004 Stephen Mitchell adaptation of Gilgamesh. [↩]
2. let’s put that at around 622 BCE in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, when King Josiah’s reforms wiped out the Jewish worship of Baal and Asherah [↩]
3. in Genesis 2, which was written around 1,000 BCE [↩]
4. I know that “original sin” is a Christian, not a Jewish, doctrine, but grant me the poetic license. [↩]
5. The Bible’s story of Adam and Eve was written in Jerusalem, scholars think, at about the same time David conquered that city and made it his capital around 1,000 BCE. That’s a full 3,000 years later in history than the founding of civilization in cities like Uruk. This is significant: it corrects the view that Genesis is a story from the beginning of civilization, when it’s actually precisely mid-way between the founding of Uruk and today. If Gilgamesh is pictured as the letter “A”, and our time the letter “Z,” the Jewish scriptures would be not “B” or “C,” but “M.” In strictly chronological terms, the period from the Jews’ King David in 1,000 BCE to the life of Jesus in the First Century CE are really the “Middle Ages” of the 6,000 years between Sumer and today.

   This may help explain why the Judeo-Christian story of humanity’s “state of nature” – the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 – rings so false, while the Sumerian story of Enkidu rings more true: the authors of Genesis came too late in our history to have any ancestral memory of man’s true, historical state of nature. What we know now of human evolution tells us the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is fiction – fiction with depths that give it the status of a fascinating myth, in the best sense of the word, but fiction nonetheless. Not so for the Sumerians and, through them – via Gilgamesh – the Babylonians. Since the people of Uruk were among the first to transition from neolithic life within nature to civilized life isolated from it, it’s no wonder that the story of Enkidu living as an animal among animals in nature is much closer to the truth of human evolution as we now know it through science. Unlike Adam and Eve, then, which is clearly a myth, Enkidu is just as clearly closer to history. Yes, he was made, like Adam, from clay, but the similarity ends there. Enkidu is not in any paradisal Eden, living a life of pre-lapsarian ease; he’s more of a primate living a Darwinian existence, drinking among other animals at a watering hole, fighting off predators in the kill-or-be-killed struggle to survive in the wild. He has the ring of less of myth than of legend – of something closer to dimly-remembered truth. [↩]

6. In his Introduction to Gilgamesh, Stephen Mitchell, who wrote the version of the epic I’m primarily using for these lectures, compares Gilgamesh here to our previous Royal Dumb-Ass in Chief George W. Bush when he decided to invade Iraq, and it’s an interesting parallel. I’m going for a reading less topical and more timeless here, though. [↩]
7. Now give me a medal, because I just summarized the 10,000 or so words of all the previous lectures in a few paragraphs. [↩]
8. And while we’re at it, it’s worth getting abstract for a second to entertain the idea that, on the symbolic level, Enkidu is Humbaba, in a sense. They’re both, after all, guardians of nature. If Gilgamesh kills Humbaba, he’s in a weird sense also killing Enkidu. Maybe that’s a stretch, but reading symbols often is. Whatever. [↩]

[I thought this post would be a farewell to Seoul. Instead, it wanted to be something I should have written three years ago, when I ended my six years in Shanghai. It won. I'll say bye to Korea later. And isn't writing a wonderful thing.]

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It’s probably normal to hit a “regrets” stage when you close out your time in a foreign land. All the things you didn’t do, didn’t appreciate, didn’t explore. I’m certainly there. I leave Seoul for Singapore in a month, the next strange chapter in this stranger’s life.

I’ve made no secret over the last three years about my luke-warm to icy feelings regarding Korea. But really, Korea never had a fair shake with me. I came here after six years in Shanghai, for crying out loud, one of the most friendly and colorful and dynamic and blessedly cheap metropolises in the world. I learned enough Mandarin while there to be able to engage the Shanghainese in surprisingly meaty conversations, with the added entertainment value for my Chinese interlocutors that I carried them out with the vocab and grammar of a four-year-old. Learning babyspeak made it fun to be a stupid foreigner there.

And then there’s the fact that for China, a swarm of foreigners is a new experience. The Chinese borders were closed to the world until very recently, so we foreigners are items of extreme exoticism and curiosity there. And Shanghai and the other big cities have also seen an influx of migrants from the under-developed central and western regions of China – peasants who have never seen a weiguoren, a “white devil.” Bonus points if you’re of African descent: I’ve known such people who’ve told me the Chinese walked up to them and, without a word, touched their skin and hair in wonder.

All of this, in a word, makes living in China as a foreigner a constant form of play.

And then there’s the flip side: China’s 50-year isolation after the Communist Revolution means that it’s blessedly non-Westernized. Away from the tourist and shopping districts in the cities’ shiny new centers, in the traditional city neighborhoods, the city outskirts, the small towns and villages, and the countryside, there are no signs of Western civilization consumerism. No Starbucks or Burger Kings or damnable WalMarts or Gaps. Instead, there are mom-and-pop markets, farmers’ markets, noodle shops, karaoke bars, fabric markets full of tailors, foot-rub and massage parlors. There are as many bicycles as cars in this purer, disappearing China – and these bicycles, often ancient, battered, rickety and wobbly, are a breed far removed from the status-conscious Treks and whatnots that would cost many Chinese a full year’s salary. Grandmas and grandpas ride these old bikes as their primary form of transportation, their “cars.” Young couples ride them tandem, the beau pedaling and his girl sitting primly sidesaddle on the rear rack, on sunny days topped by a lovely umbrella to shield her fair skin from the sun. They ride slowly, often well-dressed, and you can hear them conversing as they go. They often stare or doubletake at you as they glide by. “Weiguoren….hallo!” Toothy smiles. Play.

Grandmas squat on the sidewalk with their squatting grandchildren, steadying them so they can pee on the sidewalk without mishap. It’s normal – and really, foreigner, relax. How dirty can baby-pee be? Mothers carry their babies in jumpers designed to expose their bottoms, a daily parade of babies’ butts. Barber shops full of migrant peasant girls staring out the windows, almost never working, instead watching TV or chatting and eating together, or napping. They’ll take you upstairs and give you an hour’s massage for ten bucks. Sometimes “massage” is more broadly defined than it is in the West, without seeming seedy at all. The moral world is different here too,  much more accepting and far less ashamed of Nature. If massages are to relax all of the body, the thinking seems to go, then it only makes sense that the whole body be massaged.

And the wonder of the public parks in China: already at six a.m. they’re alive. Grandmas in military formation under a willow, led by a grandma with a ghetto-blaster playing traditional Chinese folk songs. They dance with swords, red fans, red scarves that fly in synchronous arcs as the old gals twirl. Grandpas carry their pet birds or crickets in bamboo cages, hang them on low tree branches, and sit under them with other grandpas on portable stools. Rainbow bridges arc over their upside-down reflections in the canals. The willows rustle, the birds sing. Peasants beat the sun to lay their daily harvest on the sidewalk, barter with the locals buying their daily vegetables. They weigh them on notched bamboo sticks suspended by a string, with counterweighing stones on one end. The big smiles, the missing teeth, the bowed backs from decades in the fields. The thatched hats.

The neighborhood park is also a free gym. More grandmas and grandpas, fathers and mothers, teens and children swarm the simple machines for their daily workout. They wear leather dress shoes with cheap gym suits or pajamas – pajamas, you’d been told, are a status symbol, since owning a pair means you have money to spare. They wear dress shirts and pants, they wear anything and everything as they do their sit-ups and back-stretches and presses. You see your neighbor – the one who had the chicken tethered to his front patio for several days until yesterday, when you happened by as he was wringing its neck in preparation for the night’s dinner – doing pull-ups. The sun is still not yet up.

After the sun goes down, these people fill the park for different activities. Young couples sit on its hillocks in the dark, next to the reflective pond and mechanical waterfall, away from their crowded apartments, to feast on their privacy together. Young and old alike fill the park’s circular center plaza, where yet another grandma with a boom-box fills the twilit sky with ballroom dance music. Old and young waltz, foxtrot, tango; they do it man with woman, man with man, woman with woman, young with old. They do it with four-year-olds. They see the weiguoren and pull him out to shake a leg, laughing at his baby-talk with those smiles, those missing teeth, those other perfections.

Looking at all of these people – the ancient ones most of all – it dawns on you that you, of all the foreigners teaching at your school and living in this neighborhood at the edge of Shanghai’s sprawl, may be the luckiest. Unlike you, they’ve been teaching algebra, or physics, or literature or phys. ed., while you, blessedly, have been teaching the history of China – the history of these very people dancing around you, dancing with you, at the park. Looking into the old folks’ bright and wizened eyes, at the lacework lining their faces, you’re struck by the fact that these very same people so happy around you now lived, decades ago, through the hardships of the Civil War, the Japanese Invasion, the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution. How many of them have seen starvation, war, re-education, labor camps? How many loved ones have they lost – or been betrayed by? And yet here they are now, leading you in a dance whose steps finally, after a century-long nightmare, are light and joyous. Christ, the presence of old Chuang-tse laughing down the Tao,  and of the imperturbable old Buddha mindful that this too shall pass – both are palpable in them all.

All of this, in a word, makes living in China as a foreigner a constant encounter with a truly different world. These people, with their cramped, dingy apartments and their dates on their battered old bicycles, with their bad teeth and their conspicuous pajamas, with their $100 a month incomes – they are poor, looked at with one set of eyes. But looked at through different eyes, that see wealth in terms unrelated to income, they’re among the richest people I’ve ever known.

If I ever have the chance to live there again, I’ll probably take it. No country – America included, America especially – has ever suited me like China has. If that luck doesn’t come my way, I count myself among the blessed for the experience. I know that’s sentimental, but it’s no less true for that.

The dance.

A simple grace.

A natural thing.

Morning Tai Chi at the Bund.

A storied face.

Primary transportation.

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