Gilgamesh (4 page)

When Gilgamesh arrives, the two heroes seize each other, butting heads like wild bulls, careening through the streets, crashing into walls, and making the houses tremble. The confrontation could hardly be more primal, stripped down to the element of male pride. Enkidu's anger is beside the point. There are no principles to be upheld, no justifications and counterjustifications. The battle is as silly as a schoolyard fight, yet there is something beautiful about its energy. There is also a deeply erotic element in it. This is not a fight to the death, as in the
Iliad
or
Beowulf.
It is a fight at the end of which each man will be able to say to his opponent, “Now I know you,” or even (as Jacob said to his angel), “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.” It is an entrance into intimacy, and as close to lovemaking as to violence.

The poem comes just short of stating that the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu is homosexual (in Tablet XII, a separate poem appended to the epic, the genital sexuality is explicit). But it's clear that the homoerotic element in their bond is very strong. Even before he meets Enkidu in combat, Gilgamesh dreams of him in an image of great physical tenderness. A boulder representing Enkidu falls from the sky; at first it is too heavy to budge, then it becomes the beloved in his arms, stone turning to warm flesh through the power of the metaphor. Gilgamesh's mother, in interpreting the dream, says that that is indeed how it will be, that the boulder

Both men come to feel their friendship as a kind of marriage, and each one could say, as David says of Jonathan, “Thy love to me [is] wonderful, passing the love of women.”

After the fight, Enkidu doesn't slink off or proffer his neck like an animal defeated by the alpha male; in a speech of the loveliest, most dignified humility, he acknowledges Gilgamesh as the superior fighter, the superior human being. In fact, he sees him with the eyes of appreciation, gazing at him in wonder as Shamhat had advised him to.

Gilgamesh, as victor, doesn't feel the need to reciprocate with any appreciation of Enkidu. But he knows that what he dreamed at the end of Book I has come true. The dear friend and mighty hero has appeared, the longed-for companion of his heart, the man who will stand at his side through the greatest dangers. The fight is over without any residue of anger, resentment, or competitiveness. They know each other through and through. Like David and Jonathan, each loves the other as his own soul.

S
o Gilgamesh and Enkidu become true friends. Now, because the two heroes “balance each other perfectly,” Uruk can have peace. Now the son can return to his father, the girl can return to her mother, and the life of the great city can continue in all its vibrancy, with no shadow of oppression to make the people cry out. The two realities can collapse into Shamhat's enamored vision of a truly civilized, festive society of bright colors and finery and music and laughing courtesan-priestesses and gratified desire. The gods are in their heaven and, for the time being, all's right with the world.

The transition to the next episode—the journey to the Cedar Forest and the killing of the monster Humbaba—is fragmentary and obscure. We aren't told how long Gilgamesh and Enkidu stayed in Uruk deepening their friendship; we don't know what they did during those weeks or months. How do vigorous young giants spend their free time? This is not one of the poem's interests, but it's easy to imagine an ongoing revel of feasting and beer drinking, wrestling matches, swimming, polo, bullfighting perhaps, Gilgamesh delightedly teaching his friend all the new dances and songs, daily visits to the Eanna temple to make love with the most beautiful of the young priestesses (Shamhat included),
and—because ancient Babylonian kings prided themselves on being scholars as well as warriors and athletes—daily visits to the royal library, where Enkidu can take lessons in elementary cuneiform.

At a certain point, though, out of the blue, Gilgamesh announces that it is time to leave Uruk and begin the fatal adventure that provides the shape for the rest of the epic: an ascent to an ambiguous victory, followed by a plunge into death, unassuageable grief, and the futile search for immortality. “Now we must travel to the Cedar Forest,” Gilgamesh says,

Living in the year 2004, one can't help hearing this statement of an ancient Mesopotamian king in eerie counterpoint to the recent American invasion of Iraq. From this perspective, Gilgamesh's action is the original preemptive attack. Ancient readers, like many contemporary Americans, would have considered it to be unquestionably heroic. But the poem is wiser than the culture from which it arose. It wonderfully complicates the ostensible moral certainties, and once again, when we look closely, the mind finds no solid ground to stand on.

What impels Gilgamesh to go on this adventure? Why should he kill the monster? At first, all we hear is the sudden announcement itself. As listeners to a great adventure story, we don't need any more motivation than this. After all, that's what heroes do: they slay monsters. The motivation in this sense is literary rather than psychological. Story, not character, is fate.

But a bit further on, the poet does provide a motivation for the decision to leave for the Cedar Forest. What Gilgamesh wants is fame, as he explains in a passionate speech to Enkidu:

It is obvious that Gilgamesh considers himself fully human and that, for him, “two-thirds divine” is just a polite compliment or a rhetorical flourish. His mother may be a goddess, but he is as mortal as any other human. The only way for him to transcend death, he thinks, is to make an everlasting name for himself.

The desire for fame is at the heart of the ancient heroic traditions, Babylonian, Greek, and Germanic. It is one of the nobler delusions, and it can produce great art—in addition, as we know, to great havoc. There is something very human and even endearing about all this posturing; human nature hasn't changed much from Gilgamesh—or Enkidu, with his
“I
am the mightiest!”—to Cassius Clay. But heroic? It's hard to take the boasts and the derring-do seriously in
28 comparison with the actions of what we would all consider true heroes: those who risk harm or death for the sake of others. The anonymous, everyday heroism of fire fighters and police officers makes the desire for “a lasting name” seem far less admirable to us than it has seemed to other cultures. In any event, the poet makes it clear from the outset that however morally Gilgamesh thinks he is acting, he wants to kill Humbaba “and drive out evil from the world,” not for the sake of the people, or to alleviate suffering, or to help anyone but himself.

As the story proceeds, we hear another possible motivation: that Shamash, the sun god, god of justice and Gilgamesh's special protector, has put this decision into his head. At least, that is the theory of Gilgamesh's mother, the goddess Ninsun (neither Gilgamesh nor Shamash ever acknowledges it). According to her, the whole adventure is Shamash's idea, and Gilgamesh is only an instrument in his hand, a warrior in the battle of good against evil. “Lord of heaven,” Ninsun says in her prayer to the sun god,

Here Ninsun, “the wise, the all-knowing,” is portrayed as a purely human figure, neither more nor less wise than any worried mother of flesh and blood. She knows her son well, and when she mentions his “restless heart,” she is pointing to what drives Gilgamesh throughout the epic, both before and after Enkidu's death. Whatever Shamash's part in the process may be, we can understand how Gilgamesh's restless heart has stirred him up, as powerfully as his desire for fame. Psychologically, this restlessness can't be inspired by the god of justice; it is the opposite of inspiration; it is ultimately desperation. One might even say that the attack on Humbaba stems from what Pascal called the cause of all human misery: the inability to sit contentedly alone in a room.

Is Ninsun correct in her theory that this is a battle of good against evil? Everything in the poem argues against it. As a matter of fact, the only evil we are informed of is the suffering Gilgamesh has inflicted on his own people; the only monster is Gilgamesh himself.
^*
If he has a real enemy, it is the selfishness that arises from his own restless heart. Uruk may be at peace now, but Gilgamesh isn't. The
moral imbalance still exists; he is, as far as we are told, unable to acknowledge what he has done, unable to apologize or make amends to the young men and women he has been terrorizing.

Whatever Gilgamesh's mother may say, the poet makes it impossible to see Humbaba as a threat to the security of Uruk or as part of any “axis of evil.” Unlike Grendel in
Beowulf,
he is not seen as the enemy of God; there is no devil or negative metaphysical force in the poet's cosmology for him to be an instrument of. He hasn't harmed a single living being, as far as we know. If anything, our sympathies are with him. He may be ugly and terrifying, with his fire-spewing breath, thunderous voice, and nightmare faces, but to be terrifying is his job. He just stays where he is, minding his business and doing his duty, which is to take care of the Cedar Forest and keep humans out. “If anyone knows the rules of my forest,” he says later to Enkidu,

Like the precivilized Enkidu, Humbaba is a figure of balance and a defender of the ecosystem. (Having a monster or two around to guard our national forests from corporate and other predators wouldn't be such a bad thing.)

I love how the poet has morally situated his poem so that as soon as we are tempted to take a position about good and evil, we realize
that there is an opposite and equally valid position. This world, like ours, is not black and white; there is ultimately nowhere to stand, no side we can ultimately take and not cut ourselves off from the truth. Yes, Humbaba is a monster; perhaps he is evil, as Ninsun says; conceivably he is even a threat to the city, though we are never told how. But it is at least as true that Humbaba has his appointed place in the divine order of things. He has specifically been commissioned to be monstrous by one of the great gods, because humans are not supposed to penetrate into the Cedar Forest and chop down its trees.

If there must be a monster in the house (to paraphrase Wallace Stevens), let him be one who is just doing his job, without malice. The problem with believing in evil monsters and an evil-hating god (or God) is that it splits the universe down the middle, separates us from at least half of creation, and eventually leads to the claustrophobic and doom-haunted world of the Germanic hero sagas, however idealistic we may be. “The struggle between good and evil / is the primal disease of the mind,” wrote the sixth-century Zen master Seng-ts'an, who knew what he was talking about. It is all too easy to see ourselves as fighting on God's side, to identify our ideology with what is best for the world and use it to justify crusades, pogroms, or preemptive attacks. Projecting evil onto the world makes me unassailably right—a position as dangerous in politics as in marriage.

Much of Book III is in debate form: between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, then between Gilgamesh and the elders of Uruk. It is a debate between bravery (or foolhardiness) and prudence. Gilgamesh's position is that he must go on this journey in order to win
everlasting fame. Enkidu first points out that the Cedar Forest is forbidden to humans and that Humbaba has been put there by Enlil himself, to terrify men. Then, echoed by the elders, he says that in any case the journey is too dangerous and Humbaba too powerful. The arguments are not sophisticated and don't vary. Gilgamesh wins the debate by walking away. He is the king, after all, and can do whatever he wants; what he wants now is to order new weapons at the forge. By the end of the episode, Enkidu and the whole city support him. The elders offer their cautious, geriatric advice. The young men cheer. The heroes depart.

They walk east, in three-day marches, at the pace of more than three hundred miles a day (not a huge effort for someone like Gil-gamesh, whose legs, according to one fragmentary passage, are nine feet long). Each march is described in exactly the same way; the repetition creates a sense of extended time, a shift from the ordinary time of the city into mythological time. Each culminates in the dream ritual, which is described in the same few crisply visualized lines. Gilgamesh's dreams vary in their details, but they are all essentially the same dream of disaster or near disaster. Enkidu, by the method known as “reversal of values,” interprets them as omens that promise victory. And though his interpretation is correct for the actual battle with Humbaba, there is another sense in which the dreams are begging to be taken at their face value, unreversed, as the other dreams in the epic are. A disaster does indeed loom ahead, though with a time delay. Ironically, it involves the death of the dream interpreter, a death that is the direct, divinely ordained consequence of
killing Humbaba. A more literal interpreter might advise Gilgamesh to turn back, however aggressively Shamash urges him to attack.