by Joshua Cohen
Regardless of the true course of Western development, writing was, is, and will continue to be an unnatural act—as curious as a zyzzyva (an American weevil, which is death to crops, but also the concluding entry in many dictionaries and encyclopedias, and among the most difficult of words to type on the QWERTY keyboard, in terms of “finger privileging,” “row skips,” “lateral shifts,” and “repetitions”).
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“ATTENTION” IS THE PRETEXT—ATTENTION, no quotes, the text itself. The earliest unit of attention in literature—its first metric, or standardization of meter—was called, but only later and in Latin, the incipit (literally “it begins”). Today we’re familiar with the incipit through the indices to poetry anthologies, which list the poems by their opening lines, though this tradition dates back to the clay-tablet catalogs that listed the introductory verses or stanzas of Sumerian compositions, which the archaeologists and linguists who uncovered them misidentified, quite understandably, as poems unto themselves:
When in ancient days heaven was separated from earth
The pelican emerged from the reedbeds
To overturn the appointed times
In the beginning
(My own verse—comprised entirely of incipit from the catalog of Nibru.)
The oldest text that can be associated with an author contains one of the oldest incipit: “In those days, in those far remote days”—a formula that prefaces countless histories and prayers. But while most anonymous Sumerian literature concerns the gods (An, Enlil, Enki, Inanna), this earliest non-anonymous work—this incipit of authorship, The Instructions of Shuruppak, a haranguing hunk of wisdom lit from ca. 2600 B.C.E.—concerns man:
In those days, those far remote days, in those nights, those far remote nights, in those years, those faraway years, at that time the wise one who knew how to speak in difficult words lived in the land, Shuruppak the wise one who knew how to speak in difficult words lived in the land.
Shuruppak gave instructions to his son, Shuruppak the son of Ubara-Tutu gave instructions to his son Zi-ud-sura: My son, I will give you instructions: you have to pay attention! Zi-ud-sura, let me speak a word to you: you must pay attention! Don’t ignore my instructions! Don’t transgress my words! The instructions of an old man are priceless; do what I say!
No trespassing! Beware! Shuruppak’s advice continues, and continues to present attention in its most elemental form—not just as caution, or warning, but as cuneiform, from Latin’s cuneus, meaning “wedge”—the imperative as a wedge between wrong and right: “You must not buy an ass that brays”; “you must not locate a field on a road”; “never vouch for someone/never let someone vouch for you”; “if an argument starts, leave”; “don’t rob homes, steal from people, or cut yourself with an axe”; “don’t have sex with a woman not your wife”; “don’t buy an onager”; “don’t have sex with a slave girl”; “don’t curse or lie or travel at night or eastward alone.” Masculine advice, from an age when women and pack animals were considered similarly useful, though if you choose to ignore it maybe the ending—not the excipit but, more correctly, the explicit—will command your attention: “These are the instructions given by Shuruppak, son of Ubara-Tutu! Praise be to the lady who finished these great tablets, the maiden Nisaba, to whom Shuruppak, the son of Ubara-Tutu, gave his instructions!”
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EVERYONE KNOWS THE MYTHS of Genesis. Everyone knows Babel. The hubris. The confusion of tongues. At the time—one interpretation might divagate—humanity had been nomadic, tribal, hunter-gatherers following the seasonal animal migrations. But by erecting this tower to propitiate, or meet, the gods, they rooted themselves, and became agriculturalists who required new words for all the new seisms—the stuff—around them: “tower,” “civilization.”
Previously everyone had understood everyone, and everything, but then specialization evolved—divisions. Sin-Nasir the son of Shamash-Nasir was the mud-brick constructor, and spawned a dynasty of mud-brick constructors. His own son-in-law, Ishme-Ea, the irrigationist. Royalty, the city’s class iteration of itinerant clan rule, collaborated with religion in the organization of labor to ensure crop and so community survival. The builders of Babel were the second chance of humanity, the first generation since the Flood. The fate of humanity, and the authority of God, will later become the fate of the Decalogue, and the authority of Moses, who breaks the first set of the commandments—because of an idol cow that wouldn’t plow—and so has to ascend Sinai again to obtain a second set, a disgraced probationary copy.
This is the favored interpretation of utopianists, dystopianists, mystics, dreamers. Sennacherib felled the presumed model for the biblical tower—the anonymously constructed Etemenanki—in the conquering of Babylon, seventh century B.C.E. Nabopolassar restored the city, while his son, Nebuchadnezzar II, restored the tower—or ziggurat (and hung the gardens to please his wife).
Myth is based on history, is based on myth—they’re baked in the desert sun, dried into one, softened with blood only to harden again. Just as the Tower of Babel is prefigured in the epic of Emmerkar (“Let the people of Aratta bring down for me the stones from their mountain, erect the great shrine for me, erect the great abode for me, make the great abode, the abode of the gods, famous for me”), the Flood of Genesis has its own genesis in the epic of Gilgamesh, but even there its existence is subsidiary. Gilgamesh wanders in search of Utanapishtim, aka the Faraway, the only survivor of a great deluge, hoping to get from him the secret of eternal life:
Utanapishtim spoke to Gilgamesh, saying: You want my hidden knowledge? It’s yours!
It begins in Shuruppak, a familiar city, located on the bank of the Euphrates. A familiar yet very ancient city, a dwelling of the gods—who had decided to impose a flood.
Father Anu had sworn an oath to this flood, and so did his adviser, the hero Enlil, their servant, the god Ninurta, and their guard, the god Ennugi.
The heir Ea swore with them as well, repeating their words to a reed fence: O reed fence, O brick wall, hear and take heed! O man of Shuruppak, son of Ubara-Tutu, demolish your house and build a boat! Abandon wealth and cling to life! Forsake possessions and survive! Build a boat and take on board the seed of all living!
Not only is this passage a memory—the deluge had long been drained, the earth long survived, by the time of Gilgamesh’s pilgrimage—but it also contains a memory: the heir, Ea, “repeating” the words of the gods.
The Genesis version, while clearly related to the Sumerian, accounts for its existence entirely differently. Its nesting is as radical as that of the dove—the bird that told Noah land had emerged, that builds its nests both in trees and on the ground.
Here, amid the destruction of the world, a creation still—the creation of attention:
And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God. And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
It’s beyond dispute that reiteration, beyond being a feature of Hebrew—of all Semitic languages: “in those days, in those far remote days”
—is a result of the Flood narrative as we know it being either the composite of multiple sources, or the compiled layers of a single source. The most notable of these versions or supplements are known as the Jahwist (regarded as a populist account, which calls the deity JHWH, which the King James translates as LORD, ca. seventh–sixth century B.C.E.) and the Priestly (regarded as the account of an editorial elite, which calls the deity Elohim, which the King James translates as God, though the Hebrew is plural, ca. fifth century B.C.E.).
Taken alone, each version provides a reading of attentive capacities both human and divine—the Jahwist people’s Bible presenting an anthropomorphized deity concerned with His creation’s relationship to the earth; the Priestly testament of caste attempting to assert or analogize the unremitting nature of power.
If Genesis is a matter of strata, its attention is revealed as a layering too—the alteration, becoming the synthesis, of humanity’s and God’s. Here is that King James passage again, with the exclusively Jahwist verses in italics, the exclusively Priestly bolded:
And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God. And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
The earlier account, if taken alone, has God seeing—amassing the evidence—and grieving—delineating the burden of considered judgment—as if in justification of His decision to destroy. The later account, which cannot be taken alone, moderates God’s vision and denies His regret, as if humanity had already been prejudged as corrupted and the only issue that remained was its sentencing—no justifications offered, no appeals accepted.
In the first, God announces His intentions to all humanity. In the synoptic second, to a single representative.
The powerless and the powerful: Each entity sees God in its own image, and so is seen by Him, accordingly.
Put secularly: The same process is at work with attention.
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FLEEING IN REVERSE, to Eden. God is only the second entity the Bible allows to attend to the mind. The first is Cain, who slaughtered Abel, his brother, and showed no remorse. Both God and Cain are psychopaths, sociopaths, mad. God sought to justify His irrational violence. Cain lied—he lied to an omniscience—and denied ending his brother’s life. By contrast, the martyr Abel is purely a symbol. If his parents’ fate represents the perils of knowledge (one’s own), Abel’s represents the perils of knowledge (another’s).
Cain was the planted cultivator of crops, Abel the mobile shepherd. Adam and Eve were neither. It takes an Eden to deny a paradise—Adam and Eve had no choice between a life lived in motion or stasis, amid the rural or urban (marked Cain went on to found the world’s first city, which he called after his son, Enoch), in monogamy or polygamy, or singlehood. Instead, they dwelled in a dreamworld, were free to wander a garden whose plants grew on their own, whose animals bred and raised themselves and offered themselves as sacrifices to temporal hunger before spiritual hunger ever compelled an offering of sacrifices to God—this couple, matched from a rib, had only to lounge around unsheltered and nude, naming the animals and plants. In Eden, they were gods governed only by God, Who was their consciousness, repressed, or suppressed, whichever—Vienna had not yet been settled. But then Eve plucked an apple from the one tree forbidden her, the one thing, in a psychoanalytic reading, she had forbidden herself through her imagination of a supreme authority, and so, having transgressed and so been forced into a dialogue with her consciousness, was punished—or punished herself and her mate—with a Fall: a lifetime of tilling and weeding, naked shame, excruciating childbirth, property issues, and petty chores—the penultimate of which is to develop a psychological approach to each, the ultimate of which is to die. (The true serpent in this narrative is the tangle of the mind, its coils forcing humanity to yearn for a sustenance it can never have, let alone define.)
Our damnation, though, is granted a reprieve every Sabbath: the weekly anniversary of the seventh day of creation, when even the numinous rests. Further, the Bible decrees every seventh year a Sabbatical Year—the fields must lay fallow, the people must live from gleaning alone, in an intimation or fantasy of Eden—and every seventh Sabbatical a Jubilee Year, during which all debts are forgiven, and all slaves manumitted, in yet another return to the garden. These septenary mandated vacations are all attempts to circulate time, as blood circulates in the body, to turn time’s relentless progress into a regulatory cycle—a human model both of the seasons, and of the rotations and revolutions of the heavenly bodies. The purpose: to give humanity a hint of eternity on earth, and to keep it from a continuous contemplation of death.
The search for an origin point for these cycles might be fruitless. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”: The Bible begins with an acknowledgment that God’s authorship was so supreme that it must have, by implication alone, created God Himself. The Bible, of course, is the ur metafiction, a book that describes its own giving, and it’s for that reason—as well as due to the mundane fact that it’s best to begin a fiction with its most irrational element, as a neutralizing principle—that most readers pass over this formulation without pausing to interrogate its strangeness.
But the Hebrew is even stranger: B’rayshit bara Elohim. While B’rayshit means “in the beginning,” the word contains the root of the next word, bara, or “created.”
This is obvious even to people who read no Hebrew, just by scanning the letters (skimming over the face of the deep):
This containment might imply that creation was within the beginning, or that the beginning of creation was merely God’s acknowledgment of the circumstances of creation—of the instinct to make. What is definite, however, is that the two words share the same first letter, the bet or vet, the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet after the unvoiced, ineffable aleph.
It’s notable that the Bible begins with the alphabet’s second letter, which is the first that can be pronounced. It’s as if the aleph were the creationary instinct itself, the ununderstandable cause.
The two forms of this second letter serve different functions.
Without a dot in its center—the dot called a dagesh—it’s just another letter, a mundane component, a vet:
With a dot, though, it becomes a bet, with the honor of also serving as preposition, meaning “in,” “at,” “with,” “within”:
It is this version that begins the Bible. It is this letter that begins both words that might, ultimately, share meaning.
In both versions this letter is closed on three sides but open on one—opening outward, like a home should, like a mind should.
It’s been said that this very shape is intended to encourage humanity to question everything that happened after creation, but nothing of what happened before it. Further, the dot, the dagesh, has been said to represent either, at the incipit of the world, the world itself, floating in the incommensurable center of the primordial void, or the presence of humanity within it, a mark of punctuation suspended not at the end but at the start of God’s pronouncement.
The dagesh, both mystically and comprehendingly, has always been an ele
ment of attention. It’s been said that even those who cannot read Hebrew, especially those who cannot read Hebrew, must concentrate on it, for it provides, in time, at the initiation of time, a locus. Deconstruct the three walls of its house, one by one. Once they’ve fallen away, the last approach toward total unity with creation is to meditate on the very sound of the dagesh, which, on its own, like an aleph, like a punctus, is unpronounceable, or just a pause, a breath.
* Most people (approx. 70 to 95 percent) are R-handed; the remainder is L, save a smattering of the cross-dominant (ambidextrous). But the determining factors of handedness remain elusive. Geneticists cling to genetics, of course, though while some studies have shown dominance to be hereditary, others have demonstrated only a limited relationship (a 2006 study of twins set L heritability at approx. 24 percent). Sociologists point out that handedness can be influenced by culture, obviously, by intolerant adults who might consider leftyism a social liability (modern incarnations of the religious fanatics who believed the sinister left—from Latin’s sinistra, meaning both “left” and “unlucky”—to be the idle hand of Satan). Some neurologists claim handedness is based on where the language and fine-motor-skills controls are based in the brain: For most of the population, they’re in the L hemisphere, which controls the R half of the body. Other neurologists cite research that indicates that many people who have those controls in the opposite, or R, hemisphere, aren’t in fact lefties, while many lefties have those controls in the L. Still other researchers have found evidence of what they call “pathological leftness,” related to brain trauma during birth, while still others again seek a prenatal intrauterine developmental/hormonal imbalance as cause.