The Ram in the Thicket Pat Aakhus Ram in the Thicket Colloquium, September 23, 2005
At Dun Aenghus on the island of Inishmore a man threw himself from the cliff on the anniversary of his wife’s death. That night, back on the mainland, the music was great in Doolin. It was a wake but we didn’t know it, not the fiddler nor the bodhran player, nor the bartender or the busload of Americans in green jackets that filled the place asking for Danny Boy. No one knew the man. Somebody said he was an American tourist who’d once been to Inishmore on holiday with his wife, and that she’d died of cancer. The cliff is three hundred feet above the sea; he couldn’t miss. An impulse of grief, someone said. But it isn’t so easy to get there.
You take the boat from Doolin, and from Killeany Bay, a ponycart; the driver will leave you at the bottom of Dun Aenghus and wait an hour only. You must hurry, unless you’re thinking of walking back, or never coming back. The climb is difficult against the wind, stepping across deep crevasses between the stones, called grikes, where maidenhair ferns, anemones, wood sorrel and dark red helleborine orchids peer out of the dark. If you had the time you might look for dwarf ash, holly or hazel trees in the grikes as well, grazed down to the stone by goats and hares. Near the fort you must find your way through eighty feet of cheval de frises, stones set close like spikes in the ground, a stone thicket to keep wolves from the sheep, chariots from the keep. There are three defensive walls and then you’re inside. One hundred fifty feet to the cliff and the sea. There are danger signs everywhere but you’re not afraid of falling. White gannets move up and down the cliff like spirits. Below, waves break from the cliff and move away as if all waves begin from that place, and life itself, from the beginning of the world to the last day.
Myself, I crawled the last ten feet to the cliff edge to look over; I was afraid to stand in that wind without a rail. Mrs. Hickey would have walked to the edge, being ninety and fearless. That very week she had gone down an Iron Age souterrain, smashing her oil lamp in the process and bidding me follow her. I didn’t have the nerve. It had been forty years or more since she’d been down there, and from the feel of her feet there was no bottom to it. Perhaps I was wise to decline, she said later, making tea in her Norman keep where she lived alone with nine cairn terriers, an Irish wolfhound, and some chickens she raised for soup. I said I was going to Dun Aenghus on Inishmore. It’s an interesting place, she said, though grim. The white horses
1 of Connemara were driven into the fort and off the cliff onto the rocks below.
When Sir Leonard Wooley discovered the Great Death Pit of Ur he sent a telegram to London in Latin, so the secret might not be revealed. The tombs were full of treasure. Sixty-eight men and women had drunk poison from cups of gold, laid down in their place and died. They wore willow and poplar leaves of gold in their hair, and carried gold daggers and whetstones and enormous lyres in the shape of Nanna, the moon god, the bull with the lapis beard. Someone had covered them with reed mats, and then with earth, five thousand years ago.
In one chamber he found Queen Puabi lying on her bed, her name engraved on a lapis cylinder seal at her breast. She was five feet tall and forty years old. She wore a crown of gold roses, animals and fruit, a cape of thousands of lapis, gold and carnelian beads, a lapis necklace, gold earrings, bracelets and a gold pin.
All these the goddess Inanna, queen of heaven, daughter of the moon, wore as she passed through the seven gates of the underworld, and was stripped of her possessions. ‘Do not question the ways of the underworld,’ the demons said. At last she stood naked before her sister Erishkigal, who fixed her with the evil eye and gave her mortal sickness, so that she became a rotting corpse, hung from a hook on the wall. The land of Ur grew barren. Inanna didn’t want to die. No surrogate could be found. Demons hunted her husband. He ran and hid, transformed himself from one animal to the next, until he was found. In the end he took her place for half the year, and the earth was fertile. Inanna took back her crown of roses, her lapis necklace, her gold rings.
Puabi was not alone. Three attendants kept her company, each wearing gold crowns and lapis beads. Five men with gold daggers guarded the door to her chamber, three men, a chest filled with garments, gold cups, silver lions, and gaming boards. Five men guided a chariot drawn by oxen. Twelve crowned women stood in a row playing instruments. All these, in their finery, had drunk poison.
As a rule, Nature does not seek death. She has provided us with only one exception: lemmings. On a regular basis, they commit mass suicide. Apart from being Nature’s most cynical manifestation, lemmings offer a metaphor
2 for modern life: overpopulation, urbanization, despair. In 1958 Disney released White Wilderness which showed thousands of lemmings tragically pouring over a cliff, providing baby boomers--the children who habitually dropped and covered, who were told not to sip from drinking fountains after a nuclear attack--with an escape clause. I could see the wisdom of this, even at six. It was true there were too many of us, five children in a three bedroom house; we had small portions at dinner, no seconds, only one black and white tv. Someday something in my genetic structure would kick in, I would get in the car, and drive inexorably, though slowly, on the Santa Monica Freeway with five million other Los Angelinos, get off at the Venice Beach exit, turn right, drive two blocks and into the sea. I could just see it, all those Mercedes and BMWs getting hung up in the sand like sea turtles.
It’s true that accidents happen: a lemming slips and falls into a ditch. But in fact Disney Studio purchased lemmings from Inuit children and threw them off a cliff in Alberta. The fact is lemmings never kill themselves. They’re more likely to kill each other, just like humans.
On NPR an Israeli woman weeps: “I pray to God to give me a normal life, to let me open the newspaper and read about baseball.” A man from Beirut says there is no solution. ‘Only live your life, take care of your children.’ Siduri said that to Gilgamesh as she offered him a cup of consolation for the loss of his companion. The man who leapt from the cliffs had drunk his cup of grief. We drink ours too as the deaths mount up in Ur again, in Basra, and further north, in Baghdad, intentional, unintentional.
What was the intention of the people of Ur? In the tomb a young girl is found clutching a coil of silver hair ribbon in her hand. Had she come breathless, nearly late for the performance? We see vestiges of actors, costumes, props and music. We have nothing of the script, only the last action: everybody dies. As if we had watched the final moments of a play set in Denmark long ago, the king, the queen, the prince, even the extras lie dead. The curtain goes down, the theatre is emptied, the doors locked forever.
A young musician sits against the wall, her fingers laced in the strings of her lyre. Only her gold crown, lapis necklace and bones remain, but the lyre is nearly intact. The soundboard is decorated with images of a banquet in shell and bitumen. A scorpion greeting someone, a goat offers a drink. An ass plays the great lyre the girl holds. A bear steadies it, and a squirrel sits on
3 his foot playing a drum. A jackal serves meat: the haunch of an ox, the head of a pig. A lion offers a cup from a large jar, like those found in the tomb, where perhaps the people had filled their cups.
The scorpion’s sting does not last long; it makes her drowsy. She drinks again from the cup, and sets it down beside her. What does she play to comfort herself as the tomb grows silent, as one by one musicians drop out of the ensemble? When others seem to forget the notes, does she improvise, playing a simple shepherd’s tune, a lullaby? Or in her drowsiness does she repeat the last notes, listening to the decay in the room until her soul flutters away? One note in the last moment is infinitely interesting. Or is it rehearsal that keeps her going, not to think or question the insanity of what she is doing, what they are all doing: a soldier stepping towards the woods filled with rifle fire like falling stars, because it is what he has been trained to do. What does the scorpion’s draught taste like? Is it honeyed nectar, the first taste of the banquet of the gods? Or is it bitter as betrayal on her tongue?
What notes remain under her hands now? For her the music of the spheres stops; the planets freeze in their rotation. Everything stops. Breath, and then the heart. Soon the Euphrates River will change course and Ur diminish. The Lamentations of Ur will record hurricanes, floods, corpses in the roads, “melting like butter in the sun.” These words are not strange to us. The gods will weep and go away.
As Sir Leonard Wooley and his wife lay face down in the soft earth, gold flowers began to appear everywhere. They did not know at first that they were crowns of the dead. Like the gold flesh of the gods, the flowers never wilt or die.
In her chamber Puabi sleeps and her kingdom also has been cast into sleep, so that when she wakes, thousands of years from now, she will not be alone. Her family and friends will not have passed away. This nectar sends them all to sleep. Though skin turns to earth, leaves stay gold, carnelian red, lapis violet as summer midnight. Thorns grow thick around them, dust of millennia falls and lies like silken coverlets on the sleeping people; they too turn to dust.
Among the treasures of Ur, the greatest is the Ram in the Thicket. It was rumored to have been stolen from the Baghdad Museum after the invasion.
4 But the rumor is false; there are two Rams: both are safe. One is in the British Museum. It’s the first thing you see when you walk into the room. Sir Leonard named him that because he was reminded of the surrogate sacrifice for Isaac in Genesis. I passed through the room several times, admiring him, without reading the fine print. The truth is written on the walls, like the dread hand of God on the walls of Babylon, and it’s a shock, like turning over a rock and seeing beetles scurry away. All those people committed suicide.
But the ram is clearly not a sacrifice; he’s not frightened, not a victim. He’s cheerful, alert, rambunctious. He loves life. And to be precise, the ram isn’t a ram at all, but a goat, a he-goat by his gold genitals. He is made entirely of gold, lapis and shell. He stands on his hind-legs, reaching for a gold rose which exactly resembles the roses on Pu-Abi’s crown, in the tomb above.
When Puabi wakes up the people will rise and rub their eyes as if they have only slept an hour or so, not even one single night. The oxen will shake their horns and stamp the ground. The musicians will play and the banquet begin. The goat will snatch the gold blossom and leap away. It will be as if the curtain has come down and up again, and in the dark amphitheatre thousands have watched and waited, holding their breath, a gleam of gold here and there in the dark.
It never got dark that summer in Ireland. When I left the bar past midnight it was still light; when I woke at five to catch the first boat back to Dun Aenghus, it was light. Standing there, in the wind, where the sea begins and ends against the cliff, I watched the gannets rise and fall with the waves, and a goat skip along the edge, eating wild roses that grew out of the bare rock.
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