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Who Was I Again?

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Sexting, or using cell phones to send pornographic images to each other
Wonder what's interesting on the phone today?


If you go back far enough, fragments are all you have.

That isn't bad if you used to dress like a penis.

Take the epic of Gilgamesh, for example, or rather the epics of Gilgamesh. There are at least ten versions, all from different cities and different times. None are complete. Some contradict. We speak of an epic of Gilgamesh, but like everything else in life, you get different answers depending on who you ask.

Like our personal lives, the story of Gilgamesh, among other things, is a story of friendship and a search for immortality. Gilgamesh is a great king who meets and fights Enkidu, then they become fast friends. Enkidu is a wild man, born in the fields, who eats grass, is hairy, howls at the moon, and probably forgets to wear underarm deodorant most days.

"The whole of his body was hairy and his (uncut) locks were like a woman's or the hair of the goddess of grain. Moreover, he knew nothing of settled fields or human beings and was clothed (in skins) like a deity of flocks."

Gilgamesh sends him a prostitute. That seems to settle him down. She has sex with him for a few days, then convinces him to try some wine. After downing the ancient equivalent of a case of beer, Enkidu begins singing and allows himself to be shaved and bathed. He gets a haircut, picks up his sword, and is ready to go out and fight.

As far back as we can look, people were hooking up with hookers, getting loaded, having sex, and doing other stupid things. In Gilgamesh such activities were considered an essential part of becoming civilized. Nothing like a little sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll to knock the edge off.

I was thinking about Gilgamesh when I read an article about how kids were sending pornographic pictures of themselves by cell phone to each other. It's called "sexting." The kids are being arrested and held for felony charges -- child pornography and distribution of child pornography. This is strange because the "children" in question are the kids themselves. The victims are also the perpetrators.

This sounds like something Alfred Hitchcock would direct. One of those movies where the protagonist is searching for the bad guy -- and the bad guy turns out to look an awful lot like the guy doing the searching. "Spellbound" is a must-see if you haven't had the pleasure. It's a masterpiece. Hitchcock is long gone, but when you see one of his films it's like he's still there speaking to us, even though he's dead.

Enkidu gets sick and dies too, cursing the fact that he is dying of illness instead of in battle and cursing the old temple harlot for leading him out of the life he was born into.

Gilgamesh decides that he does not want to follow his friend: he wants to live forever. So another story kicks off, with Gilgamesh finding a special plant but losing it on the way back home. The epic ends (we think) with Gilgamesh sitting outside his beautiful city, Uruk, admiring the walls he built. The lesson seems to be that although it is the fate of men to die, they can live after death by the great deeds they have done, just like "Spellbound" allows Hitchcock to survive.

Uruk, by the way, is where we get the modern word "Iraq".

Iraq from four-thousand years ago is mystery shrouded in legend. Fragments are all we have.

It's an entirely different situation today. Just Google Iraq. There was some heavy military action over there in 2003 during the invasion, and a good deal of desultory warfare since then.

It's not like with Gilgamesh, where all we have are dusty broken tablets with murky meanings from unknown authors. Today we can pick and choose among millions of stories about Iraq in any language and in any media format. Everybody is their own scribe. Say hello to "war porn", where soldiers take videos of combat so that people can see what it is like to really be there.

We know about Iraq because we have hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of pieces of recording media embedded in it: cameras, cell phones, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, satellites, radar and other EM devices. In addition, we have dissemination capabilities that are incredible. The web allows anybody with an opinion and a cell phone to write their own epic.

By telling your own story you can have your own small piece of immortality, just like Gilgamesh wanted some three or four thousand years ago. Except you don't have to go around building great city walls to get it. All you have to do is tweet.

This ability of the average man to blog his way into history is a very, very recent thing. It took two thousand years after Gilgamesh for us to start getting reliable single complete versions of things, and that only initially happened with extremely important single stories. The Homeric Epics are much more defined than Gilgamesh, even though they're mostly myth and we still debate who wrote them. A library, scholarship, and high culture was the internet of the ancient age. Odysseus was Gilgamesh with a cell phone.

Homer Simpson, Nude
No matter what the teenager next door says,
this is not the author of the Homeric Epics
(Some images, once seen, are best quickly forgotten)


We see this in The Iliad and The Odyssey, which involves the Trojan War. Among other things, they're stories of friendships and immortality. Odysseus had a hard time of things. After he left Troy, it took him ten years to get home.

During that time, Odysseus gets stuck on an island with the sea nymph Calypso (she's nothing like she was in Pirates of the Caribbean) Calypso is a thing of beauty who hasn't seen a man in over a hundred years. If Odysseus stays, she'll offer him immortality.

So Odysseus either gets to become immortal and live with this beautiful sea nymph or go home. But he doesn't want immortality. Odysseus is a man, like other men, and his life is defined by his commitments. He's a father. He's a husband, a king, a leader, a fighter, a friend. But Calypso is irresistible. So Odysseus rejoices by night and mourns by day.

However wonderful Calypso's offer, in the end Odysseus would not be himself if he chose to stay. Like all characters, his identity is defined by his choices.

Calypso points out that Penelope, his wife, has gotten old. His son won't even recognize him. There are troubles galore for him when he returns. It will be a great trial. Still, Odysseus cries for his family, for his wife. Calypso then confronts him in words that could have come from a modern TV show. What's she have that I don't have?

"Ah great Goddess,"
worldly Odysseus answered, "don't be angry with me,
please. All that you say is true, how well I know.
Look at my wise Penelope, She falls far short of you,
your beauty, stature. She is mortal after all
and you, you never age or die ...
Nevertheless I long -- I pine, all my days --
to travel home and see the dawn of my return.
And if a god will wreck me yet again on the wine-dark sea,
I can bear that too, with a spirit tempered to endure.
Much have I suffered, labored long and hard by now
in the waves and wars. And this to the total --
bring the trial on!

Odysseys makes it home and it all works out. No mention is made of the fact that he spent years with Calypso, cheating on his wife. Hey -- that was then and this is now. The Odysseus that shows up in Ithaca on April 16, 1178 BC, is very different from the one that left Troy some ten years earlier. Or the one that lived with Calypso on Ogygia for years. You see, each place he goes he has a fresh start. After all, without the dissemination of written newspapers and books, wherever you go you're simply defined by what you do -- how you look and act -- when you get there.

In "Spellbound", Gregory Peck plays a Dr. Anthony Edwardes, a man who arrives at a mental institution to be the new manager. Later on we find out that he is not Dr. Edwardes. But of course, back in the dark ages of just fifty years ago, a famous doctor was somebody you read about, heard about, maybe read a few of his books. It wasn't that unusual not to know what he looked like. Today you'd Google "Dr. Anthony Edwardes" and within seconds have all sorts of information about him: his blog, his institute, his books on Amazon, his Flickr account. The average man lurching towards immortality.

Gregory Peck, Ingrid Bergman, and Michael Chekhov in the movie Spellbound
Spellbound shows us that in the 1940s it wasn't
unusual not to know what a famous author looked like


Kudos to the Greeks for realizing that if you write down what happens, people can make good use of it later. You can spread the immortality around. In one of the first histories ever written Herodotus says

Herodotus of Halicarnassus here displays his enquiry, so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvellous deeds - some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians - may not be without their glory; and especially to show why the two peoples fought with each other.

The Greeks quickly became a productive lot, for a bunch of sheep herders who just got their alphabet somewhere around 800 BC. They wrote thousands of comedies which evolved and were performed during festivals to the God Dionysus. Dionysus is the one who gave us energetic movement and lack of inhibition. That soon became associated with wine, which is great for loosening up and getting moving. There's nothing more fun than mixing friends with wine.

Cities and the countryside would celebrate Dionysia, which consisted of extended drinking and a phallic procession. Yes, you got drunk and wandered through town with a giant penis. Later, people would dress like giant stuffed penises and give speeches. This is how we got comedy. 'Cause if you're drunk and dressed like a giant penis, people are going to laugh at about anything you say.

A Phallic Procession, or Penis Parade
Please do not attempt this at home. These are trained professionals.
Link to unaltered pic (NSFW)


Good thing nobody had a cell phone back then. Some parts of history are best read and not viewed.

That's the good part about fragments, with forgetting, with different versions for stories, at least on a personal level. I tell people I had a "misspent youth" -- this seems to serve the purpose of indicating that my late teenage years were nothing to be proud about without having to go into a lot of detail.

And why should I go into detail? Is it important, for instance, that although I got the highest SAT scores in my high school that I failed every course my senior year due to staying out late partying with my friends? Or that, although I consistently scored in the top ten in statewide mathematics contests I ended up in summer school in order to graduate? Do I want every bit of my life on Google?

I mixed in the good with the bad in the above paragraph in order to show that life is a mixed bag -- you always have the bad stuff and the good stuff. I could go on, at length, about all the stupid stuff I did when I was a teenager. Or I could go on about the good stuff. The bad stuff, hopefully, fades away. It becomes fragments. Little pieces of stories that don't always agree with each other. The good stuff we keep.

Who was I? Depends on who you ask.

If you go back far enough, fragments are all you have.

Psychiatrists say that the brain needs forgetfulness in order to function. Society may need this as well for the individual to function.

But we're running out of forgetfulness. Do I think it should be a felony for kids to take pictures of themselves naked? No. I think it is just kids being kids: kids doing things they would not do as adults. It's the Greeks dressed up like penises drunkenly telling bawdy jokes to each other.

But here's the thing: in the process of recording everything, we're making our lives more static than they've ever been before. I'm not that kid of 18 who was apathetic and hated school anymore. Greeks, hopefully, don't spend a lot of time dressed up like male genitalia. The teenagers taking pictures of themselves performing sex acts are going to have to live with those pictures their entire lives. There's no more forgetting.

You can't start over. You're going to be forced to live with your life in a single version and in graphic detail, a whole cloth of experience from birth until death.

Will society change to fit this? Will folks realize that "kids are kids" and forgive them 30 years later when they apply for a job? Maybe in 300 years, perhaps, but in our lifetimes? Not happening. In the age of the 24-hour news cycle every little tidbit is considered fair game for discussion. Google is a critical part of hiring, dating, selecting baby-sitters, living.

Every detail. Easily remembered. Rarely noticed. Never Forgotten.

All of our history is on YouTube, MySpace, and elsewhere. We can't re-invent ourselves without a court order for a new name and a new identity. Maybe not even then. That door is closing.

Gilgamesh looked at his city walls in the setting sun and thought that the good that he did would live forever and this would be his form of immortality. But the walls of Uruk were sacked just a short time later by Sargon of Akkad in a demonstration of how powerful he was. The city itself was completely lost to history until 1850. Gilgamesh's immortality was in his words, not his walls.

We know about him because somebody took the time and effort to write it down, but there's no time and effort needed anymore. Everything is written down. We've all become immortal, and immortality comes with a price tag.

The heck with society, can people live like this? Can we live in a world where our every misdeed is recorded for life? What's the impact on our psyche to not be able to escape a bad past? Never to start over?

I wonder if, like Odysseus, when we finally realize that we have immortality in our reach through the recording of our entire life, if we won't rejoice and mourn at the same time. Will we ask fair Calypso to leave us to our misery and mortality in order for us to remain ourselves, or will we rejoice by night and mourn by day?

Perhaps if you go back far enough, fragments are all you want.

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This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on February 20, 2009 1:52 PM.

The Airlines are Trying to Make People Deaf was the previous entry in this blog.

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Recently I created a list of books that hackers recommend to each other -- what are the books super hackers use to help guide them form their own startups and make millions? hn-books might be a site you'd like to check out.
On the low-end of the spectrum, I realized that a lot of people have problems logging into Facebook, of all things. So I created a micro-site to help folks learn how to log-in correctly, and to share various funny pictures and such that folks might like to share with their friends. It's called (appropriately enough) facebook login help