Gilgamesh Googles

The idea that good should be rewarded and evil should be punished is something that’s ingrained in all aspects of our lives. It’s in the stories we heard as children, it’s evident in our justice systems, and its what we all supposedly value. We’ve got to be “good for goodness sake”. The notion of rewarding good and punishing evil is necessary because it preserves our social system. Without an incentive to act “good” and even more so without consequences for acting badly, we would have rampant chaos. Job is great at that whole righteousness for the sake of righteousness thing, but I think some of us need a goal, need an incentive to act a certain way. Whether we’re running from the negative consequences (the punishments), toward the rewards, or both, there’s always something pushing or pulling us, and it’s not always inert. Others though, are more like Job in that they have this inert want to be good and act good.

The problem with this idea of the benefits of being good and the consequences of being bad, is that it’s not always true. We always think that if you work hard, it’ll pay off and if you are “good”, you will be rewarded. How then do we fathom failure after hard work? How do we reconclile the tragic events that plague “good people”?  If we know that we can be punished no matter how good we are or how hard we work; why do we even try? I think the answer to this is two-fold. First, there’s the weighing of benefits vs. non-benefits. People weigh what “benefits” they have for being good versus the relative bad they have received. Then, there’s hope. People generally act “good” for the hope they’ll be rewarded, despite any punishments they may receive. They are also quick to ask what they have done wrong, what they have done bad if they are “punished”. Rather than just talking about punishments, people can also just have bad things happen to them, even the most simple ones. This isn’t because they’ve acted badly, and it’s not because they didn’t work hard, it’s just that bad things happen. Even harder to accept than bad things happening to good people is good things happening to bad people. In our want to believe that good things are for good people, and that they are sometimes accompanied with suffering or bad things, it is ever more complicated when we have to reconcile the successes or the good things that happen to a person that we observe does bad things. Why doesn’t it happen to them, we think. Overall, we need to act ethically in an effort to preserve order and keep us from chaos. Acting good means respecting others and acting with the interest of others in mind in addition to those “good” actions that are purely of self-interest. 

No matter how many times a person reads the book of Job, I think what God does to Job is never something that sits right with people. Long-term plan or not, trust or not, God seems to act evil himself by amounting suffering onto a “good and righteous man” such as Job. The most reconcilable reason is that God has a bigger plan for Job, that he knows that Job will endure the suffering and will be better and will thrive because of it. For a god-fearing person, that’s probably a reassuring answer, that you could be chosen by God and that he would have that trust in you. Other than that, we as humans have basic empathy enough to still question why Job had to suffer that much for God’s point. While there really is no justification given for God’s replacement of Jobs children, we have to consider what Job gained. Job gained a greater understanding of God, as well as his own role. And as an example for all humans, Job served as a reminder that suffering is inevitable, and it is inevitable no matter whether you’re good or bad. 

I’ve felt drawn to the stage ever since I was a child. Theater was a place I could live out the wildest of my fantasies. I could have bright lights on my face and the most ostenatious costumes on, and I would be happy. No one could contain me from singing the most off-key version of any song, preferably from Wicked (I hadn’t been told I needed voice lessons at this point). I pretended I was a Rockette, a ballerina, a tap dancer. The stage and the shows were places I felt safe. 

This was the bright, strawberry-blonde haired girl who ALWAYS was picked to play the witch, and when she could, cast herself either as Hermione, or as the Justice of Peace in a wedding gone wrong. 

Somewhere between this and more recent shows, I became afraid of the stage. I still loved it, it still gave me the warm familiar feeling; the one you get when cozy up underneath your favorite blanket. But the magic I loved to create, the easiness of stepping into a role and allowing it to bring me out of everything else; was missing. I couldn’t ignore everyone around me, I suddenly was overwhelmingly aware that everyone could, and probably did, have an opinion about my performance, my interpretation. I could have the smallest role on stage, and I was so terrified that my whole cast would be so embarrassed about having me on their stage. 

Our directors constantly encouraged us to add more personality, add more depth to our characters, especially if we were ensemble. I was used to finding this easy. But I was too scared to add any option, to try anything. I barely even smiled when we ran our dances. They were stiff, and I knew I was lacking, but I thought it was better to give minimum effort than to try too hard and look stupid. 

One day, as we approached the show, one of my directors called me out into the hallway. She complimented, as she had before, my ability to remind others of their choreography, my own ability to do the moves, but expressed concern that she thought I had more to give. The dreaded compliment sandwich. But she ended this with something I’m sure she thought of on the spot, but something that sticks with me so profoundly today. She pleaded for me to try something new, saying, “CJ, you’ve got to go out there and play. Play with the people and the objects and the story that you’re part of. Play like you’re a little kid on the playground again and dig and dig and create the magic you want everyone to see.” 

By pulling me aside, she let me know that she saw me. I mattered, I was noticed. And though I was terrified of messing up, I discovered I couldn’t fathom going through the show and not trying at all. 

I’ve heard this advice over and over again, adults pushing me more and more to release the fear of messing up on stage. Once you hear it from three directors, you know you have to make some drastic changes. Get louder, move your face more, get physical, belt that note. When I was cast as Donna in a production of Mamma Mia, with many girls my junior, I started taking more risks. Many of them seemed fearless and I saw this as my now or never moment. I could love the stage from my seat in the audience, which was reflective of the effort I was putting in at that point, or I could relinquish the amount of power I gave to the fear of messing up. So what if I forgot a line in rehearsal, so what if I had no formal dance training. I had passion and clearly some talent, and I needed to use that. 

From there, I rediscovered why I love to be on stage, and I found that I could be both mature and playful, and that these were assets to my performance. I know I’m hard on myself, and therefore it’s easy to let the little errors that are only noticeable to me ruin my vibe for the night. But I also know that the best feeling is to engage with the audience: when they’re clapping for you, and you’re proud of yourself, when they’re laughing and you are too. If I remained so rigid and so hellbent on being perfect, no one would be able to connect with me. 

In Beauty and Beast last year, I leaned all the way in to “playing” with our Gaston number. It’s always been a favorite of mine, and had arguably the best choreography of any number in the show. We worked so hard to make the dance so perfect that all of the before and after, all of the interactions needed to be at the level of play of this drinking song. Every night, we’d laugh and make up stories about our characters, the village, whatever. Our mics’ were off, no one knew what we were saying, but it was a moment for us that they could pick up on. At the end of the song, I was always supposed to move from dancing with my partner on a bench, up to dancing on a table. However, at our second performance, the weight distribution was off, and when my partner stepped off of the bench to go to his final spot, the bench tipped and threw me into the air. When I landed, I had no idea who and if anyone had seen it, apart from the two people adjacent to me laughing as they held their goblets up and tried to assess whether I was at all injured. The song was over, and I needed to do something, give my salute. So, I just raised my glass and my feet in the air, and pretended I was the best drunkard in the tavern. I broke my shoe, the table, and everyone was so concerned as to whether I was okay, but I was just so happy, not only because I messed up and kept going, but because I wasn’t afraid at all. Nothing mattered except that I had had the most fun of anyone on that stage on that night. 

The advice that encouraged me to play like a child was super important. It reminded me that theater is supposed to be a community, somewhere that everyone can be free to express themselves, and that it’s a collaborative experience. I can’t rely on my castmates to carry the whole show, and I can’t, myself, ruin the entire thing alone. I needed to dig and use the fear of doing something wrong to allow myself to do something right. Without my director trying to ascertain some emotion out of me and talking with me one-on-one, I really don’t know if I would have continued doing theater. I would’ve continued to feel like a hindrance to the potential of show and allowed myself to shrink in confidence more than I already had, and I don’t know where that would’ve left me. Playing though, letting yourself use the people around you as fuel and just imagining yourself as the carefree child on playground is essential to my success.

Dum loquimur, fugerit invida

aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. (Odes 1.11)

“While we talk, envious time will have fled: pluck the day, trusting as little as possible to the future.”

After death, a person’s life value is measured by the impact they had on others. If they demonstrated positive traits such as kindness, selflessness, humor, and a sense of resilience, we decide they had a great and valuable life. What we don’t do is consider the value of a person’s life, and our own lives when we/they are still alive.

We might consider and often undermine the value of our own lives because that’s what we observe of others. We live in a society focused on the sole product of success: money. So in our lifetime, we measure the value of our life in comparison to others, about the amount of “success” we have reached, and in the opinions of others. I think the meaning and purpose of life are entirely subjective; only you can really decide what makes your life meaningful and what makes your life have value. But with that, you have to find a sense of being content to find purpose or meaning in your life. You have to be able to look around and be content with who and where you are in life. And with that, you have to move forward to get yourself to a place of contentment.

If you submit to the idea that you will never be good enough; that you are nowhere near where you need to be and that everything in your life has been and will be useless; then I suppose you could conclude that your life is meaningless and has no value. However, most people who say this do have value and meaning to their lives, they have families whom they positively impact or work that they do well; even if the best. Your life won’t have value if you dwell on your shortcomings alone, because you interpret it that way. The meaning of one person’s life often doesn’t come from the big accomplishments they achieve, their huge mansion, or the elaborate vacations they take. It comes from the small things like the family they have or the activities they love doing. The little things that give a life meaning can be the everyday,  seemingly mundane abilities you have or constants that exist in your world that have meaning and when put together, you can derive your own place in them, your own value. This also involves the people and the experiences that you choose to interact with and surround yourself with, and your ability to be independent. To find value in ourselves and in our lives we must often be retrospective. Look back on where you started, where you are now, and how, even in the smallest of ways, you are doing at least something that you had once hoped to be able to do. 

To contradict everything I’ve said thus far, here’s my list of things that without completing, will render me a life not lived, meaningless, and without value:

1. Write and FINISH some sort of major work of writing
2. Travel to more places than I could even think of off the top of my head
3. Own whatever property I’m living in outright; and furthermore, be financially independent
4. To have loved multiple times
5. Work on a major peace negotiation/treaty

1. I don’t know where my professional life will take me, whether I pursue journalism at some level, in conjunction with another career, or whether I do something completely different. I do know that I love to write, and I think my mark of a life well- and fully-lived life would include a finished work whether that be a book of poems, a novel, grouped writings, or a finished drama. My shortcoming as a writer has always been in the falling action, writing the end of anything and everything. I have always sort of thought that it is because I have not lived enough to know how or when to end something. So to be able to overcome this, would (hopefully) answer my question and produce a finished work. The finished work is first and foremost to prove to myself that I can actually finish something, but I hope that if/when I finish whatever this takes the shape of, I will want to share it, and will find it worthy enough to share, that is.
2. It’s easy to say I want to travel more. I just said it. It’s also simple to say that I want to go backpacking through Europe and that I want to spend a year or two living in some place completely different from the US. But I want to travel to places I can’t pronounce (I just realized that’s a One Direction lyric), to places that I’m possibly afraid to travel to now, to places I have never even heard of. I once saw a video of a man who said that he always travels to countries right after they have terrorist attacks because he says everything’s cheap, there’s no one there, and security is great. I’m not actually going to adapt to this, but I do like that he’s not afraid, and that he wants to see the world.
3. Oh to be financially independent. I was just listening to NPR while driving home last week and the radio stations were all messed up so it was either country (yuck) or this NPR segment on how to approach your parents about their financial situation. (Normally I love NPR but I really didn’t care about this lady and her elderly parents who needed advice on how to approach them on my Sunday afternoon) Clearly, I was not the target audience for this, but as I deal with the financial information regarding college, it wasn’t entirely irrelevant. The segment discussed beginning a long-term care plan so that children do not have to pay for long-term care for their parents should they need it, as well as how to approach a parent to find out if they have retirement savings or how much they own on the house. I know a lot of information about my parent’s finances, and even more about my grandmother’s because I manage a lot of it. And while both my parents and my maternal grandparents have thus far made good financial decisions, I cannot fathom, at this point, how I will get to where they are. I face a plethora of mountain sizes of loan debt to pay back heading into college. While I have already decided the maximum amount of money I will ever take out in loans to attend college, I still don’t know if I will see the return on investment to get me to where my parents want me to be, and frankly where I want to be; ahead of them with a higher salary and no money owed on my home. If I’m still living in the US, I would want precautions taken for potential long-term medical care so that I can truly consider myself financially independent. (This one went a bit off-topic)
4. “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”. -Alfred Tennyson

Love and loss, based on love, seem to be the biggest creative proponents present in all mediums of art I consume or view. From this, I suppose you could say that I’ve learned that I need to love and be loved back in order to feel fulfilled in my life, but I probably wouldn’t necessarily agree with that. I want to love, but I don’t want to do it once. I think it’s idealistic and hypocritical to believe that you should only love once. Love can present itself in so many different ways, and I want to experience as many as I can. Living is learning, and love is something you can learn and grow from as you live. I want to love and do things wrong and have someone else do things wrong and then have realizations about myself and my life and LIVE. Maybe I’ve read too many books about the subject or watched too many movies but that’s exactly my point. The people who write those, they’ve experienced love in different ways and at different times and they can use that to create. I want to do that.

5. Ever since I heard of a concentration in “Peace and Conflict Studies” I knew that I had to someday obtain work in that field. Maybe it’s a lifetime of acting as a peacemaker in my own life that drives me toward this path, and maybe I’ll find out later that it isn’t the right work for me. If I’m being idealistic about career goals, I’d allow myself five careers in my lifetime; partly because I’m indecisive, and partly because I’m just so fascinated by each one. Problems and questions, particularly real-life ones that involve conflict or human rights issues are what get my gears turning. That’s where you’ll find me hunched over a computer or a notebook with a hand crap and eye strain, and I’ll still have a smile on my face because I’ll be doing what I love to do, solving these problems. I’m usually a person who loves to get questions right, and who thrives on the rush of a correct answer. But in these situations, all you have is the pressure and the problem, you don’t know what the solution is. That should absolutely terrify me, but instead, it ignites a passion. I should be deterred from this because all you can do is hope that you did the right thing, and do what I hate to do: wait. Instead, I do the waiting, the researching, the applications, the writing. At the base, it’s all about a solution. So in my lifetime, which will be successful if I’m able to fulfill some of these goals on the list, it would be the greatest privilege to serve and conduct peace negotiations and find a solution for a global problem or a civil war.

So how do I want to be remembered?

I’ve actually thought a lot about this. I had a phase once where first, I wanted to own a used coffin store (and yes I will still argue for this), and I wrote eulogies for my family members. The alive ones of course. And in doing so, I thought about what people might already say about me, and what I would want people to say. I’m sure that people would say things about how I was always so involved, so mature, so bright, and that I was a decent person, but regardless of what I can accomplish in my lifetime, I want people to remember how I helped people have fun.

I’ve (by and large) been the youngest at events and gatherings for family and friends, and been the “why does everything always happen to her” girl at everything else. And what does that mean? Everyone was always laughing at me. Or with me. I’m still not sure. Nonetheless, it was clearly my role early on to keep everyone laughing and keep everyone’s spirits bright. So I’ve tried to take that one in all parts of my life. I say stupid things around my parents and do silly dance moves, just to keep everyone laughing. I’m no class clown, but I believe one of the greatest gifts we have is the ability to laugh and to be happy. This isn’t my role with everyone, particularly at school (I’ll leave room for some others to grow their material :)), but I would want people to remember how much I made them laugh and how light things could be when we let them be. I hate false positivity in that a person can never be sad, so that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that everyone could use a bathroom joke a dance break or a silly voice to break up their day.

All of these works can be brought down to just their good vs. evil trope, and one can extract the supposed “hero”. In order to decide whether or not a character is a hero, we must first create a definition for the hero or rather the characteristics needed for the classification. The hero must make courageous and often selfless choices, they must have noble tendencies, and they must take up fighting for a “moral cause”. In many cases, heroes are also idealized. While this does impact the classification of a hero, I don’t think someone who possesses the other qualities but isn’t idealized, is necessarily not a hero. Harry Potter? He’s courageous enough and makes arguably selfless choices (although most are just stupid), and if Voldemort and his followers pose a threat to the people, Harry fights for a moral cause. Is he idealized? For sure. So, he’s a hero. 

In literature and in media, we’re faced with much more material for the support of the hero, as it represents for humanity the ideals that we strive for. The hero gives us something to root for and that’s why we need it.  Think about the roar of people watching a superhero movie in theaters or the child who begs his parent for a costume of a character so he can feel like a hero for a day. Without the hero, the child in that costume (or the adult in glorified spandex) just looks silly. But the hero that the costume represents gives the person confidence and a certain sense of pride. A few weeks ago, I was doing a movie search on Netflix and I watched a movie that can be simplified to the journey that four people took after watching Rocky III in theaters. Each person was such a Rocky idealist that their call to action was watching Rocky III. This is the power of the hero. The hero, particularly a hero with humble beginnings, presents us with a sort of “I could be that” mentality. 

But with that, we have far less support and far fewer adaptations for the villain. Few want to support the villain because it represents the worst parts of what a human can be, bordering on inhumane. That’s why we see villains like Voldemort and Darth Vader lose their humanity. But there is more to a villain than just evil, as evident in the first three episodes of Star Wars. Villains often have their own cause to protect, they just don’t protect this in a “just way”, as we deem from the reader’s perspective. Anakin Skywalker is the best modern example of this. He is so imbued by reversing a prophecy that he ends up fulfilling it, and sends himself to the dark side. But in the first two episodes of Star Wars, Anakin could be argued as a hero. Voldemort’s backstory mostly consists of his mother dying, but he doesn’t have a history of any redeeming qualities. If he did, would we find more understanding and justification for his actions?

The question of whether a woman can be a heroine is one I’ve wrestled with time and time again. Clearly, they have the ability to be a hero, but there are so few female heroines compared to their male counterparts. This is mostly due to age-old sexist standards, and how they relate to the definition of a hero. Of course, we have Joan of Arc and Mulan, but these are indisputable heroines due to their physical variable: they fight. But fighting and war has historically been a very masculine thing. Women can’t be heroines without fighting for a moral cause, but they would be a bad example to women if they did fight, and they would be undesirable to men because they were fighters and not domestic. So do we need to have a definition for heroines because of this barrier? And to that point, are heroines only applicable to women? Heroes, as in Hercules or Iron Man are examples of idealism for both genders. 

In terms of modern media female heroes seem to be more of a response to the lack of them. Katniss Everdeen may be a 21st-century organic female hero, but then there’s Super Woman, Bat Girl, the heroines created just to have a female version of a popular male character. Clearly, those in power find male heroes to be more marketable. Is that because more men are searching for a hero in movies and in comics? Probably. But the in-organic heroines (as in those created in response to an absence of female heroes) might have better success if their stories were created better, and if they weren’t meant to be sex symbols. Examples of these characters are Wonder Woman and Black Widow. Looking at them when I was younger, I was always sort of like, “How does their hair always look so good? And how do they fight in that?” Take an even newer character, She-Hulk. The Hulk is easily picturable; big green, busting out of his clothes. But She-Hulk? She’s tall, but her muscles aren’t remarkable for super-human strength. To be honest, it felt like they just tried to make her extra pretty at the expense of making her character believable. The problem with heroines isn’t that they can’t occur, it’s that there are double standards for their existence. 

To address the quotation, “Unhappy the land that needs heroes.”, I think that it’s likely true. Overall, if a place needs a hero, if a group of people needs a hero, they probably require salvation. There’s a moral cause the hero needs to address, a void that needs a courageous and selfless fill. If a place had no problems, had no threat, in that the people were all generally happy, there would be absolutely no need for a hero. And this would be a good thing, because heroes inevitably bring destruction, even though it’s often justifiable destruction.

Utnapishtim says to Gilgamesh, “There is no permanence” (106). This quotation references both the mortality of humans and the relative short length of life of the things in our world. Our evolution, both biologically and socially is evident of that. In a world once only livable through a hunter-gatherer lifestyle; we shifted to nomadic farming. While we are overarchingly an agricultural lifestyle species, our modern world allows for much more travel and far fewer people stay in the same place as before. The dominating civilizations of the past are no more, they have no permanence. Our technology is constantly changing, with examples being AI and increased modes of transportation, also demonstrating the lack of permanence in the archaicness of so much that we once goggled at. 

Utnapishtim’s conclusion reflects a peaceful conclusion about “end”, whether or not that necessarily means death. As humans, we are conditioned to fight against this notion, to crave permanence. We drive to do whatever we can to evolve past aging, to last forever. But if you find a wise older person, or rather someone on their death bed, an overwhelming population of such will tell you that they wished they had had more fun, or they had not worried so much about the superficialness. These people have grasped what Gilgamesh realizes at the end of the book, that mortality is destiny. This conclusion, however, is hopefully not made until a person has reached the final parts of their life. The idea that people wished they spent more time having fun is cyclical, because we always feel we have more time. While we know somewhere in the back of our heads that immorality is unattainable, how do we continue? People are able to get up and work through denial. They deny the fleeting sense both of themselves and the world around them. This is really the only way possible. If people spent endless hours dwelling on the fact that they were constantly encroaching on their own expiration date, and that their environment was doing the same, nothing would ever get done. People would instead crawl into a hole and accept their “fate”. And then our world full of impermanence would descend into meaninglessness because no one would do anything. Not living because you’re going to die someday doesn’t fufill the purpose of mortality as destiny. You can only fufill this destiny by living. That’s like saying “why do laundry if the clothes are only going to get dirty?” 

The meaning of life is a timeless question that seemingly means there is no answer. It’s true that its an individual concept, a specific meaning of life only applies to one person. This is found through through living. And then, the meaning of life can is also present itself the fear of death. This fear of death motivates us because, as stated before, people generally do not want to die, and in actuality do everything in their power not to die. 

Our world demonstrates this sense of impermenance in our quest for constant innovation. In a post-industrial society, we are constantly racing to make something better, to make processes “more efficient”, to prove true this sense of impermanence. Technology from five years ago is borderline archaic, and our search for efficiency is only realized through additional complexities. Not only is nothing permanent all around us, the lifespan of many of our modern technologies is incredibly short. This isn’t necessarily always a bad thing. Our innovations have allowed us to live in a safe and more connected world, to have a better quality of life and to live longer on average. 

The problem occurs when we refuse to realize the connection between the impermanence of that which surrounds us, and our own impermanence. The “grind mentality” encourages us to further this impermanence, to always work toward creating something that replaces what was previously new and quality. But we can’t step off that grind, we can’t allow ourselves to be happy with what we have; which is when we would have to face our own impermanence. We, as humans, wane in a process that can be beautiful, when we allow it to be.  Coupled with our mortality is the ability to have eternal life through our legacies. Certain religions may have ideas about the afterlife or reincarnation, but overall we are able to live forever in the way we impact those around us. When we inevitably die, those we interacted with and affected will remember us. In an idyllic sense, our families will pass down our traditions; our recipes, and stories about us. Our friends will continue to talk about us. Maybe our contributions will have lasting effects on humanity. I think it’s easier to accept our mortality when we are eased by the existence of our legacy. To believe that we can die and that we won’t be forgotten. But sometimes, people take their inability to accept death and morph that into their obession with their legacy. Isn’t this one of the biggest points in Hamilton? Much of Alexander Hamilton’s downfall was because of his quest for a pinnacle legacy. And in the end, the reason he is remembered is his wife, his political opponents, and his contributions to our country. “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” Allow yourself to find out. Be the best version of yourself, while your alive, but realize your limits. Accept the natural course of life. As 23% of homes in the US have a sign saying, “Live, Laugh, Love” 

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