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The Origin of the Name
Novus ordo seclorum. —Virgil.
There is a strange sense in which this is a "participatory universe." —Wheeler.
The sound of rain needs no translation. —Morimoto Roshi.
Our word for "rain" is now Enlil, the same as our name for the Rain God, the same as our name for the sound of a setting sun, the sound of any system dwindling into its ultimate shape. Before my father's epoch, the Time of Rain, men had no names and names meant nothing. Names were only symbols for things, not things themselves. When the rains came and did not stop, the priests released the Final Glyphs—Enlil-Ehmen-Takh—and we noticed all at once, having never seen those shrouded tablets before, that the Final Glyphs name rain and its God and the "name" (description of task) of the high priest of that God—each, equally, "Enlil." The tertiary revelation, the priest's name, was the one that revolutionized our language and thus our thought and empire. (Indeed—the first datum was already known, for we had needed a name for the element rain; the second, only surprising, for we had never seen the name of God writ, it being holy and secret.) The anomie spread quickly: On the slick steps of the ziggurat, women swooned and men haggled over metaphysics. We had never considered that the name of our God could be a mere word, nor that the priest's task, his title or "name," could exactly mirror the sound for the natural leakage-of-the-sky that gives him a task in the first place. The three names fused in our minds. This confusion elicited the questions: Wherefrom did the name arise? Did the rain prefigure its lord? Though we have never seen him, we reasoned: Someone or something must have created the rain; for I author this tablet; my mother and father authored me; nothing is without predecessor; no effect lacks cause. But our priests had no great answers. Within a week, our questions had vectored into even more beastly realms of thought: Do coincident names describe the same things? Was our high priest not only the Rain God's avatar but the primogenitor of rain itself? We now know more than we did in my father's times. Through at first incautious probing, then via experiments almost mercilessly without room for error, we have concluded: Coincident names not only describe exactly similar objects, ideas, and personages, but, far more terrifying—by giving two heteroclite things the same name, one automatically and completely conflates them. This was our great error, or the error of our ancestor-priests, who wrote and sealed away the Final Glyphs: By naming God "rain" and rain "God" and hierophant both and both "hierophant," we have consigned the entire knowable world to a dreary, divine deconstruction. (Indeed—as the recently dead hierophant pointed out—if man is mortal and the hierophant a man, then making him "God" makes God vulnerable; and one day God, too, must die.) Even now, our people exist—those who are left—only thanks to continuous renaming. E.g, I am no longer "me;" I am Not Rain; I am Man; I am This Man Who Is Not Rain; etc. We tearfully forget ourselves at night, and that first act of naming "God," who must have authored us (as our ancestors authored the tablet that contains his name), rewrites us into "rain," and we melt. Both parents, all fourteen of my brothers and sisters—all commingle with the well-water; all are cognate with the flood. Of my line, only I am left to contemplate. But I and my people are not without hope. In a man's final days, he reasons: So long as my life had purpose and nobility at one point, then my life was full and good; I was no chattel from beyond the great rivers; I was a citizen. So, too, as our cities perish nightly from unnaming, they seek to prove their histories in tablets such as this one. My purpose as a scribe of Ur-Shamash, then, is to validate the existence of the past at the cost of the stormy present and the misty future. The problem inherent in this task is obvious to anyone who strolls the avenues of our once-formidable city: Our citizens no longer quarrel or adulterate; our cats are quiet and uninterested in stealing our venison; our beggars no longer spread their hands for alms; even the heretics who hasten to accelerate our drowning do so privately, almost diffidently. It is true: We are living in a terrible Golden Age, and I have no words to undo it, to shake it back to its sustaining roots, those ignorant times of my father and long-sodden mother.
[Here I pause to examine the watercup on my desk. Concentrating on the solidness of it, I name it "Brother" and revive one of my seven syncretic brothers but temporarily. (For we agree: "God," by which we and all who believe in Him mean "everything," is named "rain" and vice versa; soon my brother will melt again.) For now, I ask him to tell me of mother, whose very shape and voice I do not recall in the slightest. My brother (I've forgotten what we called him before "rain") yawns and refuses; he'd rather play a guessing game or watch cormorants drink from the rill that used to be the drunken potter. "Guessing games always end in rain," I tell him, but he shakes his head. He still believes in the aleatory. Worse, he believes, like many deluded souls called back from across the Black River Nammu, that a desert paradise awaits him when he returns to God (to rain). Many ghosts preach of the Dry beyond; we must wail to drown out their febrile jabbering. I begin to chant, and he raises his shrill voice—a sound like the rushing of the rocky beck that took my father from this world when the great floods first came. He will not stop speaking of the Dry. I push him, feel my fingers come away dewy and shaking. He chants back: "Beyond Nammu—Bright Shamash, Thirsty Ki! Beyond Nammu—Bright Shamash, Thirsty Ki! Beyond Nammu—" I can feel him lulling me, and I scream: "I am Not Rain; I am Not Rain; I am Not Rain…" He screams; I scream. Spittle flies from both our mouths; the floor receives our sweat. We are truly fluid; I know, I know! In my rage, I grip my stylus like a dagger and thrust it into my brother's neck, stunning him. His blood is teary and weak, more like foul, cheap wine than blood. He stumbles and cannot scream his siren lies. I close my eyes and pronounce the one word, the only word left to us—our only potency in an era of soggy unanimity: "Enlil." My doused brother falls into a puddle, and, after a still while, I resume writing.]
The puddle in the hay that lines the floor of my atelier will evaporate by nightfall, then reform when the world remembers its true name. But for now, the saturation that was my brother is the very incarnation of solution: What proves that this age, however perfect, is inferior to the Anhydrous Times is this age's implied antinomianism: If everything is now quite literally God—if everything is everything, if everything has the same parentage and parage—there are no sins. The lowliest strangler is no less "God" than the son of the pious hierophant who doomed us. The man who loves his neighbor's wife is as much as saint as I, who toil in a barn sided by four rindles. We all share the same, infinite Name. Of course, any a priori solution to the puzzle of this epoch's limitation is useful only to the very faithful among us—those who are already able to see in the name of the world (God) their own name and vice versa. In order that even the lowly stranglers should understand the sublimity of my father's age, I must enforce the antinomianism only yet deduced from the aqueous present. I must share the same divine violence that allowed me to reduce my brother to a crimson pool; I must name "sin" the equal of "God," and I must do so publicly, indisputably. In this way, our great city—the arête above the plains of the barbarians, who must invent fabulous demigods and epics to explicate the world's slow dissolution—will have stood for a thousand ages as the earthly axis of Art and Law and not as just another mote of Monist drizzle. In short: By my violence, the world will learn—must learn—to distinguish itself from us.
…
I row boats of whores to the gates of the leper colonies; I hang poisoned lambs from the tentpoles in the meatmarket; I stuff flies into figs and sell them to children; I acclaim incurable maladies and denounce altruism. In this way, the people learn to free themselves from the moral and even the rational. But one fact still puzzles me: I have solved the problem of the dichotomy of ages (why my father's age was ignorant but sustainable; why this age and its apocalypse—the word means revelation—are elegant and inexorable), and yet I do not know who sundered the eras, who brought on this apocalypse in the first place. In my travels, in my far-sights and deep-draughts, I have asked every stone and every fakir: Who authored the tablets? Who doomed us? And yet, at every turn, with every shout—only the echo, "us…" Finally, at the high yellow gates of the ziggurat's Story Tower, understanding floods my brain. I have arrived here by accident. The roads nearest the city's center are those least symmetric, least accessible. I have many times turned left to maneuver north only to walk south for so long the air's grown warm, the fauna have shifted in kind and number. I have rarely found the Story Tower, even when desirous of it. My father toiled here, or said he did.
…
The heretics will kill me tonight, at midnight, in the Square of Seven Lions as I read the last sentence of the Final Glyphs, which I have taken from their sapphire ark. The heretics hardly understand the mysteries of divinity and history, and their nescience hardly matters any more: My slippery people—what is left of them—are behind me. I analyze the dregs of my tea and at once understand my happy fate:
The people of Ur-Shamash pour into the square and hoist aloft the sacred Moloch, the Seven-Bellied Maw, who drains from its offering the aqua vitae by which the high priests gain insight into the true nature of the Enlil. I smile and begin to recite: "The Name of the World and Its Blood and Its God is the Name of the Priest of the Blood and the Name of the Blood is the Name of the World and All is Holy, Holy, Holy, and All is Enlil… The Name of the World and Its Blood and Its God is the Name of the Priest of the Blood—" My dithyramb is cut off as the people, my people, pull me from my dais and toss me into the air and pass me, hand over hand, towards the highest and holiest jaw of the fiery Moloch, the artifact I have so many times imagined applying to the heretics, ever since that sudden un-summoning of my brother. The heretics have joined forces, I realize as they bind my flailing limbs and stuff my mouth with holy grapes: The heretics who desired the world's quick end have made peace with the citizens who simply did not accept sin as civilization's necessary expression of existence in a constantly syncretizing universe. As the Moloch's great iron jaws crack my bones and stitch my clammy hide to itself in weird involutes and alephs and bestial pictograms, the people of Ur-Shamash cry in ecstasy: "The flesh ends the Flood! The flesh, the Flesh, the Blood!" And then I know, I truly know: I have not only alerted the city and its children to their importance and godliness (via their distinctiveness); I have saved the whole of Existence; I have given God another name, a new, realer, truer name—flesh—and, too—blood…
I pause my tasseography long enough to finish this opuscule. No more needs be writ concerning my deeds or my city—surely the final city that will stand forever, now sealed against the Waters of Heaven and Hell themselves. All will come to understand and appreciate my sacrifice. I need only fling wide the doors of this barn. I need only call out one word to the passing waterbearer and drink a little of his ware, for—for now—I thirst… |
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Wythe Marschall lives and writes Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in 5_Trope (upcoming), McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Euphony, Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, Locus Novus, Wishtank, Bennington College's Silo (which he edited), Pomp & Circumstance (which he copy edits), and his own A Lush In Rio (alushinrio .com, currently defunct). Wythe graduated from Bennington and worked as the marketing associate at Culture Project ( cultureproject .org) until recently. He's now enrolled in Brooklyn College's MFA fiction program, where he plans to workshop several stories about alligators, ancient civilizations, and the future of hip hop. |
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Date of Publication: 29 Oct 2007 |
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