Beyond School

Nothing sadder than a sick joke that’s true. Adennack’s brilliant flowchart below is not an exaggeration of Palin’s approach when non-answering Gwen Ifill’s debate questions:¹

If you’re as disgusted as I am that the media is calling this insult to democracy and intelligence a “passed test” on Palin’s part (and Ifill miserably failed my test for quality debate questions), post it, spread it, make it viral.

No, wait. I changed my mind. I want a Vice President who blows kisses to world audiences at grave political moments like she did before the debate. I want sage political wisdom from the bleachers of the hockey rink.

I suspect living in Rome c. 425 must have felt like this. Uncanny.

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1. here’s hoping Katie Couric, the only interviewer with the guts to ask a follow-up, moderates in 2012 [↩]

"As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of America, where do they go? It's Alaska!" Palin CBS interview, Sep. 2008

Test-Making 101: A Teacher’s Take

Most teachers know that multiple choice tests focusing on facts only are easier for their students to ace than essay tests requiring students to use those facts to analyze a problem and reason their way to a solution. A concrete example would be a map test requiring students to merely identify countries and geographic features of central Europe during World War II, versus an essay test requiring students to argue which side of the warring alliances, the Allied or Axis powers, had the geographic advantage during that war.

Know-nothing students can easily cram to memorize the map of Europe at that time and score an A on the first test. But to score an A on the second test would require an intelligence orders of magnitude higher. Requiring students to demonstrate an understanding of such things as the significance of the easily traversed plains of Poland and the limited coastlines of Germany in the context of the war, the second test would expose which students really deserved an A, and which knew how to cover their shallowness by excelling at rote memorization.

This puts me in mind of Sarah Palin right now, whom I picture desperately cramming with her debate coaches in McCain’s estate in Sedona for the Big Test on Thursday: the Vice Presidential debates.

With even the conservative punditry now conceding Palin is an “embarrassment” who is “not ready” to assume the presidency in the not-unlikely event of the death or disability of the oldest - and either the most politically reckless or medically clueless - presidential candidate in the history of the United States, Thursday’s debate, offering us a glimpse at the most sequestered vice presidential candidate in living memory, looms larger as a serious moment for the fate of the nation because, quite simply, it’s one of the only chances we’ll have to see the candidate think and talk on her feet, live and unscripted.

Palin’s Report Card So Far

Student Palin’s grade point average started with a sterling 100% for her public speaking assessment at the Republican National Convention. She turned in a gifted performance there, reading someone else’s speech off a teleprompter. A+.

But since then, in her three subsequent assessments - a number about which classmate Joe Biden, who has had almost daily assessments in the media and on the campaign trail, should complain to the principal, since the teacher is clearly showing favoritism to Palin by excusing her from all these tests - Palin’s g.p.a. has crashed and burned. She scored a C in her softball interview with Charles Gibson, a C in her love-fest with FOX’s Sean Hannity, and an F (a “Z-” grade being unavailable) in her debacle with Katie Couric.

What We Learn from Student Councils

Watching the former beauty queen and high school track star eat crow on the national stage is an experience not unfamiliar to that of many high school teachers who watch that painful annual ritual in high schools around the world called the Student Council elections. They always involve the popular kid - the cheerleader or football star with ill-starred academic records - deciding, due to ill-advised assurances that popularity is all that matters to win an election, to enter the race. Then on speech day, the cafeteria kings and queens face off against the Math Club and Literary Magazine whizzes, and the former show their stuff while the latter show their lack of stuff.

It often ends in tears on stage, pity in the crowd, and teachers afterwards trying to help the unfit student draw some wisdom from the experience about the difference between confidence and ability, and between sound advice and bad.

The McCain campaign gave Palin bad advice here. No mayor of a town smaller than many big-city high schools (only 6,000 residents) not yet through her second year as governor of a state whose population is smaller than all but North Dakota and Vermont should be expected to ace a test designed to assess the next president of the nation with the world’s largest economy and military. And that the McCain campaign didn’t foresee this blinding reality when they urged her to join the ticket speaks volumes about either its staggeringly bad judgment or, to go Rorschach on you, its withering cynicism regarding the intelligence of the American electorate.

And as a result, the good cheerleader is undergoing a public humiliation that pulls at the heart-strings of any caring teacher. “Whoever put her up to this,” the teacher thinks, “should be ashamed.”

The Most Important Test in American History? A Plea to Gwen Ifill

But Palin rose to the bait, and the debate is set. She’s cramming in Sedona for a test any good teacher who knows this student knows she cannot ace - if the test is a form of assessment for thinking instead of memorizing.

And that’s what makes me think the most important person in this debate in not Palin, and not Biden. It’s the assessor - the person who creates the test questions.

So to PBS moderator Gwen Ifill, I can only offer this advice: give an assessment that will show the electorate not who can memorize the most facts. That kind of test leads to a class with all A’s. Instead, give a test that will show us how these candidates will use their knowledge-base to solve problems.

A very perceptive commenter on the Chicago Tribune’s blog says as much in the below:

The key to the debate will be for either the moderator or Biden to dig beneath the thin veneer of rote memorization that will be the basis of her performance. She has had plenty of time to memorize some statistics and talking points to certain questions she knows will be on the test, and even someone with her intellectual paucity can do that somewhat convincingly.

It’s when you dig slightly beneath the surface that she implodes. As anyone who has ever B.S.ed their way through anything knows, your goose is cooked when you’re asked to explain the basis of your statements. Being able to give simple, concise answers to complicated questions is way harder than it looks. You need to have a deep understanding of what you’re talking about - an understanding of international and domestic affairs that are the result of years and years of study and analysis, not just a few weeks of cramming.

If Ifill’s debate questions follow those guidelines, the nation benefits. If not, it may fall victim to the most fateful and disastrous consequences of grade inflation due to lack of assessment rigor in the history of the United States.

Palin is clearly likable, her policies and beliefs notwithstanding. But by putting herself in line for the Oval Office, we can’t let our sympathy for her soften our assessment of her. She’s not running for student council or small-town mayor. She’s running for 76-year-old-heartbeat-away-from-president. It shouldn’t be an easy test to pass.

–

Image: BoingBoing

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Gilgamesh - the Earth's oldest religious epic - in Stephen Mitchell's brilliant 2004 translation.

[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.]¹

Let me state at the outset that this lecture is about Gilgamesh, though at times it will be so only north by northwest - because this lecture will be speaking of Gilgamesh in the context of a death in the family, and that family’s attempts to make meaning of life in the face of that death.

It’s the same struggle Gilgamesh experiences in the world’s oldest religious story.

~     ~     ~

Death, Consolation, and the Problem of Evil

My wife lost her mother two weeks ago. Her mother was a good woman, and passionately Christian. Yet her life was ended at a young 64 by a stroke followed closely by a terminal cancer. My wife, on the one hand, cannot understand how the god her mother loved so much would end her life so early; and on the other hand, my wife now feels pulled to explore her mother’s religion in order to understand and, she hopes, experience the happiness this religion gave her mother.

The question my wife keeps asking is “Why?” It’s an old and bedeviling question in Christianity, one that theologians have a term for: theodicy, “the problem of evil,” in a universe purportedly controlled by a god said to be both all-powerful and all-good. If he is these things, then how could he stand by and watch this devout woman die such a slow and tragically early death?

Had this death occurred before I began this series on Gilgamesh, I probably would have offered insights about our reaction to death and loss from Buddhism and Taoism.

I’m not a Buddhist because I find reincarnation as improbable - and as devoid of compelling evidence - as I find notions of heaven and hell (though Buddhism’s lack of a permanent hell makes it a more humane metaphysics than Christianity or Islam, in my view). But the Buddha’s teachings on how we create our own suffering by letting our fear and desire master us strike me simply as psychological, not religious, wisdom.

Fearing death is unwise like fearing old age is: it’s part of the natural order - and there’s the Tao - so fearing it is unprofitable. Add to that that death is an unknown, and as far as evidence goes, most probably is nothing more than oblivion on the order of an eternal and peaceful sleep without dreams, and there seems little cause for fear. Sadness, yes, but not fear.

Desiring immortality or, more to the point, to see our deceased loved ones again in an afterlife, is equally painful. In our most honest, quiet, interior moments, I can’t help but suspect that we all harbor extreme doubts that there’s an eternal reunion of friends and family in any heaven. But our desire that this be the case, despite our secret honesty, sets the stage for inner conflict, for anguish, as hope battles skepticism and desire battles realism in our breasts. Resolution favors doubt on this question, and thus, so long as we side with our desired fantasy over the evidence of our senses, we don’t find peace.

It really boils down to a conflict between naturalism - what we guess or reason by observing nature - and supernaturalism: the teachings about unobservable things from ancient tribal books and their interpreters in today’s various priestly classes.

But to repeat: I would have offered the above perspectives had this death occurred before my studies of Gilgamesh. That’s not the case. And I am as surprised as the next person that I find myself now believing that Gilgamesh offers a wisdom about death and how it is best dealt with that is superior to that of Buddhism.

As I mentioned in my last post, the three days’ mourning and funeral for my Korean mother-in-law here in Seoul was dominated by one book: the Bible. There was one other book present during those rites, and it was my copy of Gilgamesh. As the Korean mourners and I sat on the floor with the Christian preacher leading her flock in readings, songs, and prayers - none of which I could understand, of course - I found it entirely appropriate to read this other ancient meditation on mortality and the meaning of life, since it was, after all, from a religion and a book that lived in people’s hearts for four thousand years at least - twice as long as Christianity has lived so far - and which informed and influenced the Bible as well.

When I was told that it looked disrespectful to be reading this book as the Koreans looked to their own ancient book for guidance, I put the book away. When in Rome and all of that.

But I got the chance, later, to explain to my wife why that book was profoundly relevant to the occasion. Call it a rehearsal for this post. Here goes.

A Bit of Homosexuality and a Macho Fight Scene: Ho Hum

The last lecture concluded with Shamhat - the temple prostitute who played a “holy Eve” by sexually elevating the “animal Adam” Enkidu into civilization - leading Enkidu to the city to experience its glories and to meet Gilgamesh, its king. We noted the contradiction of Enkidu’s feelings about meeting the king.  On the one hand, he looked forward to Gilgamesh satisfying his new yearning for “a true friend”; but on the other hand, he declared he would challenge Gilgamesh to a fight for two reasons: first, to stop the king’s unjust practice of taking each new bride’s virginity before her husband on her wedding day; and second, simply to show he was physically mightier than the king.

I find the story from this point to the end of the fight scene only marginally interesting.  Gilgamesh has a few dreams portending Enkidu’s arrival that disturb him, and we see the unsurprising evidence that this ancient culture, like so many others, saw dreams as possible messages from the divine.  Beyond that, we see hints that male friendship in this culture might be homosexual - which won’t surprise anybody familiar with similar hints about Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, practically all the Athenians of classical Greece’s Golden Age (these normal homosexuals - who gave us democracy, philosophy, tragedy, comedy, and so much more - considered straight men queer), and the Bible’s King David and Jonathan.²

Then comes the big fight scene: Gilgamesh shows up to taste his latest bride, but Enkidu blocks his way. Their fight is predictably over-the-top, half saloon-brawl in a cliche cowboy movie, half the Incredible Hulk, and finally Gilgamesh pins Enkidu. Enkidu’s a good sport: he acknowledges that Gilgamesh is his superior, that he has the right to rule, and declares his loyalty. They kiss, hold hands, and walk back to the palace.

Another WTF Plot Twist: The Quest to Kill Nature’s “Evil” Guardian

I’m intimidated at this point, because the plot turn that happens here, just a third of the way into the story, connects to everything that happens from this point forward. It’s a huge and intricate tapestry of meaning from this point on, and I honestly don’t know if I’m equal to the task of holding all the threads together. I’ll do my best, though.

The plot turn I speak of is this: After an unspecified period of time during which Gilgamesh and Enkidu cement their friendship in the city, Gilgamesh gets a wild hair up his behind and announces to Enkidu that he has a new mission: He and Enkidu are going to travel to the Cedar Forest, a sacred place which men are forbidden to enter, in order to kill its “evil” guardian, the “monster” Humbaba, and chop down the tallest cedar tree in the forest.

Enkidu, remember, was originally a semi-animal in the wild, running with the gazelles and fighting off the lions that preyed upon them. He knew the Cedar Forest, knew it was sacred to the god of the wind, Enlil, and knew that Humbaba, being appointed by Enlil to protect the forest, was thus not a creature so easy to label as “evil.” So Enkidu begs the hot-blooded young king to drop this idea.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu argue about this, and the interesting thing about the argument is this: Enkidu frames his argument in terms of the sacred. The forest is holy, Humbaba is its divinely-appointed guardian, and so to kill Humbaba would be a sacrilege. Gilgamesh, though, frames the argument not in terms of the sacred, but in terms of the heroic.

Let me assure you that, as an English teacher, I’ve always inwardly groaned at how often other English teachers trot out the unit on “the Hero’s Journey.” It’s not a bad thing, this theory. Anybody who’s read books like Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces knows how fascinating the subject is. What makes me groan is its popularity. It’s the “Hotel California” or “Stairway to Heaven” (or, god help us, the “Free Bird”) of English units, trotted out so many times that even the wormiest of us booky types must get tired of it after the thousandth listening. The other thing that makes me groan is that, in the wrong hands, it becomes as formulaic as the dreaded, crappy five-paragraph essay. There’s something dangerous about prescribing to students that they take every story under the sun and shoehorn it into the Hero’s Journey formula. By reducing stories to that framework, we can ignore what’s unique or surprising that doesn’t fit so nicely into that shoe.

So trust me, I offer the following as one of the few times I want to talk about a story in these terms.

What’s interesting about Gilgamesh to me, more than anything, is really the mind of the poets who polished and revised this story from its early Sumerian version around the 23rd century BCE to its later Babylonian version in the 12th century BCE. Unlike other ancient books that were edited and revised by countless hands over many centuries - the Bible comes to mind more than any other book I know - Gilgamesh seems to have gained in coherence and consistency of vision over time, rather than becoming, like the Bible, more contradictory and less coherent.

And the vision all these Gilgamesh poets so sharply refined is one that, contrary to appearances, is deeply anti-heroic.

You don’t realize it in the current scene. Gilgamesh answers Enkidu’s religious argument with an argument based on heroism. His motives boil down to these two: first, he wants to achieve something no other mortal has achieved, and so - since “none of us can escape death,” he says - gain immortality for his name, in stories of his exploits; and second, he wants to rid the world of “evil.” He doesn’t respond to Enkidu’s arguments at all. Instead, he chides Enkidu for being cowardly, and finally wins Enkidu over by this shaming tactic.

So the “Hero” argument wins the day. We’ll see, by the end, that it was a fool’s argument as well.

Before closing this installment, a couple more observations:

The “Double That Balances” Motif, and Another “Genesis, Backwards” Trope

To step back from the canvas for a second to take a larger view, we should review the original “wtf plot twist” so far: the god Anu’s “solution” to Gilgamesh’s oppressive behavior as king by creating Enkidu as a “double that balances” him, and “so brings peace” to Uruk.  In the first stage of this pattern, we saw Gilgamesh as symbol of the city, and Enkidu as symbol of nature; Gilgamesh as civilization, Enkidu as animal; Gilgamesh as two-thirds divine, one-third human, Enkidu as two-thirds animal, one-third human.

Now, though, we’ve seen Enkidu seem to upset that balance by crossing over to Gilgamesh’s side. Sex with Shamhat erased his original animal innocence and replaced it with full humanity; his journey to the city took him out of the realm of nature; and though he resists Gilgamesh’s urge to kill Humbaba and violate the Cedar Forest, his ultimate submission again places him now on the same side as Gilgamesh, rather than opposing him as a “balancing double.”

But look what is about to happen:  Gilgamesh is about to lead Enkidu out of the city - out of his own territory - and into Nature, the original domain of Enkidu. So in a sense, we see Enkidu cross into civilization only to - wtf - see Gilgamesh now “balance” this by entering Enkidu’s territory.

Note, further, that something is imbalanced about all of this nonetheless: because while Enkidu, when in his original state of animal innocence, protected the other animals from predators and, more significantly, human trappers, Gilgamesh is entering nature with the opposite intention: to conquer it, to kill its guardian, and to exploit its natural resources - the “tallest cedar” - for the benefit of civilization.

That was wordy, I know. I’m getting tired. But I hope you can see how very, very deep this is.

As I said in the very first lecture, this is the story of possibly the first walled city in human history. That means it’s the story of the first civilization to wall itself off from nature, and radically exploit nature in order to develop its civilization.  Since pre-civilized humans worshiped nature for hundreds of thousands of years in the paleolithic and neolithic ages, it seems quite reasonable to suspect that the people of the first city, cutting down forests for buildings and mining the earth for gold, silver, and the lapis lazuli so loved by the Sumerians, must have felt a certain fear as they violated Nature for the good of their city life.

That’s what’s so radical, to me, about the coming episode in the Cedar Forest. It’s holy to the gods. Man should not violate it. Humbaba is only “evil” from the viewpoint of the city people who want lumber for more housing, temples, markets. From the viewpoint of most of human pre-history, Humbaba is closer to an angel of the lords.

And Gilgamesh wants to kill him.

To pre-empt the type of comment that I frequently get accusing me of one-sidedness, let me make this clear: Civilization is glorious in this poem, according to its poets. They sing its praises with unambiguous adoration. And they surely understood that civilization thus required the lumber, the minerals, the precious stones, and all the other natural resources sacred to the gods.

And that’s one of the beauties of this classic: we see the earth’s first advanced civilizations rightly celebrating its achievements while at the same time worrying about its effects on the natural order around it.

In that sense, Gilgamesh feels closer to me - as I read the daily accounts of global warming’s acceleration and the death of the seas through acidification and over-fishing - than any other ancient book. If we’re the Omega of civilization, due to our unrestrained exploitation of nature in the name of civilization, then Gilgamesh is the Alpha. And that’s deep to me - and another reason this classic doesn’t suck.

And it’s just the beginning.

As for the “Genesis, Backwards” thing? We’ve seen how Gilgamesh is the opposite of “Genesis” in terms of woman and sexuality (both good), and in terms of most of the “Seven Deadly Sins” (not deadly, not sins).  Now we see another radical difference from the Judeo-Christian in this older religion: In Gilgamesh, the gods created nature and forbade mankind to violate it. In “Genesis,” though?

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Genesis 1:26

While there are various ways to interpret this text - and ReligousTolerance.org gives a nicely balanced overview of those ways - it’s beyond dispute that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god comes nowhere close to the Sumerian and Babylonian position on nature in Gilgamesh. In this book, nature was not created for humanity at all; on the contrary, the gods defend Nature from us.

Wtf indeed. It’s an ancient wisdom never more relevant than now.

And if you haven’t noticed, let me spell it out: in my view, the Tanach (what Christians call “The Old Testament”) seems, more and more, to be the polar opposite of Gilgamesh.  Up to now, I’ve been playing with phrases like “Adam and Eve, Backwards,” and “The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards.” But really, since both of those things come later than the culture of Gilgamesh - and the Biblical Judeans were conquered by the Babylonians, deported by them, and had their temple destroyed by them - it seems far more accurate to call the Bible “Gilgamesh, Backwards.”

More on that later too. And oh yes: death.

~ ~ ~

The Gilgamesh Series So Far:
1. Gilgamesh: 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 and Evil, Nature and the Hero - Backwards

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. This series based on the beautifully poetic 2004 Stephen Mitchell translation of Gilgamesh. [↩]
2. Please note I that I speak here of “hints” of homosexuality. Google or Wikipedia will give you more info. [↩]

[Rarely in the last 21 months have I let more than two days go by without writing in this space. It's been a full week, though, since my last post. There are a number of reasons, and I just want to explain one of them by telling this story:]

~     ~     ~

New readers might not know this, but I’m somewhat of a newlywed, having married my Korean wife on March 8 of this year.  One Sunday morning five weeks after the wedding, my wife’s mother suffered a catastrophic stroke from which the doctors doubted she would recover at all - though she did pull through, that tough woman.  Six weeks after that, though, still in the hospital, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  For the following nine weeks, we received regular urgent calls to rush to the hospital to say goodbye.  All of them were false alarms, until another Sunday morning two weeks ago, when my wife’s mother finally passed away.

My wife’s family, though Christian, is still deeply Confucian in its devotion to family. You Westerners and Anglos who think you know what a close family is would probably agree, after living in China or Korea, that Confucianism takes family ties to depths unknown in the West. And because I’m married to the oldest child in the family, I was a bit shocked to discover that I was now looked upon as the “oldest son” of my wife’s family, outranking her two brothers - in theory, anyway. My inability to speak Korean soon made it clear that I could not play that role, so I receive much honor from my brothers, but little of the burden they’re having to bear.

This became clear, especially, during the three days’ mourning at the funeral home. Korean Confucianism dictates that the sons of the deceased spend two full days in black mourning suits, welcoming all who come to pay their final respects. (The daughters are not allowed to do this, but instead linger outside the altar room in their own black mourning dresses.) The visiting hours extend from roughly 8.00 a.m. to midnight, and the sons spend that entire time seated next to the altar, until a visitor arrives, at which point the sons stand shoulder to shoulder.

At first, my brothers-in-law insisted I welcome guests with them in this fashion, and I did my best - but it was confusing. Sometimes, visitors would come, we would bow, and then the visitors would turn to my mother-in-law’s portrait, place a white chrysanthemum on the table in front of it, then bow their heads and pray. They would then turn back to us, and we would both bow to each other from the waist, shake hands while exchanging a few words of thanks, and say goodbye.

At other times, though, guests would come in and go through the same process up to placing the flower - but then, instead of bowing their heads and praying, they would stand upright, fall to their knees, then place both hands on the floor in front of them, and touch their foreheads to the floor between their hands for a few long seconds.  Then they would stand up, and repeat that ritual a second time, and stand back up, bow toward the portrait from the waist, slowly, then turn to us.

The first time this happened, I thought my brothers-in-law and I would bow from the waist the way we had with the earlier guests. So I was surprised to see them instead spread out a bit, face the guests, and then, together with the guests, do the two full head-to-the-floor genuflections all over again, followed by the final bow from the waist.

I thought this second form of reverence was beautiful. I couldn’t understand why it was performed less frequently than the first.

Anyway, after we and the visitors performed that rite, the visitors would then shake my brothers-in-laws’ hands down the line, and usually, when they got to me, look quizzically at me and either ask my brothers-in-law a polite “who’s the foreigner” question in Korean and then shake my hand, or else look at me coldly, turn their backs without a word, and leave.

To digress for a second, I can’t recommend highly enough that second experience to any white Anglo, because it was the first time in my life I had experienced what it feels like to be looked down upon and rejected because of your race. I’m fully aware, in retrospect, that my interpretation of these people’s reactions to me could be wrong, that possibly it was just discomfort, confusion, or any number of other reasons that they didn’t treat me as equal to my brothers-in-law. But the feelings I experienced during those moments were new. I felt a new appreciation for the experience of people of color, or in interracial marriages, in the U.S. and other white-dominated countries.

My brothers-in-law noted the awkwardness, and seemed to come to grips with the fact that I was not Korean, that I was a somewhat distracting presence for all, and gave me permission to basically come and go as I pleased while they kept the stricter vigil.  I pretty much did that for the rest of the mourning.

Back to the story, though: After a few hours of sometimes kneeling - kow-towing, to give it its Chinese name - and sometimes only bowing, I asked my brother-in-law: “Why do some people kneel and touch their heads to the floor when paying their final respects, while others don’t, but instead only stand, pray, and bow?”

His answer saddened me: “The ones who kneel are traditional Koreans. That’s the way we’ve always done it. But the ones who don’t kneel are Korean Christians. They were taught by the missionaries not to kneel to their ancestors, because that was worshiping them, and the First Commandment in the Bible forbids that, so it would displease God.”

My wife had told me, in the first days of our courtship, that her childhood was marred by family fights over whether to pay respect to ancestors the traditional way or, in following the teachings of their new Christian faith, to refuse to do so. It’s an issue that has caused a lot of strife and discord in many Korean families since the missionaries came, and continues to do so. The funny thing is, though, that as I watched this custom being enacted by mourners toward my mother-in-law, it never entered my mind that they were “worshiping” her. They were paying respect, they were honoring, they were expressing reverence for this woman they loved and her path on this earth, as far as I could see - and doing it in a very touching, beautiful, humbled way. And now, because some long-ago foreign man of a foreign god had interpreted their culture in terms of his own, they were fighting about it.

My wife’s family, again, being Christian, themselves did not pay their final respects to their mother in this traditional way. Instead, they constantly pulled out their Korean translations of the English (King James) translation of the Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek Bible, read verses from it, prayed to its god, and droned Western hymns (again in Korean translation) from its hymnal. I found that sad.

On the third day, we were called to watch the Korean undertakers wrap my mother-in-law’s body in the traditional silk binding-cloth, from head to toe, layer after layer, each layer tied tightly across her body with silk ties, until in the end she looked as if enclosed in a silk cocoon. A few hours later, we were at the funeral grave-site. The Christian preacher read a few verses from the Bible, they sang a few more hymns, the Korean grave-diggers covered the coffin with dirt and trotted in a circle of four to pack it down, in a cheerful way that made the children laugh and me think of the wry grave-digger in the Yorick’s skull scene in Hamlet. They said one last prayer - I kept my eyes open, as always when people pray, and took in the beautiful view of nature from this hilltop site, thinking appreciative thoughts the whole while about nature’s beauty, my in-laws’ decency, my mother-in-law’s well-meaning life - and then we all left.

We were all exhausted. I thought that was the end of it. But soon I learned that Korean Chusok - “Thanksgiving” - began two days later, and we would be spending another three or four days with the family at my father-in-law’s apartment on the outskirts of Seoul.

During Chusok, I learned that families visit the graves of their ancestors to have a meal “with them” there - so back we went to the gravesite, only three days after the burial. For some reason, my wife’s family didn’t bring a meal to the grave, but at many of the neighboring graves speckling the rolling hills of the massive cemetery, families were all picnicking by the burial mounds with rice and chopsticks and kimchi and the whole Korean spread. It was a cheerful sight on a beautiful, sunny, late-summer day.

We kept our visit short. Father-in-law now read from the Bible instead of preacher. I noticed he read from Revelation, the last book of the Christian New Testament, which Martin Luther himself rejected and opined should not be included in the Protestant Bible because he “saw no God there.”  More hymns were sung and prayers said, as I again surveyed the view of nature, and mentally surveyed the path of all our lives, and its common destination.

I found myself wondering again, as I had many times over the past week, if anybody in the family found it sad that all the words being spoken were not from the hearts of the family members, but the pages of a foreign book; that no words at all were being spoken by any but the elder men - preacher, then father; that the words were not about this kind woman in the ground at the end of her good life, but were instead about a “jealous God” and a crucified teacher in that foreign book. Even the tombstone inscription was not the family’s words, and its subject not the family’s mother and wife: instead, it was a cliche verse glorifying the god of that book. It seemed so impersonal to me.

I remembered, too, all those rushed “last visits” to the hospital bed, the family thinking so many times they were sharing their last moments with her, and each time wishing that someone would simply speak to her - would tell her she had been a good mother, a good wife, that she was loved, that her life was well-spent - instead of incessantly weeping and praying above her to the god they hoped would save her. I don’t think she ever got to hear her family express such things. Religiosity kept getting in the way.

The final Chusok prayer was said, and the family turned to leave. My wife stayed, and so did I. I told her I didn’t want to offend anybody, but that I wanted to pay my respects to her mother in the most beautiful way I could. After I explained what I meant by that, I was surprised that my wife approved.

So, though it felt slightly foolish, this foreigner - whose culture’s book and customs had dominated the life and death of this woman - he faced his mother-in-law’s fresh grave, went to his knees, touched his head to the earth at her feet, lingered, stood. Did the same thing again, stood again. Then he bowed his head, inwardly thanked her for her selfless life as a good mother and wife and neighbor - she really was all of these things - and rejoined his family.

~     ~     ~

Thanksgiving is over now, and we’re back home. But things are fragile, and it’s hard to concentrate. I’m almost ready to tackle the next three books of Gilgamesh, but not quite. To complicate matters more, I’m both job-hunting and writing a non-fiction book proposal, which is about a 40-page task.

So bear with me. I hope to be the regular old writer soon.

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Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic - in Stephen Mitchell's brilliant 2004 translation.

[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. this post ~ 5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero - Backwards]¹

~     ~     ~

Beyond the Giggles: More on the “Seven Days’ Erection”

As we saw last episode, seven days of sex with Shamhat, the temple prostitute of the goddess Ishtar, gave the innocent, wild, and Adam-like Enkidu² more than seven days of carnal pleasure: “knowing what a woman is” in this way also humanized him, making him lose his animal essence, making his “mind grow,” making him understand language, making him suddenly yearn for that most civilized thing - friendship.

It’s worth speculating that Enkidu’s epic sexual marathon with Shamhat might itself be another “gift of civilization,” since animals, so far as I know, don’t draw out the raw sexual act across days, don’t turn it into a sacred art form the way Ishtar’s hierodules³ do, and thus don’t experience this natural act with anywhere near the range of sensations, thoughts, and emotions that humans do. Without being literal about the sex scene’s “seven days” - any more than Bible readers should be literal about the forty days of Noah’s flood or of Jesus’ meditation in the desert, which are probably the ancient culture’s variation of our own “dozens” or “hundreds” or “millions,” when we just mean to say “many” in a hyperbolic way - the fact remains that the poets of Gilgamesh chose to emphasize that Enkidu’s sexual initiation was no animalistic quickie, but instead something lasting an unusually long time. Why? Because what humans can learn through erotic love, seen as sacred, cannot be learned in a hurry.

Some of you will think I’m crazy at this point, but I’ll counter by pointing out that Hinduism is another major religion that does not damn sex as a sin, does not freak out at this centerpiece of the natural order, and on the contrary, has among its sacred scriptures the Kama Sutra, which is essentially a Sanskrit sex manual aiming to instruct men and women in the arts of love-making - so that families, with happier husbands and happier wives, can be stronger.⁴

So after one last bit of love-making in their natural paradise, Shamhat gives Enkidu one of her robes - you have to love the “Adam as cross-dresser” bit - and they begin their trip to Uruk, the only big city in that mind-bogglingly distant ancient world, twice as far from us in time as the Bible.

The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards: Enkidu’s Moral Education Continues

They stop on the way at some shepherds’ huts, where Enkidu creates quite a stir. The shepherds all compare him to King Gilgamesh in strength and stature, and speculate who would win if the two supermen came to blows. ESPN, Sumerian-style. Whatever.

More interestingly, though, they provide Enkidu with his next taste - literally - of civilization: bread and beer. Shamhat, still the teacher and initiator, tells Shamhat:

“Go ahead, Enkidu. This is food,
we humans eat and drink this.”

Let’s stop here and think about the pattern so far of Enkidu’s “civilized education”: the first stage was sex, a physical pleasure; and now we come to bread - eating - another physical pleasure, and beer, which is complicated.

Because beer is not just the “drinking” equivalent to “eating,” the way water or milk would be.  Beer is an intoxicant.

How would most of today’s Christian preachers advise us to regard this food and drink? I can only point to the status of “gluttony” - the love of food - as one of the “Seven Deadly Sins,” and to the general disapproval of alcohol among most serious Christians today⁵ to support my argument that these two “civilized gifts” would be unpopular in Christian circles.

But in Gilgamesh, again, we see that religious viewpoint turned upside-down.  Enkidu eats the bread until he’s full, and more interestingly, likes the beer so much he drinks “seven” pitchers - after which:

his heart grew light,
his face glowed, and he sang out with joy.

No moralizing at all here. Beer is a good thing. (And please note, I think there are secular arguments against beer now, in the age of the automobile and drunk driving, that make alcohol one of the worst intoxicating substances to encourage - not because it’s sinful, but because so many irresponsible people don’t know how to drink, and don’t know better than to drive after doing so. In the pre-automobile age, though? It’s harder to argue that there’s something wrong with a beverage that makes our “heart grow light” and our voice “sing out with joy.”)

This pattern of “Good, Blessed Things” being the opposite of what we see in popular Christian morality today is something to remember. We’ll return to it later, when we ask the question, “Why does the Bible forbid and demonize the things that the Sumero-Babylonian culture praises as good?” Those of you who know Jewish history - and that Christianity is essentially a radical form of Judaism - probably have the same type of answer to that question that I do. But that’s later.

Back to the story. Enkidu undergoes a couple more transformations into civilized life while with the shepherds: he gets a hair-cut, takes his first bath, and oils his skin, thus becoming, according to the poet, “fully human,” and “handsome as a bridegroom.”

Do I have to point out that caring about your appearance could qualify as the sins known as “vanity” or “pride” in the Christian tradition? And that this is yet another detail in the overall pattern that the flesh is good?

Finally, the poet follows up this last detail with evidence that Enkidu, though now more of a city-type and hedonist, enjoying sex, food, beer, and a good hair-cut and skin treatment, is still morally innocent.  My evidence?  After enjoying all these things, Enkidu takes the night shift for the shepherds, watching and protecting their flocks as they sleep, and retaining that compassion for nature’s living things that was among his chief traits “before Shamhat.”

I’ll stop there for now, after this warning: those of you who think, based on this series so far, that Gilgamesh is a text that unambiguously argues that civilization is better than nature, that humanity without limits or divine punishment is “good,” and so forth?  You have another thing coming.  As we work our way through the changes that both Enkidu and Gilgamesh undergo throughout the rest of this story, I hope you’ll agree that this ancient story is far more subtle, more disturbing, and to repeat, more wise than we would expect.

Next episode: 5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero - Backwards

The Gilgamesh Series So Far:
1. Gilgamesh: 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 and Evil, Nature and the Hero - Backwards

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. All quotes taken from the beautifully poetic 2004 Stephen Mitchell translation of Gilgamesh. [↩]
2. please don’t take the Adam comparison too literally; there are differences distinguishing Enkidu and Shamhat from Adam and Eve that we have to recognize also. [↩]
3. ”Hierodule” is the word for a temple prostitute in the ancient world. [↩]
4. The Kama Sutra is more than that, and much of its caste-system dogma is objectionable, which is inevitable when seen with modern, post-scientific and post-democratic eyes; but the point remains: Hinduism, like the Sumero-Babylonian religion, embraces the sexual and erotic as social goods, when practiced with a sacred consciousness instead of a dark, taboo, guilt-ridden one. [↩]
5. Though I’m damned if I can find much scriptural precedent for the sinfulness of drinking alcohol in the Bible - can anybody help? [↩]