Sputterpub's Blog

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.

From the textbooks: two points suggest a line; three establish a plane.

The triangle, elegant and easy, is the most stable, supportive form. The first shape. The image of a person, upright. A natural mountain. Tepee.

Two is productive but flimsy. On/off. Black/white. True/false. Binary numbers, electricity, all those computers. Lacking perspective.

From the lessons: Semites and Sumerians are not alike. They have different understandings of space and time. They have different home planets. They can’t produce offspring. Dogs and Semites share 90% of their DNA. Sumerians and Semites have less than 84% of their genetic material in common.

But the two peoples look alike. They’ve lived and worked side by side now for five thousand years. The visitors, far less plentiful but much longer-lived, aware of the situation and careful like vampires to guard their real identities, and the indigenous opportunistic fecund folk, fruitful and foolish.

It’s time the story was told. I know I’m risking resentment by some and scorn by many, but I’ve had a long life and a full career and, anyway, continuing this way has become intolerable to me. I must speak:

About three thousand years before the beginning of the Common Era, this planet was seeded by Sumerian scouts. Only a few places in Asia, the Middle East and Africa were actually populated then, and the property between the two rivers had oft-flooding waterways and a little agriculture, so the Sumerians inserted themselves into the Tigris/Euphrates region.

The indigenous Semites were making some progress toward civilization there. Swamps had been drained; canals had been built and were maintained. People were beginning to cluster together in bigger groups, with consequent politics. The Sumerians were able to slip a few of themselves into those proto-cities, and to introduce constructs that helped them become city-states.

Sumerians have trinary attitudes. They think in terms of on/off/other, where other goes in the direction which is perpendicular to the on/off axis, the line which takes the issue into three dimensions. Their intergalactic travel is based on a type of teleportation that rides that “other” line. Their best reproductions involve three parents. The epic hero Gilgamesh, for example, was a true Sumerian, and a hint of that sneaks out in the poetry, which describes him as two parts god and one part man.

On close examination, a Sumerian skull is a little pointed on top. The fontanelle closes differently than on Semites. It wasn’t accidental that Sumerian brains invented writing based on the wedge shape, or came up with ziggurats for shrines. They also brought the wheel, which was of course not triangular in shape, but they were forced to adopt that because it was so much better than a sledge at transporting goods. Sumerians introduced arithmetic to keep track of trade, and contrary to popular thought, base ten was used not because it happened to be the number of a person’s digits. It was simply the best pyramid number – one, three and six were too small, and fifteen was too big.

Sumerian “civilization” didn’t last that long; a thousand years is a Sumerian life span, and that’s about the extent of their rule. But their developments were adopted by the succeeding dynasties of Semites. Written language continued, the wheel was refined, arithmetic was advanced. Their pantheon became the basis for all the region’s religions; their law, with its attention to contracts and revenge, became the foundation for western civilization.

Some Semites got the message better than others. The Hebrews had an apparently innate affinity for trade; they were such commercial “naturals” that the Sumerians more or less chose them as spiritual successors, and the Hebrews (coincidentally?) chose the intersection of two equilateral triangles as the symbol of their culture. Other sects had less mercantile attitudes (and symbols made of straight lines or, romantically, curves!), but everyone caught on to the benefits of organized manufacture and distribution.