Gilgamesh

There is a famous story amongst Assyriologists. It concerns a man named George Smith, who was working at the British Museum in the mid-nineteenth century at the time our story takes place but who was by no means someone you’d expect to be working at the British Museum and studying and deciphering cuneiform tablets since he was, in fact, born in working class circumstances in London in 1840, and then worked for some years as a banknote and seal engraver and yet also managed, somehow, to teach himself Near Eastern history and also how to read Akkadian and Sumerian, which anyone who has ever looked at a cuneiform tablet will realize is not such an easy thing to do.

Anyway, George had been hired by the Museum as an assistant in the Antiquities Department and it was there that he came upon some fragments of cuneiform that contained, it so turned out, passages from the flood narrative in the ancient epic Gilgamesh. He’d read enough of the tablet fragments to realize that he’d stumbled on something extraordinary, but the tablets were dirty and George was waiting quite impatiently, he was known to be an excitable and impatient person, as the forthcoming story will surely only further confirm, and so after what must have been for him an excruciating wait for a person named Robert Ready to come back to the museum and do the official work of tablet-cleaning, George was finally able to read the fragments in their entirety and to realize that he was, indeed, in possession of the portions of Gilgamesh that record the Flood story.

According to witnesses, George said something like, “I’m the first person to read these lines for two thousand years.” He was overcome. The lines he was reading began like this:

O man of Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu,
Tear down (your) house, build a boat!
Abandon riches, seek life.
Despise possessions, save your life.

And then the story proceeds in detail very much like the Noah’s Ark story, which is obviously a later riff on the story in Gilgamesh. George became so, I don’t know, I suppose we should say overheated in his reading of these ancient lines that he started running around the room. He was physically affected by the fragments he was reading, by the import of these lines and presumably also by their power. He started making crazy noises and then, or so the story goes, he just began to tear his own clothes off. You can picture the scene, I think. We can picture it. Here is a person who suddenly realizes that he is the human being who will bring this eons lost story back into the light of human knowledge. These lines will live again. Something absolutely momentous has happened. And he is undone. He is overcome. He doesn’t know what to do and he is feeling it physically. He feels stripped down and so he realizes that he must actually strip down. The only action that makes any sense is just to strip himself naked.

We are speaking of ancient texts here. There’s another ancient text. It is far far less ancient than Gilgamesh and was written by Longinus sometime in the early period of the Common Era though also, truth be told, it was probably not written by Longinus but by someone else lost to history so that scholars sometimes refer to it as the text of Pseudo-Longinus. Whoever it was that wrote the text, it has come down to us as On The Sublime. On The Sublime is quite an odd little text, actually, made odder by the fact that we are missing long sections of it including the ending. Pseudo-Longinus makes some points along the lines of what we might call literary theory and his main object seems to be to describe and explain what it is that makes some pieces of writing sublime and other pieces of writing not sublime. He tries to come up with a sort of theory of the sublime in writing, I guess you could say. Except that there isn’t really much of a theory there. Just a bunch of examples, a bunch of fragments of text from Plato and Homer and Demosthenes and a bunch of other lesser known writers from antiquity. The famous poem by Sappho, for instance, is preserved in this text by Pseudo-Longinus.

All in all it’s not the most impressive work of literary criticism ever written and it gets quite dull at times. But one of the things that Pseudo-Longinus says, over and over, is that sublime writing, however exactly it comes to be, should be astounding in its results. It should make you crazy, he says. He doesn’t actually use the most obvious ancient Greek word for ‘crazy’ which would probably be some variation on manein but he does in fact use variations on the word ekplessein (knocked out of one’s senses) and ekplexis and thambos (astonishment and stupefaction). He says that sublime writing is like a thunderbolt and it knocks you on your ass (again, my paraphrase). We should indeed understand this physically. Sublime writing, according to Longinus, does not really go to your head. It goes to your gut and your insides in general. It is felt more than it is understood, if it is ever even understood.

This is a shocking theory, if you think about it and no pun intended. You could call this a profoundly anti-intellectual theory of literature and in the very literal sense it is. The intellect is not the arbiter here. Sublime writing is a gut punch.

Take the first few words of the afore-mentioned Gilgamesh (at least in the Standard Babylonian Version).

ša naqba īmuru

You could translate that as “he who saw the deep.” As a complete sentence it could be rendered as, “there was a man who saw the deep,” which is what Sophus Helle does in his fine new translation. The word naqba can have various implications, the totality, the hidden, the unknown. There was a man who saw something so incredible that it can’t really be said or explained, what he saw. Anyway, it is a first line so astounding as to knock you down and make you want to strip your clothes off, to be naked before it and to be undone by it, to have it go through you like a thunderbolt and never to be able to explain even to yourself exactly why.

Morgan Meis has a PhD in Philosophy and is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for n+1, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review and is a contributor at The New Yorker. He won the Whiting Award for non-fiction in 2013. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, and a winner of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. A book of Morgan’s selected essays can be found here. His books from Slant are The Drunken Silenus. The Fate of The Animals, and The Grand Valley He can be reached at morganmeis@gmail.com.