Robert Silverberg - Some Notes on the Pre-Dynastic Epoch

We understand some of their languages, but none of them completely. That is one of the great difficulties. What has come down from their epoch to ours is spotted and stained and eroded by time, full of lacunae and static; and so we can only approximately comprehend the nature of their civilization and the reasons for its collapse. Too often, I fear, we project our own values and assumptions back upon them and deceive ourselves into thinking we are making valid historic judgments.

On the other hand there are certain aesthetic rewards in the very incompleteness of the record. Their poetry, for example, is heightened and made more mysterious, more strangely appealing, by the tantalizing gaps that result from our faulty linguistic knowledge and from the uncertainties we experience in transliterating their fragmentary written texts, as well as in transcribing their surviving spoken archives. It is as though time itself has turned poet, collaborating belatedly with the ancients to produce something new and fascinating by punching its own inexorable imprint into their work. Consider the resonances and implications of this deformed and defective song, perhaps a chant of a ritual nature, dating from the late pre-dynastic:

Once upon a time youso fine,

You threw the (?) a (? small unit of currency?) in your prime,

Didnt you?

Peopled call, say Bewareto fall,

Youkidding you.

Youlaugh

Everybody

Now you dontso loud,

Now you dontso proud

Aboutfor your next meal.

How does it feel, how does it feel

To behomeunknown

a rolling stone?

Or examine this, which is an earlier pre-dynastic piece, possibly of Babylonian-American origin:

In my wearied.., me

In my inflamed nostril, me

Punishment, sickness, troubleme

A flail which wickedly afflicts,me

A lacerating rodme

Ahandme

A terrifying messageme

A stinging whip..me

in pain I faint (?)

The Center for Pre-Dynastic Studies is a comfortingly massive building fashioned from blocks of some greasy green synthetic stone and laid out in three spokelike wings radiating from a common center. It is situated in the midst of the central continental plateau, near what may have been the site of the ancient metropolis of Omahaha. On clear days we take to the air in small solar-powered flying machines and survey the outlines of the city, which are still visible as indistinct white scars on the green breast of the earth. There are more than two thousand staff members. Many of them are women and some are sexually available, even to me. I have been employed here for eleven years. My current title is Metalinguistic Archaeologist, Third Grade. My father before me held that title for much of his life. He died in a professional quarrel while I was a child, and my mother dedicated me to filling his place. I have a small office with several data terminals, a neatly beveled viewing screen, and a modest desk. Upon my desk I keep a collection of artifacts of the so-called twentieth century. These serve as talismans, spurring me on to greater depth of insight. They include:

One grey communications device (telephone).

One black inscribing device (typewriter?) which has been exposed to high temperatures and is somewhat melted.

One metal key, incised with the numerals 1714 and fastened by a rusted metal ring to a small white plastic plaque that declares, in red letters, IF CARRIED AWAY INADVERTENTLY///DROP IN ANY MAIL BOX///SHERATON BOSTON HOTEL///BOSTON, MASS. 02199.

One coin of uncertain denomination.

It is understood that these items are the property of the Center for Pre-Dynastic Studies and are merely on loan to me. Considering their great age and the harsh conditions to which they must have been exposed after the collapse of twentieth-century civilization, they are in remarkably fine condition. I am proud to be their custodian.

I am thirty-one years of age, slender, blue-eyed, austere in personal habits, and unmarried. My knowledge of the languages and customs of the so-called twentieth century is considerable, although I strive constantly to increase it. My work both saddens and exhilarates me. I see it as a species of poetry, if poetry may be understood to be the imaginative verbal reconstruction of experience; in my case the experiences I reconstruct are not my own, are in fact alien and repugnant to me, but what does that matter? Each night when I go home my feet are moist and chilled, as though I have been wading in swamps all day. Last summer the Dynast visited the Center on Imperial Unity Day, examined our latest findings with care and an apparently sincere show of interest, and said, `We must draw from these researches a profound lesson for our times.

None of the foregoing is true. I take pleasure in deceiving. I am an extremely unreliable witness.

The heart of the problem, as we have come to understand it, is a pervasive generalized dislocation of awareness. Nightmares break into the fabric of daily life, and we no longer notice, or, if we do notice, we fail to make appropriate response. Nothing seems excessive any longer, nothing perturbs our dulled, numbed minds. Predatory giant insects, the products of pointless experiments in mutation, escape from laboratories and devastate the countryside. Rivers are contaminated by lethal micro-organisms released accidentally or deliberately by civil servants. Parts of human foetuses obtained from abortions are kept alive in hospital research units; human fetal toes and fingers grow up to four times as fast under controlled conditions as they do in utero, starting from single rods of cartilage and becoming fully jointed digits in seven to ten days. These are used in the study of the causes of arthritis. Zoos are vandalized by children, who stone geese and ducks to death and shoot lions in their cages. Sulfuric acid, the result of a combination of rain, mist, and sea spray with sulfurous industrial effluents, devours the statuary of Venice at a rate of five percent a year. The nose is the first part to go when this process, locally termed marble cancer, strikes. Just off the shores of Manhattan Island, a thick, stinking mass of floating sludge transforms a twenty-square-mile region of the ocean into a dead sea, a sterile soup of dark, poisonous wastes; this pocket of coagulated pollutants has been formed over a forty-year period by the licensed dumping each year of millions of cubic yards of treated sewage, towed by barge to the site, and by the unrestrained discharge of 365 million gallons per day of raw sewage from the Hudson River.

All these events are widely deplored but the causative factors are permitted to remain uncorrected, which means a constant widening of their operative zone. (There are no static negative phases; the laws of expansive deterioration decree that bad inevitably becomes worse.) Why is nothing done on any functional level? Because no one believes anything can be done. Such a belief in collective impotence is, structurally speaking, identical in effect to actual impotence; one does not need to be helpless, merely to think that one is helpless, in order to reach a condition of surrender to accelerating degenerative conditions. Under such circumstances a withdrawal of attention is the only satisfactory therapy. Along with this emptying of reactive impulse comes a corresponding semantic inflation and devaluation which further speeds the process of general dehumanization. Thus the roving gangs of adolescents who commit random crimes in the streets of New York City say they have blown away a victim whom they have in fact murdered, and the President of the United States, announcing an adjustment in the par value of his countrys currency made necessary by the surreptitious economic mismanagement of the previous administration, describes it as the most significant monetary agreement in the history of the world.