This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh The barren sand opened up to British archaeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard in 1845, as he tapped into two millennia of unguessed literacy: . .. papyrus jungle sandhill splayed-wedge wader damsel crane. . . The papyrus had long since decayed (taking with it perhaps the major literature of the time, since the most esteemed Mesopotamian texts were inscribed on elegant parchment rather than on the crude though durable clay tablets); but some twenty-thousand tablets of "splayed-wedge" script went to the British Museum, where the work of deciphering and translating eventually captured public interest in pages of the Daily Telegraph in 1886. Over twenty-five hundred years had passed since these tablets were kept in baskets on shelves, in cataloged order. This library of Assurbanipal was destroyed in 612 B.C. when Chaldeans and Medes overran the city ofNinevah, whose walls were broad enough for chariot tracks.The books were shelved according to subject in a series of rooms; one of the rooms wasdevoted to legend and mythology—ancient at that time by as much astwo thousand years— in which was kept an Akkadian rendition of an old Sumerian poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh. The invocation "Praise!.. gill.. gam .. mesh .." is recorded by Louis Zukofsky (a late member of the tribe of Israelites that has its roots in Assurbanipal'stime), composting Levantine mythology in 1973. By that time his text, for nearlyfifty years called simply "A," had begun to resemble "an ancient manuscript" with "hints of syntax, but keywords or phrases obliterated by tears or worm holes. There are too many words or not enough" (Byrd, "Getting Ready to Read 'A,'" 291). Access to Gilgamesh is now limited to twelve Akkadian tablets from Assurbanipal'slibrary— thirty-six hundred lines—and a scattering of older versions in Babylonian, Sumerian , Hittite, and Human fragments, all of which we read toward anunavailable "complete poem" that our Greco-Hebraic literary sensibilities attempt to project, an epic by patchwork. Charles Olson's project in The Maximus Poems is to reactivate such particles of archaic texts in a terrain that engages wreaderly energies in their full proprioceptive stamina,overcoming the restrictions implicit in generic frames.* His theory of * "Wreading" is my neologism for the collaborative momentum initiated by certain texts, like The Maximus Poems, in which the reader is enlisted as an agent of the writing. Recipii T H I S C O M P O S T projective verse at thislevel iswreading or inhabitingthe text asthe poem comes to inhabit Olson himself, and he ends up pacing roads in Gloucester, Massachusetts, attempting to identify everything asifit were atext (and atext a map),asif crossing a street were to pace off one line of the poem, as if going around the block made a trope, a turn, a verse. The labor becomes a spiritual exercise, convening a heavenly city in which the earth's own geography is divinity,out of which the figures of mythology from around the world are liable at any moment to extrude, like Ge in the Gravelly Hill poem (Maximus Poems, 330—32). The surface of the earth is itself a parchment, and to scratch the surface is almost certainly to come across a prior attribution for everything discovered. A life already in momentum. All there is to be found has been lost and recovered before. Recycled, composted. But once the crypt is unearthed, or the ka'ba circumambulated in Gloucester streets, the space is availablefor such acts of psychic reclamation as the plowing of a poem allows (its "verses" turns at the edge of a field). Zukofsky chose for "A"23conditions as immutable as mortality and the accidents of archaeological exhumation. His Gilgamesh is narrated with harsh ellipses into four pages of five-line stanzas, each line consisting of five words: a pregnant example of a sediment that measures"the sifting of human creations"—which is how WilliamJames defined the humanities ("Social Value," 1243). Readers of the Daily Telegraph were thrilled by the discovery of an old text that gave credence to the biblical flood; Gilgamesh was an event for Victorians because it fit into the library of the Christian epoch. Scholars would later come to value it as an epic because they could ascribe "heroic proportions" to Gilgamesh's quest for eternal life. But for Zukofsky near the end of his own life, Gilgamesh preceded Heraclitus in the perception that both the sleeping and the dead are doing the world's work: I outlived a flood to be called everlasting, to...