Lecture Two

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  1. Ondaatje
  2. death
  3. communality
  4. the other, the double, dopleganger
  5. reflection
  6. identity
  7. double bind - protector and pariah
  8. amoral
  9. moral
  10. the self suddenly perceived as an exotic other
  11. questioning absoultist definitions of identity by embracing the other
  12. zenophobia
  13. diversity, multiculturalism, seperateness, unity

Ondaatje

  • Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion takes its title from The Gilgamesh Epic, a Babylonian text less generally known to educated readers than Homer's epics.
  • Ondaatje's novel begins with an epigraph from the ancient work that identifies the intertext and specifies grief for a dead friend as a key similarity:
  • "The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion."
  • In the epic, Gilgamesh, grieving for his dead friend, goes in search of Utnapishtim, a Noah-figure, who has been given everlasting life.
  • A number of episodes in Ondaatje's novel suggest scenes in the ancient epic.
  • On his quest to find out why his friend Enkidu has died, Gilgamesh visits the garden of the gods and tells a woman, Siduri, of his grief and his quest.
  • Similarly, Patrick hides on an island during his quest to avenge the death of Alice Gull and thinks of telling a blind woman he meets in a garden there of his love and grief: "Alice Gull, he could say, who once pushed her hands up against the slope of a ceiling and spoke of a grand cause, who leapt like a live puppet into his arms, who died later on a bloody pavement, ruined in his arms" (171).
  • Urshanabi ferries Gilgamesh across the waters of death to visit Utnapishtim, who tells him the story of the great Flood; then Gilgamesh sleeps in his presence before beginning his return journey.
  • Patrick, after being ferried to the intake of the water works by Caravaggio, tires himself by swimming through the intake tunnel and setting explosives; then, after telling Commissioner Harris the story of Alice Gull's death (for the first time telling the full story, the one that implicates himself), he falls asleep in Harris's presence, evoking the novel's second quote from The Gilgamesh Epic as Harris identifies the character of Patrick Lewis with Gilgamesh:6
  • He stood over Patrick. "He lay down to sleep, until he was woken from out of a dream. He saw the lions around him glorying in life; then he took his axe in his hand, he drew his sword from his belt, and he fell upon them like an arrow from the string." (242)
  • Gilgamesh's fight with the lions in the night is both an act of self-preservation and an act of anger that the beasts still enjoy life while Enkidu is dead.
  • Similarly, Patrick Lewis's attempt on Commissioner Harris's life and the Waterworks grows out of his anger at Harris's continued success and power while Patrick's love, Alice Gull, is dead.
  • Harris retains his power as he orders the explosives removed, but, in recognizing Patrick as Gilgamesh, he recognizes the power and importance of the workers, the underlings; the unknown man who fails in his subversive mission, whom Harris previously designated as "among the dwarfs of enterprise who never get accepted or acknowledged" (238), is now identified as a hero.
  • The Odysseus returning myth relates Canadian experience to universal experience (Woodcock, MacLennan 53); the mythic journey reinforces the "'journey' of a country towards the point of self-consciousness in which it meets and recognizes its own identity" (Woodcock, MacLennan 60).
  • Linking the Halifax explosion and The Odyssey implies that the focal point of the tradition of western civilization that began in ancient Greece and has continued unbroken has now crossed the Atlantic to Canada:
  • Why was he glad to be back? It was more than a man could ever put into words. It was more than the idea that he was young enough to see a great country move into its destiny.
  • It was what he felt inside himself, as a Canadian who had lived both in the United States and England.
  • Canada at present was called a nation only because a few laws had been passed and a railway line sent from one coast to the other.
  • In returning home he knew that he was doing more than coming back to familiar surroundings.
  • For better or worse he was entering the future, he was identifying himself with the still-hidden forces which were doomed to shape humanity as certainly as the tiny states of Europe had shaped the past. Canada was still hesitant, was still ham-strung by men with the mentality of Geoffrey Wain.
  • But if there were enough Canadians like himself, half-American and half-English, then the day was inevitable when the halves would join and his country would become the central arch which united the new order. (218)
  • MacLennan says that, when he first thought of writing Barometer Rising,
  • Canada was virtually an uncharacterized country. It seemed to me then that if our literature was to be anything but purely regional, it must be directed to at least two audiences.
  • One was the Canadian public, which took the Canadian scene for granted but had never defined its particular essence.
  • The other was the international public, which had never thought about Canada at all, and knew nothing whatever about us. ("Potted Palm" 187)

The discovery of the Tablets of Ninaveh

  • One afternoon in 1872 in a dusty room of the British Museum
  • A young curator, who had been studying a number of tablets shipped back by an ameteur archeologist from the recently uncovered ruins of King Asure Beny Pal's library in Nineveh
  • Suddenly began to tear of his clothes and dance around the tables in an extasy of Joy
  • to the restrained astonishment of his colleagues
  • The name of this excitable curator was George Smith
  • and the reason for his excitement was that he suddenly realized that he was reading a portion at least of the caldeian account of the delluge
  • spurred on by this find Smith began to look for other fragments of this account among the thousands of similar tablets and eventually after long and heavy work was able to piece together a Mesopotanian version of the story of Noah's flood
  • Which he presented at the meeting for biblical archeology
  • Smith though that he haad discovered truth if truth was necessary of the bibles truth

Shin Lakey Unini

  • we know today that the Ninaveh tablets, written in an acadian dialect, in the second mellenium BCE
  • were penned by a scholar priest Shin Lakey Unini who probably colated a number of older acadian texts themselves based on ancient Samarian originals
  • Like Homer Shin Lakey Unini may have truly existed or he may have been a literary invention an author created by later readers to to justify a collosal poem
  • whichever the case, his work the Epic of Gilgamesh is both the story of man and a city
  • How a man, King Gilgamesh came to know who he was, and who a city, Oruk became not only magnificent but Just

The epic begins - 6.19

  • the epic starts with an exhortation to the reader
  • handing over to us across the many centuries the responsibility of learning
  • You and I, the Poet begins, must enter the city of Oruk
  • and must seek in its foundation a copper box containing the lapislazary tablets
  • on which the story of Gilgamesh is written
  • this as far as we know is the earliest book within a book device in the history of literature
  • Here all stories begin
  • now we come to the crux

The story begins

  • Gilgamesh is the strongest of men huge, hansom, radient perfect
  • one third human and two thirds devine
  • but Gilgamesh is also a tyrant
  • who abuses his authority oppressing the men and raping the women
  • unable to bear his injustice any longer the people of Oruk call up to Heaven for reparation
  • The gods hear their complaint
  • and understand that for Gilgamesh to become just he requires a counterpart
  • someone who will balance the abuse of royal power so that peace will return to the city

The creation of Enkidu

  • the wild man
  • who as the mirror image of Gilgamesh is 2/3rds animal and one third human
  • strong but gentle
  • living among the beasts whom he also protects
  • Enkidu has no knowledge of his own humanity and natural sense of justice

the discovery of Enkidu

  • one day a young trapper discovers Enkidu in the forest
  • Terrified he tells his father he has seen a savage creature
  • who eats grass a drinks from the water hole and frees the animals from the trappers snares
  • Go to Oruk, his father says, go to Gilgamesh tell him what happened and then follow his advice
  • he will know what to do
  • Gilgamesh orders the trapper to seek out the Priestess Shamat
  • and to take her into the forest
  • there she is to strip naked and lie with her legs apart
  • until Enkidu appears
  • enticed by Shamats charms Enkidu will surrender
  • the trapper obeys and the priestess does as she is told
  • the epic of Gilgamesh contains the first account of Beauty and the Beast
  • everything comes to pass as Gilgamesh has foreseen
  • Enkidu and shamat make love for seven days
  • afterwards the animals shy away from him
  • having gained the beginnings of self awareness Enkidu has lost his animal innocence
  • he now knows that he is human and the animals know it to
  • Dressed in one of Shamats robes, his hair cut, his body washed and oiled Enkidu is taken into the city to confront Gilgamesh

the dream

  • in the mean time Gilgamesh has a dream
  • a star shoots across the sky and falls beneath him like a huge boulder
  • he tries to lift it but it is too heavy
  • so he embraces it and caresses it
  • there the dream ends
  • Gilgamesh's mother explains the dream to him
  • the boulder is a dear friend a mighty hero
  • whom Gilgamesh will take in his arms and caress the way a man caresses a women
  • he will be your double your second self she tells him
  • may the dream come true

these words, may the dream come true are important, signalling that something in Gilgamesh himself, some uncontcious stirring in his mind, desires the union with the other

the two counterparts meet 10.59

  • So Enkidu challenges Gilgamesh and the two strong men fight
  • limbs intertwined each huge body struggling to break free from the others embrace
  • at last Gilgamesh succeeds in overthrowing Enkidu and succeeds at pinning him on the ground
  • then Gilgamesh fulfills his dream
  • he takes Enkidu in his arms and the two men embrace and Kiss
  • they held hands like brothers the walked side by side
  • they became true friends
  • their adventures begin
  • now that they are two they can face all the dangers that threaten the city state
  • among them a fierce monster called Oumbaba
  • a creature both outside the civilized circle of Gilgamesh and the natural circle of Enkidu
  • a demon who deep inside the forest attacks the people of Oruk on their travels
  • to vanquish Oumbaba Gilgamesh and Enkidu support each other and calm eachothers fears
  • fear breed by civilization is tempered by the knowledge of the natural world vice a versa
  • each man drawing strength from his own experience and intuition

love and revenge

  • after killing the monster the goddess Ishta falls in love with Gilgamesh but Gilgamesh rejects her
  • as a punishment she begs he father the God Anew to send down the bull of heaven to kill the two friends
  • The god complies with his daughters wishes but Gilgamesh adn Enkidu prove stronger than the beast, and kill it.
  • because there is as little justice in heaven then as now
  • The gods decide that by killing the bull the friends have insulted them
  • and that one of the two heros must die
  • Enkidu is chosen as the victim
  • But Gilgamesh will not resign himself to the lose of his beloved and moaning like a dove descends into the underworld in an attempt to bring him back to life
  • here he speaks to the souls of the departed
  • and is told from the lips of a mesopotanian noah the story of the flood (that is the fragment that is deciphered by George Smith)
  • but now deprived od his companion Gilgamesh can no longer accomplish great deeds
  • empty handed he returns to his city

Gilgamesh's lament

  • and yet this return is not a defeat
  • in the sequence of magical events that make up the adventure
  • Gilgamesh has acquired a deep knowledge of the meaning of death
  • not only that it is our unvoidable common lot
  • but that its communality extends to life itself
  • that our life is never individual but that it is endlessly enriched by the presence of the other
  • and consequently imporverished by his absence
  • alone we have no name and no face, no one to call out to us and no reflection in which to recognize our own features
  • it is only after Enkidu dies that Gilgamesh realizes the extent to which Enkidu is part of his own identity
  • oh Enkidu, Gilgamesh weeps you were the axe at my side in which my arm trusted
  • a knife in my sheath, a shield i carried, my glorious robe, the wide belt around my loins,
  • and now a harsh fate has torn you from forever

the double bind of reflecting protagonists

  • if the Epic of Gilgamesh carries a teaching it is that the other makes our existence possible
  • a double bind illuminates and enriches the reflected protagonists
  • Gilgamesh and Enkidu are the prototype
  • since the history of literature can be read as the history of such bindings (amorous couples, friends, colleagues, enemies, master and servant teacher and pupil)
  • the combinations are many and never eclvusively of one kind
  • throughout our literature and infinity of charcters oppose, compliment, instruct and struggle against eachother on the pages of our books
  • in Europe in the 18th and 19th century the fear instilled by the growing mechanization of activity
  • fear that our humanity would be replaced by a growing simulacrum
  • gave birth to the other as the tangiable presence of a hidden self
  • the other seen not as foreign not as someone else from whome we can distance our own identity
  • nor as a flattering reflection of an idealized self portrait
  • but as the secret ultimately unknowable interior
  • the dark side of the heart
  • the other became the doupleganger or double he had the features of the protagonist but perserved his opposite identity that of a shadow being
  • In 1839 Edgar Allen Poe published a story, William Wilson in which both the actions and thoughts of the mirrored protagonists diverge and then coalesce he begins as one splits into two and is united once again in the end when the double, my antagonist, Poe calls him, says to the self who has just killed him
  • you have conquered and i yield, yet hence force you are dead dead to the world, to heaven and to hope, in me didst thou exist and in my death see by this image which is thine own who utterly hath thou murdered thy self

privacy: the critique of privacy, self deprication, idealized self portrait fueled by ignorence and lack of information

  • this final terrible lesson must be ours
  • the other through whose presence we become aware of our own being is transformed by us into our enemy at the cost of our life
  • since whatever we do to him we do to ourself
  • this is the lesson of Gilgamesh for who Enkidu's death must be mourned by the whole world
  • since he was part of the world as he is part of Gilgamesh

the double 18.00

  • now the nature of the double is ambiguious
  • someone identitcal to and yet unlke us
  • the image in a mirrror in which left is right and right is left
  • the double is human and yet not entirely so
  • of flesh and blood and with and element of unreality
  • because we fail to recognize or identify everyone of his actions
  • for Gilgamesh the double is Enkidu civilized into friendship
  • but he is also Enkidu the wildman familiar with the woods and the rocks
  • he is our neighbour our equal but also the foreigner the one who does things differently
  • has a different colour or speaks a different language
  • to better differentiate us from him we exagerate his superficial characteristics

the first doubles 1830

  • the first doubles were merely monsters
  • other men and women who nature had granted different attributes from ours
  • even outside fiction these early doubles where carefully accounted for (Pleny the Elder)

lesergonians, aremapsy, cinosopoly

Dogmen

  • the american scholar David Gordon White noted that with the addition of new material
  • the specific names of Alexander's monstorous enemies was revised to fit current events
  • so that the monstorous other would be brought up to date with each new edition
  • in this way the Dogmen of the Alexander romance, according to the time of the edition would come to be assoociated with many real and imagined races
  • the tactics for domesticating the wildmen are notably the same in both stories
  • they are nevertheless human
  • and considered children of God since anyone born of Adam and is rational and capable is capable of being taught god's word
  • the Dogmen were blessed with the head of a familiar and loyal creature
  • perhaps a man with another head would have been more difficult to embrace
  • there was something reassuringly domestic about it
  • 5th century ethiopic story tells of how St. Andrew and St. Barts traveling among the parthians converted a Dogman to Christianity, the Dogman's name was changed to christian or Christopher and the this Giant man carried the Baby Jesus across a river and became civilized as St. Christopher the giant saint who carried the baby jesus across the river
  • and changes like Enkidu into a civilized white man
  • the dog as both terrifying and helpful

dual function of the dogmen

  • according to a talmudic interpretation of genisis, when cain is banished from eden God gives him a dog
  • the dog is to both protect him against wild beasts and mark him as a sinner
  • the dog is marked with the double quality of both pariah and protector
  • but do not lend the dog a moral quality that only humans can possess

the benefits of the amoral dogman

  • when the nature of the dog becomes that of the human being and the race of the dogmen appear
  • it acquires a similar a moral not immoral quality
  • the dogmen's actions are not faulty
  • they are merely outside the moral realm
  • in any given society this is a useful quality for a foreigner to have
  • since he can serve the citizens by doing deeds, that a member in that society would be considered contrary to morals and therefore forbiddon

back to Gilgamesh, the mixture of the dogmen with politics

  • this incorporation of the exotic into the familiar
  • happened without reference to the political circumstances within which the story took place

the other, politics, amoral, moral, identity

  • in later tellings however, these circumstances become pivotal
  • and the story of what is outside and what is inside acquires certain historical features
  • so prevelant is this theme that literature can be read as a continious chronical of the resolution and restatement of a defining opposition
  • since everytime a new identity is created a new exclusion to that identity is simultaniously defined (in and out group)
  • every home bred Gilgamesh requires its exotic Enkidu
  • exotic - that which is not contained within the city walls
  • For Europeans the idea of home of what lies inside

so technology will never displace the city,

loving technology has made me painfully aware of its limitations

creating physical spaces that are close together enriches life

having organizations that are visible, and well organized without a interface enriches and simplifies life

  • coincided with the idea of the west, outside was all the rest the unfamiliar the uncanny
  • from the orient came everything strange and forbiddenous senseous - the temptation of the exotic

the crusades: the dual consequences of mirrored others

  • wanting to reclaim what they claimed as the assured properties of christiandom
  • but there were also attempt to wall in the outside of the strange orient
  • to domesticate the exotic
  • the arab amazement of the brutality and senselessness of these crusading invaders
  • stems in part from a reflection in a mirror
  • the self suddenly perceived as an exotic other
  • who becomes in turn another percieving self
  • the image of the west as a land of mortal danger for muslims casts a long shadow

Al Watan

  • march 2007
  • warns young Saudis who study in the west via government grant
  • must take a course on the dangers that await them in non islamic lands
  • such absurd arguments, said Alwatan, stem in part from attempts to demonize "the other"
  • to divide the world into muslim and non muslim territories
  • is an open contradiction with the reality of the modern world in which different populations mingle
  • a world in which different populations mingle
  • perhaps this is one of the reasons we are together
  • Why Gilgamesh and Enkidu once sought each other out

multiculturalism, through historical examples he undresses the current global pendulumn shift toward protectionism and isolationism, Sarkozy, Brown, Bush, Licenses,Saudi

  • in a land that today seems destined for anything but togetherness
  • a land that is today relentessly drifting
  • into a land that is descending into a patchwork of families and tribes

Re-enter Oruk

  • a land where Enkidu continues to die and Gilgamesh continues to mourn
  • forgetting that once upon a time they stood side by side in their adventures
  • but what of a society in which all this takes place
  • Enkidu's death and Gilgamesh's lement are not the final moments in the poem
  • framing their adventures at the beginning and at the end is the unity of Oruk - which no city on Earth can equal
  • in what ways do the deeds of its heros the King inside its walls and the wild man outside them help us understand the character of the imperial metropolis
  • how does an epic of the coming together with artificial civilization and the natural world become the history of the city state itself
  • it is as if for the Author of the epic, Enkidu's sacrifice and Gilgamesh's sorrow were required for the cities greater glory
  • as if the adventures of the two friends in some mysterious way increased Oruk's power and prestige
  • granting it in the process a heroic identity
  • that of a double in stone and mortor
  • Enkidu Dies, Gilgamesh suffers, but the city of Oruk flourishes
  • since at the start the purpose of the Epic was to restore Justice to the city
  • the poem has afterall a happy ending

Gilgamesh's marching orders

  • because what the poet tells us is that after the ordeals and adventures after the revelation and the loss
  • after the splendor and the loss the the king must do two things preserve the splendor of the city and tell his own story
  • both tasks are complementry both speak to the intimate connection between building a city of walls and a city of words
  • and both require, to be accomplished the existence of the other

stories

  • all stories are interpretations of stories
  • no reading is innocent
  • The 19th century discovers of the Ninaveh tablets, George Smith and his colleagues
  • chose to read the epic of Gilgamesh as an endorsement of the biblical account of western societies beginnings
  • the core tale of the epic, the questioning of a monarchs rights, had for them little relevance

blinded by the dominant discourse of the day

  • In Queen Victoria's realm the story of the king who learns humanity from a wild other
  • and builds with him a powerful friendship must have seemed almost incomprehensiable
  • When Kipling in an effort to instruct his fellow englishment on the extent and variety of the British Empire asked the question
  • What should they know of England who only England knows? - he wasn't being merely ironical
  • low all our pomp of yesterday he warned, is one with Ninaveh entire
  • But, Gilgamesh's Ninaveh is not the one in which the English choose to see their mirror

xenophobias

xenophobic, protectionist, isolationist

  • most of Victoria's subjects endorsed a definition of England based on the exclusion of everything and everyone not English
  • Not English, Said the pompous mr. Potsnap in Dicken's, our mutural friend
  • whenever he doesn't understand something
  • and with a way of his arms dismisses away anything which lay outside his little sphere of knowledge
  • defined through exclusion depicted as both foreigner and mirror image
  • accused of both being a wild man and never being able to be one with the acknowledged members of the city
  • Enkidu in his many incarnations continues to live his suspiciously existence
  • simultaneously outside and inside the city walls through out the world

contemporary examples

  • more than a century after the reign of Queen Victoria
  • faced with a growing number of young British Muslims declaring their allegiance not to Great Britain but to the faith of Islam
  • Bliar imposed Mr. Potsnaps method and in January 2007
  • decreed that schools were to insist on the notion of "Britishness"
  • That is to say that instead of allowing for an Islamic perspective to become part of the multiplicity of perspectives already intrinsic in what Britishness might mean
  • Norman, Saxen, Franc, Soctish, Irish, Welsh, protestant, Catholic, and so on
  • The government decided to limit the concept of Britishness to a quality of generalized local colour

when identity becomes static, muted, inflexible it is dead, dead to the world, to heaven and to hope

  • to the kind implored in tourist propaganda
  • to the concept of multiculturalism, Blair's government imposed that to mono-culturalism
  • in which all cultures are suppose to blend but in which practically only the dominant culture has a voice
  • what was wrong with multiculturalism, said the now Prime Minister Gordon Brown, using the past tense in a demonstration of wishful thinking,
  • was not the recognition of diversity but that it overemphasized separateness at the cost of unity
  • Brown proposed Unity at the cost of multiplicity

overlooked in the hustle and bustle of the school and working Year over the holidays I waded through this years massey lectures
The essays freely distributed in non propriety way with which I can manipulate easily to my own ends and devices
if there is any way to encourage the CBC to continue and expand this service i love to know how.

  • identifying a national us as a means not to identify with them whoever the other might be.
  • the point Brown missed is that it is not the separateness that is detrimental to unity but the labeling of the separate others as inimical
  • Brown's attempt to construct a separate identity has been echoed in several other countries
  • notably in France where Sarkozy on March 8th 2007 the creation of a ministry of immigration and national identity
  • thereby neatly coupling in one institution what is to be walled out and what is to be walled in

the ancient scholar

  • a wiser man than either Sarkozy or Brown
  • active in an earlier multicultural society
  • that of Alexandria third century BCE
  • proposed a different way of considering the problem of seperateness

seperatness, identity, other,

  • Aritostinease of Cyrean employed in the Great Library of Alexandria
  • composed in his old age a philosophical essay now unfortunately lost
  • but of which a few fragments have been perserved in the works of later writers
  • one of these fragments, quoted almost four centuries later by geographer Strabos
  • has this to say about the notion of other
  • toward the ends of Aritostoneases book, says Strabos, the Author rejects the principal of the twofold division of the human race
  • that of Greek and Barbarian
  • and disapproves of the advice given to Alexander that he treat all Greek's as friends and all barbarians as enemies
  • it is better he writes to employ as a division critieria the qualities of virtue and dishonesty
  • many Greeks are dishonest and many barbarians enjoy a refined civilization such as the people of India, the Romans, carthiginans, and the Arians,

return to contemporary analogy

  • For Brown and Sarkozy assimilation and exclusion are the only methods to ensure the survival of a societies identity
  • a policy of open identity, a society that accepts the measure of its own evolution
  • is in their eyes too dangerous because that society might be transformed out of all recognition
  • from their perspective Oruk will only be Oruk is Enkidu is not allowed to live as Enkidu within its walls
  • for them the other must renounce his own identity or remain forever alien to us
  • in fact the other, as other, must not be allowed to remain part of us since union with that other is suppose to have terrible consequences
  • Sarkozy and Brown have co-opted the moral of certain ancient legends
  • according to which the mere presence of the double means certain death
  • we of course must never identify with the other side
  • we are the vrituous ones and Aritostonease's distinction must not be taken into account in our case
  • otherwise we might find ourselves among the ranks of those displaying negative and uncivilized qualities

the other in 19th Century Literature

  • 1886 - 10 years after Smith's covorting in the British Museum
  • Robert Lewis Stevenson published the strange tale of Dr. Jeckle and Mr. Hide
  • perhaps the most accomplished of all stories about the multiplicity of identitie
  • in which the terror of the other is made explicit as the terror of what is in ourselves
  • Nicolas Rankin - notes that is not by chance - that between the letter H for Hide and J for Jeckle is the letter I
  • 4 years later Oscar wilde explored the same notion in his Portrait of Dorian Gray
  • while with Stevenson the two seperate selves converge in the end back to their common self - the ambitious Dr. Jeckle
  • In Wilde the never aging dorian and his constantly decaying portrait are condemned on the final pages to two seperate faits
  • that of a haggard wizzen Dorian and that of his youthful portrait

i want to know the modern times so i want to know the modern writers, Ondaattje.

  • in both stories, however, it is suggested that our intimate fears of self revelation require in order to be exercised the expulsion of this unexplored identity
  • the banishment of the other, the bad other, to somewhere outside the city walls

contrast 19th century with Gilgamesh

  • the epic of Gilgamesh proposes a healing of these fears
  • a recalling of that which we are afraid to acknoweldge
  • in order to work and live in its presence
  • Gilgamesh becomes a full individual only by joining forces with the wild Enkidu
  • so that the egotistical ambitions of civilized man
  • become tempered by the wisdom of the uncivilized one
  • and the city a place of social intercourse acquires its identity by defining itself through a sort of conglomorate individuality
  • this is what centuries later will become defined as a social contract
  • the passing from a pregovernmental state of nature to one in which humans benefit from mutual support
  • what the epic of Gilgamesh suggests is two fold
  • on the one hand, that civilization must find in what lies outside whatever, contrasts and enriches its social and cultural identity
  • on the other, that the community must be healed from its inner evils by setting up rules and regulations enforcing their obedience
  • Gilgamesh the tyrant becomes Gilgamesh the hero through the appearnce of Enkidu the wild man
  • an Enkidu the wildman becomes the unwitting civilizer a citizen of Oruk subject to its laws (parallel with immigrants)
  • Gilgamesh is himself when he is with another
  • the city is itself by enclosing itself including its King within the circle of its legislation
  • Oruk is the physical catelogue of Urban conquests
  • with which the poem concludes its praise of the city

the palm trees, the gardens, the orchards, the glorious palaces, and temples, the shops and market places, the houses and public squares,

  • all ruled by the same law but at the same time it must not forget the wilders beyond where its laws hold no power
  • the identity of the city because of the laws that define it
  • depends on some sort of banning and exclusion
  • the individual identity requires the reverse a constant measure of inclusion
  • a story reminding Gilgamesh that in order to know who one is we need two

French story

  • In the 16th century Michelle DeFontaine
  • attempted to understand the reasons that move us to be together
  • whether we be friegtheningly different or attractively similar
  • in the municipal library of Bordeaux is a copy of Demontagne's essays annotated in his hand
  • with corrections for the Printer
  • which DeMOntagne kept at his bed side to revise at his liesure
  • in the first book in essay 28
  • he had written about his relationship with Atien delabousie
  • a dear friend who had died at the age of 33
  • and whose loss Fontaine had felt so deeply
  • in the friendship of which i am speaking, Fontaine says, souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam that joins them together so that it can not be found
  • According to Montaine in this kind of relationship the seperation between i and the other is not denied
  • each perserves intact his individuality and uniqueness
  • only that the seam that unites them and is consequently what divides one being from the other
  • cannot be found in the eyes of the observer
  • it remains undetected and therefore unlabeled
  • free from the possibility of prejudice
  • this distinct invisibility, this evident but indefinble seperateness that links two individuals in affectionate concern for one another is what a fluid multifaceted society may strive for
  • not only between two but all of its members
  • before jumping to the conclusion that such relationships are impossible
  • on so large a scale, let us ask, in what does it consist exactly this as if seamless relationship
  • Montagne confesses that he finds it impossible to give an answer
  • if you press me to say why i loved him
  • i feel it cannot be expressed
  • this is how the paragraph of text ends in all the essay up to 1588
  • but then in 1592 shortly before its death
  • Montagne found a sort of answer
  • and scribbled it on the right side margain of the printed book
  • after it cannot be expressed , he wrote in his elegant script
  • except by replying that because it was him
  • that is to say because of those qualities that identified his friend and yet remained ineffable because of what lent him existence and not because of their perceived difference
  • but because of his intrinsic qualities
  • and then a few days or months later
  • as if the full notion has suddenly been reveal to him
  • Montagne added five more words in a hurried hand and in a different ink
  • so that today we can read the whole sentence as one single thought luminous in its wisdom
  • if you press me to say why i loved him i feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying because it was him and because it was me

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