Crossing The River Whose Source And End We Are (Because We Cross It)

The Euphrates River in southern Turkey, not far from the ritual site of Gobekli Tepe, where the excavation of a ritual site for  hunter-gatherers predating agriculture is challenging conceptions of how human civilizations began.

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I.

The hunt takes them far
into the great forest,
heaving spears at bear and elk
whose hot hearts have kept
flint-edges true for a million
years of this one and only day.
They have walked the steppes
of night so long and far
that birth from a woman
seems impossible in their myth,
a tale for children’s comfort
til they too join the hunt.

But down there in the valley now
a new tribe—disturbing because
nothing ever changes for the hunters–
is curiously still, laboring
dawn to dusk in one bounded land
and sleeping in round huts
that huddle against the open night,
on beds of straw no spear invades,
encircled by a woman’s sleep.

Even the animals have slowed
from flight into duration,
lingering safely in the shadows
of these people, feeding on scraps from
the table, hunting mice in granaries.
The heavy aurochs now submit
to great leather straps ,
walking tense across the fields
tendoned to a stone blade,
creating long furrows  in what
they sing mother as they cast
their seeds in, invoking a plenty
it will a pregnancy to reap.
Ox they call them, their
hot meat resisted for
the greater yield of labor …

Sometimes the hunters on the hill
and the farmers in the valley
watch each other across the river,
each group perhaps yearning
for something in the other –-
endless couplings with the goddess
in a safe communal bed,
the freedom of a long night’s hunt
in the boundless forest.

That river runs through the mind
and is a perilous fjord to both.
From the hunters’ vantage
the rising sun caresses their
faces and the morning breeze
exhales a scented musk;
to cross the river
is to lay down spear and knife
and take up plow and sickle,
tending fields with sons,
coming home each night to
a wife who suckles babes
and joins their daughters
grinding grain in stone bowls
holding the pestle like a phallus,
singing as if to a god’s desire
to loose semen from the storm.

Come night and sleep
the settlement is besieged
by dreams of fleeing back
over that river, of running fast
after boar with flashing bloody tusks,
killing bears and lions
like bears and lions,
resumed in that fraternity
whose father is eternity,
the stars spiraling
in a dreamtime sprung free
from the fields’ fixed round.

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II.

The bridge across the river
is a ley of stone pillars arranged
in circles atop the hill
that overlooks the valley.
The hunters raised those stones,
summing something there
that somehow sprouted in
the fields.  They carved them
with bears and lions, vultures
and snakes – predators all,
the fiercest glutters of red death –
devout in the name of that
which keeps the hunters’
spear-thrusts true.

The ritual appeared out of
something that took centuries
to shape in nascent mind.
The prey that once talked to them
in dreamtime had gone silent,
the woods no longer braided
night with starry song.
Words kept rising on the tongue
up from that growing absence,
a song of longing that
led to pillars carved in likeness
of that old forest enactment
as if the symbol were the thing,
re-enacting the trope for
generations, setting each new
circle of standing stones
upon the covered-over
phalli of the last entreaty to the lost.

The very act of tending these
sites meant stilling in their motion
for a season, quarrying, carrying,
carving and setting the pillars in place;
out of that duration welled a
strange new tide that bid
them linger on when all
instinct screamed Run!
in a voice somehow fainter
with each raising of the round–:
Bid them gather, bid them stay,
bid them weave their story of
ancestor kin on looming stone
that somehow made the animals
present in the new way and
and receding in the old.

Over unmarked centuries that
absence became presence,
the old forest abyss become
both history and mystery
carved by words into a round
of named seasons, making it
possible to walk across that
river and set spear by a
permanent door, settling down
by putting terror that far enough
away – just beyond the river, say –
and turning animal speech into
prayer to the Mother of
Domesticated Beasts, her
forest-green waist
become a fertile field.

And with those softer, more durable
words the farms appeared,
the huddled huts, the granaries and
priests: all the product of words
for settling down into the enduring
comforts of duration. And out
of that bounded round of time
a mind came into being, one
half bent to field-labors,
the other loud with gods
who sang into being
a hundred cunning crafts,
fashioning new tools to increase
the yield of field and thought,
baking pots in the womb of kilns,
writing laws on tablets
to keep the rounds bound
to orders of consequence.

And when people of the settlement
died their heads were interred
into the foundations
of their houses along with the
skulls of parents and grandparents,
an ossuary of thought that
grew, like grain, into strings
of words called narrative,
a purely human world
bound in time and space
far from the hills and
forests of the old wild night.

Those who stayed on the other
side of the river slowly died out,
stubborn in the ways of a world
that less and less existed
the way some drinkers never get off
their barstools chasing the last cherry
to the bottom of an endless glass
while the rest of the world
is sleeping, repairing
for the next long working day.

Settling down means ceasing
to wander the unending avenues
of the big night music
and sitting down {here},
calling this place home by
working in one place only
of the heart’s far vistas,
round after round of
the mind’s spiraling life,
become a tower or steeple
filled with words for world.

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III.

Over ten millennia
[the distance of a spear-toss
in the old dreamtime]
the settlements evolved
into civilizations that
rose and fell and rose and fell.
Each new round was
fathered by new tools
and midwifed by words for
them—copper, bronze, steel,
Delphi, Chartres, World Trade Center,
scroll, book, virtual.

The round of civilizations
became a whirl and
then white noise
and so did those words, first
profane, then sacred,
then learned, then distant,
then empty as the hills
where the vanished hunters’
last pillars were deep
in nameless dirt.

The river is still there
and we’re now here
looking across to something
yet to have a proper name,
calling from every empty
word scattered from
the fallen siloes of the times.

There’s no more running
back to the fields,
no more refusing
the bridge’s call:
a  strange new faith bids us
step out as if on air
and join the hunt
that’s deepest in the furrow
feet bare and calloused
running all night after
sunlit prey, true to old freedoms
inside the working day.

Long ago the hunters
crossed that bridge
and now it’s our turn
to dig down deepest
in the ground to find
it in open doors
inside black holes,

revealing a face that,
finally unearthed,
smiles with that old hungry
look that sees the forest
orchard beyond the raging
river of the fretted mind,
world and word now over
the bridge, settled-wild,
fertile-free, our next home
amid the beasts and stars,
become their husbandry.

January 2012

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Some of the excavated pillars at Gobekli Tepe.

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Note

Excavations at Gobekli Tepe in southern Turkey over the past decade have revealed a ritual site of carved pillars dating to about 9,500 BCE – predating, archaeologists believe, the beginnings of agriculture. It is the oldest known temple, and leads to an upending of theory about the transition from Paleolithic hunter-gatherer culture to those agricultural societies that sparked what we call civilization.  Writing, art and religion were believed to have been the result of the development of agriculture, but with the evidence from Gobekli Tepe, it seems that worship is what led to agriculture, not vice versa.

For whatever reasons the hunter-gatherers created and maintained Gobekli Tepe (similar to the way animals in Paleolithic caves were often painted over each other by long successive generations, the ritual stones at Gobekli Tepe were erected right over previous circles), they stuck around in one place long enough (it takes a while to quarry, carry, and carve those big limestone pillars) that some of them stayed and eventually settled and began domesticating the land.

One local tradition has it that Gobekli Tepe is the site of the Garden of Eden, and it makes mythological sense, for it was in Eden that humans lived off the fat of the land, much as hunter-gatherers had for hundreds of centuries; by eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, humans were separated from that Eden and bid to live by the sweat of their brow, working the land.

There’s a good article in National Geographic about the site and its radical challenge to theories of cultural evolution here.

The poem owes much to The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, though similar to the Big Bang theory, his left me wondering what mind came before? And as it seems the bicameral, god-ruled mind has about burned out its candle (don’t tell Rick Santorum), I wonder: what mind comes after?

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Lucas Cranach the Elder, “Adam and Eve in The Garden of Eden.”