The Way It Is With Friends

1. The Way It Is With Friends Feraco Myth to Science Fiction 11 October 2011

2. From Triumph to Tragedy • The epic spares no time in moving from triumph to tragedy. Once Gilgamesh and Enkidu defeat Humbaba and return, triumphant, to Uruk, Ishtar appears. • She is the goddess of sex, love, fertility – and war. • The seeming contradiction in those roles merely serves to highlight the violence at the heart of powerful love.

3. Notes on Ishtar • She pops up without preamble, although it’s worth noting that she has a larger role in the entire epic than in Mason’s verse narrative. • Even with her abrupt entrance, her motive is clear: Gilgamesh has won glory, and in changing into his kingly attire appears even more beautiful than before. • She’s easily drawn to new things, as well as to power, and (as a goddess) is accustomed to getting her way.

4. A Curious Rejection • But no sooner does Ishtar preposition Gilgamesh than the king rebukes her, and fiercely at that. • Mason cuts much of what Gilgamesh says (the Mitchell translation includes three-and-a-half uninterrupted pages of verbal abuse), but what he does include is more than enough to register our hero’s disapproval. • Initially, we’re left wondering why Gilgamesh reacts as he does; after all, he’s not married, and we’re well aware of his loneliness.

5. A Rational Explanation • Yet as he continues through his litany of insults, a pattern emerges • As Gilgamesh lists every lover Ishtar has taken, we become well-acquainted with her history of betrayal and pain. • Those she convinces to love her know only grief in the end. • She turns on those she grows satisfied with and forces them to suffer – and she grows satisfied with everyone in time.

6. Those a Goddess Cannot Love • Gilgamesh points out that it's naïve to assume that a goddess could love a mortal • After all, he's part god, and that alone had been enough to separate him from the mortal world until Enkidu came along. • In this way, she is as he was. • By alluding to her romantic past in the crudest way possible, Gilgamesh isn’t just causing as much offense as he can • He’s refusing the ultimate temptation, to join with that which transcends our mortal limits.

7. Complications • This results in a very complicated scene, with at least three questionable elements. • Gilgamesh may not crave what Ishtar represents sexually, but he soon wants what she represents personally – immortality, power beyond even his human reckoning. • Once Enkidu dies, he’ll give in to the pursuit of that temptation far more readily. • Furthermore, one could argue that Gilgamesh shows great wisdom in resisting Ishtar’s advances; most would simply surrender to instinct. • On the other hand, is rejecting a goddess – let alone intentionally hurting (and therefore infuriating) one really a sign of wisdom? • Remember, wisdom matters here; the story’s supposed to be about how Gilgamesh learns to come to terms with the things he can’t change, and he’s supposed to be demonstrating nēmēqu.

8. Capable of Atrocity • At any rate, Gilgamesh makes his scorn and displeasure clear, and Ishtar goes straight to Anu, her father. • She demands the right to unleash the Bull of Heaven on Uruk: “I will send [Gilgamesh] something / He would never wish to dream. / There will be more dead / Than living on this earth.” • We’ll learn in time that Ishtar’s perfectly capable of slaughtering mankind if she’s moved to • She’s the one who unleashed the Flood that only Utnapishtim and his family survived.

9. Giving In, Giving Way • Anu tries to calm her at first, asking her whether she’s considered every consequence of the action she’s about to take. • Successfully bringing the Bull to Earth to kill Gilgamesh will cause a famine, he says; you’ll destroy all of your beloved humans again if you don’t have them set aside enough grain to survive, and you regretted doing so last time. • Ishtar is immovable, as implacable in her rage as Gilgamesh once was in his tyranny • She insists she’s taken enough steps to ensure that some of us will survive this time. • Moreover, she threatens to shatter the gates of the Underworld, unleashing a million dead souls, unless her father complies. • In the end, Anu simply isn’t wired to resist his daughter’s demands; just as with Gilgamesh in the beginning of the epic, Ishtar has no equal to keep her in check, and no satisfactory outlets for the emotions that overwhelm her.

10. The Battle in a Nutshell • Ishtar brings the Bull down, whereupon the beast’s snorting and stamping fractures the world. • In an instant, three hundred of Gilgamesh’s warriors plummet to the center of the earth. • But Enkidu sets on the creature before it can do any more damage; Mason devotes a single short passage to his victory. • In other translations, Gilgamesh is the one to kill the Bull while Enkidu holds it in place. • Mason shows Enkidu killing it instead, which perhaps makes more sense, considering that the gods condemn him and not his king. • (If Gilgamesh kills both Humbaba and the Bull, why is Enkidu the one to perish?) • Once the Bull dies, Ishtar flees to the top of Uruk’s walls, cursing Gilgamesh (and, in Mason’s version, Enkidu). • Enkidu responds by ripping the Bull’s leg from its carcass and flinging it at her – which, in hindsight, is perhaps not the most well-considered move.

11. The Worst Dream One Can Have • Indeed, the epic spends no time basking in its heroes’ glory; it’s too busy making them suffer. • That very night, Enkidu dreams of a meeting between the gods. • Almost all of them are furious, Enlil particularly so: Gilgamesh and Enkidu have killed our Forest Guardian, Gilgamesh and Enkidu have chopped down our trees, Gilgamesh and Enkidu have slaughtered our Bull of Heaven and desecrated its corpse. • Both must die, but Enlil wants Enkidu’s blood alone; he says Gilgamesh should be spared because he’s two-thirds divine.

12. An Unexplained Disagreement • Shamash, Ishtar’s husband/brother (it’s the gods), interjects on Enkidu’s behalf, but it’s hopeless. • No reason is given for this split between the gods; Shamash apparently didn’t consult any of the others before sending Gilgamesh on his quest, but none of the surviving tablets explain why. • It is, perhaps, a decision whose reasoning made inherent sense to contemporary audiences, and whose explanation has now been forever lost.

13. No Justice • This strikes audiences as unfair, to say the least. • Gilgamesh didn’t exactly request to be visited by the Bull of Heaven; he and Enkidu fought to protect the city and its people. • For that matter, Gilgamesh’s initial desire to kill Humbaba is not entirely his own: Shamash sent him to do his bidding, even over Ninsun’s objections. • How can our heroes be justifiably killed for serving the dictates of the gods? • Does their willingness to resist the fates that divinities set up for them warrant death?

14. Death and Its Bringers • It’s important to consider this development – this entire section, in fact – in the context of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian attitudes. • Remember, these cultures considered death an unfair interruption of mankind’s potential. • Here, the larger forces responsible for birth, fate and death are portrayed as flawed, shallow, irrational, untrustworthy, capricious, arbitrary, – even abusive.

15. The Tension and the Terror • In many ways, the section provides more ammunition for the camp that sees Gilgamesh as a “rebellion against death” rather than a chronicle • What better justification for claiming death is unjust than to show those who introduced death to the universe in an unkind light? • So we see the tension humans felt while regarding the divine, the joy of knowing life given by gods, the agony of seeing that life taken away by the same deities, and the anger that results from not understanding the greater meaning of the bigger picture • The ancient question: why do the good die?

16. Rage Against the Dying of the Light • In the meantime, Enkidu knows the end is near. • Mason cuts his enraged, frustrated reaction a bit short, keeping only the portion where he curses the harlot, Shamhat, for introducing him to civilized life. • He also curses the trapper whose visit to Uruk caused Gilgamesh to send Shamhat to the Steppe, as well as the great door he and Gilgamesh built from the trees in the Cedar Forest. • It’s not a dignified moment. • Few of us can greet death with any sort of equanimity, whether we’re the ones dying or losing. • We’re much likelier to rage, as Enkidu does, at the unfairness of what’s befallen us; most people fall before they’re ready to go, and Enkidu himself is certainly no exception. • Moreover, his death isn’t even a glorious one. • There are no epic battles for him to fight, no invaders against whom he must defend his adopted city, no sacrifices he can nobly make. • He’s forced to just sit and wait for the gods to kill him, unable to do anything to change or challenge his fate.

17. Nothing Comes Without Cost • Shamash comes to him then (at least in other translations), and tells him this: • Enkidu, why are you cursing the priestess Shamhat? Wasn’t it she who gave you fine bread fit for a god and fine beer fit for a king, who clothed you in a glorious robe and gave you splendid Gilgamesh as your intimate friend? He will lay you down on a bed of honor, he will put you on a royal bier, on his left he will place your statue in the seat of repose, the princes of the earth will kiss its feet, [and] the people of Uruk will mourn you… • What’s left unsaid is that none of this happens without Shamhat’s “conversion” of Enkidu; he simply would have lived out his days on the Steppe, never knowing the companionship or love he discovered in the city.

18. Looking for Life That’s Gone • After this, Enkidu calms himself somewhat. Before he passes on, he has one last conversation with his friend: A man sees death in things. That is what it is to be a man. You’ll know When you have lost the strength to see The way you once did. You’ll be alone and wander Looking for that life that’s gone, or some Eternal life you have to find.

19. Strength Reduced to Tears • And Gilgamesh, for all his terrible strength and prowess, proves powerless in the face of the gods’ demands: he can find no words with which to convince them to reverse their decision, can perform no feat of strength to prevent them from carrying out their will. • In Mason’s translation, Enkidu dies not from fighting the Bull of Heaven, but from the wound he suffered while battling Humbaba as Gilgamesh stood paralyzed – a wound that resulted from his prior crippling at Humbaba’s gate, a crippling that the king trivialized at the time. • In others, he simply falls ill, expiring slowly over twelve days as Gilgamesh stands by helplessly. • The ending’s the same either way: Enkidu slips from the world, and Gilgamesh is utterly alone once more.

20. Why am I to die, You to wander on alone? Is that the way it is with friends?

21. Converted to a Thing That Sees… • At this point, Gilgamesh begins to revert to his old ways – fixated only on one thing, he grows maniacal in his desire to relieve himself of pain. The only nourishment He knew was grief, endless in its hidden source Yet never ending hunger. All that is left to once who grieves Is convalescence. No change of heart or spiritual Conversion, for the heart has changed And the soul has been converted To a thing that sees How much it costs to lose a friend it loved. • This three-page section immediately following Enkidu’s passing is one of my favorites in the epic; it has some truly profound things to say about grief, why we grieve, and how we recover.

22. Recover or Drown…Flip It Now • Gilgamesh eventually travels through the desert – the literal and metaphorical one – in search of Utnapishtim. • The book refers to him as “the one who survived the flood,” and here we see another parallel with a Biblical archetype: whereas before we saw Enkidu cast out of Eden, we’re now told of Ishtar’s Flood, which wiped out virtually everything save Utnapishtim, his family, and the animals he could save. • The king is now driven to take back what the gods wrongfully took from mankind. • He aims to defeat death, and searches for the only man who can live forever. • What Gilgamesh discovers during his journey will ultimately determine whether he will be successful – whether he will recover from pain, or drown in it…