Last night I read in bed about the adventures of Gilgamesh and fell asleep thinking about the unspoken plots in The Epic of Gilgamesh. Not about those threads missing or undeveloped because of the cuneiform writing on the clay tablets being smeared, because of many tablets not being found, because of their mismatch. I thought of the missing details of events in the famous poem, told too quickly, too briefly, too succinctly, perhaps because the Sumerians and Babylonians did not need to be told the obvious - many of these details are still not obvious to us.
Thoughts before falling asleep brought me a dream in which a good friend of mine, the owner of a large estate on the Hudson River in central New York, simply Riki, was telling me about his meetings with Gilgamesh.
Riki is a good-natured giant who likes to fictionalize the most trivial gossip from the neighborhood over a sumptuous meal, or his youthful adventures for the thousandth time; a Harvard graduate who speaks a dozen languages, including ancient Greek and Polish; a man who loves his fanciful farming freedom, a patron and lover of all crazy artistic events. Today, he is no longer young, but he still likes to talk about his family's connections (through Zuzanna née Livingston) with Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz as much as he loves endlessly repairing antique tractors and old Mercedes limousines.
Riki's story of meeting Gilgamesh was fascinating. Here he was with his beloved machines, with a tractor lugging a huge lawn mower or a harrow, with his favorite excavator and some other mechanisms that the whole park has near the big barns. I dreamed that Riki was helping the king of the city of Uruk on one of his journeys, or even on this major expedition to the abode of the monster Humbaba, to cut down a huge cedar forest with Enkidu and Gilgamesh.
He told me the events in order and so vividly that I could see the whirling augers and blades of the saws. I've seen his giant antique tractor, which is still better than the new tech. The tractor was smoking, the engine roared at top speed. Giant tires dug sand and clay, kicking up clouds of dust. And every now and then he moved another of the dozen levers on the steering wheel. The mechanisms of the excavator and the harrow rose and fell.
In the visions that the story created in the dream, Riki was working on many machines at the same time, because I saw him on a tractor and an excavator. The teeth of the latter burrowed under the trunks, pulling out the roots from the ground and tearing at the boughs that got stuck in the river. I didn't see Gilgamesh, but he was somewhere nearby. Riki himself, like a Mesopotamian hero, hovered above the saddles of the seats, leaned beyond the cabins of the machines, adjusted his cap, wiped his sweat, sometimes reached for a water bottle, wiped his hands on oily rags, stretched and released the chains. A tractor or two, a mower, a backhoe, and some sort of portable generator were raging with the roar, and the billowing exhaust, and Riki, as I have said, seemed to be on all of them at the same time.
I woke up excited and delighted. I decided immediately to write down the whole story, every detail of the events and all of Riki's conversations with Gilgamesh and Enkidu. He himself seemed to me a hero equal to the two Sumerians, neither weaker nor lesser than them. Riki as a real man is a big guy, broad, pot-bellied, with a handsome, photogenic face, strong, usually dressed in farmer's robes, no less rich and varied than the costumes of Sumerian warriors and kings. I wrote everything down carefully, rejoicing that I had not missed anything, and that I would compose an excellent new book of the Epic.
And then I really woke up and realized that I don't remember anything from Riki's story, except for the vague visions presented above.
