Sputterpub's Blog

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.

The afternoon of Joel’s impromptu visit, we took a stroll. We left Emmet with Laura and wandered the perimeter of the place. We ended up in the small eucalyptus grove near the cow barn. I remember the dialogue vividly and inexactly, for it has become my own private example of complete miscommunication.

We walked on leaf-laced dirt beneath the trees. Joel was to my left, naturally taller but bouncing shorter with his compressing energy.

I’d already tried to break it off by telling him I wasn’t ready; he said he’d wait. And I’d attempted the non-exclusive, non-possessive argument, even to the point of screwing Ari the young soldier. Joel saw beyond all that and still loved me. Finally I tried cruel mockery.

“If you’ll just give me a little more time,” I petitioned with a whine. I tried to make my tone wheedling, like his sounded to me, as I threw his own words back at him. “I know I’ve been selfish and not completely honest, but I really want to change.” I cut my glance toward him. He paced beside me, gaze downward. I added with what I thought was a sneer: “I need you to be here for me.”

Suddenly he was in front of me. He executed one of his bounce-moves and there was his firm chest blocking my way. He cupped my shoulders with his hands and peered earnestly into my face. “I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited to hear you say that. I love you so much. Of course I’m here for you.”

I was simply flabbergasted. I never imagined he wouldn’t get my sarcasm; I suppose if I dreaded anything it was him lashing out, hurt, to hit me.

I think I became parental then. Firm. “Uh unh, Joel. No.” And while I’m sure he continued to contend, I think he finally started to get it.

He spent the night anyway. It was already dinner time when we finished our walk, and that scooter was unquestionably not roadworthy in the dark. After a quiet meal we went to my room.

When we first arrived at the kibbutz, Mary and Laura and I were assigned to a nice address. The volunteers and soldiers slept in wooden barracks instead of the stucco rooms that housed the residents, but the barracks walls were sound, the windows were screened, and there was cold water available from the sink at the end of each row.

Further up the slope were the shanty-barracks. They weren’t needed so they weren’t kept in repair. Their walls and window screens had holes in them; their plumbing was shut off. But they were the only place to go when Laura and I decided we could no longer live with Mary.

It wasn’t that Mary talked in her sleep, or partied too much, or failed to clean up. In fact it was as far as possible from those. The obnoxious thing about Mary was her quiet, zealous fastidiousness. Incessantly tidying. Making use, somehow sometime, of every little bit. Brushing her teeth after each and every postprandial nibble of a cookie from the tin we kept in the closet – a snacking and brushing that occurred on average six times an evening.

Laura and I would have been happy to live together except there weren’t any decent rooms, and we also knew we’d hurt Mary’s feelings less if we went off separately – as if the problem, really, was our simple need for more space. So like homesteaders we staked out our places in the wild territories. We went up the slope and found rooms we could make acceptable, and then we swept, dusted, patched, and furnished them.

They were never better than barely adequate but they were home. Straw mattresses on iron frames, spool tables and box drawers. The winter cold penetrated the worn slats of the walls. But Laura and I each managed to be cozy enough. That’s where I took Joel.

I’ll never be sure if he was a hero or an agent of mischance that night. I do know nothing was at risk but my row of barracks. My room burned and the fire was started by my heater. Joel woke me and helped me out of the smoke-filled noxiousness. I’ve always assumed it was his jitteriness, an edgy insomnia, that placed him where he could sense the fire and save me. But maybe it was his usual harm-filled karma that allowed the heater to tip. I won’t argue that those kerosene contraptions are safe, but many have slept with them burning, to no calamity.

(Of course you can wear the scalplock. You might want to take care of it, for Joel’s sake, but that was 30 years ago– he’s already made whatever he has of his life).

Joel was in all ways manipulative, and he played the kitten card with exquisite skill. He’d managed to hear little Emmet’s mews exactly when they served to interrupt us on a slide into old argument. He had left me and my weary exasperation, for just a moment, and he hunted out the striped gray bundle of warm mammal that he later named Emmet (Truth). I fell in love with the kitten the moment I held him, and after we took the cab to the shelter, learned it was not a no-kill place, took another taxi to a vet, and paid a fair amount to have Emmet debugged and vaccinated, by the time we got back to Joel’s place that evening, I’d been lured into continuing with him, for a little more, just to co-parent the kitten.

I would have told Joel to turn around and go back to Jerusalem when he showed up without notice at the kibbutz, except that I was so pleased to see Emmet. Joel got to stay the night.

(You’re wondering if we were still having sex. I’m a little ashamed to say yes. I didn’t intend for it to continue, but we usually got to talking and arguing and then agreeing, and he was a very compelling kisser. But I made it clear to him that he wasn’t the only one. I had a week-long affair with an Israeli soldier on the kibbutz, partly to emphasize to Joel and to me that I wasn’t committed to Joel (and also just to do it with someone whose language I didn’t share, which was a strange trip)).

Our kibbutz was a poor place. Kibbutzim are affiliated with political parties and we had applied to the most radical. We wanted to try socialism. We were assigned to a small place inland from Hadera, which is about midway between Tel Aviv and Haifa. Our kibbutz only had about 200 residents and a few dozen soldiers and studentim (us), and none of the gardens or swimming pools or language classes that the larger and more moderate kibbutzim offered. We raised cotton, avocados, and apples, cows for milk, and chickens for market. Our common dining room served as our meeting hall and theater. The residents lived in stucco duplexes and we young folk had uninsulated plank barracks. Kids lived apart from parents.

We didn’t have a camera with us, so my memories are more like dreams than photographs. I recollect a water tower at the top of a slope, with a small athletic field near it, the ranks of poor barracks terracing that slight slope, the trees from which bats flew at sunset. I remember the cinderblock shower house near the kitchen. There were always frogs squatting in the far dark corners, and the acoustics were so satisfying that Laura and Mary and I sang Motown there while we shampooed. Just outside the shower house was a big kerosene tank, where we filled our cans to cart to our rooms to fuel our little space heaters (everyone assumes it’s always hot in Israel, but Jerusalem’s a mile-high city that gets snow every few years, and the kibbutz weather was like Southern California’s – definitely chilly in the winter). I remember how impossible it was not to spill some kerosene near the end of the fill, and how that spilled stuff wrecked the gum soles of our sensible shoes.

Over on the other side of the kibbutz, beyond the kitchen and the chickens and near the big circular drive at the entrance, was a grove of eucalyptus trees, the cow barn, and the hay loft. The loft was actually just a roof on big posts, seeming about three stories high and stacked with bales of hay dried from peanut plants. Laura and I liked to climb up the bales on rainy afternoons when our work shifts were over. We made nests for ourselves at the top of the loft, talked and smoked cigarettes while we poked through the hay for unharvested peanuts.

(Yes, we smoked in the hayloft! We heated our rooms with open kerosene fires. We snorted strange white powders and smoked hash with unknown Arabs. Once I rode from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on the back of Joel’s scooter, and even though he informed me that we were only able to proceed as long as he held two bare wires together, circumventing some short but continually shocking himself, I was by then so blase about the perils of Joel that I managed to fall asleep, actually nap, while riding behind him. We were Disney-generation kids, raised in a culture that told us if we stayed in line and followed the rules, we’d be okay – life is a ride on tracks – and we’d landed in a perfunctory hazardous place, yet we were somehow protected, like morons or teenagers.)

(to be concluded tomorrow)