Sputterpub's Blog

Yaya loved working with her mother, but she thought she had to work too hard. Meshie was older and stronger than she, but he didn’t have to do as much. It seemed to Yaya that this was only because he had a penis. He and his father got to sit around while the women kept going even serving them food and drink, as if the men somehow worked harder. Somewhere. Meshie knew it, too. He had a way of sitting behind their father and making faces at Yaya that neither of their parents ever saw. An insolent way of requesting that she bring him something, soup or beer, so if she refused she would appear even to her mother to be mean. Meshie was not smart but he was sly.

Their climate was mild but they definitely had a winter. Occasionally it snowed. Yaya loved to bundle on her cot under a warm woven blanket while she drifted into sleep after a day’s work. She’d imagine that she was sinking deeper and deeper into a welcoming place. She’d envision the patterns of weaving in degrees of wool and twine. She had ideas for incorporating ceramic beads into her work. Guarding her precious seeds from the birds, she even had some notions about filling blankets with small feathers and making tassels of large ones, but the problem, always, was that she had too much work.

As much as she loved retiring under her blankets, she hated to emerge from them on winter mornings. The air on her lower legs stung like a slap, the water was cold, and she was still tired. She avoided her grumpy brother as she started the morning meal. She greeted her mother with affection and usually made a plan with her for some secret weaving. She saw her father watching her. She knew he was arranging her marriage, assessing her as nubile, needful of metal and sheep. She considered her few options, for she was twelve but she was not naive, and she decided to hope for a kind man who wouldn’t take her far away.

The religions of the area, even in that last degenerating decade, had nothing to do with afterlife and everything to do with a person’s time on earth. And there were enough cases of senile dementia around Yaya for her to understand that personality has no necessary permanence, even in life. She had to take her best shots while alive. The thought depressed her. Best shots. She was constrained by her father. If he wasn’t around, Meshie was in charge of her. To be superseded by a husband. She wasn’t likely to get too far with her creative ideas. No farther than her mother …

Yaya figured her best bet was in progeny. She could raise fellow-weavers and thinkers. And they, at least the female ones, could raise more.

She gathered her best beads together, some feathers and her only gold ring, and she tucked those treasures in the suede bag she wore under her shift. While her mother combed the hemp field and her father dreamed of bride-price and her brother schemed for the coin to get drunk and laid that evening, Yaya piled up a little shrine near the river. She made a private sacrifice to Inanna, for health and babies.

Mesopotamia, the land “between the rivers,” invented writing. They didn’t do it for religious or artistic purposes, or even to improve communication. They were record-keepers. They established writing so they could maintain commercial information. They shaped the wheel so they could get their goods to market. They developed the first code of law (Ur-Nammu headed up that project, three centuries before Hammurabi), and it was all about protecting contracts and personal property.

They were busy. They created business.

They were also healthy. Contrary to ideas four thousand years later, Sumerians tended to live long and rather comfortable lives. There were few plagues and no colds. VD, tuberculosis, polio, malaria, and AIDS were unknown. But infections were dangerous. Childbirth was the biggest killer of women. Battle was the number one cause of death among men. Absent those conditions, a person could expect to live eighty years.

Meshie and Yaya knew their paternal great grandparents and all four parents of their parents. Their father’s big family lived close by, near the center of Larsa, but their mother’s was still in Ur. Meshie and Yaya and their folks occupied a cluster of buildings on the outskirts of town, near the fields where the sheep grazed and where Yaya and her mother could experiment with fiber crops. They only saw their mother’s family once every year or so. They spent more time than Yaya wished with her father’s brothers and nephews. Of a dozen cousins there was only one other female and she was a baby; Yaya at twelve learned to be watchful, because she attracted far too much attention from her male relatives.

She once overheard her male cousins conspiring to catch her in her bath. She stayed closer to the women after that, although she found her aunts demanding and dull. She was safer with the females.

She avoided even her own father and brother. Not that they would touch her sexually, but they teased her and commented on her and sought to embarrass her. In her opinion they were too aware of her, and she tried to stay out of their way.

The men in her family had impulsive tempers. The women gave them what distance they could. While her father and Meshie worked with the sheep, Yaya and her mother tended their experimental garden. In addition to dependable flax plants they were trying to grow the fibrous perennial that would be known as hemp. They had visions of hangers made of the twiny string, open weavings like hammocks and cradles. They’d traded a month’s worth of fine wool for a ladle of the tiny seeds and then lost half of them to birds before they learned how to shield them. Their first season of plants was scrawny, but they’d let the hardiest females go to seed and with each year after they’d had a lusher, tougher crop. They harvested in the autumn, plied the fibers and spun them like yarn and braided and wove them all winter while they burned the chaff in braziers in their workroom, and together produced shaped-rope containers that were getting some notice in the market.

(the rest tomorrow)

They remembered the winter of 2002 as the season of Polartec. It started with the 4×6 throws (in varying colors) available from Lands’End for $39 each, and ended with robes of the same material and hues. In between there were occasions of Primaloft and good old down and even a bit of knitting (although the yarn was nylon Tactel microfiber which never came near a sheep). Coziness was a recurring theme.

The weather drove some of the impulses. It was wintry early that year, with rainfall at 180% of normal by New Year’s Day and temperatures chilly enough to redden noses and water eyes. But the twin insecurities of economic recession and the war on terrorism also created a lust for safety and soft comfort. Home and the hearth.

They weren’t knitting to help the war effort or even to save money on clothes. The exercise was therapeutic and meditative. The mind stretched while the hands moved. The knit chevrons took shape, rhythmically, from the dance of yarn around long needles, and the brain loving those patterns sought others. Drifted into dreams of ancient textiles.

They called her Yaya. Her full name is transliterated “Erishti-Aya,” which the family shortened to “E-Aya” and the human mouth, then and now, transformed to “Yaya.”

She was at the bottom of the family; her parents only had two children, but the other was older and male. His name was Meshiaggasher, and he was a bully.

They were an attractive household. Meshie and Yaya were well-formed, olive-skinned, chocolate-haired. She was petite like her mother and large-eyed like her father. He was big, strong, and handsome.

From the perspective of a meditating knitter, Yaya was born in 2002 B.C.E. But her culture had their own ways of measuring time: she began her life in the second year of the Elamites, or in the twentieth season after the Amorites first attacked her city-state, or during the forty-third winter of intermittent war between Larsa and Isin.

Her family could trace itself back, maternally, to the enlightened age. They flourished during the reign of Ur-Nammu, in Ur itself, then the center of art and trade. They were weavers and they were innovative. But they mostly had ideas instead of offspring. They never produced enough children to establish a textile dynasty. Yaya and Meshie were the only bearers left of that line, and they were expected to meld like their mother did into their father’s customary ways.

Larsa was one of the prettiest city-states in Sumer. Nestled in the angle where the Euphrates meets the Tigris, overlooking the long delta but just high enough to withstand the floods, it was a metropolis of 20,000, with regular streets and attractive mud-brick houses, surrounded by fields of cultivated grains and hemmed by grazing pastures. The climate was mild. The agriculture was easy, provided they managed the silt. But the skirmishes and battles with Isin and sometimes Uruk and Lagash left its marks: gouged garden terraces; lacerated canals. Temporary military encampments crystalized and were immediately outlined by purveyors and prostitutes, scoring the crooked circumferences of the world’s first slums.

(more on Wednesday)

Semites are Semites, and their brains remained binary. There wasn’t any possibility of interbreeding with Sumerians, and if there’s ever been a binary-to-trinary natural mutation, it must not have survived to be reported; none of us have heard of it. So certain capabilities, such as a three-party political system or intergalactic travel, remained unavailable to them.

But they took to the market. They seemed to have a natural aptitude, by and large. For most of my life, I thought Sumerians were here to mentor the young Semites. Trade seemed good. As earth’s cultures began to mimic Sumerian there was progress, improvement, apparent advancement. We were helping the disadvantaged. It’s only lately, in my early old age, that I’ve come to understand the object of our mission. Having exhausted our own markets, I see now that we’ve been preparing this place for commercial harvest. Rather than backing away from our own history, taking an honest look, and admitting that, really, our capitalism has done much more harm than good, we’re out here at the edges of the galaxy breeding new places for plunder.

I can’t believe how deluded I’ve been. I saw Semites as limited, because the “other” wasn’t available to them. I thought I was doing good work by affording them a trinary existence. I knew they were different and, after all, we were the ones with the ability to visit; I see now I thought we were better.

And maybe trinary is better than binary. But sneaking the perspective upon a whole unsuspecting people; that can’t work and can’t even be intended to work. I somehow overlooked the fact that everywhere on this planet, before the introduction of Sumerian mercantile culture and benefits, people exhibited a deep and natural connection to the land beneath their feet. To the sky above and the waters around. A respectful relationship to the other creatures of this place. But Sumerians are not attached to any physical location. We rose away from that long ago, as we developed our culture along the weblines of efficient distribution. And wherever Sumerian ideas have taken hold, where progress and leisure and bureaucracy have flourished, there ensued a severance of people from reality: abrupt, amnesiac, and proud.

I’ve seen it more than once. I’ve lived long enough to watch several societies flourish by our devices and then wither through disconnection. I used to quietly regret it, as a necessary evil for the greater good. I’m still regretting, but I’ve decided no longer to be quiet.

It seems so obvious to me now. I’ve always known how much we need carbon fossil fuels to power our Sumerian luxuries; teleportation is fine for travel, but there’s nothing like fuel oil for material comfort. Here I am in the midst of a planet with, now, one superpower, fully commercialized. And it looks like that superpower is poised for destruction, engineered into a hugely expensive war against guerillas, doomed to holocaust. The turgid military budget pours dollars into the corporations and puts them in control of world resources, which they will no sooner govern than be visited by us, the harvesters.

Sumerians will reap the fossil wealth of this planet and then, in accordance with our historical patterns, we will return in a few millennia, to take the second crop, when the Semites have themselves become fossils.

Of course I have no support for my assertions. But they are consistent with Sumerian history, they explain the observable phenomena, and they are not contradicted by facts. At the least that makes them a worthwhile theory. And the market disconnects the people from the planet. You don’t even notice the leeching of resources! I don’t expect to be much believed …

My effort may be futile but I just can’t resume my old behavior. I’m going to dedicate the rest of my existence to this testimony.

We came here like gods with our inventions and devices.

We came here like demons, subtle and ravenous.

God/demon? Good/bad? I’ve been here so long I’m slipping into binaries. I must remember: I am Sumerian; there is more.