gnimmel (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} gnimmel) wrote,@ 2006-10-29 21:09:00 |
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The men of this period became birds
After about a week, the mountain obsession turned into another one; a strange vision, wholly related, but one which made my physicist heart revolt. Simply relating it makes it sound a little daft. Perhaps I should provide a little backstory as to why it seemed a logical step to make.
See, when I was a teenager I decided I'd rather like to be Tolkien. Unfortunately for me, this was a profession which had only ever had one post, and this post had, alas, already been filled by (as it happens) one Prof. Tolkien. The fact that the original incumbant had since died did not seem to have created an opening in the field. So I was stuck in dubious-career-expectations land with nary a handbook to point the way, and (like many other teenagers who had independently decided they wanted to take a shot at being Tolkien) decided to start world-building anyway, dammit. I was very thorough with the world-building (it had several languages, all of which co-incidentally had very simple syntaxes; a range of maps at varying levels of resolution, from 'solar system' to 'village'; a variety of races and species; one detailed and several less-detailed mythologies; a number of cursive and formal scripts; plate tectonics; poetry; and an actual song with actual music which I would hum when feeling insufficiently Tolkienish). Unfortunately I was so thorough that by the time I'd got onto other things (such as university), I'd grown up and changed my mind entirely about what a world should consist of. To say that the start and end of the work didn't match doesn't really convey what I'm talking about. They were unrecognisable as the same world. They went together like bats and ocean liners.
So I set all that aside, with some relief; apart from some of the myths, which I still think of from time to time. And perhaps this time it was all that thinking of mountains, and of death and mysticism, which jogged my memory. I found myself idly thinking of one in particular. It was a worlds' end myth; a sort of gentle, formalised Revelations. The earlier details are not particularly important. What did matter, though, was that a particular (and on the outward face of it innocuous) act would start the end times; and, the unknowing participants in this happening being near water, shortly thereafter a silent, uncrewed, unknown ship would sail from the horizon's edge to berth itself before them, and they would board it, and be taken to the edge of the known world. What was this ship? It had never occurred to me to ask; I had told myself these myths when quite young, and (though the others had been built up on better foundations) this one had become lodged in an unquestioning place in my head. These days I have a more critical eye. If one had been brought up in this world, I thought, one would surely know the myth; and Unless one lost all free will as soon as Great Happenings were afoot, or unless by the end times people had come to desire the end of the world, who would ever board such a ship? A more approriate response to the arrival of the Last Ship would be, I felt, to take a deep breath, utter a heartfelt cunting hellfire! and run for the hills. But the Ship, of course, was not susceptible to reason; the Ship was the blunt instrument of a higher power. If you ran for the hills, would it patiently wait for you? Or would it follow? And if it were to follow, the sea would have to follow as well; and if one were to run for the mountains, the sea would have to follow there; and, like the Ship itself, it would progress silently, slowly, unstoppably. If one were to run for the highest mountains, the rising of the sea would cover all else, and one would have come de facto to the edge of the new known world; a few tiny, frozen islands in a huge ocean of drifting ice and mist. And, technically speaking, the old world would indeed have ended. And still the Ship would wait.
But anyhow, this was the end result: suddenly my mountain-reverie had been derailed by -- of all things -- an archetypal flood myth. I had slipped over to the high peaks of a fantasy world, and that fantasy world had responded by submerging everything but the high peaks in a cold, silent ocean. Honestly, haven't you heard of conservation of mass?, I said to the fantasy world; and, unsurprisingly, the fantasy world shook shook its little head and said nope.
Then the fantasy world took me out for a drink and showed me cryptic glyphs which said such things as:
'Atonatiuh, Water Sun, third Cosmosgonic Era, called Quiauhtonatiuh - Rain Sun. The Sun at this time is Tlaloc, God of Rain, and ended in a cataclysm on a day Nauhiquiahuitl - Four Rain - when Fire rained down from the Sky. The men of this period become birds.'
It told me of Uta-napishti, who Gilgamesh sought on an island at the edge of the world, and how he was warned by the gods to build a boat to save his household from the oncoming deluge; and how at the end of seven days of rain his boat came to rest on the peak of a mountain; and he and his wife were given immortality and repeopled the world. The same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened, said my fantasy world, abruptly switching to Noah; who, it reminded me, had also survived in a boat a flood that had covered all the high hills and mountains. It told me then that the Greek Deucalion had done such a thing as well, although he at least had neglected to fill his boat with animals; and his flood had lasted nine days, and he had come to rest on some mountain or other. The Menominee Manabus, it said, had shot two of the gods and in consequence was chased by the waters to the peak of a mountain. The Caddo, menaced by four giant monsters, hid themselves and pairs of good animals in a giant reed, so that when the flood came to drown the monsters they might survive. Manu was warned of the flood by a fish, who towed his boat to a mountaintop when the waters rose. Need I go on?, said my fantasy world. And I conceded that it might not have been a particularly original thought after all and that yes, mythology was rather fond of floods overtopping mountains, particularly where there were boats involved. One might even, I supposed, surmise things about the need for survivors of disasters to find reasons why they were spared, combined with the Chinese whispers of ten thousand years, combined with a few historical misadventures of water. But, I told the fantasy world, my accidental flood myth was at least in the future -- all the others were tales of the distant past. At which point the fantasy world rolled its eyes, said You might want to read a few more things like this, then, and left.
Ungrateful bloody mythology. Still, it has a sort of a point. Sea levels have risen in the past. Sea levels are rising now, and if I have learnt anything in my brief time flitting around climate science it is that we do not know how high the waters may reach; other than that, if all the ice in the world were to melt, we would be 60--75 metres deeper in ocean. I think of the fens, much of which are kept dry by pumping stations as it is. I think of the highest peak in Tuvalu; not particularly lofty, but in danger of being submerged in the forseeable future.
And since Venice I have been thinking of drowned cities (and there are many drowned already), serene like dead Ophelia or Fuchsia (as if the process of drowning were serene or pretty; as if a drowning city would not belch oil and sewage, as if the last to leave would not be looters and madmen). This morning Debussy's Sunken Cathedral was playing on the radio. I would think of the murky waters of a submerged London, but this is hardly a new idea. And I have been reading J. G. Ballard's Drowned World, in which London is a hellish riot of heat and swamp, of skyscrapers overgrown with creepers, of deep lagoons through which one can see the old city streets receding benath silt. At least the brief idea of worlds' end I had was serene and cold; some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.
You know who else had a flood myth?, interjects the fantasy world one final time, Tolkien. He had dreams about it: of the ineluctable Wave, either coming up out of a quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands. Oh, and by the way, the being-Tolkien corporation is not hiring.
After about a week, the mountain obsession turned into another one; a strange vision, wholly related, but one which made my physicist heart revolt. Simply relating it makes it sound a little daft. Perhaps I should provide a little backstory as to why it seemed a logical step to make.
See, when I was a teenager I decided I'd rather like to be Tolkien. Unfortunately for me, this was a profession which had only ever had one post, and this post had, alas, already been filled by (as it happens) one Prof. Tolkien. The fact that the original incumbant had since died did not seem to have created an opening in the field. So I was stuck in dubious-career-expectations land with nary a handbook to point the way, and (like many other teenagers who had independently decided they wanted to take a shot at being Tolkien) decided to start world-building anyway, dammit. I was very thorough with the world-building (it had several languages, all of which co-incidentally had very simple syntaxes; a range of maps at varying levels of resolution, from 'solar system' to 'village'; a variety of races and species; one detailed and several less-detailed mythologies; a number of cursive and formal scripts; plate tectonics; poetry; and an actual song with actual music which I would hum when feeling insufficiently Tolkienish). Unfortunately I was so thorough that by the time I'd got onto other things (such as university), I'd grown up and changed my mind entirely about what a world should consist of. To say that the start and end of the work didn't match doesn't really convey what I'm talking about. They were unrecognisable as the same world. They went together like bats and ocean liners.
So I set all that aside, with some relief; apart from some of the myths, which I still think of from time to time. And perhaps this time it was all that thinking of mountains, and of death and mysticism, which jogged my memory. I found myself idly thinking of one in particular. It was a worlds' end myth; a sort of gentle, formalised Revelations. The earlier details are not particularly important. What did matter, though, was that a particular (and on the outward face of it innocuous) act would start the end times; and, the unknowing participants in this happening being near water, shortly thereafter a silent, uncrewed, unknown ship would sail from the horizon's edge to berth itself before them, and they would board it, and be taken to the edge of the known world. What was this ship? It had never occurred to me to ask; I had told myself these myths when quite young, and (though the others had been built up on better foundations) this one had become lodged in an unquestioning place in my head. These days I have a more critical eye. If one had been brought up in this world, I thought, one would surely know the myth; and Unless one lost all free will as soon as Great Happenings were afoot, or unless by the end times people had come to desire the end of the world, who would ever board such a ship? A more approriate response to the arrival of the Last Ship would be, I felt, to take a deep breath, utter a heartfelt cunting hellfire! and run for the hills. But the Ship, of course, was not susceptible to reason; the Ship was the blunt instrument of a higher power. If you ran for the hills, would it patiently wait for you? Or would it follow? And if it were to follow, the sea would have to follow as well; and if one were to run for the mountains, the sea would have to follow there; and, like the Ship itself, it would progress silently, slowly, unstoppably. If one were to run for the highest mountains, the rising of the sea would cover all else, and one would have come de facto to the edge of the new known world; a few tiny, frozen islands in a huge ocean of drifting ice and mist. And, technically speaking, the old world would indeed have ended. And still the Ship would wait.
But anyhow, this was the end result: suddenly my mountain-reverie had been derailed by -- of all things -- an archetypal flood myth. I had slipped over to the high peaks of a fantasy world, and that fantasy world had responded by submerging everything but the high peaks in a cold, silent ocean. Honestly, haven't you heard of conservation of mass?, I said to the fantasy world; and, unsurprisingly, the fantasy world shook shook its little head and said nope.
Then the fantasy world took me out for a drink and showed me cryptic glyphs which said such things as:
'Atonatiuh, Water Sun, third Cosmosgonic Era, called Quiauhtonatiuh - Rain Sun. The Sun at this time is Tlaloc, God of Rain, and ended in a cataclysm on a day Nauhiquiahuitl - Four Rain - when Fire rained down from the Sky. The men of this period become birds.'
It told me of Uta-napishti, who Gilgamesh sought on an island at the edge of the world, and how he was warned by the gods to build a boat to save his household from the oncoming deluge; and how at the end of seven days of rain his boat came to rest on the peak of a mountain; and he and his wife were given immortality and repeopled the world. The same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened, said my fantasy world, abruptly switching to Noah; who, it reminded me, had also survived in a boat a flood that had covered all the high hills and mountains. It told me then that the Greek Deucalion had done such a thing as well, although he at least had neglected to fill his boat with animals; and his flood had lasted nine days, and he had come to rest on some mountain or other. The Menominee Manabus, it said, had shot two of the gods and in consequence was chased by the waters to the peak of a mountain. The Caddo, menaced by four giant monsters, hid themselves and pairs of good animals in a giant reed, so that when the flood came to drown the monsters they might survive. Manu was warned of the flood by a fish, who towed his boat to a mountaintop when the waters rose. Need I go on?, said my fantasy world. And I conceded that it might not have been a particularly original thought after all and that yes, mythology was rather fond of floods overtopping mountains, particularly where there were boats involved. One might even, I supposed, surmise things about the need for survivors of disasters to find reasons why they were spared, combined with the Chinese whispers of ten thousand years, combined with a few historical misadventures of water. But, I told the fantasy world, my accidental flood myth was at least in the future -- all the others were tales of the distant past. At which point the fantasy world rolled its eyes, said You might want to read a few more things like this, then, and left.
Ungrateful bloody mythology. Still, it has a sort of a point. Sea levels have risen in the past. Sea levels are rising now, and if I have learnt anything in my brief time flitting around climate science it is that we do not know how high the waters may reach; other than that, if all the ice in the world were to melt, we would be 60--75 metres deeper in ocean. I think of the fens, much of which are kept dry by pumping stations as it is. I think of the highest peak in Tuvalu; not particularly lofty, but in danger of being submerged in the forseeable future.
And since Venice I have been thinking of drowned cities (and there are many drowned already), serene like dead Ophelia or Fuchsia (as if the process of drowning were serene or pretty; as if a drowning city would not belch oil and sewage, as if the last to leave would not be looters and madmen). This morning Debussy's Sunken Cathedral was playing on the radio. I would think of the murky waters of a submerged London, but this is hardly a new idea. And I have been reading J. G. Ballard's Drowned World, in which London is a hellish riot of heat and swamp, of skyscrapers overgrown with creepers, of deep lagoons through which one can see the old city streets receding benath silt. At least the brief idea of worlds' end I had was serene and cold; some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.
You know who else had a flood myth?, interjects the fantasy world one final time, Tolkien. He had dreams about it: of the ineluctable Wave, either coming up out of a quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands. Oh, and by the way, the being-Tolkien corporation is not hiring.
