Cuneiform

I wonder how writing first appeared? Haphazard and by accident, I would hope.



Scratches on plaster, imprints in wet clay, then dried to make it permanent. Baked. To make it eternal. Wedges, left and right, up and down, recording a civilization from four thousand years ago. They are our kissing cousins. Bureaucrats and poets used hen scratches to hold a human civilization together. One citizen at a time. His stockpiles of wheat and oil. His allocation of fields and volume of cisterns and warehouses used to store the bounty times against the lean times, the times when the gods sleep and people starve. So long as we survive to worship our gods again. Maybe they will bless us again. If not? Maybe they will bless somebody else. But now and for us, each man owns a clay tablet imprinted with his inventory in the city warehouse. A second millennia BC credit card. Public records. Well guarded. Layered in bureaucracy. Corrupt. This is not just our legacy. This is not our standing as a people against the long juggernaut of time. Nothing so dramatic. It is just our survival into the next year. And we did so collectively. Whether we liked it or not. Whether it was entirely good or not. As long as it worked.

And the human mind is restless. The human experience. Our ups and downs. We just can’t stop looking for meaning where there is none. And finding it. And we found it in a novel use for writing. To do what humans do best. To tell a story. And its history. Inanna of the dawn. The goddess over all who blesses and bestows all gifts; the poet, the judge, the lawgiver, the family goddess. Her myths and bedside stories make the children feel like they have a place. Will the villain prevail? Will the hero overcome? As Shamash traverses the vault of heaven to light our days and warm our crops, so will we endure. Good night, my pet. Dream the dreams of the blessed.

But in the end, we are all scratches in clay.

I was misquoted

I heard a funny buzzing in my house. That could be the refrigerator, or one of the mathoms of the deep reaches of my cellar. In which case I might find myself back in a survival situation. If my well is broken or the power compromised or gnome people are coming up through my basement, I'm screwed.

I ventured out into the balcony, and down the tapestried and much revered corridors of learning, past the suits of armor all standing around smoking cigarettes and-who am I kidding? This is my house, not the Taj Mahal. I went out to the hall and heard a buzzing, buzz, buzz, buzzing upon my cellar door.

“'Tis only some annoying smart gadget,” I said. “Barfed up upon the Internecine shore. Only this and nothing more.”

Quote the raven, “Nevermore.”

What? What the fuck is a raven doing in my house? I've got mice dancing in my ceiling and some kind of buzz kill in the basement. Fruit flies make strafing runs out of my compost bucket and telemarketers howl at the cell phone. I was in the middle ages thermally the other day, and now I’ve got a bird omen in my living room? “Quaff,” I say. “Or just get lost. Geesh! And leave Thales alone!”

So, down the Dantean depths I descended,

Seeking those I have offended,

Upon that Hyperion shore.

As I, down Jacob’s ladder falling,

Heard a cawing voice now calling.

In a stream of cries, appalling.

Quote the…

“I said stop it! Come on. Nobody likes a nineteenth century raven dropper.”

Quote the raven, “Sorry.”

Where was I? Yes. The buzzer was a warning from the dryer. Which is kind of ironic. I got to the bottom of my cellar stairs to step into four inches of water.

Quote the raven, “Fuck.”