July
1996
Editorial:
Wish Fulfillment
By Martin Rowe
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In the Sumerian city of Uruk in the ancient Middle
East, there was once a king called Gilgamesh. We know about Gilgamesh
mainly because of
the epic poems written about him about 600 years after his death (he died
around 2700 BCE), as well as other corroborating evidence. Gilgamesh
is known in the poems as a builder; indeed he is one of the first recognizably
urban figures — establishing the city walls as boundaries of civilization
against the animals, peoples, and natural world that existed beyond
those walls.
As related in one version of the epic, Gilgamesh looks beyond the walls
and sees the bodies of Uruk’s dead floating down the river —
as customary in ancient Sumerian festivals. Suddenly, Gilgamesh becomes
painfully aware that he will also end up like this. He prays to the
sun god Utu to enable him to leave the city and slay a sacred forest
demon — a deed which Gilgamesh believes will win him fame and,
through commemoration in stone or brick, perpetuate his existence beyond
death.
Utu doesn’t understand Gilgamesh’s insistence, but ultimately
Gilgamesh is allowed to go to the land of great forests — envisioning
that, on killing the demon, he will deforest the area so widely that
thousands of felled trees will be sent down the river like the cadavers
of Uruk. For Gilgamesh knows that human beings will never be able to
cover the land in the way forests can.*
That we still remember Gilgamesh and the Sumerians, along with the
Egyptians, as the first great Mediterranean civilizers is itself instructive.
For
we also remember the ancient Greeks and Romans as civilizers, and they
similarly denuded their countries — and those of their empires
— of trees. Significantly, also, the Hebrew prophets of Israel’s
early years also rail against the worship of trees sacred to Asherah
as a false religion of the "high places" beyond the temple
walls.
This past couple of months, the Make-a-Wish Foundation — which
gives money to dying children so they can fulfill their biggest wish
— has found itself the focus of intense scrutiny. A 17-year old
young Minnesotan called Eric was given money so that, with his father,
he could hunt and kill a Kodiak bear. Eric and his father are, apparently,
lifelong hunters — but the bear would be his biggest kill. So
"big" in fact, that pledges from others to give Eric a camera
for him to shoot the bear with film rather than bullets, or to visit
Pierce Brosnan on the set on the next Bond movie, were shunned. Now,
the Pennsylvania branch of the Make-a-Wish Foundation has given a sum
of money to a young man who wants to kill a moose.
Let’s leave aside a critique of charitable responsibility. Clearly,
the Make-a-Wish Foundation would not fulfill a young person’s
dying wish if he or she wanted to boil human babies alive or even skin
a cat. So it’s not simply that they do whatever the kids want.
And the issue, I think, goes a little deeper than the mere sanctioning
by society of hunting wild animals.
Let’s go back to Gilgamesh. What does a kid from Minnesota have
to do with the semi-mythic king of Sumer? Well, Eric still has plans
for his life. In the Fall he intends to go to college to study, of all
things, Land Management. Clearly Eric, and others like him, feel a connection
to the land and the outdoors: there is nothing wrong with that. But,
behind that feeling of intimacy, there seems to be lurking a sense that
what or who lie beyond the city walls need to be killed or denuded —
in a word, "managed."
Gilgamesh’s fury and his fear, his feeling of hopelessness in
the face of the hugeness of the forest cover and his own insignificance,
leads him to several inescapable conclusions: that if he can never be
as great as the forest, he will at least destroy its greatness. That
if he is to die, he will not go alone — the ever-living, ever-regenerating
forest will go with him too. Finally, in killing the forest, the vast
indifference of the natural world to his death will be avenged.
I fancy, although he may not be a king, Eric is going through the same
thing. The Kodiak bear, wholly non-human and entirely singular, lives
his or her life with no regard for Eric. She or he does not care whether
Eric lives or dies or whether his name lives on or not. And because
of the bear’s indifference, and that of the earth on which she
or he walks, Eric (and we are all Erics in our way) destroy, denude,
and kill — deluding ourselves into believing that ultimately
any of our efforts to memorialize our name are meaningful. If that
is all
the destruction amounted to, it would be pitiable; but because so many
and so much are destroyed, it is tragic.
*I am indebted to Robert Pogue Harrison’s book Forests: The
Shadow of Civilization, (University of Chicago Press, 1992) for
the analysis of Gilgamesh.
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