Commonplaces from Gilgamesh by Stuart Kendall
Posted on August 17th, 2023
Contemporary environmental writers, like Gary Snyder, delineate three ways of talking about the plac es human beings inhabit related to three spheres of human concern: the urban, the natural, and the wild. The urban sphere is a built world, shaped intensely by human hands. It is natural in the sense that all material things are part of nature, but it is not wild. The wild or the wilderness is a space beyond human control. XXVI
The earliest gods were numinous in the world; later gods were identified with or conceived on the model of kings, which is to say as being responsible for maintaining order; and still later, more recent gods were seen as abstract entities, principles organizing the world from behind the scenes. Through this development, the gods were progressive1y abstracted and exiled from the world, which became in its turn progressively disenchanted. XXVII
In Mircea Eliade's summation: "A complex symbolism, anthropocosmic in structure, associates woman and sexuality with the lunar rhythms, with the earth (assimilated to the womb), and with what must be called the 'mystery' of vegetation." XXVIII
Moreover, though ancient Mesopotamian languages possess numerous words for genitalia, none of these words carry a pejorative sense, the way that words like cunt and prick do in contemporary English. This obviously poses a translation problem. English words for female genitalia are either negative, like cunt, or scientific and clinical, like vulva. Our ironic age has lost the ability to speak of sexuality in a genuinely erotic way. Pornography, for us, has replaced the poetry of eroticism. XXIX
The gender codes at work here are familiar. The female is coded as being closer to nature than the male and as being unreliable and vindictive. This is a profoundly disturbing legacy from the earliest reaches of civilization. XXXII
If this part of the text does have an overall structure it is that of a visionary journey, a vision quest in which Gilgamesh travels through the three realms of the cosmos. He leaves the middle or human realm when he leaves Uruk. He travels through the under or netherworld when he runs through the mountain; he he tea the thieheartenin, stoneadia crosses and Water of Death. XXXIX
It is very difficult to be both a poet and an historian.
Charles Olsen, Mayan Letters 226
In my view, poetry is a form of writing that raises questions about itself. 230