Zone of the Marvellous Read online

  It is a vast subject, one I could approach only in a discontinuous, partial and idiosyncratic way. There’s nothing definitive here, nor is there meant to be. Many voices are evoked, many others that might have been here are not. My inclination is to go into areas where I am curious, where I think there might be something that could answer a question, or where too little knowledge has made me want to know more. In some respects the result resembles a collage of images and voices that may, for some, decay into incoherence but for others might unexpectedly cohere. Borges has a fragment about a man who spent his life assembling images to no preconceived plan, intuitively, perhaps randomly; at the moment of his death he realised he had made a picture of his own face. This is not meant as a self-portrait; but, as the result of one person’s trawl through the detritus of the past five millennia, looking for the sense and the resonant non-sense that keep alive our feeling for the marvellous, it may be mistaken for one.

  Since ancient times the antipodes has figured as a zone of the marvellous. The Sumerian/Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh culminates in a journey across the Waters of Death, into the rising sun, in search of immortality. A thousand years before Christ, an Egyptian poet of the twentieth dynasty wrote that the smell of his lover’s shirt transported him instantly to the South Seas. Subsequently, Africa was most likely circumnavigated by Phoenician sailors, while Greek mariners certainly visited India. Plato’s Atlantis, located in the western seas, has returned in other forms beneath other oceans, including the Pacific. The first utopia, written at the Macedonian court a generation after Alexander the Great, placed the fabulous land of Panchaea in the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, the writings of Claudius Ptolemaeus, a Greek living in Alexandria, in Roman Egypt, in the second century ce, dominated European thought about the globe and the stars for 1500 years. It is from Ptolemy that the notion of a Great South Land was ultimately derived.

  I

  ANCIENT VOICES

  SHA NAQBA IMURU … ARE THE OPENING WORDS OF the Epic of Gilgamesh in the version inscribed at Nineveh under the kingship of Ashurbanipal and found again when his library was unearthed by Victorian archaeologists in the mid-nineteenth century. It means He who saw into the depths or He who saw the Deep or perhaps He who saw everything. ‘He’ is Gilgamesh and those opening words were, in the Assyria of the seventh century BCE, generally used as the title of the epic. The depths into which Gilgamesh had seen were those of the Waters of Death that he crossed in search of immortality and of the abyssal waters into which he dived to pluck the herb that makes old men young again; but they were also the deeps of time. For when the epic was lost in the destruction of Nineveh in 612 BCE, it was already two millennia old.

  The Old Babylonian version, inscribed 1200 years earlier, opened differently, with titular words that translate: Surpassing all other kings …; but that version in turn was derived from tales told by the black-headed people of Sumer in the preceding millennium. Nobody knows where the Sumerians came from or who they were; their language is an isolate, unrelated to those of neighbouring peoples. Nevertheless, it was the cuneiform writing they invented that provided the script for subsequent versions of the poem, whatever language it was written in; and there is a probable basis for the epic in the life, deeds and person of an historical Sumerian king of Uruk who lived and ruled around 2700 BCE in the city which has given its name to the modern nation we know as Iraq.

  The priest and exorcist Sîn-leqe-unninni (Moon, accept my Prayer), working in Babylon around the year 1200 BCE, is credited with putting the epic into its ‘modern’ form. It was he who added the story of the Flood to the tale, although that too was based on another old Sumerian poem. Sîn-leqe-unninni in his preface to the poem wrote lines that still sound strangely prescient:

  See the cedar tablet-box

  release its clasp of bronze!

  Lift the lid of its secret,

  take out the tablet of lapis lazuli, and read

  the struggles of Gilgamesh and all he endured.

  In the fiction of the poem this sacred tablet was buried inside the walls of the city of Uruk as rebuilt by Gilgamesh himself, much in the way that the actual clay tablets, with their cuneiform writing, would be found buried in the ruins of Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh slightly less than two and a half millennia after its destruction.

  Here then, at the very beginning of writing, we have a memory of writing; in the same way that in the writing itself we have a memory of divinity that has passed, leaving us, as humans, alone on the earth with our peculiar fate: not just to live and to die, but to know that we live and die. Things were once different – before the Flood, people lived longer, conversed with the gods, could sometimes become gods; now, we may have the consolation of writing and reading about such things but immortality, such as it is, will come only through the remembrance of our deeds; only, that is, through writing itself, which is memory turned into visible signs.

  So the Sha Naqba Imuru leads into the hall of mirrors that literature is, back through the versions to the time before the Flood and also, at least by implication, forward into other books: The Iliad, for instance, with its paired heroes, Achilles and Patroclus, so like Gilgamesh and Enkidu; The Odyssey, whose hero, like Gilgamesh, braves the realm of death; and the Bible, with its myths of the Garden of Eden and the Flood, its snake that robs us of the ever-renewed youthfulness that could have been ours, that Fall from innocence into knowledge. Indeed there are such strong parallels between, for example, the Book of Ecclesiastes and the advice given Gilgamesh to live for today, forgetting tomorrow, that the former must surely be based upon the latter.

  It has been said that philosophy was invented at about the time remembered poetic discourse began to give way to written texts, as if thinking about fate and writing about it are as intrinsically related as a mirror and the things it reflects; and this is most likely true because writing something down not only encourages reflection upon its possible meanings, it also makes those possible meanings accessible to others in the same form – which an oral tradition, with its infinite, untraceable variations, can never really do. Writing thus mirrors consciousness; but it could further be said that mirrors, along with the self-consciousness they engender, are themselves intrinsic to writing. Gilgamesh, that old king of Uruk, knew glass, knew mirrors, could see reflected in polished copper images of himself, or of hairy Enkidu, or Shamhat, the priestess – some say harlot – of Ishtar sent down from the temple to seduce the wild man. Written literature does not pre-date mirrors; even the earliest script could have been held up to obsidian, copper or glass to reveal its secret reversals, its antipodes.

  The tale of Gilgamesh was so popular in antiquity, so widely known, that lost lines from it are still being discovered in one or other of the ancient languages of the Near East – Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Elamite, Hittite. It is a story, among other things,

  of he who crossed the ocean, the vast seas, to the rising sun,

  who explored the world regions, seeking life.

  It was he who reached by his own sheer strength Uta-napishti, the Faraway,

  who restored the sanctuaries that the Flood had destroyed!

  Or, as another commentator put it, Gilgamesh is about an ancient Middle Eastern king’s quest for immortality and his coming to terms with the inevitability of death. But it is also a primer on the ways in which a king should and should not rule and as such is open to political and social as well as philosophical and poetic readings.

  The young Gilgamesh, like a wild bull, lives carelessly, abusing his subjects, keeping sons from their fathers and daughters from their mothers, flagrantly exercising his seigniorial right to sleep with brides on their wedding nights. The women of Uruk complain to the gods, who decide to fashion Enkidu, a true wild man, half bull half human, to curb Gilgamesh’s excesses. Hairy Enkidu, made from a pinch of clay, born of silence, lives in a state of nature, running with gazelles and other wild animals, until he is seduced by Shamhat at the spring; after which the animals of t
he forest will have nothing more to do with him. When he confronts Gilgamesh, who is on his way to deflower another newly married virgin, the pair wrestle so violently they nearly demolish the surrounding buildings in the city of Uruk; subsequently they become friends, perhaps lovers.

  Adventures ensue. Gilgamesh, accompanied by Enkidu, defeats and destroys Humbaba, an ogre who guards a sacred cedar wood in the west; images of Humbaba were sometimes made out of the coils of sheep intestines. Then Gilgamesh, returning in triumph, spurns the sexual invitation of the goddess Ishtar; and kills the monstrous Bull of Heaven – perhaps a similitude of drought – she sends to avenge her honour. But Gilgamesh and Enkidu have by now so angered the gods that one of them must pay with his life: Enkidu, who dies after a series of ominous dreams of the underworld. Gilgamesh is distraught, afflicted by grief and by the fearful knowledge that his friend’s fate will also be his. He resolves to journey to the ends of the earth and seek the help of his ancestor Uta-napishti, the Faraway, a king who survived the great Flood and has been given the gift of immortality.

  On his journey to the east Gilgamesh first meets the Scorpion Beings who guard the gates to the twin-peaked Mount Mashu and watch over the rising and the setting of the sun. To look upon them is death, the epic says, but Gilgamesh, who is two thirds divine, convinces them to let him pass. He continues along the Road of the Sun, which is the path, perhaps a tunnel, under the earth that the sun takes from west to east during the night: Dense was the darkness, light there was none / neither what lies ahead nor behind can he see. He has twelve hours only to accomplish this journey and if he is still on the Road of the Sun when night comes, he will be consumed by fire. The sun, Shamash to the Babylonians, Utu in Sumerian, was the patron of travellers and a particular sponsor of Gilgamesh; but in this instance his presence is inimical.

  The hero outpaces the sun and arrives at a garden, perhaps the Garden of Eden, although it seems to be made mostly of stone; like one of Ezra Pound’s crystalline fantasies or a painting by Max Ernst:

  … the trees of the gods.

  A carnelian tree was in fruit

  hung with bunches of grapes, lovely to look on.

  A lapis lazuli tree bore foliage

  in full fruit and gorgeous to gaze on …

  There’s a lacuna in the text here and most of the rest of the description is lost. What remains, if anything, reinforces the sense of a stone garden: cypress … cedar … its leaf stems were of pappardilu stone … sea coral … sasu stone … instead of thorns and briars … stone vials … He touched a carob, it was abasahmu stone … agate and hematite …

  Here on a sea shore lives Shiduri, sometimes called a tavern-keeper; she is veiled, has a golden vat and is a deity associated with brewing or fermenting; some see her as a Circe figure because, as Circe did Odysseus, she shows Gilgamesh the way to the land of the dead. At first she takes him for a rogue hunter – he is filthy with blood and dirt and clothed in the skins of animals he has killed – bars her gate and goes up on to the roof of her house for sanctuary. He recites his exploits, speaks of his pain at the death of Enkidu and says that he wants from her the landmark so he can cross the sea: if not I will roam through the wilderness. In the old version of the story Shiduri tries to dissuade him, using the words later echoed in Ecclesiastes: fill your belly with good things, day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man. In the later version this advice is transferred to Uta-napishti himself, and Shiduri merely says that to cross the Waters of Death is impossible – no one has ever done it before, only the sun – then directs him to the ferryman, Ur-shanabi, and his mysterious Stone Ones.

  Ur-shanabi is picking a pine clean in the woods. Gilgamesh, with his axe and his dirk, improvidently rushes among the Stone Ones, breaks them up and throws them in the river: thereby destroying the only crew who can cross without harm the Waters of Death. Ur-shanabi, with startling equanimity, instructs Gilgamesh instead to cut and shape 300 long poles and bring them down to the boat. This he does and the two of them sail away, accomplishing a one-and-a-half-month journey in just three days. They reach the Waters of Death, where Gilgamesh must punt the boat along using the poles he has cut, for his hand will wither if it touches the water. It is as if they are crossing a lake of acid such as sometimes forms after volcanic eruptions: each pole is discarded once it has been used and, when they are all gone, Gilgamesh makes his own and Ur-shanabi’s shirts into sails, holding them up in his outstretched arms. The image of the two men, like castaways, is compelling and perplexes Uta-napishti, watching on the further shore of the Waters of Death.

  When Uta-napishti, the Faraway, a Noah figure, does meet Gilgamesh, he speaks these admonitory lines:

  No one can see death,

  no one can see the face of death,

  no one can hear the voice of death,

  yet there is savage death that snaps off mankind.

  For how long do we build a household?

  For how long do we seal a document?

  For how long do brothers share the inheritance?

  For how long is there to be jealousy in the land?

  For how long has the river risen and brought the overflowing waters,

  so that dragonflies drift down stream?

  The face that could gaze upon the face of the Sun

  has never existed ever.

  How alike are the sleeping and the dead …

  Uta-napishti then tells the story of the Flood and his consequent immortality, living with his wife at the Mouth of the Rivers. Gilgamesh must pass a simple test if he wishes for the same: he has to stay awake for six days and seven nights. Exhausted from his journey, he falls asleep immediately and, since humans are not to be trusted, Uta-napishti asks his wife to bake a loaf of bread for each day that Gilgamesh sleeps in order to prove to the hero that he has indeed dreamed away his chance at immortality. The state of the loaves – desiccated, stale, soggy, turned white, sprouting grey mould, fresh, still baking – will prove the length of the sleep.

  Gilgamesh is desolated when he awakes and realises what he has done, or not done. Uta-napishti is implacable and instructs Ur-shanabi to wash, groom, oil and dress Gilgamesh in fine clothes for the journey back to his city. At the last moment Uta-napishti’s wife intercedes and pleads with her husband to give the hero some gift to return home with. Uta-napishti relents and does tell Gilgamesh how to find a thing that is hidden. He opens a path to Apsu, the watery abyss that is under the sea, upon the margins of which is Aralu, the land of the dead; and Gilgamesh, with stones tied to his feet, plunges to the bottom of the ocean to pluck the herb – like a boxthorn / it has prickles like a dogrose. Unaccountably he loses it again when, on the way back to Uruk, the herb that makes old men young again is carried off by a snake while Gilgamesh is bathing at a spring. He returns to his city, whose great walls he rebuilds; and, in the older versions at least, becomes a judge of the dead in Aralu.

  THERE ARE MANY MYSTERIES and provocations in this story of the journey to the east. Where is or was the garden? Various real locations have been suggested, including Dilmun (Bahrain), where some think the Sumerians paused on their way west from the Indus Valley; India itself; Ceylon; or even a remote and lost antediluvian kingdom in South East Asia. The description does not sound much like the biblical Garden of Eden, since the trees are made primarily out of precious and semi-precious stones and Gilgamesh doesn’t show any inclination to eat the stone grapes or carobs. If anything, it resembles some of the fabulous imaginings of Sinbad’s voyages out of The One Thousand and One Nights – which may in turn descend from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

  And who are the Stone Ones, the ferryman’s crew whom Gilgamesh destroys? Most commentators pass over their strangeness in silence. They are reminiscent of the stone boats that the megalithic people of South East Asia said they came over the sea in; w
hose villages were typically constructed after the shape of a boat, with a house for the captain and another for the steersmen, a prow and a stern, a port and a starboard side. It’s curious too that Gilgamesh reaches the Waters of Death by travelling east, towards and then past the place where the sun rises: the Egyptians, the Greeks and all subsequent major cultures in the Western tradition locate the land of the dead in the other direction, where the sun sets.

  In keeping with the imagery of a stone garden, the ‘herb’ that Gilgamesh retrieves from the bottom of the ocean could be a piece of coral; although it has also been suggested, more persuasively, that it is a pearl he retrieves and that the sharp edges are those of the shell of an oyster or a clam. This interpretation is supported by the discovery in Bahrain, ancient Dilmun, of jars in which there are skeletons of snakes associated with beads of turquoise and, in a few cases, pearls that they had evidently swallowed. The tying of stones to their feet by Red Sea pearl divers is an historically attested fact.

  Much of this section of Gilgamesh – the journey to the east, the Stone Ones, the Waters of Death, Uta-napishti himself and the plucking of the herb from the bottom of the ocean – can be read as the first example in our literary tradition of the antipodes as that realm of the world, and of the imagination, which exists in contradistinction, in opposition, to everyday reality. Here, at the very start of writing, we find otherness figured both imaginatively and geographically as an antipodes. Gilgamesh travels in search of a physical immortality that eludes him; yet the tale of his adventures, persisting over five millennia, is itself a kind of immortality. More importantly, perhaps, the poem knows this is so. It is thus both a mirror of longing and a renunciation of it; both romance and anti-romance.