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 more chance of dying, but people here just hiked themselves to the Zagros mountains, and a lot of people whose houses were made of mudbrick just camped out on the roof and fished.
The Flood wasn't that big an event. ...Oh it was big, but mostly because it made us shelter in place for two years. It was just a pre-echo of the real event that came for us within the flood's cause.
We thought The Flood focused everything, solved everything, clarified everything, and obliterated from our minds all the trivial drek. The generation before the flood was a generation of partisanship and violence. We were the generation of unity and love. We all experienced the same loss, the same fears, the same meshiggas, the same boredom, the same rage.
Everybody knew who was at fault. Everybody knew what they had to do. It was right around the flood that everyone had the sense that 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, the water god. There was even a movement to rename him Y'Ea because he was so willing to use his power. But just about everybody agreed: if one god can really be that powerful, we needed to wage a war on him before he killed the rest of us.
Sure, not everybody believed this, Ea 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, so 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, at least not if they thought about it. But they did want the right to be free of him. 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 just an old wives' tale. I just had a thought that maybe the Holy One BBH didn't think of, that all that kvetching he does about heavenly schpritz was because there's a leak in heaven, so I wanted to go up there to point it out to him.
I was there as a scribe in Uruk as the leaders of every major city convened: Eridu, Ur, Nippur, Ubaid, Lagash, Elam, Banesh, Kish, Babel, 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 flood, and it was just large enough that every one of them believed another flood from Ea was imminent. All of these cities, all of these representatives, all of them speaking barely comprehensible dialects to each other, and it took only ten minutes for everyone to agree 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, it just as long as it takes climbed up and down once with a 20 minute battle in between.
They even agreed on a place: a flattest part on 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 what we'd do once we get to heaven. Uruk's idea was to build a giant pipe and water basin in which we would drain all the water in heaven so that Ea wouldn't be able to cause another flood. 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, here follow the minutes of the second meeting:
The Coalition of Eriddu ventured much more modest proposal. If Ea floods us again, everybody just climbs the tower to stay above water. This lead to further discussion of how the people of the world would reach the tower, and how it would necessitate the construction of boats around the world and maps with directions to the tower - which itself created further discussion because all landmarks would be subsumed by water.
The Coalition of Lagash asked to be called upon later. As did the Coalition of Babel.
The Coalition of Ur proposed that since Ea was so powerful, he could come back and flood us again, so as such a tower could only be a divine miracle, their solution was to put faith in the tower as a new god to worship that might defeat Ea.
The Coalition of Nippur proposed that since Ea was so powerful, he must be proportionally enormous, so their solution was to build a proportionally large bow so that once we climb the tower, the tower can be used as an arrow, pulled out of Ea, then put back into its place to climb back down to the Valley of Shinar.
The Coalition of Lagash asked to be called upon later. As did the Coalition of Babel.
The Coalition of Ubaid was more skeptical, and they believed the tower ought to be used purely as a symbol of protest against Ea, and that we should simply use the tower so that a messenger can shout to him daily our dissatisfaction with his treatment of us.
The Coalition of Elam believed that the flood was dictated by Ea's mood, which itself was dictated by the position of the stars. So if the tower was big enough, we could make more precise calculations about when Ea was most wroth.
The Coalition of Banesh's solution was not unlike the Coalition of Ur's: to worship the tower as a god. But since Ea was so powerful to subordinate all the other gods to his will, Banesh proposed to worship only the tower as a god and no other god, so that the tower might come to life and defeat Ea. This proposal met with immediate objections from all sides and discussion of it was 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 said that the tower itself was enough and no further contingency plan was needed. People would be able see it from all sides of the world, and when the waters began 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. While voting on this measure was tabled, this was met with by no official objections. A dissenting sub-coalition within the Coalition of Elam proposed that the entire peoples of the world be moved within walking distance of the tower. This was met with immediate objections and voted against by unanimous consent.
The Coalition of Kish suggested 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 explained that electricity is energy that can be used to provide light and heat for their subjects and could perpetually be renewed. This lead to objections from all sides that renewable energy would be too expensive.
The Coalition of Lagash asked to be called upon later. As did the Coalition of Babel. But there were no further coalitions to be listened to.
The Coalition of Lagash ventured, and specified that this must be entered into the record with great reluctance, that the tower was so ambitious that it was fated to be a failed venture. While the Coalition of Lagash did not dare use its vote to prohibit a project that inspired the unity of all cities, the Coalition of Lagash proposed 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 state of worldwide brotherhood of nations was possible. This measure immediately voted against by unanimous consent.
The Coalition of Babel entered the final proposal. The Royal Vizere of Babel belived that rain happened because clouds become so full of moisture that the moisture turns to drops of water, which erupts from the clouds and falls to the earth. When the clouds are heavier, they become darker and fall further toward the earth, and then erupt with great force. The Royal Vizere 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. Babel therefore proposed 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, and the direction and speed of the wind. This would lead the world to better predict when floods would happen, and to respond accordingly. This motion carried and was approved by unanimous consent.
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