HUMBABA (cf Gilgamesh): "guardian of the pine forest, fire-breathing servant of the god Wer, depicted with a face lined like coiled intestines, ancestor of the Greek Gorgon. His voice is the abūbu weapon" - Dalley (2000), Myths from Mesopotamia, p.323 HUMBABA (cf Gilgamesh): Tricked and defeated, or beaten in combat, his head is cut off and taken away in a sack. Enkidu and Gilgamesh are punished for their transgression, but the city and temple get new gates - made from the trees cut down from the forest, guarded by Humbaba. HUMBABA (cf Gilgamesh): We imagine we have found the head of Humbaba in the mass of larvae writhing on the tips of scots pine saplings. They mimic the deep blue-green of the needles but reveal themselves by their compulsive synchronic flex, like serpents on the head of the Medusa. HUMBABA (cf Gilgamesh): '...take note: "One wishes one were a Medusa's head" in order to ... grasp the natural as the natural with the help of art!' - Celan, quoting Büchner in The Meridian (trans. P. Joris), para.16a HUMBABA (cf Gilgamesh): Humbaba ‘belongs to a common pattern of name with reduplicated second syllable; such names, of no obvious linguistic affiliation, are often styled 'Banana' -names’ (George, 2003: 144). But perhaps HUMBABA is another of the ‘unpronounceable’ names of Celan. Derrida: ‘The unpronounceable keeps and destroys the name; it protects it, like the name of God, or dooms it to annihilation among the ashes.’ (Derrida, 2005a: 50) HUMBABA (cf Gilgamesh): Humbaba 'represents the terrifying numinous power of the remote and ancient forest and has tree-like characteristics ... the auras that emanated from him were cut up like lumber' (George, 2003: 144 and n.24) HUMBABA (cf Gilgamesh): 'Several omens record the observation of Humbaba's visage in the faces of human adults and newborn humans and lambs' (George, 2003: 145). 'Which cannot see its likeness in their sorrow...' (Auden) GRIEF: Rilke considered Gilgamesh to be ‘das Epos der Todesfurcht’ (the epic of the fear of death); HUMBABA (not an epic) is regenerative, that the lines, and their echoes expire is not to prevent their recurrence; the potential of return is an offering beyond dying. TURNED: “...the workman must be dead to himself while engaged upon the work” – David Jones, The Anathemata (preface), p.12; “about … matters of all sorts which … are apt to stir in my mind at any time” – Jones, p.31 LIP: Consider that this is a platform-system-algorithm-poem as clay tablet; cf. "Clay tablets can easily be re-used:... erased and re-inscribed...; recycled, either by remoulding the clay into new tablets or by re-levigating into sediment." - Jonathan Taylor in Radner, K. and Robson, E. (eds) (2011). The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, p.21 LIPS: 'For the further development of anthropomorphic interface such as a face robot, lip configuration must be controlled to realise the coordination of facial expression and linguistic voice generation'. Hara, F. and Endo, K. (1999). Dynamic control of the lip configuration of a mouth robot for Japanese vowels. Advanced Robotics, Vol. 13, No. 3, p.331 AURA: Hayles notes: "automated cognizers are one result of evolved human consciousness" Hayles, N. K. (2017). Unthought, p.216 THICKET: Humbaba, with his seven cloaks, the automated system of the forest, the non-conscious cognizer amidst the pine trees, monkeys and birds, now lost in the thicket. SONG: '... the sounds that poems make are not here treated as acoustic sonorities, but as semi-abstract representations of relations and orderings between and across sounds, within a textual domain.' Prynne, J. H. (2009). Mental Ears and Poetic Work, Chicago Review SONG: 'To mistake the representation of sound for sound itself is to prematurely short-circuit the tension between song and text.' Roberts, L. (2019), By Law In Sound: J. H. Prynne’s Recent Poetry, Chicago Review. SONG: 'Fiddle them out an opera which reproduces the rising and sinking of the human soul as a clay pipe with water reproduces the sounds of the nightingale' Büchner, cited by Böschenstein and Schmull in Celan, The Meridian n.716 (p.247) SONG: 'All day long the Nightingale of Poetry sings its song above our head, but the finest song always goes to waste until we pluck the Nightingale's plume and dip it into ink or color' Büchner, cited by Böschenstein and Schmull in Celan, The Meridian n.716 (p.247) SONG: 'I am as if crushed in myself; not a single emotion surfaces in me. I am an automaton; my soul has been taken from me.' Büchner, cited by Böschenstein and Schmull in Celan, The Meridian n.718 (p.247). Haraway: '...a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.' (A Manifesto for Cyborgs, p.72) SONG: '... songs were understood to be common property, and, what’s more, mutable, much in the way computer programs were initially understood as communal efforts to be shared, altered, and redistributed.' Price, in Andersson, A. (ed.) (2018) Postscript: Writing after conceptual art, p.55 SONG: Something like a resonance or a force rises up in me, but the notes are impure. I hear them turning clumsily in the air. Zukofsky: 'I am wearing them for the first time.' (A-24, Act II Sc. 1 'Mother (Sonata)') SEIZED: "The automat becomes a material-discursive event that undoes representation and creates something unimaginable yet precisely 'true-to-life'." (135) - Barbara Bolt, The Athleticism of Imaging: Figuring a Materialist Performativity, In: Rubinstein, D., Golding, J., and Fisher, A., eds. On the Verge of Photography, p.135 RIPPLING: It is akin to what Dalley (2000) notes of the various and sometimes ‘telescoped’ versions of Sumerian and Akkadian literature ‘as bare skeletons which were fleshed out in practice by skilled narrators, rather as early musical notation gave only the guidelines…’ (xvi) STEMS: The Poem (Poetry) will be coiled like the face of Humbaba THICKETS: '[Donna Haraway] has evolved a wonderful way of talking that acknowledges that, if everything is related to everything else in the world, then we must create sentences to reflect that fact'. Smith, N., Haraway, D. and Harvey, D. (1995). Nature, Politics, and Possibilities: A Debate and Discussion with David Harvey and Donna Haraway. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13 (5), pp.507–527. As with sentences, so with poetry. UNBROKEN: Donna Haraway: ‘Language, tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal.’ Haraway, D. (1991). A Manifesto for Cyborgs. BROKEN: Donna Haraway: ‘Language, tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal.’ Haraway, D. (1991). A Manifesto for Cyborgs. YARN: On the homophony of HUMBABA... Zukofsky on his Catullus: 'This version of Catullus aims at the rendition of his sound. By reading his lips, that is while pronouncing the Latin words, the translation—as his lips shape—tries to breathe with him'. Zukofsky, L. (1962). Poet’s Preface, in Kulchur (5). HUMBABA is a translation, trying to match syllable and sound in some quest of other meanings. A materialist strategy. AIRWAY: Haraway (1995): 'understanding issues of possibility or understanding issues of apparatuses of production is materiality; and that it's semiotic all the way down.' Nature, Politics, and Possibilities: A Debate and Discussion with David Harvey and Donna Haraway. AIRWAYS: Haraway (1995): “There is no gap between materiality and semiosis; the meaning-making processes and the materiality of the world are dynamic, historical, contingent, specific; that bodies and institutions and machines are made, not made up.” Nature, Politics, and Possibilities: A Debate and Discussion with David Harvey and Donna Haraway. PINE: 'And when he (Gilgamesh) declares: "Man the widest, cannot cover the earth," he avows that neither can they be like forests, which cover the earth and endure through millenia according to their own self-regenerating cycles ... He imagines perhaps that he could transcend the walls that enclose him through an act of massive deforestation'. Pogue Harrison, R. (1993). Forests: the shadow of civilisation, p.17 FIELDS: '...once begun, farming obliges people to farm even more, as their populations rise and the wild creatures suffer, eventually to collapse to a new and greatly impoverished level.' Tudge, C. (1998). Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers: How agriculture really began, p.35 UNRIPE: 'Weeding, pulling out rival plants that threaten to choke the favoured one... Pruning and dead-heading follow soon after. Woolly monkeys have been reported to remove dead branches from trees.' Tudge, C. (1998). Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers: How agriculture really began, p.11 FERN: 'Adiantum capillus-veneris: In wells, caves, fissures of moist rocks, under cliffs by streams, and wherever there is dripping moisture ... Pteris aquilina: Galilee, by the Leontes river, Lebanon ... Polypodium vulgare: Woods on Lebanon ... Nothochlana lanuginosa: Moab, in deep glens.' Tristram, H. B. (1884). The Fauna and Flora of Palestine, pp.453-5. 'Between Hasan Kaif and Jeziret-ibn-'Omar the river winds through a number of narrow gorges with steep walls of limestone with many rock tombs. Here and there bands of vegetation, ferns, and green moss and oleander bushes.' Admiralty War Staff Intelligence Division (1917). A Handbook of Mesopotamia (Vol IV), p.43 FERN: Paul Celan, in Das Geheimnis der Farne (The Secret of the Ferns): 'and if anything here still gleams up, let it be a sword'. Let it be a sword that might be grasped from out of the cleft of the rocks. METALS: '...the question becomes not whether machines can think, as Alan Turing asked more than a half-century ago, but how networks of nonconscious cognitions between and among the planet’s cognizers are transforming the conditions of life, as human complex adaptive systems become increasingly interdependent upon and entwined with intelligent technologies in cognitive assemblages.' Hayles, N. K. (2017). Unthought, p.216 HALFWAY: 'I had started this piece by accident. Stumbling upon Dante’s shadeless souls on my way to other books... A perfect plot in the passing of time. Lost yet already walking.' Bergvall, C. (2004). Via (preface)' HALFWAY: At every mid-point between here and the Sacred Forests of Cedar a man may stumble and remember, not the adventure that aims at his glory, but the pitiable needs of those left at home. The voice urges him: 'Gaze on the child who holds your hand'. Gilgamesh (Old Babylonian Version), Tablet Si iii, l.12 (trans. George) EDGE: '... the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached... nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal.' Haraway, D. (1991). A Manifesto for Cyborgs. SEVEN: the 7 days and nights of Enkidu coupling with Shamhat; the 7 cloaks (auras) of Humbaba; the 7 nights of Gilgamesh’s grief; the 7 days of the deluge and the 7 days of the ark aground; the 7 nights Gilgamesh must stay awake to become immortal; the man blessed with his 7 sons HIBACHI: The burning of charcoal for warming the hands, the wood taken for the comfort of homes. 'My friend, we have cut down a lofty cedar, / whose top abutted the heavens.' Gilgamesh (Standard Version), Tablet V, ll.293-4 (trans. George) HIBACHI: To seize all one's papers and splinters and throw them into the inferno; to take even the fragments of sustenance and bring them to smoke and spirit, transfigured in a bowl of fire; to 'join the family circle' in burning out its heart to a blackened choke. AWE: 'As a child I recall standing in a woodland of beech trees that seemed like iron columns thrust into the sky. Their scale, their commitment to ascent, their smoothness without foothold or branch in reach, their indifference, seized me as if I stood beneath the precipices of some godly fortress. High in their crown the rooks cried out for compliance.' OWE: Everything begins as a response to something else. When searching for a word the evoked thing comes up against a recollected feeling, or situation, or place, or person. That collision is a node, out of which the new (or at least the next) will emerge, as if it was in hiding before. AMOK: Not knowing why is a necessary act of creative defocusing. Philip Guston says as much: 'And then something would happen, like a sensation of a mistake, so I would follow that mistake. But then, when you're through, there's an image that you've always wanted to see but you didn't know it.' (Yale Summer School talk, 1972) AMOK: A terror of middle traverse, a ringing out of gravity over the face of the bluff, an evasion of straightening. 'Krumm war der Weg, den ich gin' (Celan, from Die Niemandsrose, 'Eine gauner...') SEX: 'Kokoschka bought dresses and lingerie from the best shops in Paris to clothe the doll, and he revealed that when the trunk containing the doll arrived and was being unpacked, his butler became so excited that he had a stroke.' Levy, 2008, Love and Sex with Robots, p.240 SEX: Shamhat is the prostitute who seduces the wild man Enkidu and brings him to the city. 'The name is the feminine of the adjective shamhu, itself deriving from the verb shamaahu, which denotes superlative beauty of the flesh combined with lush growth and physical wellbeing. The adjective occurs in both genders as a personal name.' (George, 2003, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Critical Edition, vol. 1 p.148) HAFTA: In Old High German - 'custody'. 'Like a wild bull made captive he threw a rope on him' (Bilgames and Huwawa (OBV), in George, 2003, p.158) HAFTA: In Turkish, from Persian - 'week'. 'For six days and seven nights, come, do without slumber!' (Gilgamesh (Standard Version), in George, 2003, p.95) HAFTA: Urgency and compulsion are everywhere redoubled: 'go with art into your innermost narrows. And set yourself free.' (Celan, The Meridian, (trans. Joris), p.11) RAISIN: 'the presence of dried grapes would be considered by most archaeologists as relevant to an event like a destruction since they are unlikely to have existed in the archaeological record for any amount of time.' Magee, P. (2008). Deconstructing the Destruction of Hasanlu. Iranica Antiqua, vol. XLIII. EATS: 'Post-modern' famine refers to excess mortality in spite of protected food entitlements but due to non-food crises: notably, the stresses of macro shocks on relatively sophisticated health and social welfare systems. Iraq represents one of the most disastrous examples of the famine of the future.' Gazdar, H. (2002). Pre-modern, Modern and Post-modern Famine in Iraq. IDS Bulletin, Vol. 33 No. 4, p.34 HUH: I was lost once in a dense pine plantation, pushing aside the bare lower branches to move forward, but scratched and caught repeatedly, 'his tears flowing like streams'. HUH: In stumbling over the roots of the trees and sinking into the soft needle litter I tied my gasps and hesitations to the coils of derision stopping up the passages of grief that hollowed out my mind. 'Neither do they cry with throat and tongue, they have none, but their wailing is an utterance that passes in their woeful thoughts.' (Hopkins, in Phillips (ed.), p.293) AMMONIA: 'Ammonia-oxidizing microorganisms are essential to the proper functioning of the nitrogen cycle.' Stahl, D. and de la Torre, J. (2012). Physiology and Diversity of Ammonia-Oxidizing Archaea. Annual Review of Microbiology, vol. 66, p.96. And ammonia gives a streak-free shine to your metal surfaces. EYE: The spherical distortion that is caused by a retinopathy seems to resemble the action of extreme gravity on light - objects curl and turn, bent outwards leaving a void filled in by the mind. SIN: Hayles quotes Verbeek (2011): "moral agency is distributed among humans and nonhumans; moral actions and decisions are the products of human-technology associations" Hayles (2017). Unthought, p.36 MOUSE: '... there came in the night, a multitude of field-mice, which devoured all the quivers and bowstrings of the enemy, and ate the thongs by which they managed their shields'. Laato, A. (1995). Assyrian Propaganda and the Falsification of History in the Royal Inscriptions of Sennacherib. Vetus Testamentum Vol. 45, Fasc. 2, p.221 (citing Herodotus, II, 99-142) HOWE: 'It has a lot to do with Chance but severely ordered Chance operations are a dead end for me. I have no theory or set system. I believe in a perfect combination of spontaneity and habit.' Howe, S. (2018), from personal correspondence. ERA: '...it might be time to try another approach that analyzes power relations by focusing on how power is created, transformed, distributed, and exercised in an era when complex human systems are interpenetrated by technical cognition...' Hayles (2017). Unthought, p.117 CARE: What you realise at first is the absence of disruption, the unfamiliarity of being self-contained. Then a sensation of separation, a pulling away - or what might more accurately be described as a fall down a stony escarpment, the kind of fall that we expect of "majesty". SOMEBODY: 'Human beings ... must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects. spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language.' Haraway, D. (1991). A Manifesto for Cyborgs. BITTEN: 'Sandfly fever, sometimes known as pappataci fever or Phlebotomus fever, is a vector transmitted viral illness with a history of affecting naïve military formations that travel through or fight in areas in which the infection is endemic.' US Army Medical Department Journal, 2017 Oct-Dec;(3-17):60-66 BEQUEATH: Carl Andre: '[poetry is] language mapped onto an extraneous art, and formerly it was language mapped on music. I think it is now language mapped on some aspect of the visual arts.' Cited in Kotz, L. (2018). Ambivalence of the Grid, in Andersson, A. (Ed.). (2018). Postscript: writing after conceptual art. University of Toronto Press, p.346 BARN: Noting Jakobson's famous structuralist notion of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of language, HUMBABA fails with both; with the paradigmatic it is only listening and mishearing, it does not find plausible replacements; with the syntagmatic it disregards the desire to understand, and only digs away into the store-pile. Rain, which is constant, creeps in under the door. AIRWAVE: 'The near-surface explosion shock wave will experience more complicated conditions than free-field explosions, such as free-field propagation, ground positive reflection, ground oblique reflection and Mach reflection' . Xue, Z. et al (2019). Modeling of the whole process of shock wave overpressure of free-field air explosion. Defence Technology v.15 i.5 SOAR: If disturbed the rooks rise up from their nests at the top of the high beech trees and circle in the air, then re-settle looking down at the cause of their disturbance and call out in defiance. What rough wings. 'Ah Jean Dubuffet ... doing his military service in the Eiffel tower' (O'Hara, 'Naphtha') HEAVEN: '"Heaven" is also a song about this enigma of repeatability and the unrepeatable, about the desire for what "never happens."' Royle, N. (2005). Jacques Derrida, also, Enters into Heaven. Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities vol.3, iss.2, p.113 RESIGNS: '... the art historian Hannah Higgins notes that pictographs went from being “randomly scattered across the surface of the tablet to being enclosed in a system of irregular rectangles inscribed around them. The resulting compound images created clustered associations, but did not form what we would call grammatical sentences. Rather, they functioned more like lists.' Kotz (2018), Ambivalence of the Grid, p.348' SAPPING: A few steps from the path and we enter a dense undergrowth which breaks across movement and stifles ambition. Brambles and fallen branches, ground elder, and the depth of leaf litter all impose their own stasis and hold us until our will is drained into the earth. THUS: 'Must not whatever can walk have walked on this lane before? Must not whatever can happen have happened, have been done, have passed by before? ... And are not all things knotted together so firmly that this moment draws after it all that is to come?' Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, 2 (trans. Kaufmann) THUS: '... as Nietzsche makes clear, the exhausted can botch and impoverish the experience of the aesthetic as they can anything else.' Bull, Anti-Nietzsche, p.151 LOVE: 'Where love is the structure of hospitality, neither host nor guest withholds what is seemly from the other. But money changes the relations between people, makes a riddle out of human philia.' Carson, A. (1999), Economy of the Unlost, p.23 SHIT: '... a person who purchases a poem from a poet who uses three times as many negatives as anyone else can be said to be getting good value for his money.' Carson, A. (1999), Economy of the Unlost, p.102 PISS: 'Attendees were served a cocktail of Cointreau, gin and methylene blue, which, when leaving the body, dyed the imbibers' urine Klein's trademark hue.' White, K. (2018), 21 Facts about Yves Klein, Sothebys.com (fact # 17)