The lessons of Niniveh

The digging up of the Niniveh library (I recommend you hear this excellent program about it) was a revelation: 2600 years ago there existed a vast body of culture -- myth, literature, poetry, science, philosophy, religion; and one day in BC 612 it was all simply -- wiped out. Or nearly: a few fragments survived: some Biblical stories (Noah was a Summerian), some astrology (zodiac), some odd body art practices (bishop's mitre and vicar's tonsure were once Chaldean).

When contemplating these meager survivors, one is torn between two thoughts: amazement at their tenacious survival (what do fishmen mean to us today that we should wear their dress?); and the utterness of the utter destruction of everything else: 95% of what is recorded in the clay tablets had been lost prior to the library's rediscovery; and in any case the tablets were never more than 20% of the original library; 80% of it of it is thus lost for good.

One wonders: what did we lose irrevocably? A Homer? A Hesiod? A Confucius? An Epicure?


Of course, cultural production, like banking, is cyclical and wholesale destructions are part of the business. The Babylonian antiquities were wiped out by the Medes; the Persian by Alexander; the Chinese by Qin Shihuang; the Roman by the Catholics; the Mayan by the Mayas and the Khmer by the Khmers; the Saylendras by who knows who. And so on.

Note: it isn't always a matter of foreign invasions. Roman antiquities were destroyed by Romans (even if in the name of a foreign God); and Qin Shihuang The Book Burner is to this day regarded as the most Chinese of all Emperors. The destruction is an inside job as often as not.

In the west we have been witnessing such an inside job of destruction these 200 years: a wholesale attack on the art of the past in the name of modernity. The need to be "up to date" (whatever that means) is cited as the reason to build sick buildings, sew uncomfortable clothing, and serve odd food on square plates on glass-and-stainless-steel furniture under harsh lights.

The theory used to justify this attack on the past is the Hegelian/Marxists drivel that each age must have its proper art. But the theory is a lie: it is but a fig-leaf to cover the real shame: that every artist feels obliged to make his own way, to strike out in new direction. Only thus, he feels, will he earn immortality. In this the artists is wrong: the greatest artists, and almost always the most famous, were usually second generation followers, not first generation innovators. But the truth of the theory isn't important, only how artists have always felt: innovate or die. Take Khoirilios (why he should be anglicized as Choerilus beats me), the last of the aoidoi:

Oh happy was he, that capable aoidos serving his Muses,
Who lived in times when the meadows still lay untouched.
By now all has been claimed and every art has its boundaries
And we arrive stragglers, bringing up the rear.

Though I look out, I see no new chariot upon which to jump.

(Epicorum Gracorum Fragmenta, Kinkel).

Simply put, this is the wish that someone might burn and bury what had gone before, Homer especially, to make the room necessary that poor but ambitious Khoirilios might stand the chance. Few artists have had the courage to put it this plain: the neoclassicists assassinated the Baroque in the name of good taste; Corbusier proposed to tear up the historic center of Paris in the name of The Brilliant Future.

The simple truth is that every cultural production sooner or later reaches the point of surfeit, the point at which everything has been tried and perfected and all that remains are footnotes. Cross-generic experimentation, variations on old themes.

(You will be relieved to know, by the way, that Khoirilios has got his comeuppance: history preserved Homer and wiped out Khoirilios, the fragment I quote being nearly all that's left of him today. And, oh, don't bother picking holes in my translation: I wear my Greek extremely lightly).


The problem is in fact one of human brain capacity: there is only so much one can remember. When a culture is young -- i.e. there isn't much body to master -- it is easy to practice art. This is why in heroic times kings -- otherwise very busy people -- often are poets (Dom Dinis of Portugal, Quli Qutb Shah of Golconda): it's easy to master the stuff and add to it meaningfully. But as the art grows, it becomes manageable only to full time professionals -- which is why no ruler has written poetry these 400 years. And then -- then it slips beyond even the reach of the most capacious brains. Surely, all the literature we have written in the West these last 500 years is far too much for anyone to grasp? May anyone write anything today in safe knowledge that he is not treading on already staked out ground? More importantly, has everything good that can be written been written already? Even highly educated writers today have difficulty producing anything really new.



Here is a thought experiment.

Surely, watching this stuff (Bejart's Firebird) you might find it a refreshing, indeed, a revolutionary breakthrough compared to all the classical ballet stuff (which is really quite good but oh so familiarly dull by now). But -- royal ballet in France goes back to at least the 14th century while our records of it go back only to mid 1800's. So -- is it just possible that all these eurekish figures which Bejart so heartily invents for us have been danced before?

I'd say there is a very good chance of that: there is only so much one can do with two arms and two legs.

Therefore there is a sense in which Bejart can be fascinating, indeed, can produce at all only because so much of what had gone before had been lost. Losing, you see, has its advantages.

I wonder, should we set out on a program of forgetting ourselves? To clear the decks, I mean. (If so, then I suggest we start by forgetting the Divine Comedy. It would be oh so good to forget).




There is another aspect of all this: the remembering.

One day in the early 18th century King João V of Portugal ordered that an aqueduct be built to bring water from Monsanto to Lisbon. Hearing this, his chief engineer no doubt said to him: "Sire, modern pipe technology makes the high cost of an aqueduct unnecessary." But His Majesty replied: "Oh, I don't care about the water." And of course he didn't. The point was to have an aqueduct. It is the same point Louis Vaz de Camões made when he started his epic with

As armas e os barões assinalados

Which is, of course,

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris

Both men were doing what we all like to do from time to time: making learned allusions to the glorious past.

Which is why what happened at Niniveh is nearly perfect. It cleared the decks making it possible for the succeeding generations to be great poets and philosophers again; almost certainly we stage Euripides today because we are not staging some Summerian classic instead. And almost certainly we have Euripides today because Euripides did not have the same Summerian classic to go up against.

If anything, the Medes may have been a little extreme at Niniveh. They really left us too little -- I mean zodiac and fishhats? The Holy Roman Catholic Church did a lot better: they left us Virgil and the aqueducts; and this really is close to perfect. One really hardly needs more: something to allude to, yes, but certainly not mountains of stuff, however good, with which to bury us.

Just the amount of knowledge which one may reasonably wear lightly.