Beyond School

Speech Outline

If you just want to watch my recent keynote address in Australia — which, as farce would have it, turned into two addresses — just click on the screenshots of each speech below. But I hope you read the little mock-heroic back-story.

Learning Technologies 2009 Keynote, Part 1: Click image to view.

The Missing Link: Texas Politics Distorts US Textbooks
(watch before Speech Part 2. Slide to 5.15 for the kicker)

Learning Technologies Keynote Part 2 (click image to view)

~

Prologue: On Time and Other Thieves¹

Anybody as oblivious to the passage of time and calendar pages as I am knows it can be a source of both bliss and embarrassment: bliss because the hours and days are so damned interesting you don’t have time to notice them; embarrassment because some of those hours and days demand your notice — or else there’s hell to pay.

Common examples: birthdays, anniversaries, blasted holidays.²

Less common: the keynote speech I gave to the Learning Technologies 2009 Conference in Mooloolaba, Australia, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, recently — d’oh! — not so recently: last November. It’s time to share it, reflect on it, and say thanks. Where does the time go?

~

The Story of the Speech: A Farce

Exposition: Seth Godin as Textbook

I’ve given smaller presentations before at various schools, at the Apple Distinguished Educators Institute in Bangkok a few years ago, and so forth, but they were always in-house. But this one was by special invitation and, cooler still, for the keynote of the final day. I’ve never given a keynote before, and wanted to rise to the occasion with my best creative effort.

But I had other, more important reasons for wanting to do well: I wanted to use the speech to teach my students. The invitation came in September, at the very time that I had assigned my Western Civ and Chinese history students to give “creative speeches” of their own. As you’ll see if you watch the speech, I had tossed out the ’schooly’ approach to oral presentations — you know, the Death by Droning Powerpoint  — and replaced it with a different “textbook” for speeches.

That “different textbook” was online. It was TED Talks. More specifically, Seth Godin’s talk “On Standing Out.” Here it is:

I showed this Talk to all my classes in the first week of school and, in a nutshell, told them that the closer they got to Godin’s delivery and slide creativity, the closer they got to an “A.” It resulted in the best time I’d had watching student presentations in my entire decade of teaching. Not all the students rose to the challenge, mind you. But those that did proved the value of the attempt in spades.

Good for the Gander

So I figured I’d be a good egg and put my money (and reputation) where my mouth was for my students: I’d give my own “Godinesque” presentation³ in Australia and, knowing it was to be filmed and put online, share the link so they could learn, along with me, whether my TED/Godin evangelism had real-world merit, or was just the latest example of teacher BS. They’d get to see me walk the tightrope without a net, and judge for themselves.

Damned Clocks, Blasted Calendars

There was a small problem. I was already drowning in the waves familiar to all teachers in their first year at a new school — above all,  creating curriculum and syllabi from virtual scratch (I didn’t like the textbooks). I didn’t have a lot of mental space for crafting a speech on something as far afield from that teacher-head terrain as the conference’s theme: “The Power of You.” My head was in the Power of History.

I burnt the candle one night brainstorming an outline for the thing, wrestling the whole time with my confusion over that most important question for any communicator: Who, exactly, is the audience? I couldn’t tell if it was teachers, administrators, corporate types; if they were already techie born-agains, or phobic techie infidels. I muddled on anyway, and saved the file for later.

The next time I looked at the calendar it was the Friday a week before the conference. I didn’t have a single slide.

The Pleasures of Masochism

My long-suffering wife of a workaholic listened to another apology that I had to work through another weekend, and watched me slink off into my office/doghouse. I fired up the by-now old outline I’d banged out, looked at it, and promptly deleted that four hours of late-night work. My head was in the Roman Republic back then, and now it was in the Late Medieval period. I had other things to say now. Our classroom had long since moved on from the student presentations to discussions of the “key concept” of “civilization” and its textbooky “five characteristics,” and I wanted to prove to my 15-year-old charges that this bit of schooly knowledge could be put to good real-world use, done critically and creatively. Plus, our class time-travels, since I’d made that outline, had covered an additional 1,500 years of memorizing one damn fact and name after another for ninth-grade tests and essays, and I wanted to demonstrate ditto for those schooly testable items — wanted to show them that knowing history can be golden when arguing in public for a real cause.

The Madness of Blog-Mining and Flickr-Fishing

Then something beautiful happened. Read the rest of this entry »

1. “Time and other thieves” lifted from lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s “Furry Sings the Blues,” from the (near-perfect) Hejira album [↩]
2. David, one of my all-time favorite students — whose work you’ll see featured in the speech — told me last week he’d found the perfect coffee mug for me from the Onion website. The cup reads, “I hate whatever today is.” [↩]
3. I actually use that phrase in class [↩]

217 years ago last week, Louis XVI’s head rolled from a Paris guillotine. One of my students emailed me to tell me that, because we’d discussed that event on the very day of its anniversary. A few years after that bloody blade gave death to feudalism and birth to modernity, the French Revolution became so radical it tried to uproot the Christian church in France and replace it with what it considered a better alternative. This reminds me, sidewise, of a story I heard years back, and want to embellish in the telling. I’ve been using this space too much lately to merely blog, and tonight I feel like writing. It’s hard to get back into that swing, but harder not to swing in it.

Pride and Prejudice, Revisited

He was lower-middle class economically, above most of the “upper” class culturally, and long past much belief in, or need for, most things church-related.

But he was engaged now, and meeting his future family-in-law for the first time. They were opposite him in almost every way, but in two ways, above all, that made him nervous: they were unimaginably wealthy, and they were regular church-goers.

During their first meeting the day before, through several subtle signs — their exchange of glances when he told them he’d never golfed, and when he had to ask how to mount that horse at their estate; his future mother-in-law’s quick scold of her husband’s questions about his (non-existent) investment portfolio, followed by her pained change of subject — he had gathered that he had little hope of overcoming their disappointment in his lack of silver-spooned pedigree.

(Truth be told, he wished his girl lacked it too, so that they could leave this Jane Austen re-run, dispense with the class difference dramas, rely on their own talents and hard work for any future success, and just live and love more simply — as, when they were on neutral turf, they did. Like that day at the river the week before, when she was just her, and he was more than enough for her. She’d dropped her gold ring and watch, heirlooms both, off the rocks and into the river, and given them up for lost beneath the rapids. He told her to keep the faith, found a long branch in the forest, and told her to hold it straight down from the rock to the river-bottom. He dove in, followed the branch down, and felt his way along the silt in the dark, then rose fist-first from the depths, exultant and beaming, jewels in hand and glowing gold in the sun.

They’d told that story to her family later that day, but none of them seemed to think it mattered. He knew it didn’t either, but also knew it very much did.)

His friends didn’t believe him, but he really did regret that she came from wealth.

But if the wealth gap was spilt milk, he still had a fighting chance, he knew, to overcome that other difference. He told himself he would be a good sport about his in-laws’ faith, and go to their Sunday morning service with the open mind he prided himself on, and with his own version of faith: “good faith.” He would withhold judgment, and give their church the benefit of the doubt.

At the same time, he was honest enough with himself to recognize that he fully expected the service to be a pained, “smile until your lips bleed” affair.

Sunday

The colonial red-brick church was exclusive, for Virginia’s bluest bloods. Several of America’s Founding Fathers, who had lived in the neighborhood over two centuries earlier, had worshiped in these very pews. The Sunday morning parking lot was filled with the Saabs of the Old Money families, the Lexuses and Mercedes of the less secure and more self-conscious nouveau riche. His clothes and shoes were a couple of notches below the apparent Sunday standard here. He smiled through the doorway handshakes, the class inspections posing as introductions; then he smiled down the aisle and into the pew. His mother-in-law’s perfume seemed a thing made in heaven. He never knew perfume could so intoxicate, and could only imagine how dear the price tag.

To the podium came the pastor, a powerfully-built but kind-faced old man. He liked the old man instantly — naturally mild and at ease, much the mold of old man into which he hoped he’d ripen himself.

The opening remarks told him he’d come on a special day for this church: it was the old man’s last sermon. He’d given his first one in this church a full four decades ago, a much younger man with a long future ahead of him. The old man spoke of his imminent departure, and of the passage it marked to his life’s Final Stage, and all the while spoke like a man at peace with life’s impermanence, with the natural cycle of life and death that spins us all. Only the slightest sadness could be sensed; more palpable was the old man’s obvious concern that he’d chosen a suitable topic for his final performance on this sunny morn.

The Sermon

He’d chosen, the old man announced, to speak of a story surely known to all the faithful in the house, a story that had surely gripped them all in childhood, such were its wonders and beauties, such its gifts of wisdom and hope.

And that story, he said, was this: the Tale of the Frog and the Princess.

The groom-to-be scanned the faces of his in-laws-to-be and others in nearby pews for signs of scandal. Surely the congregation would find this choice inappropriate — it wasn’t from the Bible at all, and worse yet, it was a childish fairy tale! But all he saw on the all those faces was soft smiles and eyes aglow with an anticipation both childlike and mature. He smiled too, and with no lip-bleeding grit. While he fully expected the old man to somehow, by the end of the sermon, tie the fairy tale to the predictable narrative he’d heard so often when small, he nonetheless adored the idea of letting the old man lead him, along with the rest, back to those days of childhood.

In this return to the “teachings of childhood” — his favorite line from Gone With the Wind, and his favorite silver moment in all of Clark Gable’s celluloid immortality — what meanings would he hear in this story now, as an adult, that he couldn’t hear as a child? He’d forgotten much of the story. What were the details?

He was ready to listen to the old man with the best of his own “good faith.”

The old man eased into his tale. “You remember the story,” he said. “How the Princess had a golden ball she loved to throw into the air and catch — how it so glowed in the sky she imagined she was catching the very sun.

“And you remember,” he continued, “how her parents told her never to go beyond the palace walls into the forest. It was full of dirt and, worse than dirt, of the lowly people of the realm — the ‘commoners.’

“But we know how the old tales work,” he went on. “Of course the Princess was fated to transgress her parents’ boundaries.

“One day, she threw the ball too high, and over the palace wall it went, with her in hot pursuit. She exited the gate just in time to see her golden ball bounce down the hill, bounce high once, and again, and then plop into a deep, dark well. Of course that well was dirty — too dirty for our Princess. All she could do was kneel there by the well, the silly bird, crying and crying over that stupid golden ball.

“She was at least lucky in one respect,” he added with a pause long enough to look a good half of the congregation in the eye: “There were no dirty poor people around.”

A faint laugh came from the faithful.

“You remember too, I’m sure, that the Princess stopped her blubbering when a frog approached her, all slimy and wet and, in a word, dirty — and she recoiled from it in disgust that soon turned to wonder. Because it spoke to her.

” ‘What are you crying about, Princess?’,” it croaked.

“She answered it the way a Princess should answer a dirty thing: dripping with disdain. ‘I’m crying because my golden ball fell into the well, you dirty frog.’

“But the frog’s next croak caught her attention: ‘What if I can get your ball for you? What will you give me?’

“The Princess’ life was so stuffed with gold, she knew she could give him a small fortune without noticing its absence. ‘I’ll give you my golden crown,’ she said.

“Now it was the frog’s turn for disdain. ‘What would I do with a golden crown? All it would do is drag me to the bottom of the pond and drown me.’

“The King’s little girl was dense enough to follow with an offer of a perfect pearl necklace — she surely had dozens of them, so no worries there,” he added. “But the frog explained they’d just tangle around his legs and, again, cause him to drown. No thanks, said he.

“The Princess huffed and, like our friend Mr. Pooh — Of Very Little Brain — said, ‘What about my ruby ring, then?’ And again the frog croaked out a snort: ‘It would fall off my finger and I’d be left with nothing at all.’

The old man stopped the story to observe that so far, the girl had failed to recognize the frog as a “person” at all. It was just a thing to be bought off, a laborer to do the dirty-work and get her back her gold. It never occurred to her to ask the frog what he needed; never occurred to her to think of the frog as another living “person” at all. He sighed and shook his head, and as he took a breath to continue, the groom thought, “Here comes the pivot to the preaching.”

He was wrong.

“But in the classic ‘Rule of Threes’ pattern so common in stories, it seems our Princess, after hearing the frog three times try to tell her that what she valued for him had no value, finally — though probably dimly, for our dear princess is a dimwit  — finally, I say, she begins to catch on: she’s talking to another living soul. How do I know? Because her next offer is different: ‘I’ll give you one of my silk slippers,’ she says — wait for it, now….ready? — ’so that you may sleep in it and keep warm.’”

Another gaze into the pews, then: “That’s more like it,” he said. “There’s always hope. A warm place to sleep is something we all need. It’s a lot more important than jewels to our cold, clammy frog. Our Princess is waking up.” His eyebrows arched above his bifocals, and he smiled.

The groom smiled back.

“Mr. Frog still wasn’t sold, though, but — if you’ll pardon this old man for saying so — the offer seemed to bring out his kinky side: ‘I don’t want your slipper,’ he says. ‘But it gives me an idea. What I do want,’ Frog continued, ‘is…’ — and pardon me, ladies — ‘to sleep in your bed. With you.’”

[I hate to do this to you, but it's late, so: to be continued. Soon.]

An example worth sharing to students of a kid who figured out the power of simple blogging — combined, of course, with quality thinking and writing — and blogged his way to stardom by age 27. In China.

From the excellent China Digital Times, with emphasis added:

Han Han was named as the ‘Person of the Year” in 2009 by two influential publications: Guangzhou-based newspaper Southern Weekend（南方周末) and Hong Kong-based magazine Asia Weekly (亚洲周刊). Here are some excerpts of the relevant articles in both publications, translated by CDT:

By Asia Weekly: Han Han: Youthful Citizen vs Power 亚洲周刊二零零九年度风云人物韩寒——青春公民VS权力.

Han Han is a 27-year-old author and race car driver, and his blog has generated nearly 300 million visits since 2006. He follows and is concerned with public rights defending events. On the Shanghai “Fishing” incident, Hangzhou “70 yards” incident, forced eviction incident and other events his clear and powerful writing has generated an enormous influence on public opinion. As a member of the post-80s generation, he lives authentically and freely, and demonstrates the energy of China’s youthful citizens and the hope of civil society in China.

韩寒，二十七岁的作家和赛车手，博客浏览量近三亿，他关注、跟进公共维权事件，在上海「钓鱼」事件、杭州「七十码」、强拆民居事件中，言论清醒、有力，产生巨大舆论影响力；作为「八零后」一代，他活得真实、自由，展示中国青春公民的能量和中国公民社会的希望。

From Southern Weekend: The Name of Han Han Means to Offend [the Establishment]

In the public eyes for ten years, he is now a household name, and still young, he is called by his supporters “Young Master Han.” This nickname is flattering and lighthearted, saying that he has style and quality, and is not a boring person. Young Master Han is an author, the only National Champion of in both field and rally car race, is an idol, and owns a blog which has the highest traffic in the world. He is so famous, that people often forget how extraordinary it is that one person has all these different titles. But Young Master Han became the Han Han that is now widely respected after he started a blog, and began writing social commentary which resonates with our time. His self-styled commentaries caused controversy, but were also widely popular. One day, even the most conservative people started to realize that this young man was not full of nonsense. Behind the 300 million clicks on his blog posts was a fresh humanist radiating the wave of freedom. [read the rest]

Regular readers will know I’ve become somewhat of an elitist when it comes to urging the young to blog, only wanting to “attract” those rare students who have the gifts but don’t seem to understand the tools we now have to manifest those gifts to the world — and this example is a case in point: Han can write well and think critically, “follows” (surely via RSS?) issues he “is concerned with” and writes about them. In other words, he’s got the gifts of curiosity, passion, a drive for socio-political engagement and reform, and an apparently wicked mind and pen. And a “humanist” to boot.¹

The most delicious detail in this young man’s delicious life? His secondary school held him back a year, and he dropped out of school without graduating.

Han Han was born on September 23, 1982. He won the first class award in the first “New Concept” writing contest in 1999, and was held back in his first year in the Songjian Number 2 High School in Shanghai the same year. He dropped out of high school in 2000, and published his first novel “Three Gates.” This book has sold 2,030,000 copies since then.

{…}

In 2008, he published a selected collection of his blog posts, “Random Texts.” In 2009, he published a novel, “His Nation,” a collection of essays, “Grass,” and a collection of blog posts, “Lovely Predators”…. Also in 2009, he announced he would publish a magazine “A Chorus of Solos.” [Han Han originally planned to name the magazine Renaissance, but the name was not approved by authorities.]

P.S.–To any students at my school: if you think you have this kind of talent, and want me to help you learn the simple blogging tools, come see me. I’ll work overtime with you, and it will have nothing to do with grades, homework, or GPA’s.

1. I’m teaching the Enlightenment right now in European history, alongside my Chinese history course, and Han for all the world sounds like a Chinese Voltaire to me. And good god, just think if Voltaire could have blogged. [↩]

Second draft:

On Two Ways of Reading: Slavery reads on its knees. Freedom reads on its feet.¹

So a high school teacher’s job: to teach students to find those feet?

I’m just looking for snappy first principles here. Ones within the 15-year-old attention span.

1. I know, I know — wannabee Nietszchean aphorist indulgence. But cut me some slack. Time is slow here on this beach. [↩]

Nothing like seeing a friend from three decades ago, when you were a new and very green adult in the world, to stir up the mind.

John and I also talked a bit about Gilgamesh today. Me talking about Gilgamesh is nothing new. I do that with anybody and everybody who’ll listen. But talking about it to the guy who knew you way back when when you so naively embarked on a conscious search for “Truth” — especially when that same guy joined you, and with exactly the same naivete — that is something new.

It’s like our 20-year old selves were sitting on that beach with us two 47-year-olds all day.

False Starts in the Search for Truth

That 20-year-old me was such a lousy seeker for Truth. He read all the Old Books devotedly — the Greek, the Hebrew, the Vedic, the Christian, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Taoist, the Gnostic, the Transcendental, “Yak yak yak.” He read them all, underlined passages, filled margins with scribbles, exclamation points, interrobangs. He started (and rarely finished) journals devoted to only copying the choicest of those words of Wisdom — quotes only. The Things to Remember. These were the words of Wisdom and Truth, and they were going to teach him Truth and Wisdom, by god. If he read them real closely to be sure he understood, then he’d find Truth and Wisdom. And life would be better because he’d have those things.

All I could do today while thinking about him was laugh at him.

Because I think I know now that that’s exactly the wrong way to read the Old Books.

If I had read Gilgamesh back then, when I was him, I would have been expecting it to teach me too. Another Old Book that was supposed to be Wise. That’s not how I read it now, thank goodness.

How Moderns Read

Anyway, I sat there on that beach wishing I had my iPod so I could record  what I was trying to aphoristically sum up about what I know about reading now — and wish I’d known well before 20, at your age, my students. I didn’t want this little stab at something essential to slip away. It went something like this:

It’s not what we learn from the Old Books. It’s what we see in them.¹

That mental shift in relation to reading, I want to say, comes close to a definition of the modern reader. A traditional reader gives up his authority to the author. A modern reader takes that authority back. Copernicus did it to Aristotle and Ptolemy, for example — he doubted their scientific authority based on his own observations. Voltaire and Nietzsche did it to the religious authority of popes, preachers, and the Bible.

A modern reader, in a nutshell, doesn’t read on his knees.

The scary thing? It seems that a large number of Americans are not modern readers at all.

And the sad thing? They all went to American schools — which doesn’t speak well about American education.

1. And yes, this is probably true of all books. But moreso, I think, for pre-scientific books. [↩]

I think this question would make either a good meme or a good open thread:

What new routines have worked their way into your teaching-and-learning life as a result of the digital revolution?

I’ll share a couple of mine. I think history teachers will find the first one valuable, but teachers of any discipline can find and do similar things in their subjects.

1. Annotating Open Courseware University Lectures on Academic Earth, YouTube, Yale:

I’ve been watching UCLA Professor Lynn Hunt’s European Civilization from 1750 to the Present course lectures on Academic Earth to review modern European history before teaching it in the semester beginning next month.¹ I’m also watching Yale Professor John Merriman’s course on the same subject.

Here’s the rub: Yale’s courses are better watched at Yale’s Open Yale site, where you can find transcripts, video downloads for iPods, and all sorts of supplemental goodies for each lecture. But I haven’t been able to find the UCLA course on any UCLA-hosted site, so all we have for Prof. Hunt’s course is Academic Earth’s video. That means no transcripts or text of any sort. [Update: UCLA has a YouTube channel that allows downloads of the lectures -- something Academic Earth doesn't do. I'm putting my floating stickies on the YouTube lectures too. Here's the Modern Western Civ course playlist.]

Dr. Hunt’s a fine lecturer. She opens each class with a musical or artistic piece from the period covered, for example, and discusses its significance in the wider historical context. Her lectures are also well-organized, tight, and interesting. So my new routine, as the screenshot below shows, is a simple one: While I watch a lecture, I have a Diigo floating sticky-note open on the page, and simply outline the lecture with time-stamps. You can see it live here, if you have Diigo [Update: And here on YouTube]. Obvious uses:

• I — or anybody else — can use the time-stamp to show exactly the segments wanted in class.
• I can also adapt and/or condense the entire lecture for my own presentations in my classes. Simply extract the time-stamp and notes on my Diigo page, print them out if needed, and voila — an outline for a lecture, presentation, or discussion.

Again, this is simple and no big deal. It’s just taking notes while watching a video. But the cool thing is, other teachers worldwide (if they use Diigo) can share mine and add their own. (Among other possibilities.)

Here’s the screenshot:

Dr Hunt's UCLA lecture, my Diigo floating sticky-note (click for larger image)

2. Planning Classes While Walking to School with iPod/iPhone Voice Memo

Talking to Yourself is Good

I love Voice Memo. My daily routine in Singapore is an hour metro ride to school, then a 10-minute walk from the metro station to my classroom. I use it as planning time, and my best tool is my iPod Touch’s Voice Memo app. My iPod earbuds have a mic in the wire, so all I have to do is spend five minutes or so thinking about how I want to structure the day’s classes, and talk it into my iPod. When I get to school, I listen to the voice memo to write my lesson plan on the board.

I know some people can plan classes weeks in advance, but I’m not one of them. Too many ideas worth incorporating come in the days,  even the hours, before the class. So this has been a godsend for me. I don’t forget my best ideas, and don’t have to write them down. I literally talk to myself as I walk to class about the best ideas I have for the day.

Again, no big deal. A drunk could do this in his worst hangover. And that’s the beauty: low-labor, high-leverage changes in routine, thanks to new tools.

What about you? Any to share?

And Happy New Year, by the way. May the five-fingered fist of fate always smash the mean person next to you, and pet you like a kitten until 2011.

1. Be warned: the audio is sometimes bad, but the lectures are quite good. Dr. Hunt’s a trooper for not tearing off the microphone and telling the tech crew she’s mad as hell and not going to take it any more. [↩]

I’ll have more to say soon about how I’ve been trying to teach the wisdom in this “napkin philosopher” piece in my classroom all year. It’s going to get center stage on my classroom door window first day back to school. Maybe even tattooed on students’ hands.

But right now, it’s off to the airport to send my in-laws back to Korea. (If you haven’t downloaded Seth Godin et. al.’s What Matters Now, follow that link. And see more about Dan Roam’s work here and here.)

Dan Roam, from "What Matters Now" (click image for larger file)

This “Critical Thinking” video is worth a watch.

Now: What follow-up questions for discussion or writing will get the most bang for the buck if used in the classroom?

(h/t One Good Move)

Just a quick share of some resources I made optional for the “In Google We Trust” students I mentioned last time.  Transparency is all, so enjoy, quibble, supplement, whatever:

Optional Media Literacy Readings:
1. Think Peer Reviewed journals are no better than blogs? “How Stuff Works” gives a good overview that will (I hope) make you think again.
2. Shocked that even peered reviewed journals can can be *gasp* imperfect? (To which I say good, so you should think even more about what you read.) This article might interest you (hint: some peer reviewed journals are better than others, and it’s up to you to know the Big League ones).
3. Still think “popular media” journalists — TIME, Newsweek, NYTimes, etc — are as “expert” as scholars, historians, and academics in respected journals?
–Treat yourself to Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi on mainstream newspaper journalism. (His style is snappy and hilarious.)
–See Bill Moyers’ “Selling the War” (transcript here, or you can watch the documentary online there) on how the mainstream media chose inaccuracy and disinformation due to all sorts of political pressures leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

[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. [↩]