Class 1 Reflections.

September 8, 2010.
GLS 800, Class 1

Timaeus
Genesis
Enuma Elish
Anishinabe Creation Story

None of my previous blogs were what I'd call essays although each tended to have a general theme. The following entry is both a reflection and summary of some points from our first class. In content and organization, it is more scattered than past posts. The reason for this is that we covered a lot in this seminar and so many viewpoints were expressed. I learned a lot and was quite surprised to notice that after so many years of teaching in front of a roomful of students I get very nervous when speaking in front of a classroom of peers! The ideas were so many and new to me that I felt mentally bombarded with unfolding thoughts of my own; some that went somewhere (to an actual point) and others that simply came and went, ethereal, ungraspable. In such a mental state, my fear was that I might speak up and start on a point, only to lose it and stop short midstream. I'm sure comfort will come with time and practice, as always.

The general sequence of a "Creation Story" is as follows: Primordial chaos, god brings order, and his efforts and creations culminate with man. Man, the creator of creation myths, clearly does not like disorder. He seems to have an innate need to explain and understand the world in the same way that symmetry - visual order - for some reason has a pleasing effect on us. Just an interesting thought that came to mind regarding our desire to control: why is it that various guises of order, whether visual or intellectual, have a comforting effect on us, as if clutter and disorganization is not 'right'.

We tend to believe that there's an explicable cause for everything. Given enough time and effort, surely we can figure it out. The next best thing is to name something. One classmate mentioned the opening lines of the Enuma Elish, which read, “When in the height heaven was not named, / And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name…” This describes the chaos before the gods assumed control of it. By naming something, humans, intellectually speaking, own it. Imagine a house pet with no name or a nameless child. Naming something is a necessary first step in explaining the cause of something, the reason for something.

The similarities in basic storyline shouldn't suggest similar forms. Genesis is a narrative, Timaeus a dialogue and the Enuma Elish, is very much like a poem. Pastoral societies probably craved to hear stories about the powers of gods, the supernatural, and wanted to have their surroundings explained to them since they couldn't explain natural phenomena any other way. It was likely more entertaining and meaningful for them to learn about the gods, who humans hoped to join in the afterlife, than hearing about a relatively inconsequential village romance, for example.

I always felt that such stories involving gods are a form of wishful thinking. If we have faith in a higher power, maybe, just maybe, we will go to a higher place after death. If this self-delusion works properly, not only does death become insignificant, it becomes something welcomed and eagerly awaited. Likewise, knowing that god was on one’s side must have made suffering not only bearable but perhaps even pleasurable. It was the word of god “…that his [Ishmael’s] descendants would live in hostility with all his brothers”. One can more easily accept war if it is known that war and suffering are part of god’s plan.

Consider the surroundings of the authors of these works. Compare Plato’s Athens to the environments of the writers of the Enuma Elish or the Anishinabe myth where they are faced with a hostile world and are in endless conflict with Nature. Whereas it was in the interest of relatively helpless hunters and gatherers to create a god, it was not so in Plato’s day. In Plato’s day, man sought immortality through “love of learning and Wisdom” (90c-d). This type of salvation is vastly different from that promised by older myths. Perhaps Plato saw the hardships faced by Athens as caused by manand therefore he looks within man to solve those hardships. The Anishinabe, on the other hand, saw many of its problems the result of Nature not being kind and so gives power to an exterior source.

In our first seminar, I was struck by the complexity and the depth of interpreting Genesis’. The repetitive, unfolding of god’s covenant with his people is full of purpose. It acts as a set-up of basic relationships between god and humans (and vice versa) and equates a good citizen as one in close relationship to god (Yahweh). Genesis shows the evolution of the people’s moral identity. Herein lies the emergence of structure, morality and genealogies. What I will take away from this point of the seminar is that Genesis is a coming of age story of the Jewish people and that this is only the first layer of a very large onion!

Indeed, I was very surprised to learn that the story of Genesis - to a certain extent - set up the geopolitical backdrop of today’s Middle East, one example being that there is a distinction between the descendents of Ishmael and Isaac to this very day! I never would have guessed the long-lasting political consequences of Genesis but I suppose all written works are historical documents in one way or another.

One thing that left me rather confused after reading Genesis was that there is so much emphasis on genealogies. Genesis 11, for instance, could have been truncated to the first 10 lines. What’s the point of the next 22 which only document “who begat who”? In class someone mentioned that this feature gives credibility to the story because these people actually existed and their descendents are with us today. Another fellow student - one with a far better ear for poetry and rhythm than me - remarked on the beautiful cadences within Genesis and the Enuma Elish. I then had a very romantic visualization of a creation myth's campfire reading where an idyllic, bucolic people, under an awning of infinite stars and constellations, sit spellbound. The image alone had an hypnotic effect on me! As a listener, I can only imagine how such a reading and resulting mental state might reinforce belief in a story and the indoctrination of its tenets.

Feeling is often pitted against reason and depending on the circumstances and the era, one will win out. I don't know how relevant this is, but my feeling was that reason is given too much sway in our time and there is not enough consideration given to feeling and morality. Perhaps what I was feeling (and am having difficulty articulating) is that we might be very smart, technically, but we sometimes lack basic common sense, something that often partly relies on feeling or intuition. One example: What is your reaction to the geoengineering idea of dumping sulfuric acid into the atmosphere to help block out the sun’s rays and hence cool down the warming world? The letters CFC come to my mind. Who would have thought that CFCs would have been so destructive to the ozone layer? At first, these compounds dramatically raised our quality of life but what a mistake they turned out to be! Mitigating climate change by dumping compounds into the air might sound reasonable, given the science we now know, but who knows what the consequences are? The complexity of humanity is matched by that of the physical world. How arrogant of some scientists to think that they can engineer the world in such a way as if this planet is their little test tube? Although science does have answers to some things - some answers being correct, some wrong, none proven - science is never infallible and when it comes to answering questions on such a scale, one can only propose a likely story and concede that it might be wide of the mark. Humanity has never known so much about the world and its history than it does today but, still, it might be advised to consider both feeling and intuition. This is but an extreme example of how “feeling” - listening to one’s heart or gut feeling - has a place in the world and, to quote M.J., can make the world a better place. After all, we are not only reasoning beings but feeling beings, and emotions are not always unreliable and to one’s detriment, as Plato might have believed.