Stories do not need to inform us of anything. They do inform us of  things. From The Epic of Gilgamesh,for example, we know something  of the people who lived in the land between the Tigris and  Euphrates rivers in the second and third millenniums BCE. We know  they celebrated a king named Gilgamesh; we know they believed in  many gods; we know they were self-conscious of their own  cultivation of the natural world; and we know they were literate.  These things we can fix -- or establish definitely. But stories  also remind us of things we cannot fix -- of what it means to be  human. They reflect our will to understand what we cannot  understand, and reconcile us to mortality.

We read The Epic of Gilgamesh,four thousand years after it was written, in part because we are scholars, or pseudo-scholars, and  wish to learn something about human history. We read it as well  because we want to know the meaning of life. The meaning of life,  however, is not something we can wrap up and walk away with.  Discussing the philosophy of the Tao, Alan Watts explains what he  believes Lao-tzu means by the line, "The five colours will blind a man's sight." "[T]he eye's sensitivity to color," Watts writes,  "is impaired by the fixed idea that there are just five true  colors. There is an infinite continuity of shading, and breaking  it down into divisions with names distracts the attention from its  subtlety" (27). Similarly, the mind's sensitivity to the meaning  of life is impaired by fixed notions or perspectives on what it  means to be human. There is an infinite continuity of meaning that  can be comprehended only by seeing again, for ourselves. We read  stories -- and reading is a kind of re-telling -- not to learn  what is known but to know what cannot be known, for it is ongoing  and we are in the middle of it.

To see for ourselves the meaning of a story, we need, first of  all, to look carefully at what happens in the story; that is, we  need to look at it as if the actions and people it describes  actually took place or existed. We can articulate the questions  raised by a character's actions and discuss the implications of  their consequences. But we need to consider, too, how a story is  put together -- how it uses the conventions of language, of events  with beginnings and endings, of description, of character, and of  storytelling itself to reawaken our sensitivity to the real world.  The real world is the world without conventions, the unnameable,  unrepresentable world -- in its continuity of action, its shadings  and blurrings of character, its indecipherable patterns of being.  The stories that mean most to us bring us back to our own  unintelligible and yet immeasurably meaningful lives.

The Epic of Gilgamesh opens with the convention of a frame -- a  prologue that sets off the story of Gilgamesh's life. An unnamed  narrator states, "I will proclaim to the world the deeds of  Gilgamesh" (61). Thus the narrator introduces himself before he  introduces the hero, and by doing so, welcomes us, as the  imaginary listeners and actual readers, into the endless present  of the telling of the tale. The deeds of Gilgamesh took place in  the past. Having returned from his journey and resting from his  labor, Gilgamesh, the narrator recounts, engraved the whole story  on a clay tablet. What we are reading, then, is the transcription  of an oral telling that repeats a written telling. On the one hand  the frame helps verisimilitude. By referring to Gilgamesh's own  act of writing, the narrator attempts to convince us that  Gilgamesh was an actual king and that the story that follows is a  true story. On the other hand, by calling our attention to the act  of telling, the narrator reminds us that the truth of a story  might lie in the very fact of its being a story -- the undeniable  fact of its narration. To deny its narration would be to deny our  own existence. Either way, the frame blurs the distinction between  Gilgamesh's world, or the world of the tale, and our own.

And yet there is an irony in the prologue of which the narrator  himself seems unaware -- an irony that highlights our position as  readers and not listeners. Praising Gilgamesh's accomplishments,  the narrator invites us to survey the city of Uruk: "Look at it  still today.... Touch the threshold, it is ancient.... Climb upon  the wall of Uruk; walk along it, I say; regard the foundation  terrace and examine the masonry: is it not burnt brick and good?  The seven sages laid the foundations" (61). It seems as if the  narrator is counting on the walls themselves to verify his story,  while from where we stand in time and space, these walls are  nowhere to be seen -- they have been buried for centuries.  However, we could say that the writer of the clay tablets  anticipates our distance from Uruk and asks only that we imagine  the walls, the way all storytellers ask their audiences to imagine  what they are about to hear. Our ability to imagine the walls --  our inability not to as we read the sentence that describes them  -- once again makes the act of narration part of the story and  forces us, as readers, into the world of the text. The story has  been passed on from narrator to narrator to listener to reader --  from writer to reader to reader. Thus even before we begin to read  this story about the death of a friend and the hero's failed  attempt to find immortality, we are made aware of the passage of  time that connects us even as it separates us.

In the prologue we learn that Gilgamesh was two-thirds god and  one-third man, and this knowledge is key to all that follows.  Gilgamesh is a hero -- more beautiful, more courageous, more  terrifying than the rest of us; his desires, attributes, and  accomplishments epitomize our own. Yet he is also mortal: he must  experience the death of others and die himself. How much more must  a god rage against death than we who are merely mortal!And if he  can reconcile himself with death then surely we can. In fact,  without death his life would be meaningless, and the adventures  that make up the epic would disappear. In celebrating Gilgamesh --  in reading The Epic of Gilgamesh-- we celebrate that which makes  us human.

The story begins with the coming of Enkidu. As a young man and a  god, Gilgamesh has no compassion for the people of Uruk. He is  their king but not their shepherd; he kills their sons and rapes  the daughters. Hearing the people's lament, the gods create Enkidu  as a match for Gilgamesh, a second self: "`Let them contend  together and leave Uruk in quiet'" (62). The plan works in several  ways. First, Enkidu prevents Gilgamesh from entering the house of  a bride and bridegroom; they fight and then they embrace as  friends. Second, Enkidu and Gilgamesh undertake a journey into the  forest to confront the terrible Humbaba. There they encourage each  other to face death triumphantly:

All living creatures born of the flesh shall sit at last   in the boat of the West, and when it sinks, when theboat of Magilum sinks, they are gone; but we shall go   forward and fix our eyes on this monster. (81)

While everlasting life is not his destiny, Gilgamesh will leave  behind him a name that endures. "I will go to the country where  the cedar is felled," he tells Enkidu. "I will set up my name in  the place where the names of famous men are written" (70). Thus  Gilgamesh turns his attention away from small personal desires to  loftier personal desires -- desires that benefit rather than harm  Uruk. We remember from the prologue that the walls of the city,  made from the cedar taken from the forest, still stand in  actuality or in imagination to proclaim Gilgamesh's fame, and the  very first sentence of the epic attests to the immortality of his  name. But the immortality of a name is less the ability to live  forever than the inability to die. Third and most important,  Enkidu teaches Gilgamesh what it means to be human; he teaches him  the meaning of love and compassion, the meaning of loss and of  growing older, the meaning of mortality.

From its beginnings, Enkidu's story raises many questions on the  nature of man. Created of clay and water and dropped into the  wilderness, Enkidu is "innocent of mankind," knowing "nothing of  cultivated land" (63). He lives in joy with the beasts until a  trapper sees that Enkidu is destroying the traps and helping the  beasts escape. The trapper needs to tame Enkidu just as the people  of Uruk need to tame Gilgamesh, or to redirect his desires. As we  read the story, we are not necessarily on the trapper's or the  people's sides; we may identify more with the heroes -- with  Enkidu and Gilgamesh. Civilization is less a thing than a process,  the transformation of the primitive. Without the primitive,  civilization would cease to exist. The Epic of Gilgameshhelps us  see past the conventional classifications of "civilized" and  "primitive" so that we might recall what each of us gains and  loses in developing from one state of being to another. Would  civilized man, if he could, go back to being primitive? Or, to put  it another way, what does primitive man lose in the process of  becoming civilized -- and what does he gain?

What Enkidu gains is wisdom. The harlot -- brought to the  wilderness to trap Enkidu -- stands for this wisdom and speaks for  civilization, even as she stands also as an outcast and an object  of sexual desire. Enkidu is seduced by the harlot and then  rejected by the beasts. This seems a dirty trick. Recognizing the  corruption in himself, civilized man corrupts primitive man to  weaken him and make him one of his own. Yet for Enkidu as for  human beings in general, sexual desire leads to domesticity, or  love. "Enkidu was grown weak," the narrator tells us, "for wisdom  was in him, and the thoughts of a man were in his heart." The  woman says to him, "You are wise, Enkidu, and now you have become  like a god. Why do you want to run wild with the beasts in the  hills?" She tells him about "strong-walled Uruk" and "the blessed  temple of Ishtar and of Anu, of love and of heaven," and about  Gilgamesh himself. Enkidu is pleased: "he longed for a comrade,  for one who would understand his heart" (65).

Ultimately, Enkidu's journey out of the wilderness and his  adventure with Gilgamesh lead to his death, and, looking back in  his sickness, Enkidu curses the walls of the city: "O, if I had  known the conclusion!If I had known that this was all the good  that would come of it, I would have raised the axe and split you  into little pieces and set up here a gate of wattle instead" (90).  He curses the trapper and the harlot, who had destroyed his  innocence -- as if innocence were precisely innocence of death and  without consciousness, or knowledge, or wisdom, there would be no  death. Yet Shamash, the Sun God, reminds him that the loss of  innocence brings recompense:

Enkidu, why are you cursing the woman, the mistress who   taught you to eat bread fit for gods and drink wine of   kings? She who put upon you a magnificent garment, did   she not give you glorious Gilgamesh for your companion,   and has not Gilgamesh, your own brother, made you rest   on a royal bed and recline on a couch at his left hand?

Above all, Shamash reminds Enkidu that he will be mourned by the  people of Uruk and that "When you are dead [Gilgamesh] will let  his hair grow long for your sake, he will wear a lion's pelt and  wander through the desert" (91). Hearing Shamash, Enkidu changes  his curse to a blessing. Bitter as his death is to him, and to  Gilgamesh, it gives meaning to his life, for it makes  companionship a thing of consequence. When Enkidu tells Gilgamesh  his dream of the Underworld, Gilgamesh responds, "we must treasure  the dream whatever the terror; for the dream has shown that misery  comes at last to the healthy man, the end of life is sorrow" (93).  Enkidu is in the story to die. In his rage and despair, Gilgamesh  must live with the death of his friend, and with the knowledge  that "What my brother is now, that shall I be" (97).

Afraid of this knowledge, even hoping to deny it, Gilgamesh goes  on a search for everlasting life. Two-thirds god, he is able to go  farther than the rest of us could go except by participating in  the act of storytelling. In the repetition of passages, the story  gives us not only a description but the sense of Gilgamesh's  journey into the twelve leagues of darkness: "At the end of five  leagues, the darkness was thick and there was no light, he could  see nothing ahead and nothing behind him. At the end of six  leagues the darkness was thick and there was no light, he could  see nothing ahead and nothing behind him" (99). Gilgamesh speaks  for us when he says, "Although I am no better than a dead man,  still let me see the light of the sun" (100). And in the  repetition of his own description of himself and recounting of  what has happened to him, we feel his grief over the loss of his  friend; we feel his aging, and the inevitability of our own grief  and aging: "[W]hy should not my cheeks be starved and my face  drawn? . . . Enkidu my brother, whom I loved, the end of mortality  has overtaken him" (101).

Beside the sea, Gilgamesh meets Siduri, "the woman of the vine,  the maker of wine," who reminds him of the meaningfulness of being  human. "Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to?" she asks.

You will never find that life for which you are looking.   When the gods created man they allotted to him death,   but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you,   Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and   night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and   rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in   water, cherish the little child that holds your hand,   and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too   is the lot of man. (102)

If it is "life" the gods retain in their keeping, it is not human  life, for human life depends on the passage of time and the  possibility of death.

Yet Gilgamesh still cannot rest. He continues his journey to  Utnapishtim the Faraway, the only mortal to whom the gods have  given everlasting life. With Urshanabi, the ferryman, Gilgamesh  crosses the waters of death. Like Siduri, Utnapishtim asks  Gilgamesh, "Where are you hurrying to?" (105), and in answer to  Gilgamesh's question, "How shall I find the life for which I am  searching?" he says, "There is no permanence" (106). But he  reveals the mystery of his own possession of everlasting life. He  tells Gilgamesh the story of the flood, of the time when the gods,  unable to sleep for the uproar raised by mankind, agreed to  destroy mankind, and would have succeeded had not Ea, one of man's  creators, instructed Utnapishtim to build a boat and "take up into  [it] the seed of all living creatures" (108). The story is  familiar to us not only because it anticipates Noah's story in the  book of Genesis,but because it is the story of life, the story of  destruction and renewal.

When Gilgamesh is ready to begin his long journey home,  Utnapishtim, at the urging of his wife, reveals a second mystery  of the gods. He tells Gilgamesh of a plant growing under water  that can restore youth to a man. Gilgamesh finds the plant and  picks it; he decides to take it to Uruk to give it to the old men.  But as Gilgamesh bathes in the cool water of a well, a serpent  rises up and snatches away the plant; immediately it sloughs its  skin and returns to the well. Again this story is familiar to us,  not only because we recognize this snake as a precursor of the  more sinister one that appears in the Garden of Eden, but because  we comprehend it as a symbol. In the Sumerian world, Ningizzida,  the god of the serpent, is "the lord of the Tree of Life" (119).  While Gilgamesh himself has lost the ability to live forever, or  the opportunity to pass on this ability to the men of Uruk, it is  enough that the snake recalls for us, in its sloughing of its  skin, nature's pattern of regeneration.

And with this dramatic statement of theme, Gilgamesh returns to  the strong-walled city of Uruk, and the story itself returns to  its beginning. Gilgamesh says to the ferryman, with whom he has  made the journey home, "Urshanabi, climb up on to the wall of  Uruk, inspect its foundation terrace, and examine well the  brickwork; see if it is not of burnt bricks; and did not the seven  wise men lay these foundations?" We have taken the ferryman's  place by passing the story on -- even if only to ourselves. The  narrator tells us once again that Gilgamesh, worn out with his  labor, "engraved on a stone the whole story" (117). And finally,  with the death of Gilgamesh -- the end of the story and the end of  the telling of it -- the text returns us to our mortal lives.

Works Cited

Sandars, N. K., trans. The Epic of Gilgamesh. London: Penguin,  1972.

Watts, Alan W. The Way of Zen. New York: Vintage, 1957.

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Copyright © 1996. Arthur A. Brown. This file may be copied for educational  and personal use   on the condition that the entire contents, including the header and this  copyright notice, remain intact. It may not be sold for profit without the written permission of the author.
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