“                                              ”
                       --- The Epic of Gilgamesh

1.  How can we map what is empty? Can we describe what is blank? The above quote from one of the lost portions of the Epic of Gilgamesh could be drawn from any lacuna in ancient literature, those in the poems of Sappho, of Catullus, or in the Ugaritic tablets scribed by Ili-Milku. We could stack, in fact, a whole mountain of such quotes on top of each other in this way and it would not occupy more space on the page. Peter Turchi, in his recent book Maps of the Imaginations: The Writer as Cartographer, illustrates the numerous parallels between writing and cartography, including the necessity of blanks, gaps, and lacunae. I write this as a tangent from his first chapter. It seems that he has not fully exhausted the parallels.
 
2.  As much a part of imagining where we live is imagining where we do not. The first globe is not recorded in history. Its idea is attributed to either Pythagoras or Parmenides, a founder of the former’s school. In either case, this puts the representation of the earth’s sphericity (at the least) at the end of the 6th or the beginning of the 5th century B.C.E. In large part, the reasoning behind the earth’s orbicular shape rests in theology: Spheres and circles were thought to be perfect by the Pythagoreans. It followed for them, that the planets and stars should be spherical. Socrates, as described by Plato, also believed in a spherical earth. And, by the mid-4th century B.C.E. Aristotle bases his belief that Earth is a sphere on observations of lunar eclipses, the pole, and the weight of elements. Ancient descriptions of globes leave no doubt that by this time they were being produced and manufactured.

3.  But, in as much as we conceive our world as spheroid, we must concede that where we do not dwell is its opposite, a void that grips to the solid realm like the meat of a fruit around its pit.  Although the mapping of the planet and the spaces we inhabit has some obvious practical applications, it represents only one perspective on the matter. Arguably just as valid is the mapping of the void that surrounds us. The discrepancy between describing a void and describing a planet is only an illusion of semantics. What is empty can just as easily be described as what is full and solid; we simply lack a vocabulary to do so. For us, such a description of an emptiness would perhaps look redundant --- ad nauseum repetitions of what is not.

space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, space, 

or,

empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty, empty

But, for someone wielding a more precise language, descriptions of voids would be as nuanced and accurate as any description we could make of a street corner. What lacks guideposts becomes uniform. And, for us, what is void has no labels, no names, and is thus rendered as uniformly the same. Geographies of outer space, for example, are composed largely of points, names (and often numbers) of stars, galaxies, black holes, but the space around these points is unlabeled, unnamed, vast, and subsequently incomprehensibly unvaried. Similarly, the bluer portions of our geography are sparsely described on maps. Once a place for artists’ decorations (sea monsters, gigantic caravels, and belligerent clouds), the spaces between the ragged pages of land are only marked for depth, what lies at the bottom. The formlessness that undulates above the floor, the suffocating chaos of the waters is unmentioned, aside from the very color of these spaces: blue. For its blankness, the map of the ocean offered in Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark seems a good deal more honest than many modern representations.

4.  The reason that our language has not evolved to describe negative spaces is perhaps attributable to our physiology and our way of thinking. Our eyes learn to distinguish objects, which in the course of our infancy we learn to label and name for our own self interest: mommy, blankie, water. Presumably this way of seeing is hard-wired into our being and most other animals observe reality in a similar way, categorizing and distinguishing specific objects. Carnivores learn to identify their prey; herbivores learn to distinguish their food as well as the animals that hunt them. And, even those creatures who do not see, or whose sight is largely secondary to their perception of the world, identify specific objects, and contrast these with a hollow nothingness. For example, snails probably imagine a variety of different surfaces across which they pull themselves, “rock”, “pebble”, “sand”, “moss”, and beyond this, they simply do not hazard conjectures.

5.  In ancient Hebrew, the onomatopoeic verbs hāmam and hāmāh (suggestive of mumbling or humming) represent the sound of the chaotic void. This, of course, is not the reverberating drone of the big bang, but the attempt to represent what is formless through language. Ancient literature, in fact, is full of emptiness and blanks. Almost all texts that have been recovered from the Ancient Near East, Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, Aramaic, Phoenician, etc. have suffered the maw of time such that often large chunks of the texts are missing. Such is also the case with many texts from Greece and Rome, the poetry of Sappho being a prime example of this. This is such a part of reading ancient poems that some philologists claim that their discipline would be superfluous without them. But even the most gifted philologist cannot redeem the massive breaks and holes in the texts that have survived. We must, instead, learn to read the blanks. The effect of this is, despite the best efforts of most involved, an aesthetic situation that might be cherished by John Cage and modernists and post-modernists, but regretted by most other readers. What to do?

6.  The texts that are preserved in this way are, of course, not modernist in their idiom. The ancient authors did not intend for large blanks to appear in our translations. They did not intend to obstruct our reading of their poetry, prayers, stories, etc. Such holes do not reflect the aesthetics of the author(s), the cultures in which they were scribed, the history of where they were written down. For most readers, therefore, the lacunae do not tell them something new and are, subsequently, an unfortunate nuisance. But, the blanks do tell us something, even if it is the same essential thing over and over again. They tell us that time has elapsed. And, connected with this, that what is gone is gone. Every partially preserved tablet, scroll, and ostracon announces entropy again and again. And, in part, this is what makes them precious. We may try to reconstruct the broken passages, but we must concede that what has fallen out will never exactly be known. They are perpetual blanks. And, although it is the same idea that these damaged passages consistently present, it is only so for us who have one way of describing them, as an absence. A more sophisticated vocabulary, a more sophisticated being might imagine each blank or lacuna as individually meaningful.

7.  I list some examples of broken passages from ancient literature. The ellipses indicate portions of the scroll or tablet that are missing or damaged and thus unreadable. In each case, the missing words are represented in identical fashion on the page; in each case the lacunae obstruct our understanding of the poetic line and declare our loss.

Sappho, fragment 61: “. . . became . . .  / . . . for not . . .”

Sappho, fragment 96, line 2: “. . . of]ten hither directing her thoughts . . .”

Alcaeus, fragment 61, line 11: “. . . to kindle an idea . . .”

Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet I, 23-24: “. . . Rele]ase the bronze lock / and . . . the hidden door.”

Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet IX, 129: “. . . while sighing . . .”

The Palace of Baal (CTA 3.6.6): “. . . in the rivers . . .”

Baal and Mot (CTA 5.3.8): “. . . like a star . . .”

copyright © 2006  Eric Reymond