Some Notes on the Pre-Dynastic Epoch

We understand some of their languages, but none of them completely. That is one of the great difficulties. What has come down from their epoch to ours is spotted and stained and eroded by time, full of lacunae and static; and so we can only approximately comprehend the nature of their civilization and the reasons for its collapse. Too often, I fear, we project our own values and assumptions back upon them and deceive ourselves into thinking we are making valid historic judgments.

On the other hand there are certain aesthetic rewards in the very incompleteness of the record. Their poetry, for example, is heightened and made more mysterious, more strangely appealing, by the tantalizing gaps that result from our faulty linguistic knowledge and from the uncertainties we experience in transliterating their fragmentary written texts, as well as in transcribing their surviving spoken archives. It is as though time itself has turned poet, collaborating belatedly with the ancients to produce something new and fascinating by punching its own inexorable imprint into their work. Consider the resonances and implications of this deformed and defective song, perhaps a chant of a ritual nature, dating from the late pre-dynastic:

Or examine this, which is an earlier pre-dynastic piece, possibly of Babylonian-American origin:

The Center for Pre-Dynastic Studies is a comfortingly massive building fashioned from blocks of some greasy green synthetic stone and laid out in three spokelike wings radiating from a common center. It is situated in the midst of the central continental plateau, near what may have been the site of the ancient metropolis of Omahaha. On clear days we take to the air in small solar-powered flying machines and survey the outlines of the city, which are still visible as indistinct white scars on the green breast of the earth. There are more than two thousand staff members. Many of them are women and some are sexually available, even to me. I have been employed here for eleven years. My current title is Metalinguistic Archaeologist, Third Grade. My father before me held that title for much of his life. He died in a professional quarrel while I was a child, and my mother dedicated me to filling his place. I have a small office with several data terminals, a neatly beveled viewing screen, and a modest desk. Upon my desk I keep a collection of artifacts of the so-called twentieth century. These serve as talismans, spurring me on to greater depth of insight. They include:

One grey communications device (“telephone”).

One black inscribing device (“typewriter”?) which has been exposed to high temperatures and is somewhat melted.

One metal key, incised with the numerals 1714 and fastened by a rusted metal ring to a small white plastic plaque that declares, in red letters, IF CARRIED AWAY INADVERTENTLY///DROP IN ANY MAIL BOX///SHERATON BOSTON HOTEL///BOSTON, MASS. 02199.

One coin of uncertain denomination.

It is understood that these items are the property of the Center for Pre-Dynastic Studies and are merely on loan to me. Considering their great age and the harsh conditions to which they must have been exposed after the collapse of twentieth-century civilization, they are in remarkably fine condition. I am proud to be their custodian.

I am thirty-one years of age, slender, blue-eyed, austere in personal habits, and unmarried. My knowledge of the languages and customs of the so-called twentieth century is considerable, although I strive constantly to increase it. My work both saddens and exhilarates me. I see it as a species of poetry, if poetry may be understood to be the imaginative verbal reconstruction of experience; in my case the experiences I reconstruct are not my own, are in fact alien and repugnant to me, but what does that matter? Each night when I go home my feet are moist and chilled, as though I have been wading in swamps all day. Last summer the Dynast visited the Center on Imperial Unity Day, examined our latest findings with care and an apparently sincere show of interest, and said, “`We must draw from these researches a profound lesson for our times.”’

None of the foregoing is true. I take pleasure in deceiving. I am an extremely unreliable witness.

The heart of the problem, as we have come to understand it, is a pervasive generalized dislocation of awareness. Nightmares break into the fabric of daily life, and we no longer notice, or, if we do notice, we fail to make appropriate response. Nothing seems excessive any longer, nothing perturbs our dulled, numbed minds. Predatory giant insects, the products of pointless experiments in mutation, escape from laboratories and devastate the countryside. Rivers are contaminated by lethal micro-organisms released accidentally or deliberately by civil servants. Parts of human foetuses obtained from abortions are kept alive in hospital research units; human fetal toes and fingers grow up to four times as fast under controlled conditions as they do in utero, starting from single rods of cartilage and becoming fully jointed digits in seven to ten days. These are used in the study of the causes of arthritis. Zoos are vandalized by children, who stone geese and ducks to death and shoot lions in their cages. Sulfuric acid, the result of a combination of rain, mist, and sea spray with sulfurous industrial effluents, devours the statuary of Venice at a rate of five percent a year. The nose is the first part to go when this process, locally termed “marble cancer”, strikes. Just off the shores of Manhattan Island, a thick, stinking mass of floating sludge transforms a twenty-square-mile region of the ocean into a dead sea, a sterile soup of dark, poisonous wastes; this pocket of coagulated pollutants has been formed over a forty-year period by the licensed dumping each year of millions of cubic yards of treated sewage, towed by barge to the site, and by the unrestrained discharge of 365 million gallons per day of raw sewage from the Hudson River.

All these events are widely deplored but the causative factors are permitted to remain uncorrected, which means a constant widening of their operative zone. (There are no static negative phases; the laws of expansive deterioration decree that bad inevitably becomes worse.) Why is nothing done on any functional level? Because no one believes anything can be done. Such a belief in collective impotence is, structurally speaking, identical in effect to actual impotence; one does not need to be helpless, merely to think that one is helpless, in order to reach a condition of surrender to accelerating degenerative conditions. Under such circumstances a withdrawal of attention is the only satisfactory therapy. Along with this emptying of reactive impulse comes a corresponding semantic inflation and devaluation which further speeds the process of general dehumanization. Thus the roving gangs of adolescents who commit random crimes in the streets of New York City say they have “blown away” a victim whom they have in fact murdered, and the President of the United States, announcing an adjustment in the par value of his country’s currency made necessary by the surreptitious economic mismanagement of the previous administration, describes it as “the most significant monetary agreement in the history of the world.”

Some of the topics urgently requiring detailed analysis:

1. Their poetry

2. Preferred positions of sexual intercourse

3. The street plans of their major cities

4. Religious beliefs and practices

5. Terms of endearment, heterosexual and homosexual

6. Ecological destruction, accidental and deliberate

7. Sports and rituals

8. Attitudes toward technological progress

9. Forms of government, political processes

10. Their visual art forms

11. Means of transportation

12. Their collapse and social decay

13. Their terrible last days

One of our amusements here—no, let me be frank, it’s more than an amusement, it’s a professional necessity—is periodically to enter the vanished pre-dynastic world through the gate of dreams. A drug that leaves a sour, salty taste on the tongue facilitates these journeys. Also we make use of talismans: I clutch my key in my left hand and carry my coin in my right-hand pocket. We never travel alone, but usually go in teams of two or three. A special section of the Center is set aside for those who make these dream-journeys. The rooms are small and brightly lit, with soft rubbery pink walls, rather womblike in appearance, tuned to a bland heat and an intimate humidity. Alexandra, Jerome, and I enter such a room. We remove our clothing to perform the customary ablutions. Alexandra is plump, but her breasts are small and far apart. Jerome’s body is hairy, and his muscles lie in thick slabs over his bones. I see them both looking at me. We wash and dress; Jerome produces three hexagonal grey tablets and we swallow them. Sour, salty. We lie side by side on the triple couch in the centre center of the room. I clutch my key, I touch my coin. Backward, backward, backward we drift. Alexandra’s soft forearm presses gently against my thin shoulder. Into the dark, into the old times. The pre-dynastic epoch swallows us. This is the kingdom of earth, distorted, broken, twisted, maimed, perjured. The kingdom of hell. A snowbound kingdom. Bright lights on the grease-speckled airstrip. A rusting vehicle jutting from the sand. The eyes and lips of madmen. My feet are sixteen inches above the surface of the ground. Mists curl upward, licking at my soles. I stand before a bleak hotel, and women carrying glossy leather bags pass in and out. Toward us come automobiles, berserk, driverless, with blazing headlights. A blurred column of song rises out of the darkness. Home…………unknown…………a rolling stone? These ruins are inhabited.

Much of the interior of the continent lies submerged in a deep sea of radioactive water. The region was deliberately flooded under the policy of “compensating catastrophe” promulgated by the government toward the close of the period of terminal convulsions. Hence, though we come in dreams, we do not dare enter this zone unprotected, and we make use of aquatic robots bearing brain-coupled remote-vision cameras. Without interrupting our slumber we don the equipment, giggling self-consciously as we help one another with the harnesses and snaps. The robots stride into the green, glistening depths, leaving trails of shimmering fiery bubbles. We turn and tilt our heads and our cameras obey, projecting what they see directly upon our retinas. This is a magical realm. Everything sleeps here in a single grave, yet everything throbs and bursts with terrible life. Small boys, glowing, play marbles in the street. Thieves glide on mincing feet past beefy, stolid shopkeepers. A syphilitic whore displays her thighs to potential purchasers.

A giant blue screen mounted on the haunch of a colossal glossy-skinned building shows us the face of the President, jowly, earnest, energetic. His eyes are extraordinarily narrow, almost slits. He speaks but his words are vague and formless, without perceptible syllabic intervals. We are unaware of the pressure of the water. Scraps of paper flutter past us as though driven by the wind. Little girls dance in a ring: their skinny bare legs flash like pistons. Alexandra’s robot briefly touches its coppery hand to mine, a gesture of delight, of love. We take turns entering an automobile, sitting at its wheel, depressing its pedals and levers. I am filled with an intense sense of the reality of the pre-dynastic, of its oppressive imminence, of the danger of its return. Who says the past is dead and sealed? Everything comes around at least twice, perhaps even more often, and the later passes are always more grotesque, more deadly, and more comical. Destruction is eternal. Grief is cyclical. Death is undying. We walk the drowned face of the murdered earth and we are tormented by the awareness that past and future lie joined like a lunatic serpent. The sorrows of the pharaohs will be our sorrows. Listen to the voice of Egypt.

The high-born are full of lamentation but the poor are jubilant. Every town sayeth, “Let us drive out the powerful”…The splendid judgment-hall has been stripped of its documents…The public offices lie open and their records have been stolen. Serfs have become the masters of serfs…Behold, they that had clothes are now in rags…He who had nothing is now rich and the high official must court the parvenu…Squalor is throughout the land: no clothes are white these days…The Nile is in flood yet no one has the heart to plough…Corn has perished everywhere…Everyone says, “There is no more”…The dead are thrown into the river…Laughter has perished. Grief walks the land. A man of character goes in mourning because of what has happened in the land…Foreigners have become people everywhere. There is no man of yesterday.

Alexandra, Jerome, and I waltz in the pre-dynastic streets. We sing the Hymn to the Dynast. We embrace. Jerome couples with Alexandra. We take books, phonograph records, kitchen appliances, and postage stamps, and we leave without paying, for we have no money of this epoch. No one protests. We stare at the clumsy bulk of an aeroplane soaring over the tops of the buildings. We cup our hands and drink at a public fountain. Naked, I show myself to the veiled green sun. I couple with Jerome. We peer into the pinched, dead faces of the pre-dynastic people we meet outside the grand hotel. We whisper to them in gentle voices, trying to warn them of their danger. Some sand blows across the pavement. Alexandra tenderly kisses an old man’s withered cheek and he flees her warmth. Jewelery finer than any our museums own glitters in every window. The great wealth of this epoch is awesome to us. Where did these people go astray? How did they lose the path? What is the source of their pain? Tell us, we beg. Explain yourselves to us. We are historians from a happier time. We seek to know you. What can you reveal to us concerning your poetry, your preferred positions of sexual intercourse, the street plans of your major cities, your religious beliefs and practices, your terms of endearment, heterosexual and homosexual, your ecological destruction, accidental and deliberate, your sports and rituals, your attitudes toward technical progress, your forms of government, your political processes, your visual art forms, your means of transportation, your collapse and social decay, your terrible last days? For your last days will be terrible. There is no avoiding that now. The course is fixed; the end is inevitable. The time of the Dynast must come.

I see myself tied into the totality of epochs. I am inextricably linked to the pharaohs, to Assurnasirpal, to Tiglath-Pileser, to the beggars in Calcutta, to Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong, to Caesar, to Adam, to the dwarfed and pallid scrabblers on the bleak shores of the enfamined future. All time converges on this point of now. My soul’s core is the universal focus. There is no escape. The swollen reddened moon perpetually climbs the sky. The moment of the Dynast is eternally at hand. All of time and space becomes a cage for now. We are condemned to our own company until death do us part, and perhaps even afterward. Where did we go astray? How did we lose the path? Why can’t we escape? Ah. Yes. There’s the catch. There is no escape.

They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone.

In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king’s palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.

Then the king’s countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another.

And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.

This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.

TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.

PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.

In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain.

And Darius the Median took the kingdom, being about threescore and two years old.

We wake. We say nothing to one another as we leave the room of dreams; we avert our eyes from each other’s gaze. We return to our separate offices. I spend the remainder of the afternoon analyzing shards of pre-dynastic poetry. The words are muddled and will not cohere. My eyes fill with tears. Why have I become so involved in the fate of these sad and foolish people?

Let me unmask myself. Let me confess everything. There is no Center for Pre-Dynastic Studies. I am no Metalinguistic Archaeologist, Third Grade, living in a remote and idyllic era far in your future and passing my days in pondering the wreckage of the twentieth century. The time of the Dynast may be coming, but he does not yet rule. I am your contemporary. I am your brother. These notes are the work of a pre-dynastic man like yourself, a native of the so-called twentieth century, who, like you, has lived through dark hours and may live to see darker ones. That much is true. All the rest is fantasy of my own invention. Do you believe that? Do I seem reliable now? Can you trust me, just this once?

All time converges on this point of now.