THE GUARDED MOMENT -- pt. II
"History is not a web woven with innocent hands. Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and the most active.... Everything secret degenerates; nothing is safe that does not bear discussion and publicity."
-- Lord Acton
The means for this upheaval in man from beasts of the field to law-abiding citizens of society are not the only facets of man's emergence that remain unknown. The motives are a mystery at this hour. "But WHY is it no longer good that I fornicate (and defecate) in full view? The bushes are fraught with danger!" A new standard of behavior obtained, and was codified in the first laws.
The mystery of civilization's beginning persists, but to a few, there was no mystery. The one who imposed these rules knew his whys, and his aides knew the wherefores. As such, they would have constituted what amounted to a secret society - a conspiracy - with uncommon thoughts of their own, discussion meetings for members of this elite only, and the various accoutrements of any close, small social unit, recognizable and understandable only to the cognoscenti. Unprecedented thought patterns would have found fallow ground here, and the former ruling ethos of impulse and emotion would have given way to the first stirrings of wit and the vague sense of a philosophy apparent in this passage from the oldest story in human literature - Gilgamesh, the Sumerian Odyssey:
"They stood in awe at the foot
Of the green mountain. Pleasure
Seemed to grow from fear for Gilgamesh.
As when one comes upon a path in woods
Unvisited by men, one is drawn near
The lost and undiscovered in himself;
He was revitalized by danger.
They knew it was the path Humbaba made.
Some called the forest ‘Hell,' and others
‘Paradise'" What difference does it make? Said
Gilgamesh."
Of such thoughts are sophisticates made, and this sophistication existed in a time apparently more primitive and certainly earlier than that of the Philistine. Already, Gilgamesh distanced himself. "A friend in power is a friend lost." (Henry Adams, US historian)
* * *
TIDBIT
(from a letter Mike wrote to me on some other July 20th.)
"Dear Ginnagoo,
I found you a new piece of German: this is from Rilke, who was quoted so much by my old mentor and friend and guide, Nick Crome, that a lot of my fellow students complained that Nick was interested in Rilke, not in them, and it was true.
"That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God."
I quote you this because you think of God and your senses haven't atrophied. It reminds me of the night I almost lost my mind in February 1977, fearing death, fantasizing my own beyond my power to stop. It taught me a lot, strengthened me against its recurrence, it seems.