Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 12 Read online

  "You ever known someone who's cold like that, cold as ice, where their neck meets their throat? Was your kid brother cold there? Is he now? Hmmm? And, while you're at it, why not take my pulse, Dan? What am I at? How many beats a minute? Pretty calm, isn't it?"

  I pulled my hand away slowly.

  "You're no one—"

  "I'm not no one."

  "—You're no one Janey knew."

  "You're right on that, Danny Boy; I've not yet met the gal. But why not ask me about Janey anyway? Or about your wife, Sue, or about Butter or about your bro', dearly departed though he is?” He smiled. It was a sick smile, and it made my gut drop to see it.

  "You know them? Are they—"

  His smile shifted to a smirk, “Don't bother, Dan. I was just screwing with you; it doesn't work that way."

  "What . . .” I licked my lips. “Whadayou? Um, whadaya want?"

  "I don't want nuthin', Dan. I just wanna talk."

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  Mesopotamians, All

  Jack Cheng

  My first thought upon hearing of the looting of the National Museum of Iraq and destruction of the library in Baghdad was disbelief, followed by despair and depression. This reaction was not unusual among people I know. I have a doctorate in Art History, focusing on Mesopotamian art, and my colleagues in the archaeological, museum and academic worlds were and are stunned, frustrated and furious.

  I knew immediately that the wider public would also be outraged to some degree, but I wondered how the enormity of the loss could be conveyed to the general public, especially Americans. I listened for comparisons in the news. The loss of the Liberty Bell and U.S. Constitution was suggested as comparable. Not quite. The destruction of the Mall in Washington, D.C., combined with the torching of the Library of Congress came closer. But still, no. Not so much because we are comparing two hundred and fifty year old documents to five thousand year old documents and objects, but because the objects in Baghdad were created before (in Walter Benjamin's phrase) the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

  The Constitution is an idea, and though the loss of the original would be tragic, the idea would still exist in thousands of high school textbooks and on the Internet. Nearly all the books in the Library of Congress could be replaced (amazing enough, really). The works of art in Baghdad were unique and, if destroyed or held in a private collection, are essentially lost to the world forever.

  The best metaphor I could come up with was based on a model of biological extinction. Something like: “What if all the best dinosaur bones in the world were in one museum and then destroyed?” But this is just as inadequate. Metaphor is unnecessary in this situation. This is the singular event we are faced with: the Iraqi National Museum was looted.

  One reason these metaphors are inadequate is because they do not reveal the extent to which Mesopotamia exists in our global, cultural DNA. That the U.S. Constitution exists at all owes a great deal to the rule of law first publicly instituted by Hammurabi of Babylon four thousand years ago. Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, argues that the agricultural systems and written words of Mesopotamia helped configure the world today into a dominant Europe and America. My great grandparents living in Imperial China, binding their daughters’ feet, and oblivious to western influence—yet they measured their lives in hours and minutes: a legacy of the Mesopotamian number system.

  We are Mesopotamians, all of us.

  The first written language on earth was Sumerian and everyone I know who has studied the language eventually comes to the same conclusion: the Sumerians were aliens. Tenured professors at Ivy League universities make that claim jokingly, but it is a telling joke. Sumerian is an odd language, not at all related to the languages that followed: Akkadian and Aramaic and Egyptian and Sanskrit and Chinese. Sumerian arrived as an idea, sui generis, and scholars are still trying to figure out the details of its grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary. Alien or not, the idea of written language spread and thus the Sumerians have as much of a claim to inventing the Internet as Al Gore or Tim Berners-Lee.

  All of us, Mesopotamians.

  As of this writing (May 2003), a clear accounting of what was looted has not been made but the list of objects known missing from the museum is becoming a familiar litany: stone head and alabaster vase from Warka, gold helmet of a ruler, cuneiform tablets by the thousands, including the law tablets of Hammurabi, and my favorites, the bull-lyres.

  A year ago, I stood in front of a crowd of a few hundred at Harvard's Sackler Museum to discuss the earliest stringed instruments in the history of the world. Boston area residents may be familiar with what those instruments look like from the mural on the side of the Middle East music club in Cambridge—that big gold bull-headed thing? That's a bull-lyre from the Sumerian city of Ur, from around 2400 BC—a little before the biblical Abraham lived there.

  Through the amazing work of the archaeologist Leonard Woolley and his Iraqi excavators, eight of these instruments were recovered from a cemetery and five could be reconstructed. Eight objects are a small sample with which to make an argument about anything, but the inlaid designs and suggestive animal heads suggest that music was an integral part of Sumerian culture. Depictions of these instruments on stone plaques show these instruments played at banquets. The excavated locations of the artifacts revealed that the instruments were either buried with their players, or more evocatively, musicians participated in a ritual suicide and even played a requiem for their community as they died.

  Some scholars speculate that those instruments would have been tuned to a major scale, the scale in which Mozart composed Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, the Kingsmen thrashed Louie Louie, and John Williams scored Star Wars.

  Eight instruments—five complete lyres and three fragments—give us the oldest, fullest picture of an ancient musical culture in the history of humankind.

  Two of these instruments are now gone. One of them was made of gold and came from a mass ritual grave. The New York Times reported (Apr. 24, 2003) that the gold lyre was torn apart for the precious materials of its inlay. The other was precariously cast in plaster from the hole it rotted out from. The plaster lyre would not have survived rough handling.

  Who cares? What is left to learn about them? A lot. We have little or no information on how these instruments were made, by whom, or to what specification. The bits of original wood still extant on these instruments could have been identified (as has been done for their Philadelphian cousins) and dated. Were these instruments all built at the same time? Were there competing lyre-making workshops? Could the method of construction give us clues to what qualities their creators were aiming for? Would having the full set of eight have gotten us closer to knowing what Sumerian music may have sounded like?

  We'll never know. Mesopotamian music—our music—was stolen from us.

  Does any of this matter? Now that we have language, and music, and laws, does it matter that a few early examples of language, music, and law are gone? Especially given the number of deaths from this invasion, or the number of people who die every day from preventable causes?

  Maybe. History is cruel and the truth is that most of us will be remembered by our families for three or possibly four generations and then we will be gone. The stolen objects have borne witness to some two hundred and fifty generations. The cylindrical vase from ancient Uruk (the modern village of Warka) participated in a ritual of some sort five thousand years ago and depicts a five-tiered social hierarchy. From the bottom we can read a squiggly representation of water. Above the water, various grains. The grain in turn feeds the sheep in the third register. There is a significant gap, above which a line of humans is shown holding baskets of food. Although the series progresses, the quantum leap from animal to human is recognized. In the top register a few humans present offerings to a goddess—the food, of course, but also vessels in the shape of animals and two vases of the same shape as the Warka Vase itself. Is this a historical representation or an instruction manu
al on how to use this object? The aliens left us a clue, to go along with their Sumerian mysteries.

  The Sumerians and later Mesopotamians understood history, and the passage of time. They lived their lives as we do, but occasionally acknowledged future generations in curses for those who would destroy their work and blessings on those who would restore them.

  In the spirit of those curses, I feel confident in predicting that if Donald Rumsfeld is remembered a hundred or more years from now, he will be remembered for the callousness with which he dismissed this crime against Mesopotamia, against all of us. If I were more generous than I am, I could accept that—despite the warnings from scholars, despite the precedents set after the legitimate Gulf War, despite the armed guard outside the Oil Ministry—the lack of U.S. Army protection for the Iraq Museum was an oversight. I might even ignore the fact that wealthy art collectors have recently been lobbying the Bush administration to loosen the laws that govern the importation of antiquities and dismiss that as conspiracy minded. However, for Rumsfeld to dismiss the looting as an illusion of Mechanical Reproduction is appalling:

  "The images [of looting] that you are seeing on television are images that you are seeing over and over and over. And it's the same pictures of the same person walking out of some building with a vase. And you see it twenty times. And you think, ‘My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the country?’”

  At this press conference, the reporters laughed at the Defense Secretary's joke. Of course there are many more than twenty vases in the country; more importantly, the Uruk Vase alone is priceless. What if, say, the Mona Lisa were stolen?

  The Mona Lisa was, in fact, stolen. In 1911, the portrait was taken from the Louvre by an Italian nationalist who held it for twenty-seven months before trying to sell it to the Uffizi. In Becoming Mona Lisa, Donald Sassoon argues that monotonous press coverage of the incident made the painting famous. For weeks after the theft, the Mona Lisa dominated Parisian and world newspapers and her image was reprinted on the front pages daily. The hot new medium of newspaper photography made her iconic. If Donald Rumsfeld were around at the time he might have gotten a big laugh from his friends and obsequious reporters. “My goodness, were there that many paintings? Is it possible that there were that many paintings in France?"

  Will this story, these museum pieces, continue to dominate the news? Will this incident kindle an interest in Mesopotamian art, and stimulate a nascent celebrity for these objects? Probably not. There were too many masterpieces taken at once and no individuals singled out. The news today is filled with too much reporting and not enough analysis.

  Does any of this matter? Yes, that the greatest army in the history of the earth is run by men who do not care about history or culture is of great concern. If not history and culture, what are they fighting for? We can only shudder at the answer. Who are the aliens here?

  Does any of this matter? To a few of us, scholars who dreamed of visiting the museum to study these objects firsthand, yes, it matters a lot. To many of us, people interested in learning about history lest we be forced to repeat it, it matters quite a bit. To any of us who care about human culture, it matters. To all of us Mesopotamians, we are saddened and outraged.

  For images of some of the objects taken from the Iraq Museum, including the Warka vase and the gold bull lyre, see www.oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/iraq.html

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  Death Ditty

  Christoph Meyer

  Whatcha gonna do with that twocent penny?

  Drop it on down in yer hornaplenty.

  Hoot ‘n’ Holler! Hoot ‘n’ Holler!

  Dingdong knockknock midnight caller.

  Games and fun, sup sum tea and biscuits.

  Distract a Black Jack from its dire business.

  Shout ‘n’ Shake It! Shout ‘n’ Shake It!

  Fall down still and try ta fake it.

  Don't hit opossum's cards with tuff enuff stuff.

  Bluff the ace of spades stuffed in yer sleeve cuff.

  One Eleven! Hell or Heaven!

  Reincarnate. Call the reverend.

  Whatcha gonna do when it comes to take ya

  Down to the land where the dead foresake ya?

  Beg ‘n’ Borrow! Steal Tomorrow!

  Buy back yer life with yer sorrow.

  So don't fritfret now bout yer ninebuck sawbuck.

  Count all yer ill stars fer sum good luck.

  Hoot ‘n’ Holler! Hoot ‘n’ Holler!

  Give or take that extra doller.

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  In Dreams We Remember

  Ursula Pflug

  For Rhonda Payne

  I have dreams about a school. The classes were all girls, and taught by women. They were outside. We'd follow the teacher along country paths, usually bypassing the villages, sometimes stopping at the inn. Most nights we slept under the stars. That's when astronomy class was held; at night, after we'd made our fire and cooked our dinner. When the sun fell behind the green hills we'd unroll our bedding and lie down, staring up at the canopy of stars and our teacher would name them. So many stars. Later we were also taught astrology, or predestination, and one night, alone, much later, I saw how one woman's fate was spelled out in stars. She could no more have changed it than I could turn into a swan: now, here, in this world. She comes to me in dreams, white faced, raven haired. I have never seen a face so proud or haughty, so fierce and womanly at once.

  This is a new world, and women no longer turn into swans, and don't hold their heads so high anymore, as high as she did, my proud and lonely queen. In this world we aren't taught the right things: to revere trees and wells and art and wisdom and transformation of many kinds. In this world we make do. And we pine for another way of being, and sometimes, in dreams we remember.

  I began to read, trying to discover where and when my lovely school had been, if it had even existed, who the woman had been, my beautiful queen, her face so haunting in my dreams. And I began to try and expand my dreaming, to see more of that place and time. To my surprise, it was as if I already knew how, as if there were techniques for it I'd once learned, that slowly came back to me.

  I left something back there, something back then. Something important. Was it my sisters’ hands in mine, sitting by the stream, braiding daisies into one another's hair and reciting love poems to the salmon?

  Could I really have had the ability to turn into a swan?

  From my expanded dreaming I learned so many things: we students enjoyed each other's company immensely, women and girls of all ages; we carried sticks with bells on them, they rang as we walked. We wore white. We carried crystal eggs in the big pockets of our robes, in beautiful colours: translucent red and green and blue. We talked as we walked, sometimes just joking and gossiping but more often studying, memorizing verses, thousands upon thousands. We'd stop at the holy wells, make sun-wise ritual to Brigit, to Macha, to Eire.

  I learned that when we became older and had studied long enough we were called upon to adjudicate disputes in the villages. We were looked upon as wise and learned and our judgements were generally followed, for it was known they were not given lightly, nor taken lightly. We took our work seriously, yet so much of it was pure pleasure: to learn the stars, to chant poetry that encompassed all of Eire's history, all of her legends. When we grew up we had many opportunities for employment. We could teach or practise law or medicine, all things we'd learned in those countless verses committed to memory. We could guard a sacred well, priestess to the goddess. Our job then was to make sure the kings who stopped there always took the land into account, her voice, her needs, her pleasures. In times still older than ours only a king who did so had the right of kingship; it was the land herself which bestowed it upon him. And if he strayed, well, we were there to gently remind him.

  Or so I thought when I was still young, in that other life I miss so much, but even then, the world was already changing, o
ur power slipping though our hands like water from a shattered cup.

  We eventually raised a building, a more permanent home to study in, at least in the winters. It's the school I miss the most, this time around. The school stood for centuries, on Brigid's Hill. Later it became a convent. That part I read in a history book. Queen Maeve visited us there, for I discovered it was indeed she I dreamt of, over and over and over. I was still a child, perhaps ten or eleven, and Maeve took me aside from the other girls and gave me a pin: the Celtic triple spiral emblazoned in silver: three for the Goddess who is tripartite, now as then. She had such fondness for me, Maeve said, giving me the pin.

  Of course, they burned the academy to the ground, but that was hundreds of years later; I read about it in the same book. It's true I too have been raped, just like so many girls of this time, but not with the murderous violence bestowed upon those poor girls then, and sometimes, waking at midnight, melancholic, filled with rage and sorrow, I think perhaps some of my despair might rightly be theirs. For I have enough, in this world. I have many pairs of shoes and a roof and a car and a computer and a hair dryer, things not one of us had then, not one. Except Maeve. She had many pairs of shoes and a choice of roofs to shelter her at night but then, she was Queen of Connaught.

  I eat. My family was good. How can I complain of my life?

  Sometimes we accompanied the kings to war. Oh, there were so many kings then. Kings and kings and kings, kings upon kings. It was hard at times to tell them all apart, which could of course, be embarrassing, for we too were expected to pay homage to the kings and their sons, kings again.

  Maeve stood out all the more for it.

  I went to war once, but not for a king. I went for my queen. I did not want to go, but better a druidess along on a war than not, I thought. Perhaps I could have some small influence on events, point towards a harmonious outcome. I could mitigate, search for harmony, weave a new piece out of the bloody shredded tapestry of battle. I went with her in the end, because she begged me to; although in spite of all my druid magic I could no more change the course of events than the course of the stars.