February 11, 2013

Grief over losing a friend

From Ms E:


"This week we covered the difficult topic of loss and grief. In the story, Gilgamesh loses his best friend, Enkidu. The children were saddened and scared, but were able to talk about how Gilgamesh felt. We discussed the many ways that grief can be expressed, whether through anger, sadness, or loneliness. Although the story was heavy, the children held hope for Gilgamesh, and made predictions about what might happen next.

Turning again to the theme of construction, we built another ziggurat, this time, with oh so heavy bricks! Although these bricks may not be the large mud bricks used in ancient Mesopotamia, these bricks give us an idea of how much work goes into building a giant ziggurat. However, when asked if he liked carrying bricks, E said he could do it all day! The children came up with quite an interesting design, with the inclusion of bridges and cuneiform symbols painted on with charcoal. There was also a discovery of roly polies, which of course had to be given a home in the ziggurat!"







Inscription and Image

R missed this week's Gilgamesh gathering due to a family trip to Kansas City. Yet she still got a taste of Mesopotamia when she encountered an Assyrian palace sculpture at the Nelson-Atkins Museum.

Her eyes lit up once she looked more closely and realized that inscribed onto the surface of the statue itself was . . . cuneiform.

February 4, 2013

Four ways to end a wrestling match

Here's one version of the initial, violent encounter of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, from Tablet II:


Ludmila Zeman, Gilgamesh the King

Enkidu blocked the entry to the marital chamber,
and would not allow Gilgamesh to be brought in.
They grappled with each other at the entry to the marital chamber,
in the street they attacked each other, the public square of the land.
The doorposts trembled and the wall shook,
Gilgamesh bent his knees, with his other foot on the ground,
his anger abated and he turned his chest away.

. . . They kissed each other and became friends.


Their first impulse is to grapple with one another, as enemies. But finding one another equal in strength, the wrestling turns to an embrace, as intimates. Later, they take on the bull of heaven, together; wrestling with the natural world is apparently a common motif in Mesopotamian art.
4th century BCE coin


As we think back to the struggles of last year's Greek heroes, one notable difference from Gilgamesh is the comparative solitude of the quests of Telemachus (who wrestles with Proteus) and Odysseus (who earlier in The Iliad defeated Ajax during their funeral games for Patroclus). In the Homeric epics, one man bests another, and carries this triumph forward. For Gilgamesh, wrestling provides an occasion for recognizing an extraordinary peer, one about whom he had been dreaming.

Marc Chagall, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel


A third, biblical analogue (Genesis 32) is Jacob wrestling with—a man? an angel? God? himself?


Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn. When he saw that he had not prevailed against him, he wrenched Jacob’s hip at its socket, so that the socket of his hip was strained as he wrestled with him.



Throughout the history of reading and interpreting writing, there are places where you don’t even know with what obscure thing you are wrestling. The outcome is uncertain. And when you begin to delve into commentary, you are immediately reminded that you are not alone in this struggle—centuries of careful thinkers have similarly wrestled with the text, and with one another, in an ongoing conversation. 


2009 Globe As You Like It




Shakespeare gives us a fourth outcome, with wrestling leading not to glory, or male-bonding, or a confrontation between the self and the divine, but to a metaphor for romance. In As You Like It, Rosalind effuses to an unexpectedly victorious Orlando: "Sir, you have wrestled well, and overthrown / More than your enemies." To himself, he marvels in reply: "O poor Orlando! Thou art overthrown"—by love.










Here are the closing lines from a poem by Rilke, which alludes to the Genesis account above. No matter the outcome, it's clear the these intense physical encounters have left the wrestlers changed, often irrevocably. 


“The Man Watching” (translated by Robert Bly)

When we win it's with small things, 
and the triumph itself makes us small. 
What is extraordinary and eternal 
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament: 
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight) 
went away proud and strengthened 
and great from that harsh hand,
that, like a sculptor’s, shaped him.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, 
by constantly greater forces. 

Lecture on Odyssey statues

From Professor Tronchin at Rhodes College:

Please join the Department of Art & Art History in welcoming Professor Steven Tuck (Classics and Art History, Miami University of Ohio).

He will present the annual Ruffin Lecture in the Fine Arts this Thursday, February 7, at 6PM in Frazier Jelke B.

Tuck will be speaking about the grotto of the Roman emperor Tiberius at Sperlonga, south of Rome.

It was a cave turned into an elaborate and unique “banquet hall,” filled with sculptures depicting scenes from the Odyssey, including the blinding of Polyphemus and Scylla attacking Odysseus’ ship. These statues are colossal—think minivan-sized or larger.

As the cave was only discovered and excavated in the 1950s, the sculpture and the related dining space and villa are quite open for interpretation.

Reconstruction of the Polyphemus group from the Sperlonga grotto