Epic of Gilgamesh: Because of my brother I am afraid of death

Gilgamesh Cylinder Seal, Akkad 7th Century BC

"I will proclaim to the world the deeds of Gilgamesh.  This was the man to whom all things were known; this was the king who knew the countries of the world.  He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood.  He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour, returning he rested, he engraved on a stone the whole story."
-Opening lines on p61 in the Penguin Classics version of "The Epic of Gilgamesh"

Taking a brief detour from the Greek world in my ancient classics project I decided to read The Epic of Gilgamesh last night as compiled by N.K. Sandars (the quotes will not have line citations as this version is in prose form, condensed and unseparated into the tablets).  

As has become a habit, I want to comment on the introduction offered by the author.  I tend to skip such things in newer works, such as the Austin or Dostoevsky I've read this last year, because I am in part looking to be a surprised by the unfolding plot.  But here I bow to the inevitable that while context matters in all art, the oldest is often not even intelligible without it.  Simply to have it clarified how we know the story, from a collection of tablets spread over time, admittedly incomplete, and surrounded by an assumed cloud of mythology on the part of the reader, prepared me personally for the odd jumps and omissions I encountered.  

Yet truthfully, I cannot quite see the boundless glory that Sandars exalts Gilgamesh to throughout her introduction.  In particular it was the discussion of parallels and similarities with other epics that left me distinctly unsatisfied and left me feeling oversold.  On one hand she would propose with enthusiasm that many of the great stories of the Western world were in some sense direct descendants of Gilgamesh, and that if we could only trace it backward everybody from Odysseus to Gawain would have a bit of Gilgamesh in them... only to summarily withdraw it, admitting that such was just speculation.  Conversely, she would tantalize with the ideas of the hero cycle, only to not follow them through, and so exploring how the similarities and differences might be informative.  The result was frankly to not shed a great deal of light on either proposition.

If I may say this without sounding derogatory, it felt like compensation.  Gilgamesh is a relative newcomer on the scene, and its devotees must prove that it belongs in the long-accepted pantheon of epic travels alongside the Odyssey and the Aeneid.  So they pour out praises upon it, linking it to every possible story they can, almost like a sort of inverted lineage, where rather than proving descent from Zeus as qualification for hero-ship we now try to prove Zeus's validity by citing all the heroes he sired.  The actual details of that linkage, though, do not entirely matter; just need to have the reference to get the attention.

Yet I cannot help but point out the obvious: Gilgamesh is not the work of a single mind.  While Homer and Virgil drew from their culture, the ultimate product is the synthesis of a single mind.  But here we are faced with the product of many people having their best and worst collated by the Assyrian scribes, who if they're anything like today's scribes need not have any special brilliance, and now somewhat artificially assembled into a single narrative.  I can accept that in a long and rich oral tradition the best segments rise to the top and are retained, ensuring that this epic is far more than just a campfire story, but it reinforces in me the sense that a work of collective imagination will never quite have the lucid power of a single artist.  

Panel from Bull-Headed Lyre of Ur,
2550–2450 BC

Journey Start

Now, all this said I do not wish to give the impression I found Gilgamesh unworthy of time and thought.  Rather, it is prelude for explaining how I experienced it: in patches of brilliance interspersed with tracts of commonness. The first half in particular, from Gilgamesh's introduction to Enkidu's taming to their travels to the Cedar Forest, left me wanting something.  This passage demonstrates the problems well:

"...in three days they had walked as much as much as a journey of a month and two weeks.  They crossed seven mountains before they came to the gate of the forest.  Then Enkidu called out to Gilgamesh, 'Do not go down into the forest; when I opened the gate my hand lost its strength.'  Gilgamesh answered him, 'Dear friend, do not speak like a coward.  Have we got the better of so many dangers and traveled so far, to turn back at last?  You, who are tried in wars and battles, hold close to me now and you will feel no fear of death..."
-P76-7

It begins with an emphasis on the heroic mightiness of these men: they walk fifty leagues a day carrying some six hundred pounds of weapons and armor.  All good; just the sort of thing you would expect from a mythological hero story.  Then bizarrely when Enkidu shows reluctance Gilgamesh reminds him of all they've suffered thus far... in three days.  It is safe to assume that there are missing passages, the natural elaboration of this cultural adventure down the centuries, but nonetheless it feels a bit... kludge-y.  Even trying to stretch my imagination to accept that the mythological need not conform to mundane experiences, I cannot seem to get it to fit that they experienced great struggles and sorrows in such a short time while also keeping up an average speed of 23 kilometers an hour during daylight.  The effect falls completely flat.

This also impinges on Enkidu's story itself.  Sandars emphasizes that this story, like the Iliad, separates out from the misty heights of the past concrete individuals with personalities.  Yet here it feels so much more guided by epic expectations than psychology.  For instance, at least in the version I read Enkidu went straight from the wild to being Gilgamesh's friend, only to find that sitting around in the palace all day brought on ennui:

"I am weak, my arms have lost their strength, the cry of sorrow sticks in my throat, I am oppressed by idleness."
-P70

Hearing this, Gilgamesh proposes they should go on an adventure to immortalize their (or at least his) names.  But to reference above, where are all of Enkidu's exploits in wars and battles?  Sandars mentions there is a missing Enkidu cycle of its own, so presumably they exist there, but nonetheless this is no Ecclesiastes lamenting the pointlessness of everything he's done.  It seems more that Enkidu is feeling his vitality leaking away due to being pampered, something that just doesn't seem to flow from all his apparent missing adventures.  Again, pieces glued together.

However, beginning at about halfway something started to connect.  I think the turning point was Gilgamesh's speech over Enkidu's dying body:

"What is the sleep that holds you now?
You are lost in the dark and cannot hear me."

He touched his heart but it did not beat, nor did he lift his eyes again.
-p95

Perhaps it is my inherent morbidness, but when the epic turned from questing for glory to questing for an answer to death, and hence to life, I found it far more poignant.  Those lines above are so simple, but so direct; much goes into translation, but Sandars' rendition of them is truly poetic in their flow of thought.  Gilgamesh is talking his friend as he always has, then realizes that he is really just talking to himself, and the last line sadly confirms to him why this is.  The loss is painfully bare.

Now his subsequent journeys become wearisomely long.  Not for the reader, but for Gilgamesh; while they occupy no more page space than his previous escapades, they nonetheless have solemn weight to them, as well as the epicness I felt had been missing earlier.  He crosses the wilderness, goes through the endless dark mountain, wanders the fantastic garden of the edge of the world, then finally embarks on a boat beyond even that to reach his goal.  In this regard, I was far more moved than in the Odyssey (which I finished just before this and which will eventually get an entry here); perhaps less wild imagination with fewer Scyllas and Sirens, but a deeper, stronger sense of having truly touched the bounds of human reality.  And the theme of death throughout is expressed with a moving eloquence, with two lines in particular that stood out to me.

"Let my eyes see the sun until they are dazzled with looking.  Although I am no better than a dead man, still let me see the light of the sun."
-p100

Here is humanity's yearning.  Gilgamesh speaks this line not just to another human but to Shamash, the sun god, himself after being told to leave the god's garden.  To accept his lot and stop searching.  It is a sort of fatalistic defiance that is relevant millennia later.  Let him live!  He knows against hope that being mortal he can demand no more, really that he can demand nothing, but nonetheless he will demand of the universe that he at least be given this dignity.  

"Already the thief in the night has hold of my limbs, death inhabits my room; wherever my foot rests, there I find death."
-p115

And here is humanity's fear.  There is something in that last line in particular that draws me, conveying an image that I cannot fully articulate but which is nonetheless perfect.  It surpasses primitive anthropomorphism of death and expresses exquisitely the feeling of being haunted by one's own mortality; wherever one looks, inside every object one lays hands on and patch of ground one steps, the reminder is there that it will not always remain.  I wish I could do it more justice, but perhaps that is what the line itself is there for.  And though the story should climax with Utnapishtim, it was Siduri's wisdom that stayed with me afterward:

"Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to?  You will never find that life for which you are looking.  When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping.  As for you, Gilgamesh, 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."
-p102

In such circumstances I am careful to not read too much into these, knowing I am interpreting them through a vast matrix of my own, but nonetheless I am given pause.  Sandars says that this segment is to be understood as a simple injunction to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.  Just another expression of ancient fatalism and pessimism.   And of course, literally that's what it says.

...yet I feel like the way it is expressed is not so grim.  There is a sort of thoughtlessness, of purposeful shutting out of reality by gluttony and profligacy, that accompanies that attitude.  Yet the last line here, "for this too is the lot of man" has a quiet dignity to it.  In my first post on the Iliad I remarked on the separateness, and hence wholeness, of tragedy and wellness in the Greek view.  Perhaps that is this, yet unlike the completely unmitigated Greek pessimism I feel that by ending the speech with a phrase that wraps up the good and evil together, both being the lot of man, it brings some measure of peace to it.  Though perhaps not a final answer, it is nonetheless moving to me, like an ancient version of mindfulness.  It just doesn't have the language yet beyond the physical good to express something more.

Tablet fragment of Epic of Gilgamesh

Journey End

"This too was the work of Gilgamesh, the king, who knew the countries of the world.  He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood.  He went on a long journey, was weary, worn out with labour, and returning engraved on a stone the whole story."
-p117

As the reader may have noticed, this essay somewhat humorously reflects the nature of its subject material.  I began it with a sort of brash confidence.  Part of my attitude as I explore art is to not be afraid of forming an opinion, to reflect honestly and therefore not credulously praising every "masterpiece" put before me.  Sandars' introduction being what it was, it only inspired me to write a bit of a repudiation; I would love to not only form a view here, but show off that I could separate the wheat from the chaff.  In this case, however, Gustave Flaubert caught up with me:

"The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe."

As I made my own journey further into writing, I came upon death and afterward I found to my surprise expressions of genuine pathos flowing from my fingertips.  I do not know where these sentiments had been hiding, but there they were: after all my proud words to the contrary, I was moved.  At first I thought that perhaps I ought to go back and scrap this essay, or redact the earlier portions, but I have decided to leave the whole story where it is.  I think that accepting some public chagrin is a small price to pay for chronicling my own development.  Too bad blogs are not as permanent as stones to engrave it on.

This experience brings to mind a similar one I had once before while watching an anime franchise named Aria.  It has three seasons, and I admit that aside from a single episode (S1, Ep11) I found the first two simply a wash of sentimentality and banal optimism.  Truthfully I finished them largely because they're the favorite of a friend and I think understanding somebody's favorite art is one of the best ways of understanding them.  But then I reached the third season and somehow in a way it lifted the other two up and made the entire product feel whole; the quotidian earlier portions suddenly found their place as part of an invisible journey, and while I cannot say that I will ever truly love Aria, nonetheless I have a strange fondness for it because of this exposure.

Here is the same.  My views on the early part of the epic are still roughly the same; they still feel fragmentary, simplistic, and dependent on being awed by the mightiness of larger-than-life figures.  Yet now I realize that my discounting was embarrassingly premature.  The good times with their blithe confidence are necessary, for without this initial life-ful-ness we could not appreciate the weight of the later search to reclaim them from death.

For me, then, the final delight was found in the last lines of the epic (if one excludes the Death of Gilgamesh, which is an appendation anyway).  It is a reflection, near-identical, of what began the poem.  At the time it meant nothing to me; my eyes slid over it, taking it in as just the sort of preamble every myth is required to start with.  Nothing to be gained.  But coming at the end now, it was a powerful bookend.  Before we were just told Gilgamesh was great, but we didn't really know what that meant.  Now at the end, the same words sat side by side, we know all of what went into them, for it is only after such journeys that we know what certain words truly mean.

Sound and Fury, together signifying more

 Terracotta amphora with kithara player,
attributed to the Berlin Painter, c490 B.C.

"What is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing or too mysterious - these things can be sung and only be sung."
- Kenneth Clark, Civilisation

I just had the enjoyable experience of watching a short video on the recreation of Greek music where in it they discuss not only some of the technical details, but more broadly brought home the point that Greek poetry was meant to be sung, often to music.  Now I knew this fact before the video, but I realize now it had not quite percolated into my mind in its full implications.

As I have been reading Homer I am at times suddenly... annoyed by how he seems to melodramatically dawdle in his lines.  I do not mean merely the repetition of epithets, which has its own metric basis, nor in a difference of modern expectation, where we have much less the patience of his original audience.  Instead it just seemed as though he were tossing out impromptu speeches, turns of phrase that seemed just a bit of out place and sought to soar higher than I felt warranted.  It was like people breaking spontaneously into song in a musical, something I admit I never had much sympathy for either.

But on reaching the part at 13:15 where the choir begins to sing a portion of Euripides' Orestes, it just clicked.  There is a quote I scavenged from MacIntyre's After Virtue that describes it well:

"The relationship of our beliefs to sentences that we only or primarily sing, let alone to the music which accompanies those sentences, is not at all the same as the relationship of our beliefs to the sentences that we primarily say and say in an assertive mode."

Singing Orestes' lament as he was fleeing from the Furies made all the difference.  Had I read those lines I might have been somewhat impressed by the imagery, but in the context of the music one can hear the running.  The frightening pursuit, the way the lament is dashed off, as one would bemoaning internally, had the proper power.

But I don't want to give the impression that's the full of it.  There's something else, both in that quote and in the experience, that was over and above the contents of the sentence.  I'm not quite sure what it is, but reflecting backward I can suddenly see how this element of Homer makes such sense now, that one should be walking, pacing, bending up and down and gesticulating in some of these scenes as they are narrate, and I realize why I took such delight in saying the first lines of the Iliad out loud. 

---

p.s. Is it not remarkable that we can reconstruct these things? A few marks on a page, a sketch on a vase, and back it comes to life - Attic Park, featuring extinct sounds rather than dinosaurs.  Although perhaps that metaphor is better reserved to a (rather humorous) reconstruction I once saw of Neanderthal vocal qualities.  Nonetheless, information is everywhere - we just need to know how to read it (TASFAD on the Morrison Formation).