Conductor Comment: Valery Gergiev

 So now that we in the West won't see Gergiev again until he's at least 80, I suppose it's a good time to appraise certain things about him.

Take this performance, for example. If I'm being honest with myself, this is the best performance I've ever heard of Pictures at an Exhibition, and frankly, it's not even close. There have been plenty of great performances: Koussevitzky, Toscanini, Solti, Giulini, Kubelik, Muti, Markevitch, Svetlanov, Abbado, Dorati, Jansons, and not least our own maestro hero here, Theodore Kuchar etc. etc. etc. This Gergiev performance is better, by some margin. It marries the Mussorgskian Russianness to the French color, and has the Mussorgskian grandeur and the Ravelian weirdness. It is, quite simply, a sui generis miracle of a performance.

Gergiev is just a larger than life fact of music. His career has unprecedented highs and lows and no middle. So often, a Gergiev performance is either a revelation or so awful that you wonder how he's ever hired back. If he conducted one-third of the performances he does and focus every performance on the best possible effort, he might be regarded as the world's greatest by some margin. But then again, he wouldn't be Gergiev, he clearly thrives on spontaneous combustion. Every moment in his performances is like interpretive ADHD, in which he finds a new angle mid-performance and pursues it. If it works, it works brilliantly, if it doesn't, it's truly abysmal. It's easy now to remember him for his awful concerts, but if people say that there were never moments when they were inspired by Gergiev, I can't quite believe them. At his relatively frequent best, he was so raw, so visceral, so overwhelming.

He's as much a 'musical fact' of our time as Bernstein was in the era before him. But Bernstein, for all his erraticness, was a genius whose animal instinct for music was matched by his overwhelming knowledge. Gergiev has no such intellect, he is pure instinct, and his instinct only works in Eastern European music.

The criticism is almost immaterial, because music in our time is so shaped by his presence that it changed the curvature of our perceptions. Without Gergiev, few of us would know the great Russian operas of Rimsky-Korsakov and Prokofiev, and if we were lucky enough to hear older maestri like Svetlanov and Temirkanov, might have occasionally heard the spontaneous Russian performance style that carries the 19th century 100 years later. But Gergiev showed many of us that the old romantic, instinctive spontenaeity of Mengelberg and (so we read) Nikisch was still possible 100 years later.

But like Mengelberg, there is something almost hollow sounding about his performances. It's pure exhibitionism, and however exciting, there is a kind of soullessness that eliminates introspection any potential for dullness. Compare Gergiev to other great post-Soviet bloc conductors: Jansons, Bychkov, Ivan Fischer, our own Andrey Boreyko. Gergiev is an awesome experience, but when is the heart moved? Gergiev accelerates the pulse, but the other four, much more patient and restrained, can leave you in tears.

Gergiev's opera conducting is so exciting, and yet like other superstars before him, the trail of voices he may have blown out by overplaying the orchestra is a kind of musical crime. Find that interview by Galina Gorchakova, the accusations she leaves at his feet are kind of shocking. The lack of care he exhibited for his singers is scandalous, they were all just appendages for Gergiev Inc. to be disgarded once he blew through their vocal capabilities. Like recent Russian ice skaters, their careers were practically over before they began, and he seemingly used up their voices thirty years before their careers should be over.

But Gergiev's ambition can in some ways be sympathized with. This most conspicuously Russian conductor is not Russian at all, he's Ossetian, a minority within the Georgian minority that to a certain extent depended on Russia from protection from the Georgians. Whereas more obviously probing Russian conductors like Rozhdestvensky and Jurowski are sons of great conductors themselves, Gergiev comes from a military family. He had no musical biltung and could only pursue music from the engine of his own talent.

Gergiev is pure musical id, and his career is the result of an engine that knows no rest and plows ahead through every obstacle. It might take ten years, but if he makes it to 80, he will be back West, and play on through every protest and controversy. While he is gone, as hard as as it seems, he will be missed. Not too much, but a little. The era of Gergiev is over for us, and now we get a decade to unpack it and wonder: 'OK, what the hell was that?'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-EShqVxtAg&fbclid=IwAR1I89pNcBvgCHQmTqHII_hHSj_Lt94hueVjCNevxiD8DAq6vk7HTRl_CEk

Reading List of Relevant Books for right now, most of which I haven't finished...:

 

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Red Famine by Anne Applebaum: A horrific account of Stalin's War on Ukraine by one of the best journalists of our time. Approach with caution. She also wrote a history of the Gulags. I'm just not ready.... Speaking of approach with caution...

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder: Approach with caution, an account of all the terrible horrors of the era between Poland and Western Russia from which my family hailed, and all the unprecedentedly horrific things done during the 30s and 40s in this most awful of world regions.

Man Without a Face by Masha Gessen: Nobody in the English-speaking world has done more important journalistic work in the last few years than Masha Gessen. This book is a review of all the relevant facts about Putin, the blank face about whom the world knew nothing, along with a kind of biography of the Russian people and how their hopes for a new era that were mercilessly dashed.

Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol: A short novel by Gogol about Ukrainian cossacks who go to war against Poland. The father is so filled with nationalist passion that he kills his own son for falling in love with a Polish girl.

Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov: Look, these are tough books, they operate at fever pitch and continually make emotional demands until you're exhausted and perhaps a little bored at the contant intensity, but if you want to understand the mentality of people who support Putin, this is ground zero.

From the House of the Dead and Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky: House of the Dead is Dostoevsky's semi-autobiographical account of his time in a Siberian prison camp, and it is his most digestible work. Notes from the Underground, on the other hand, is pure nihilism as prose. It is the point of view of everyone from Vladimir Putin to every troll on social media.

The Great Terror by Robert Conquest: An account of the late 30s, when Stalin ruled by fear of the disappearance. It's a little dry and takes a while to get into gear, but the detail and the horror is obviously astounding. He also wrote Harvest of Sorrow, which I haven't begun, about the enforced Ukraine famine of the early 30s.

Life and Fate and Stalingrad by Vassily Grossman - THE great of the Second World War, done, obviously, from the Soviet perspective. No novel is greater than this, and I don't have the authority to say so, but if anyone called this the greatest novel written in the 20th century I would never complain. I love every one of Life and Fate's 886 pages, but the prequel book, Stalingrad, a novel about the largest battle in human history, I have never even attempted though it sits on my shelf.

The Captain's Daughter by Alexander Pushkin: Another of my favorites. A tragically bloody and funny tale about a pretender Czar supported by the Cossacks and the very bitter losses the battles entail.

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak: Should explain itself, but it's ultimately an account of how life for privileged liberal intellectuals was shocked into realization of Russia's depravity and forced submission into the new reality.

Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam: An account by the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam of her marriage and of the Great Terror in which her husband disappeared forever.

To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson: An account of Marxism from the French Revolution to Lenin's founding of the Soviet Union. It is therefore also an account of the complacently repressive 19th century conservatism that lead to the explosion of radicalism, and also of the reactionary counterrevolution which would so soon thereafter become fascism.

The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore: A very dishy, hilariously strange and bloody account of Russian Czar's ruling family and how their whims controlled this out of control country. This is the world to which Putin wants to bring us back.

The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The first is the gulags on the micro-level, which I read at seventeen, and is an astonishing account of dignity and resilience. The second is the three-volume account of the Gulags on the macro level. Very difficult emotionally and monotonous acts of oppression, and I couldn't keep going through even fifty pages.

Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor: Beevor is kind of notorious as the historian that never skimps on 'the wet stuff', and this is an account of the most lethal battle in world history (so far). Handle with care.

Odessa Stories and Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel: Babel too was shot in the Great Terror. The first is stories organized Jewish crime in 1900s Odessa, the second a journalistic account of the brutally violent life in the Russian Civil War.

Requiem by Anna Akhmatova: A long account in poetry to bury the victims of Soviet tragedies.

Sevastopol Sketches and Hadji Murad by Leo Tolstoy: The first is Tolstoy's semi-autobiographical fiction about the brutalities of the Crimean War. The second is Tolstoy's last book. A novella about Chechan resistance to Czarist occupation and oppression.

War and Peace I guess...: explains itself...

The Inevitability of War (not yet)

 Here's why Abraham Lincoln is the greatest President:

He had the will to kill 625,000 people without flinching in a war he started himself. He had the will to impose martial law and prohibit criticism of the Presidency. He had the will to claim emergency powers for himself that were in no way emunerated by the Constitution.

War is the extension of politics by other means, and however much we ignore it, war is as inevitable a part of human life as politics. In the same way that sex is the ultimate irrationality of life, war is the ultimate irrationality of death. It is impossible to treat every human life as sacred unless human beings agree on what sanctity is, and when the world is constantly reminded of its disagreements, there is no future in which the world does not go to war.

With every new leap in communications technology, there is a new means by which the world is reminded of its disagreements, and until the death of those we love chastens us, we fight our disagreements as though they can be fought to true victory. Soon, it will be as much social media as sarin gas. One hundred years ago, it was as much newsreel footage as machine guns. A hundred years before that it was as much newspapers as artillery. A hundred-fifty years before that, it was as much pamphlets as muskets.

And inevitably, some ideas communicated are right, and some are wrong. The righter the idea, the more provocative it's found by those in the wrong.

There's no such thing as an idea that is 100% right or 100% wrong. Every idea is just an idea, even proven ones inevitably have exceptions, and every concept we hold in our head is an extreme simplification; an abstract two-dimensional blueprint that only takes on real life in dimensions well past any of which our brains can conceive. There is no dimension which any human perceives that can predict chaos, and war the ultimate human event which exists in all its dimensions.

It may be senseless, but war is the ultimate human event. Preparation for war is how large parts of societies must always organize themselves, and when the heightened drama of war comes, our conduct within it is the story which everyone who remembers us tells those who come after.

Human beings, like every animal, are wired for their survival to be threatened. In peacetime, eventually our idle minds go to seed, and we become depressed without knowing why. In war, the vast majority of us forget our troubles, because what matter the troubles of living when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death?

We may be different from every other animal, but we are still half animal, and since our destructive side cannot find release in anything but the wild, eventually the wild comes for us.

I've written this many times, but human beings seem to have a homing device. When life gets too comfortable, when we reach what should be our moments of greatest happiness, we get too far from nature, and nature seems to have installed a homing device into us at the genetic level. Our lives are better than ever, and it's always a disappointment. All we can think of is 'why is life not better than it is?' And so we require explanations. We require people to blame. And by blaming factors and people that are not ourselves, we gain self-esteem that we lacked in our dolor.

We gain self-esteem merely from the impression that we're finally smart enough to understand our problems. We gain further self-esteem by accusing those whom we see as the culprits. And we gain self-esteem still further by the esteem of others who agree with us and love us more for how we explain problems they share with us, and for our courage in calling out the people we view as responsible for the problems.

But inevitably, that in turn provokes people who disagree. The people who disagree have their own similar process of actualizing their self-esteem by which they identify their own culprits and band together to oppose them, and the culprits are inevitably us. And with enough back and forth provocation, the end result is inevitable, and happens over the course of every lifetime.

But war clarifies all these questions, because when life is on the line, it eliminates all the inessential. You may wish you could take back all those fingers you pointed, but even that doesn't matter now. All that matters is life itself, because survival is in no way guaranteed, either for us or those we love much more than ourselves.

And for a brief moment in history, society after society feels as though it's achieved a kind of ideal vision of what it should always have been, full of unity and purpose and meaning as everyone works together save themselves. People band together in a common mission that they should always have had in peacetime, but never do. It is only in those moments when life itself may end that people act as they think they should in life. But this greatest vision of ourselves comes crashing down in agony. While we may be banded together as soldiers, factory workers, fund raisers, doctors, farmers, teachers, utility and doc workers; we've all banded together as a society, so that we can kill another society. Our soldiers are literally sent abroad so that they can kill and burn and rape, and the rest of us do our part to make sure that they can do their job as best they can, because we know that this is what the other side is doing too, and if they do it better than us, we will die.

There's no explanation for why, but when you read history, it can't help but stick out: people are particularly prone to smash things up at the moments of their greatest well-being. The Enlightenment should have been the great moment when humanity embraced reason, yet it ended with guillotines and cannonade. The industrial revolution should have provided everything we needed to live, but it also made machine guns. The scientific and information revolution could have made the ideal society, and yet its weapons are pointed at us every day for decades; and we hear the clock counting down every day to the moment when they're finally put to use. For all our advancement, we are no more civilized than the great ancient religions who foresaw that all things which give light too give darkness.

Everyone on earth should read an abridged version of the India's ancient national epic: the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is the story of great virtue, but great virtue is only proven by provoking equivalently great vice. I found it impossible to read of the virtue of Prince Yhudishtira and not think of Abraham Lincoln - he had all the same qualities of modesty, prudence, slow deliberation on every decision, and leadership by setting an example of vulnerability and humility.

But like Lincoln, it is his very virtue that provokes the vice of others, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to read of Prince Duryodhana and not think of Trump: the arrogance, the petulance, the lust, the hotheadedness, the impatience with governing...

The more virtuously Yudhishtira acts, the more his virtue provokes vice in those who are jealous of him, until such a time that Yudhishtira's karma is so strong with light that his decisions literally obliterate all the men of the earth in a great battle that ushers in a new era of greater virtue.

Is that greater era worth the price? Well, it's certainly not to the people who died in the war, and I'd imagine it's not better to their wives and children, at least not for the moment, but it does enable a new ethos to take root by a new generation, chastened by tragedy into demanding less even as they get more.

War is always not worth it for the people involved in war, both the dead and the mourners. But we do not exist on earth as ourselves, we are the earth's property, and at a moment of its choosing, the earth flushes us out of consciousness like turds.

We are, at most, only one third ourselves. One third of us belongs to us, one third of us belongs to the cosmos, and one third of us belongs to the earth. Forces around us both above and below have their own agendas which we're only privy to as a minority partner controlling the least profitable third of the business. These forces around us don't just control our bodies, they control our thoughts. It is not our intellects that control which ideas appeal to us, it's our temperaments, it's our physiological wiring, it's whichever direction a few neurons choose to go on any given day, which is influenced by the nerves and blood which allow them to do its job.

So therefore, the chaos of nature calls to us at the moments we're most shielded from it. There seems to be a homing device in humans that returns us to the madness of evolution.

We sit in our comfort and we think we are at a great remove from the jungle and forest, but privilege reminds us of what we still don't have. It teases us with how close we are to better lives. Whether you're liberal or conservative, alt-right or intersectional SJW, that homing signal is the pull all Americans feel right now. If we've achieved prosperity, it's made us less satisfied, not more. At the beginning of 2020, even after three years of Trump, America was a better country than ever before, yet we've all been miserable since around 1998.

War is every bit as awful as it sounds, and every bit as unavoidable as we'd like to think it isn't. We will go to war, and the more virtuously we act, the more likely war becomes. It is inevitable, it is written, it is in the code of the human psyche, and whether now or in fifty years, the human psyche will shortly remind us that we are part beast.

What else can I end this with except what might be the greatest, most meaningful line in all Shakespeare, from Act V of Hamlet: "If it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come – the readiness is all."

Shostakovich 8th Symphony

No composer understood the eternal mendacity of Russian leadership like Shostakovich. I am convinced Shostakovich 8 is a programmatic war symphony, the first movement portraying a night bombing - dread insomnia at night, air raid sirens, evacuation to the basement, the bombs get dropped, and bitter resumption of life. The second is military parade with all its accompanying bombast. The third is a darkly comic portrayal of munition factories with an ear to imitating Chaplin's Modern Times, perhaps with a factory explosion at the end. Finally the last two movements are, I believe, a portrayal of normal life resuming, only for there to be another air raid, and finally, ending with gratitude that we've lived through another day. It is one of the greatest scores of the 20th century by far, and neither did the 20th century ever have a greater composer than Dmitri Shostakovich, nor did the 19th century have a greater one since Beethoven. He occupies a place akin to Goya in art - a witness to political horror, a painter of barbarity, grotesque, and nightmares, but also humor, eros, hope, and pleas for human dignity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtZmvhg7XME

Reading War and Peace (hint: It's a metaphor...)

 Everybody tells you that War and Peace is one of the easier 'big reads.' Don't believe them.

It totally is, but go straight to Book 4 and skip the first 300 pages, and don't read the second epilogue. What's leftover is still roughly 850 pages long, and it's incredible. But few 1200 page books need every page, and like any binge-watched TV serial, part of reading the whole thing is 'enduring' them. You get through the boring parts and for large stretches, the show slows to a crawl before the momentum hurtles you through a half day at a time. No book over 350 pages can be flawless (give or take a few), and any writer who 'writes long' is trying to say something too messy and elusive to be neat.

No writer 'writes bigger' than Tolstoy. He writes the reader into panoramic vistas of battle scenes, into the minds of the dying, into the personalities of the most consequential figures in history and speculates through his characters how a leader's temperament might result in the arbitrary deaths of millions.

But what makes War and Peace interesting is that he 'writes small' at least as well as he writes big, and writes into the minds of dozens of personalities in their most intimate thoughts, and then 'writes middle' and shows how the presence of each character affects one another. He might view women too sentimentally, but he certainly writes perceptively about the encyclopedia of subtle ways men are allowed to oppress them.

War and Peace may or may not be the greatest novel ever written, but it is, almost by default, the 'Greatest' novel ever written, in which we get a view of world large, the world small, how the large affects the small, and how the small affects the large.

The problem? Well, Tolstoy was a Count and one of the richest men in Russia. He knew everything there was to know about the life of aristocrats and bourgeois gentry, but the life of the millions of serfs who followed their orders in both war and peace? Hardly even a mention. War and Peace is society large and small, it is not, however, society top and bottom. For that, you either have to go backward to Gogol, or forward to Chekhov.

So no, I can't truly read War and Peace in book form front to back, and I've tried at least half a dozen times. I can, however, listen to the audiobook, and Thandiwe Newton, amid her recent controversial and weird apology for playing an African-American (she's a Zona princess by birth), released an audiobook of War and Peace which is one of the most stunning bits of acting I've ever heard. She doesn't just create a distinct character out of every voice, she seems to mine the book for every bit of hidden comedy, every subtle implication and innuendo, every bit of snark, every pomposity and every bit of vulgarity. It's more than a tour-de-force, it's an internalization of an entire epic. It's a shame she can't get an Oscar or Emmy for this because what she does is more impressive than she can on any show.

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Whether Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, the world of Russia is not the world of America, and while the kind of American who'd read a whole Russian novel is self-selecting to people who'd like it, I think most Americans are conditioned to find certain elements of its world repulsive.

Russia and America are so completely different as only two countries can be who grew to the world stage on exactly the same same day. They're almost mirror images of each other - and not just in the way they embraced exact opposite political systems. One month after Russia left World War I, America came in. In the same year America went to civil war to free the slaves, Russia liberated its serfs by a simple decree of a Czar. Both Petersburg and Washington were artificially designed to be capital cities apart from the pressures of the mob, to which the rest of the country looked forever after with incredible suspicion.

After World War I, the USA and USSR took over the world from Old Europe - existing as the much larger countries on either side of Europe whose mass spans whole continents - both countries containing vast reservoirs of unexplored territories, full of untapped resources and possibilities.

While European fascism looked back to the medieval world of myth and race, both America and Russia took their cues from the 18th century Enlightenment, and interpreted it in exact opposite ways. 20th century Russia took its cue from the idea that an all-knowing genius of a leader can give the people everything they need as a gift and change the world overnight. 20th century America took its cue from the idea that through carefully prepared institutions and no one person accumulating too much power, the necessary change can be affected by people working together of completely different backgrounds, to whom their leaders must answer like servants. In practice, neither worked that way. The Russian leaders murdered rather than gifted, and American leaders stayed American leaders and kept millions from rising, but there's no serious question which worked better and worse.

For the moment, it still seems as though America's vision was much more perceptive, even if false in all kinds of ways. But... if the internet makes every opinion seem as valid as facts, there is no democracy to be had, and if that's the case, the authoritarian model becomes all that prevents the world from perpetual civil insurrection.

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If human beings cannot affect the necessary changes together, the only option left is to put your trust in one guy being the smartest around, and that guy makes the decisions for everybody else. That's obviously a hugely dangerous bet, and hasn't really worked since a couple of monarchs did it in the 18th century, when modernization was affected single-handedly by 'Great Kings,' like Peter the Great in Russia, Frederick the Great in Prussia, Joseph II of Austria, Charles III in Spain, Sultan Selim in Turkey, and Gustav III of Sweden.

At the time, only monarchs had the means to get updates on all the latest information from advisors. Sometimes these advisors were powerful enough to run kingdoms for the king, but most of those politicians would quickly fall from favor if they ever accumulated enough power to contradict a King's degrees. Ministers who stayed in favor were content to remain specialists in particular subjects, and had no ambitions for country-wide rule; so therefore in the 1700s, the monarch was, almost by definition, the most enlightened citizen of his country.

But by increasing the opportunities of their subjects, these kings allowed their subjects the means to far outstrip them in skills and knowledge. And we have been dealing with the problem ever since of how best to establish enlightened rule. Half the world thinks enlightened rule can only be provided by a ruler who guarantees it, half the world thinks only democracy can provide it. Perhaps surprisingly, in the 19th century it seemed relatively clear that well-maintained autocracies did better than the republics. England and France had imperial outposts around the globe, and America had slaves at home. Meanwhile, Bismark's Germany established the first successful welfare state, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire under Franz Josef allowed rights for each of its 24 nationalities that even America today doesn't allow.

In the 20th century, it became abundantly clear that democracy was a better way forward, but we're only 21ish% of the way through the 21st century, and if the world's major democracies collapse into failed states, autocracies are virtually all that's left of human civilization.

Most humans don't naturally cooperate with each other - they always think they do, but put them in a situation where they have to compromise their most fundamental beliefs, and most humans get too mad to believe anybody can disagree with them in good faith; and rather than work together, they fight each other until one side clearly wins and the other loses, at which point the other side feels humiliated and tries to take revenge, and eventually they succeed. That's how most history works.

That doesn't mean humans are bad, but it does mean the bad side of humans comes out much more easily than people suppose, and there are only two real solutions:

1. Pacify our anger, which results in no progress being made.

2. Enact the obvious practical measures to progress society, which inevitably results in people rebelling against progress.

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People say that there is no reward for dictatorship. For better or worse, that's not at all true. The reward, however, is one Americans really don't like...

For better or worse... occasionally, a human being comes along who really is that much of a genius: a Tolstoy, a Shostakovich, a Kasparov, and their achievements can change the world forever. These sorts of geniuses are not just talented people who can write songs or scripts and collaborate with other talented people. These geniuses create whole cathedrals of meaning. You can spend your whole life studying Tolstoy every day for eight hours and never arrive at the bottom of what he lets you perceive. Sure, artists like Shostakovich depended on their teachers for their training, but their achievements are their own, and they worked like slaves at these achievements to a capacity which only a slave could understand.

In America, culture happens bit by bit. Thousands of talented artists get fifteen minutes on the world stage to show the world the glories of what they can do, America uses them up and tosses them aside at the first failure. In Russia, culture happens overnight by spontaneous explosion, and once a thinker is proven a genius, they get infinite chances to get it right again, and this explosion can last a lifetime. If their talent is noticed early, its nurtured from the earliest age, until you're an unquestionable world authority on what you do. America hates geniuses so much that we do everything we can to ignore them. Russia loves geniuses so much that their heads of state have geniuses assassinated because their effect on the population is too strong.

Americas don't believe in geniuses for the same reason we don't believe in dictators - we believe no person has the right to control our minds and tell us what to believe. We are a nation of rebels and skeptics. Our rebellions brought us our country and all the rights it provides us, it brought us a popular culture with appreciation in reach of anyone in the world; rebellion also brought us the Civil War and a century of segregation. Russia believes in dictators for the same reason it believes in genius. Russian history is a history of submission to autocrats - autocrats brought them genocide after democide, poverty after famine -but it also brought them modernization and the most gloriously ornate religion on earth (go to any Orthodox cathedral, they're stunning), and from that ornate religion came the most glorious culture of fine arts the world has ever seen in its entire history.

You know what's coming next, and I know nobody wants to hear it...

The truth is, yeah... American popular culture is great. It's fun, it's empowering, its history tells a story of how American liberated themselves demographic by demographic. But any insights you find into the human condition are the exception. Mass culture, now more than ever, is designed to be trivial and appeal to the basest parts of human beings.

What we call 'high culture' is not the dictation of powerful people's aesthetic tastes. From the Iliad to the cutouts of Kara Walker, culture tells the story of how the world is shaped by tragedy after tragedy; the illusions of every era dispelled without mercy or justice.

And in that sense, Russia has so much more accurate a view of what life is than we do, and is so much more prepared for whatever comes next. What comes next for us, whether now or in fifty years, will be the great shock of our entire history - the moment when America's forced out of its perpetual adolescence into maturity, and realizes that era after era shapes the world by mass death.

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So all those long tomes which Russians famously read in their sleep... they're what prepare you best for moments like these. It may not be fair that only Counts get the funding to write to the full extent of their genius, but part of what we're fighting for - a larger part than you think, is that when the next female Tolstoy arrives, the next black Tolstoy, the next poor Tolstoy, the next trans Tolstoy, they have as much a chance to spread their wisdom as 3000 years of rich white male geniuses did. It's not fair, but extraordinary people do exist, and regardless of whether the law protects them from their misdeeds, their insights do more to heal people and make them whole than ours. That, for better or worse, is the great insight of autocracy.

Russia's culture is barely older than America's, but in the 200 years between Peter the Great and Stalin, it grew the greatest culture in the world. Period. It took them 200 years to do what Italy did over 2000. It marries everything that's great from Europe, Byzantium, the Middle East, Moorish Islam, Ancient Greece and Rome, India, Mongolia, China, and Japan. From the incalculable insights of literature, to the infinite spirituality of its cathedrals, to the gorgeous refinement of its ballet, to the reverberent passion of its music, etc. etc., etc., etc., the culture of the world's most depressing country makes suffering lives more worth living than any force on earth. And in the moments of greatest suffering yet to come for Americans, American culture doesn't yet have enough great achievements to prepare us for the enormity of what may soon come.

So if War and Peace is too big for you, start with Chekhov; watch his lives of suffering mediocrity, feel compassion for these characters the world treats with contempt. Then move to Turgenev and feel the pure lyrical beauty of youthful hopes disappointed. Then move to Gogol and see what real absurdity is. Then go on to Pushkin's Eugene Onegin - if it's too hard, listen to Stephen Fry narrate it, and listen to a poem-novel as insightful and quotable as Hamlet (and as funny). Then, when you're really ready for it, go to Tolstoy. If War and Peace is too tough, listen to Thandiwe Newton narrate it; if Anna Karenina is too tough, listen to Maggie Gyllenhall (they're both on youtube), and see how humans evolve together as a whole societal organism. It will give you insights into everything from how history shapes our lives to how we're all influenced by friendships, friends, and frenemies.

And then when you're really for a plunge, go for Dostoevsky. Tolstoy's pomposity can be hard to take, but Dostoevsky is everything Americans hate. He's a totalitarian, pure and simple. He believes humans are evil, sinful, dirty, and can only be saved by God and all-powerful sovereigns - most particularly the Russian Orthodox God and his Czar. The key to appreciating Dostoevsky is understanding that even if he's maliciously wrong about a lot, there's a lot about which he's right. You may be bored at the time, god knows I was when I read Notes from the Underground, and yet quotes from that book surface in my head again and again - they explain everything from situations in my personal life to the behavior of the entire world and history itself.

It honestly took me years of trying to climb this pyramid. In a few crucial cases I still haven't reached the top. I love Chekhov and Pushkin like I love Coppola and Scorsese, but very few Americans have the attention span for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It's not necessarily tough to understand intellectually, this isn't German philosophy; it's tough to understand emotionally. It's nearly impossible for an American to get into a headspace that believes freedom is a curse or that our choices are completely predetermined by a historical logic we're incapable of understanding. But we clearly ignore those worldviews at our peril.

After centuries of slavish subordination, Russians so tired of authoritarian rule that they overthrew it for a Soviet republic in which all men would be equal, but having lived under a thousand years of Czars, they did not understand the first thing about how to treat each other with equality. After two-and-a-half centuries of republican governance, Americans have so tired of our country's liberal hypocrisies that a large part of this country is willing to cast the whole thing aside in favor of an anti-liberal republic that deliberately favors one kind of person over another in its most blatantly stated aims. There's little reason to think America would do any more competently under that kind of government than Russia did under the Soviets.

You learn the future by studying the past. You won't learn the exact details, but existence never changes and humans have as much capacity for destruction as creation. You learn human beings by studying their greatest art. Art is no substitute for socialization and practical experience, but an extraordinary creator will understand what motivates the average human much better than you can if you try to understand them without their help.

America and Russia will always misunderstand each other, but Russia has given us, again and again, ways to understand what makes them tick, and most of us just ignore it. Believe it or not, our survival may depend on reading their books; their big, dull, glorious books.

Tales From the Old New Land - Century 2 - Generation 7 - Dialogue 1

 And war did rage for seven years, the very machines created by the builders of Babylon in hopes to conquer death did become the world's executioners: boulders of dashing pulverization hurled into masses of men; basins of tar lifted atop the walls of cities, burned to boiling and cast upon millions of innocent as rain. Rulers wished to preserve their men as chattel, yet their chattel lay upon hills as carrion; their blood transfigureth grains of sand into forest, their flesh turneth all that lives into plague. And a fifth of the earth's men did die, and a fifth of the earth's men did become crippled, and a fifth of the earth's men did dwell in the house of lunacy.

And behold, the unfathered children of the Festival at Babel had turned twelve. And by such time as their fifth years when war beginneth throughout the world, they all were cast out from their mothers as reminders of  former sin. Great was their disgrace, and the streets of the world were tumultuous with cries through their mothers' windows: "Mothers, why hast thou forsaken us?" And the mothers did weep in concord with their children but offered them not food neither shelter nor warmth. And the children of Babel did sleep and eat within the streets of every city of the world - robbing for food, maurauding for shelter, and trespassing upon  sheep to sheer for blankets. And the Children of Babel were much despised. 

And as every city sent citizens into battle to die man by man, the unfathered boys and girls did become as men for every city. By six did they learn to ply trades no man in the city could practice. By eight they did tenant the markets of their cities. By ten did they take among themselves to man and wife. And by twelve they were manifold among ministers for the kings of the earth. 

And verily, as men fought the world elsewhere, there was none to shield mothers from their unwanted children. Few were the new children of men, and the younger children who did live were great with hunger. And the mothers did come to their unwanted children and ask for sustenance they had not means to give, and the Children of Babel did grant their mothers and brothers food and nourishment. 

And by the sixth year of war, the mothers of the earth were exceeding with woe, for their youngest sons were soon to be trained as soldiers, and the mothers did fall in supplication upon the Children of Babel: 

"Go unto the kings of the earth and prevail upon them to end the war. For we have no children but our striplings, and err the war continueth shall we have no son but the sons of Babel and no honorable men to marry our daughters?" 

and the Children of Babel did exclaim unto their mothers, "Were we not children enough for thee? Hath we not proven our honor? In shame didst thou banish us like slaver, yet for the world we did become as men. When the harvest was great we were like chaffe to thee, yet now we are the source of thy wheat, and thou askest us to vouchsafe the reverence of mothers who never did love us as children," 

to which the mothers responded, "We did always love you as the issue of our hearts, but great is the shame of our actions in Babel. Thou art not the children of thy fathers, for we did lie with enemies. Though we did wish to raise you as children, thou hadst been born with marks of shame.' 

and the Children of Babel did reply: "We are not shameful. We are descendants of the world entire. Through no aid of forebears, we have turned shame into fortune. And behold, thou wishest to profit from thy shame." 

and the mothers were prostrate with weeping and exclaimed "Lo, we have betrayed, we have been disloyal, we have sinned, we have turned away and ignored the children of our wanton acts of wickedness." 

and the Children of Babel did say to their mothers: "Well,... fuck it. No, you're not wicked or evil, you're just kind of a selfish bitch. I'll talk to the kings of the earth and see what I can do."

Tales From the Old New Land - Century 2 - Generation 7 - A Very Little More

 And the war did rage for seven years, the very machines created by the builders of Babylon in hopes to conquer death did become the world's executioners: boulders of dashing pulverization hurled into masses of men; basins of tar lifted atop the walls of cities, burned to boiling and cast upon millions of innocent as rain. Rulers wished to preserve their men as chattel, yet their chattel lay upon hills as carrion; their blood transfigureth grains of sand into forest, their flesh turneth all that lives into plague. And a fifth of the earth's men did die, and a fifth of the earth's men did become crippled, and a fifth of the earth's men did dwell in the house of lunacy.

And behold, the unfathered children of the Festival at Babel had turned twelve. And by such time as their fifth years when war beginneth throughout the world, they all were cast out from their mothers as reminders of  former sin. Great was their disgrace, and the streets of the world were tumultuous with cries through their mothers' windows: "Mothers, why hast thou forsaken us?" And the mothers did weep in concord with their children but offered them not food neither shelter nor warmth. And the children of Babel did sleep and eat within the streets of every city of the world - robbing for food, maurauding for shelter, and trespassing upon  sheep to sheer for blankets. And the Children of Babel were much despised. 

And as every city sent citizens into battle to die man by man, the unfathered boys and girls did become as men for every city. By six did they learn to ply trades no man in the city could practice. By eight they did tenant the markets of their cities. By ten did they take among themselves to man and wife. And by twelve they were manifold among ministers for the kings of the earth. 

And verily, as men fought the world elsewhere, there was none to shield mothers from their unwanted children. Few were the new children of men, and the younger children who did live were great with hunger. And the mothers did come to their unwanted children and ask for sustenance they had not means to give, and the Children of Babel did grant their mothers and brothers food and nourishment. 

And by the sixth year of war, the mothers of the earth were exceeding with woe, for their youngest sons were soon to be trained as soldiers, and the mothers did fall in supplication upon the Children of Babel: "Go unto the kings of the earth and prevail upon them to end the war. For we have no children but our striplings, and err the war continueth shall we have no son but the son of Babel?" and the Children of Babel did exclaim unto their mothers, "Were we not children enough for thee? When the harvest was great thou cast us aside like chaffe, yet now we are the source of thy wheat, and thou askest of us to vouchsafe the reverence of mothers when thou hast never loved us as children." To which the mothers responded, "We did always love you as the issue of our hearts, but great is the shame of our actions in Babel. Thou art not the children of thy fathers, for we did lie with enemies. And we did wish to raise you as children. But thou wast born with marks of shame.' And the Children of Babel did respond: "We are not shameful. We are descendants of the world entire. Through no aid of forebears, we have turned shame into fortune. And behold, thou wishest to profit from thy shame." 

And the mothers were prostrate with weeping. 

----------------------------

And the kings of the earth did reply "What life didst thou so value? With 

Tales From the Old New Land - Century 2 - Generation 7 - A Little More

 And the war did rage for seven years, the very machines created by the builders of Babylon in hopes to conquer death did become the world's executioners: boulders of dashing pulverization hurled into masses of men; basins of tar lifted atop the walls of cities, burned to boiling and cast upon millions of innocent as rain. Rulers wished to preserve their men as chattel, yet their chattel lay upon hills as carrion; their blood transfigureth grains of sand into forest, their flesh turneth all that lives into plague. And a third of the earth's men did die, and one third of the men of the earth returned home cripples.

And behold, the unfathered children of the Festival at Babel had turned twelve. And by such time as their fifth years when war beginneth throughout the world, they all were cast out from their mothers as reminders of  former sin. Great was their disgrace, and the streets of the world were tumultuous with cries through their mothers' windows: "Mothers, why hast thou forsaken us?" And they did sleep and eat within the streets of every city of the world - robbing for food and maurauding for shelter. And the Children of Babel were much despised. 

And as more men were forever away in battle to die, the unfathered boys and girls did become as men for every city. By six did they learn to ply trades no man in the city did practice. By eight they did tenant the markets of their cities. By ten did they take among themselves to man and wife. And by twelve they were manifold among ministers for the kings of the earth. 

And verily, all able bodied men fought the world elsewhere, so there was none to shield mothers from their unwanted children. Few were the new children of men, and the children who did live were great with hunger. And the mothers did come to their unwanted children and ask for sustenance they had not means to give, and the Children of Babel did grant their mothers and brothers food and nourishment. 

And by the sixth year of war, the mothers of the earth were exceeding with woe, for their youngest children were soon to be trained as soldiers to be sent off in war, and the mothers did say to the kings of the earth. 'Verily, thou must end this war lest there be no new 

Evan Articulates Fears Beneath the Fold

 I realize I'm a broken record of pessimism, but I'm terrified of this plague being done. On a personal level, sure, I doubt my natural paranoia is ready to handle the anxiety of going back into socialization, but more globally, I cannot imagine us coming out of all this being anything but a turbo version of what we were going in. A healthy civilization is unified by crisis and makes us forgive each other's differences because the common humanity is too important. But none of us, myself included, feel anything but blinding rage at people who disagree with us. And it's not just here, it's all around the Western world, and meanwhile, there are two extremely powerful dictatorships trying to make their entire citizenry as obsessed with their national humiliations as any Trump rally. I'm scared for me, sure, but I'm scared for us all, I'm scared of the world we've created, I'm scared of how it can impact people we love.

I really just want to eat a corned beef sandwich and drink scotch, but both of those may never happen again.

Tales From the Old New Land - Century 2 - Generation 7 - The Children of Babel - Opening Paragraph

And the war did rage for seven plus seven years, the very machines created by the builders of Babylon in hopes to conquer death did become the world's executioners: boulders of dashing pulverization hurled into masses of men; basins of tar lifted atop the walls of cities, burned to boiling and cast upon millions of innocents as rain. Rulers of men wished to preserve their men as chattel, yet their chattel lay in hills as carrion; their blood turning grains of sand into forest, their flesh turning all that lives into plague. 

Tales From the Old New Land - Century 2 - Generation 6 - Final Draft with Better Ending (Last Four Paragraphs)

 

So this letter is meant for God and Abel, though I don't know how to send it or if anybody else does. If anybody ever finds this letter, if you can find a way to send this to God I'll be very grateful. 

It's been a little more over 30 years since The Flood. From the way people talk about it you'd think everybody died, but it couldn't have even been one in a hundred who got themselves killed. Maybe if you were closer to the Mediterranean you had worse chance of living, but people here just hiked themselves to the Zagros mountains, and a lot of people with houses made of proper mudbrick just camped out on the roof and fished. 

As far as apocalypses go, the Flood just wasn't that big. ...It was big, but mostly for how it made us shelter in place for two years. It was just a pre-echo of the real event that came for us because of how we responded. 

We thought The Flood focused everything, solved everything, clarified everything. It obliterated from our minds all the trivial drek. The generation before the flood seemed to be the generation of partisanship and violence, but we were the generation of unity and love. Every man and woman on earth experienced the same loss, the same fears, the same meshiggas, the same boredom, the same rage. 

Everybody knew who was at fault. To make a flood this big, there must be a god so powerful that no other god can be much of a god, and it could only be Ea, this water god everybody believes in. There was even a movement to rename him Y'Ea because he was so willing to use his power, but nearly everybody agreed: if one god can be that powerful, we need a war on him before he kills the rest of us. 

Of course there were some who didn't believe this, Ea still had a bunch of loud partisans on Earth who were violent and dangerously powerful, but the partisans of the other six gods had an unbeatable coalition. Any system in which the partisans of Ea win is a broken system, and if the system was really this broken, the only option left was to go up to heaven and fix the system. It was one of those few moments in every lifetime when everybody seems to speak the same language. 

Nobody actually wanted the responsibility of a god, not if they thought about it... But they did want the right to sometimes be free of gods. Like every other god in their lives, they fulfilled every commandment of Ea's in good faith, they obeyed every obligation to sacrifice, they prayed to him whenever they were afraid, they talked to him when they were lonely, and only crazy people ever thought he answered. 

As for me? I knew that Ea was an old wives' tale. I just had a thought that maybe you B'H didn't think of, that this flood was related to all that kvetching you write to me about this heavenly schpritz. Maybe there's a leak in heaven, so I just wanted to go up there to point out the leak and help you fill it. 

But I had just been appointed court scribe in Uruk, and took the minutes of the Great Council attended by the kings of every major city except Egyptian Pharaoh, who claimed that the flood happened because the rest of us neuter our cats. But the king of every other major city was there: Eridu, Ur, Nippur, Ubaid, Lagash, Elam, Banesh, Kish, Babel, Persepolis, Erech, Accad, Calneh, Farsa, Ansha, Susa, Irsin, Larsa, Keddesh, Megido, Kass, Hurrain, Malatya, Armenia, Kizzuwatna, Luwia, Melid, Carshemesh, Mitanni, Washukani, Qatna, Armenia, Aramea, Cyprus, Hatti, Hattusas, Mycarae, and Ugarit.

Every one of these cities experienced the same flood, and every one of them believed another flood from Ea was imminent. We all thought we'd never see another gathering as glorious as this one. The Kings and entourages of every city of the world with all their finery and gifts and gold and raiment - all of them speaking barely comprehensible dialects to each other. Yet with even all that pomp and pageantry, the first meeting only took ten minutes. Everybody agreed what needed to be done:

A tower to heaven. An elite force of soldiers climbs to the top, does battle with Ea and his rain, defeats the water god, redistributes the rain to its proper season, and if possible, allots the rain more justly throughout the seasons so there is no drought. The tower doesn't need to last forever, just as long as it takes to climb up and down once with a 20 minute battle in between. 

They even agreed on a place: the City of Babel - a modest citystate lodging on the flattest part of the Valley of Shinar. Personally, nobody asked me, but I thought that was unnecessarily cautious to build in a valley rather than a mountain. That's ten thousand cubits more of material everybody needs to buy and build. 

The only problem was the contention of what we'd do once we get to heaven. It's one thing to declare war on a god, but not everybody is clear on how certain gods wage war; so everybody came up with their own plans based on what they believed Ea was. Every city brought their greatest artist to sketch their city's idea of what Ea looked like, dressed like, lived like, and the terrain of his celestial property. But before the  could even be shown, it was decided that Ea's presence is conjured by any representation of him, and can therefore see and hear what his opponents are planning in any room where such representations exist. So we burned all; the artworks along with the artists. 

The first day was met with an opening speech by the King of Uruk. I wrote it of course, but he couldn't read it so he said whatever he wanted. Nevertheless I outlined his idea to build a water basin in the sky which would drain all the water in heaven so that Ea wouldn't be able to cause another flood. If we built a detachable pipe, men should be able control how much rain falls to the ground in any given season. Everyone agreed to convene for a second meeting in three days, during which time each city could form coalitions with other cities to convene a proposal. 

As I was appointed recording secretary for the whole meeting, here follow the second meeting's minutes:  

Uruk's idea moves immediately into debate. The motion does not carry on account of widespread suspicions that wealthier cities would venture to use the water pipe more often than poorer ones. The motion does not carry. 

The Coalition of Eriddu ventures a much more modest proposal than Uruk. If Ea floods us again, everybody just climbs the tower to stay above water. The proposal moves into debate and leads to widespread discussion of how the people of the world would reach the tower, and how this plan necessitates the construction of boats around the world and maps with directions to the tower - which itself creates further discussion because so many landmarks would be subsumed by water, which leads to further discussion of which landmarks would stay above water. After twelve hours of debate, the motion does not carry. 

The Coalition of Lagash asks to be called upon later. As does the Coalition of Babel.

The Coalition of Ur proposes that since Ea is so powerful, he could come back and flood us again. But since the tower itself is such an amazing idea that it could only be a divine miracle, we might be able to invest the tower with godly powers of its own, and therefore their solution is to pray to the tower to defeat Ea. The proposal moves into debate, but leads to objections that if we give the tower powers of a god, Ea might offer the tower still better powers and the tower would work with Ea rather than for us. The motion quickly goes into vote and does not carry. 

The Coalition of Nippur proposes that since Ea is so powerful, he must be proportionally enormous, so their solution is to build a proportionally large bow so that once we climb the tower, the tower can be used as an arrow to stab Ea. The tower would subsequently be pulled out of Ea, then put back so that the soldiers may climb back down to the Valley of Shinar. The motion moves into debate. After three hours, the motion does not carry due to the dual objections that the tower might be lodged too deeply into Ea to remove from his torso, and also that Ea might be agile enough to move out from the tower's trajectory. 

The Coalition of Lagash asked to be called upon later. As did the Coalition of Babel.

The Coalition of Ubaid is more skeptical. They believe that Ea is too powerful to be fought, so they propose the tower ought purely to be used as a symbol of protest; that we should simply use the tower so that a messenger can shout to him daily our dissatisfaction with his treatment. This motion quickly moves to vote and does not carry because Ea's a water god and many things said on land cannot be heard through water.

The Coalition of Elam believes that the flood was dictated by Ea's mood, which itself is dictated by the position of the stars. So were the tower tall enough, we could make more precise astrological calculations about when Ea is most wroth. This motion is debated for eighteen hours, is voted upon five times, but does not summon the requisite votes because many cities wish for their own astrologer to have the honor of doing Ea's horoscope, each of which might pepper their findings with advice to favor their own city over other cities. The motion does not carry to the regret of all present at the council.  

The Coalition of Banesh's solution is not unlike the Coalition of Ur's: to worship the tower as a god. But since Ea is so powerful to subordinate all other gods to his will, Banesh proposes to worship only the tower as a god and no other god, so that the tower might be so moved as no other god was to fight for victory against Ea. This proposal meets with immediate objections from all sides about the inevitable afflictions of having only one god. The discussion quickly becomes so volatile that further discussion is tabled until a potential third meeting. 

The Coalition of Lagash asked to be called upon later. As did the Coalition of Babel.

The Coalition of Elam proposes that the tower itself is enough and no further contingency plan is needed. People would be able see it from all sides of the world, and when the waters begin to flood again, could journey immediately in the direction of the tower by foot, for which they would have enough time to reach the tower and climb to safety. A dissenting sub-coalition within Elam noted the unlikeliness that the tower would be tall enough to be seen at all instances, and therefore enters a revision that all the entire peoples of the should be moved within hiking distance of the tower. The revision is met with immediate objections and is voted against by unanimous consent. The original motion however is met with by no official objections, and moves into debate. After seven hours of debate, the original proposal is met by the objection that while the tower should be visible from across the world, the rain itself could obscure vision of the tower. The motion does not carry. 

The Coalition of Kish suggests that as the flood was accompanied by lightning, the tower should be used to serve as a lightning rod to send the electricity back to heaven, which would stop the rain before flooding. This lead to immediate questions from all sides about what electricity was, and the Royal Vizier of Kish explains that electricity is energy that can be used to provide light and heat for their subjects and could perpetually be renewed. This leads to objections from all sides that renewable energy would be too expensive. The motion does not carry. 

The Coalition of Lagash asks to be called upon later. As does the Coalition of Babel. But there were no  coalitions further to enter their proposals. 

The Coalition of Lagash ventures - and specifies that this must be entered into the record with great reluctance; that the tower is so ambitious that it is fated to be a failed venture. While the Coalition of Lagash does not dare use its vote to prohibit a project that inspired the unity of all cities, the Coalition of Lagash proposes that the tower be constructed as a monument to this moment of worldwide unity, brotherhood, and peace, so that future generations would know that the worldwide brotherhood of nations is possible. This measure is immediately voted against by unanimous consent. 

The Coalition of Babel, the city in which the projected tower shall be housed, enters the final proposal. Among the cities in Babel's coalition is Persepolis, and in an extreme departure from protocol, the proposal is given not by the King of Babel, nor even by the King of Persepolis, but by Persepolis's master builder, who brought a scale model of his own buildings - which many kings had seen, and of his proposed tower. 

The tower itself was so much smaller than many kings hoped, but the Master Builder of Persepolis explained that with all known substances across the earth, the maximum height any building could ever attain was 218 cubits, and even such a tower is in perpetual danger of collapse. "Towers get weaker as they grow, not stronger." There were kings who immediately objected; one shouted that the tower's divine properties could keep the tower standing a thousand years, the Master Builder silenced him very quickly "Recall all your divine structures, how many of them stood amid Ea's rage? How much more shall he rage against a divine structure built to defeat him?" 

The Master Builder of Persepolis explained his belief that rain happens because clouds become so full of midst that the midst turns to drops of water, and the water grows heavy enough that it drops from the clouds  to the earth. We know when clouds are heavy because they fall further toward the earth and grow darker; the closer and darker they grow, the more force with which they erupt. 

Persepolis's Master Builder further posited that certain temperatures and qualities of air were more conducive to greater intensity of rain, and that the direction of the wind would indicate to which direction the rain was advancing. The Coalition of Babel therefore enters a proposal that the tower be used as a weather station to record the distance, color, and amount of precipitation from each rain cloud, and further record the temperatures, the humidity of the air, the direction of the wind speed and the wind's speed. This would lead the world to better predict when floods would happen, and to respond accordingly.

The King of Babel, Nimrod I, and the King of Persepolis, Darius VI, therefore entered a unique proposition: rather than debate among the kings, the Master Builder may be called upon in interview to answer any objection raised by kings in debate. When their proposal was submitted into motion, it passed by the narrowest margin ever seen in a world congress. It was a tie, and the tie breaking fell to the normally non-voting host King of the debate, my sovereign, Gilgamesh XIX, who asked me for advice: 

What could I say? The Master Builder of Persepolis seemed like kind of a mensch who knows what he's talking about, so why not see what he has to say?

This interview raged every day eighteen hours for seven weeks, until the objections of every king of the world were answered and fully satisfied. Even while he was talking, the Master Builder of Persepolis carved all kinds of diagrams on tablets for something he called 'geometry,' which proved to all the kings smart enough to understand him how buildings stay put. He made demonstrations with clay, stone, bitumen, sand, and ore, and he turned it all into pottery, glass, soap, metals, plaster, even waterproofing. He even showed, just on a table, the exact proportions of stones to best support a tall structure, and exactly which kinds of stones, and he said the reason was something called 'mathematics.'

I didn't understand most of what he was talking about, and I suspect most of the kings didn't. But none of them wanted to appear stupid, so after seven weeks of this, they realized they had nothing to show for it except for this builder who'd talked over them for two months, so they had to approve his measure and get back home, and they had to make it seem as though they really believed in the solution they came up with.  

The whole world was prepared for Ea to rain his flood, so the world came together as one to build the tower. And even if the tower was much smaller than the kings of the earth thought it would be, it looked as though we'd built a tower all the way to the heavens. More people died while building the tower than ever died in the flood. And verily, when we reached the top, there was no Ea; just invisible light, and cloud, and cold, and occasional thunder that killed still more of us. But so unanimous was the agreement of the tower's necessity that every man prepared to die, every woman willing to live a widow, every child ready to take his father's place.

The Master Builder was a stealthy taskmaster, on the lookout the whole world over for a builder from any city he found to be at all skilled, even a mere workman, and did ask such workmen for their friends as well, and he did beseech the kings of the earth that men of such skill remain at the tower to help him gain greater rigor with his measurements. 

And when there was no Ea at the top, the whole world breathed one last sigh of relief. And lo, there was a great seven month celebration of all the world: a world's fair of bonfires, sex, golden idols, silver coins, dancing, music, raiment of wool, linen, and silk; circles in a thousand different camps, each playing a different music listened to lovingly by all, each teaching the dances of all to one another, every tribe and nation conceiving children of the other, men wearing the raiment of women from halfway around the world, women fornicating with distant men - dressed as men, even women fornicating as men and men fornicating as women, all tribes mingled with all tribes. And for all the world, minimal humans sacrificed, minimal children abducted, seemingly all partaking of festivities with nothing but joy. 

And then we all returned home, except for the city of Babel in the Valley of Shinar, who measured every rainfall, every wind, every cloud, every thunder, with trust placed in every city that the Edicts of Babel would ensure no new flood. And there was a veritable harvest of new babies, the Children of Babel, each born of fathers they knew not whom. 

And in the first year, only one new edict came from Babel: "Verily, the rain passeth from November to April, therefore let us make a law to save half our harvest for the dry months." A few complaints passed from farmer to farmer, but the cities were bounteous and less men starved. 

And in the second year came another two edicts: 

"Verily, the light of thunder only doth strike the tallest structure, therefore let all cities to build an inanimate rod of metal 100 cubits high, and the flashes shall strike the rod rather than the house." And the rods were built, and men were spared death by lightning. 

"Verily, we at the Tower have discovered that the human body hath vessels within that doth animate life: heart, kidneys, spleen, liver, hypothalmus, uterus, bladder. We shall in time understand how they do work, and death shalt be conquered." And the Tower did generate equal hope and fear throughout the lands. 

And in the third year came three edicts. 

"Verily, we have discovered a divine number: 22/7, which we may write as 3.14. It may be used to predict the tides of seas and the flow of rivers, and perhaps even to make objects that do fly through the air as gods." And the tower did generate results throughout the lands. 

"Verily, we have invented the means so that heavy objects might easily be lifted. It shall called 'lever,' and thou must put it upon a fulcrum, and thou canst move all the objects of the earth." And the tower did generate results throughout the lands. 

"Verily, we have used the divine number to invent an object circular in shape which may transport all the heavy objects of the earth to any amount of distance. This object shall be called the wheel." And the tower did generate results throughout the lands.

But the people did begin to whisper wroth words, for the Tower did promise the conquest of death, yet solely added qualities to life. 

And in the fourth year came a first edict:

"Verily, the wind showeth there shall be floods in the month of Adar. Let us all abscond to mountains that we may pass this flood above the water." 

And lo, the entire world did abscond to nearby mountains, and peoples did journey a month to climb them, but minimal flood did come, and all the world around there was neither flood remarkable nor rain exceptional, and they did return and were wroth with Babel, for verily, there was no flood.   

And the the Kings of Babel, Persepolis, and Uruk did call a second counsel of all the kings of the Earth. And the kings of the earth did invoke their promise "Verily, thou hadst promised trusting mensuration for an end to floods, yet thou hadst not provided faithful measurement."  And the three kings did say "It is better to burden with great care to avoid flood than than to take little burden to meet flood." And the kings of the earth did accuse them "Verily thou hadst not used thy plenty in the service of faithful measurement." And the three kings did respond "Lo, thou hast availed great use of our pronouncements. Thy subjects do live who shall have died, thy vines do multiply which shall have withered, and thy buildings do stay which shall have fallen." 

And many kings of the earth did respond "Our people hath neither crops this year nor work for harvest," To which the three kings did reply "But thou hast thy reservoirs of grain for the dry season," And the kings of the earth did ask "If we do give grain to our people for which they shall not work, they shall have no incentive," and the three kings did reply "They shall have all due inducement to work the greater upon the next harvest," to which the kings of the earth did respond "Thou is begat the involvement of foreign government in countries they know not," to which the the three kings did reply "But thou art natheless thine own governments to administer law as thou seest best fit." to which the kings of the earth did respond "but we must administer the laws upon which thou hath dominion over the earth," to which the three kings did say "If the world does wish to survive, then all our states must act with unity as one," to which the kings of the earth did reply "We wish not a federative community of nations, we do wish to be men in states with rights," to which the three kings did ask "But what about thy subjects? Are they too not men?" to which the kings of the earth did reply "We are men. They are but our subjects, chattel who hath not rights of men," to which the three kings responded "If thou wishest to survive a farther flood, verily thou must grant  rights of life to thy subjects,"

And to which the kings of the earth did proclaim "thou hast uttered a threat to compel our compliance with thy decrees. Thou do wish to liberate our subjects so that thou mayest enslave us. Babel dost wish to rule as lord and tyrant over the world - to act as Marduk, the world's father, and Ishtar, the world's mother. We do invoke offended gods against thee, we do invoke rites of war, we do renounce the brotherhood of kings."

And there was war within the world for which men were as chattel.