multijimbo

We are living through an interesting and potentially frightening time, and this is not a new aspect of life. Arguably, every time in human history has been an interesting and frightening time for those who lived through them. We’ll ignore here the obvious reason that we cannot see the future and we don’t know what tomorrow will bring.

We create. Over our history, we have developed remarkable technologies: writing to allow for the further creation of systems of governmental control; knapping flint to create knives and axes; steel and gunpowder to facilitate the killing of one another. And much beyond. The technologies themselves are neutral, and what is important is how we use those technologies.

And now, we are creating something else. Watching or reading or listening to the news, we see example after example of how we are training the machine world to be the Skynet in our future. And there is a part of me that wonders, why. But only a part.

We do like our conveniences. Amazon recommends what we might want to read next, Netflix what we might want to watch next and Spotify what we might want to listen to next. Books and films and bands as yet undiscovered, brought to us by the power of algorithms that spend all their time watching and gathering and evaluating. We have come to enjoy allowing machines to mediate between us and the world around us.

Even more than this, we train our machines to recognize us by our faces and how we walk. We train our machines to read our handwriting, license plates and the printed word, and to make sense of the stories we tell each other.

Soon, we will have no place left to hide.

We’ve been writing about this moment for decades. We have been making movies and television about this moment for decades. We have been speculating about the form and motivations of our coming machine overlords for a long time, and we have explored a vast number of possibilities for how we will subject ourselves to the rule of machines.

But I’ll admit, what worries me isn’t the Singularity, machines developing intelligence and deciding that it would be more appropriate for them to be in charge than us.

No, what worries me are machines trained to follow rules but without the intelligence to know what they are doing. What worries me is the possibility that we come to be ruled by overlords that are the manifestation of algorithms trained by the data we provide, but just a blind algorithm.

I am sure that I cannot reasonably estimate what’s been written about this particular topic, and it isn’t one that I’ve yet explored. On the one hand, I now have another topic for reading and study and exploration. On the other hand, I’m tempted to use this as a door to walk through to explore my imagination. And perhaps I’ll take this latter route.

Posted in bizarre and random things

So after my last post, I’ve been thinking more about the Stone Ones from Gilgamesh. They have only a very brief appearance, but an important one, being part of Gilgamesh’s journey across the Waters of Death to meet Uta-Napishtim, the immortal survivor of the Great Flood.

Perhaps this comes from all of the other appearance of stony creatures that have appeared since. There is the Golem; there are the stone skinned beings from Game of Thrones; Frankenstein’s Adam isn’t a creature of stone but it is a creature nonetheless, even if one perhaps more intelligent than its creator.

There has been some speculation on who, or what, the Stone Ones were in actuality. Anne Kilmer in Crossing the Waters of Death: the Stone Things in the Gilgamesh Epic, speculates that the stone things are part of a method for moving boats in shallow water, by throwing a (stone) anchor and then pulling the boat along.

But for me, and this might just be me, misses a basic point. I’m not sure of the actual Sumerian (or Akkadian) word, and so I don’t know whether the correct translation is Stone Ones or Stone Things. But Gilgamesh falling upon them and smashing them seems to me to indicate something more than Gilgamesh smashing stone anchors, that could be replaced before he and Ur-Shanabi started on their journey.

So I want to believe there is something more interesting here. When I first read Gilgamesh, and when I just reread it, I had the image of moveable stone statues on Ur-Shanabi’s boat, helping Ur-Shanabi propel the boat to the opposite shore of the Waters of Death.

But this makes no sense. Animate stone statues are not the sort of thing that make any sense on a boat. And this just adds to the whole air of something unusual.

So what might the Stone Ones be? I love the image of the animate stone statues, themselves immortal and immune to the effect of the Waters of Death, But if such existed, then surely there would have been mention of them either somewhere else in Gilgamesh or in some other Sumerian epic. My reading of all of Sumer is its early stages, but I’ve not seen any mention of them in my other reading.

I am operating with very incomplete information at this point, but I am struck by their one brief mention in Gilgamesh. One of the speculations that I have carried with me for a long time is the belief that we might carry echoes of stories from deep human time in our stories, and I’m wondering whether this is the case here.

What references from Gilgamesh, perhaps the Stone Ones, perhaps Enkidu, are echoes of much older stories? What strikes me about the Stone Ones in particular is their singularity, and I remember something that I read somewhere, that it is the unusual and the singular in our old stories that we need to pay attention to.

It is the unusual and the singular that we remember as the important elements in our old stories, as they might be the elements that we have some reason to remember, even if we have forgotten why we need to remember and even if we’ve forgotten what they actually mean.

Posted in bizarre and random things

I have now finished The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Penguin Classics edition edited by Andrew Geoge, as part of my current project of reading ancient Sumer. I’d read Gilgamesh before, and I will admit that I still catch my inner voice sometimes mirroring Jean-Luc Picard telling the story to the Tamarian Dathon on El-Adrel as the Tamarian lies dying, in the Start Treak – The Next Generation episode Darmok.

As strange a story as it is in places, and it can be a bit strange, Gilgamesh captured my imagination from my first encounter, I don’t remember how long ago. Part of the reason stems from the depths of my own ignorance. Gilgamesh stands for me as a stark reminder of the context inherent in stories.

Stories are born of and stories are told by people who share a context, a culture, a history. This won’t come as a revelation to anyone, and my reason for bringing it up isn’t to make some grand claim. Rather, I view it as a constant reminder of all of our interpretations of the world that have slipped through our fingers over the course of years.

What are the echoes, the associations that would have rung for an Akkadian or a Sumerian, listening to a bard recite Gilgamesh? I will admit to being filled with a sense of loss every time I think of this, because these echoes and associations are a key part of that culture, a web tying together more or less strongly so many different stories.

To take just one small such thing, there is a passing reference in Gilgamesh to the Stone Ones. They seem to be the crew of the ferryman Ur-shanabi, who is the only conduit to Uta-napishti across the Waters of Death, who alone among all men survived the great flood and was made immortal by the gods.

When Gilgamesh first encounters Ur-shanabi in his quest to find Uta-napishti, he falls upon the Stone Ones and smashes them, and so is forced then to help Ur-shanabi propel his boat across the Waters of Death.

Strangely, though, Ur-shanabi doesn’t scold or attack Gilgamesh for destroying his crew. And so I’ve become curious and want to know more about the Stone Ones, but there seems to have been very little that’s been written about them. Perhaps this is just how the stories been told and I’m reading too much into it, but Ur-shanabi doesn’t lament the destruction of the Stone Ones. Poetically, such a lamentation would have been an interesting juxtaposition, given that Gilgamesh himself wants to find Uta-napishti to learn the secret of immortality.

But what I would love to know is what a Sumerian would have understood the Stone Ones to be and to mean, if an allegory for something else, and what other stories they had that involved such beings as the Stone Ones.

Posted in bizarre and random things

As a child, my eyes were always bigger than my stomach, both literally and figuratively. I was, and still am, the sort who will never get their money’s worth at an all you can eat buffet, and my list of projects is always longer than the available time will allow, regardless of the time scale I set for them. And, as I have been experiencing over the past few weeks, regardless of the severity of the pruning of those lists.

On this last day of 2019, I thought I would take the traditional approach and reflect on the current reading project, my third over the past three years. In 2017, I read the Sir Richard Burton translation of the Tales of 1001 Arabian Nights, and in 2018 (and into the early part of 2019) I read the complete fiction of Kurt Vonnegut. (I will admit that I still have one or two collections of essays on the bedside table.)

For 2019, I set myself the project of starting at the beginning of human literature and working my way through chronologically, just to see how far I could get. In retrospect, I can only describe this as a project defined by the sheer spectacular scale of its foolishness and naïveté.

This is not to say that I’ve given up, as I haven’t, but I have realized that I need to take a step back and be a bit more cautious and prudent in my planning.

I’ve talked about a few of the issues impacting this project in previous posts, but in the end of calendar spirit of reprising and reflection, the main issue was my ignorance at the volume of what the Sumerians had written.

They were prolific scribes and writing as they did on clay tablets, we have a goodly amount of what they had written, though sometimes only in fragments. Not all of what we have has been translated, and despite my first paragraph above, I don’t have the time to learn how to read cuneiform and ancient Sumerian.

I am becoming intrigued by the Sumerians, a people whose language is unrelated to any other language. I have come to the realization that to understand what the Sumerians are writing, I need to have a deeper appreciation of who the Sumerians were, and so part of the project will be reading what we currently know of the history and culture of ancient Sumer.

And so, as was inevitable in retrospect, the project has expanded beyond merely reading, but to developing the wider context of the people whose stories and proverbs I am reading. Their myths and the stories of their gods. The day to day life in their great cities, to the extent to which we have developed a picture of this. The facts and theories of their origin and how this might have impacted the stories they told, gathered around their hearths at night.

And looking forward, I can see how this will impact this project going forward. Because after Sumer and Akkad and their successors, the Assyrians and the Babylonians, I will make my way to Egypt, in all of its extensive glory.

In a deeper sense, I’m happy to have been so wrong about the extent of this project. I have always held the belief that our distant ancestors were capable of, and accomplished, much more than we sometimes give them credit for, and the widening and overwhelming scale of this project is just one more demonstration of this.

Posted in bizarre and random things