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