A PRISM FOR ARMAND SCHWERNER
Stephen Williams

[S]ince metaphysics is not art, the artifact must exist in time, and be partial, and be—to be however small a degree “constructed.” Is this sad?
—Armand Schwerner
It is sad the way comedy is sad. Armand Schwerner is a sad comedian who uses the textual conventions of archaeology to frame a poem unlike any other of its era. What does he have to teach us?

FORM/FORMAT
The Tablets is a fictional archaeological treatise about the textual heritage of a fictional people who mostly go without a name (though at times Schwerner calls them the Old Ones). It's meant to call to mind editions of Mesopotamian cuneiform literature. The poem speaks through the voice of the anonymous ancient poets in the Scholar/Translator's modern English “translation,” and through the Scholar/Translator's commentary.

This makes the text a leaky vessel for knowledge: within the bounds of its fiction, there exist the possibilities of a) misinterpretation by the Scholar/Translator; b) mistranslation by the Scholar/Translator; c) lacunae in the “original” texts; d) errors by the “original writers.

In Black Mountain practice, the form of a poem only has validity under the immediate pressures of the moment of writing. This vouchsafes the authenticity of the poem's content.

With The Tablets, on the other hand, the form, or format—that of an anthropological treatise—is the only part of the poem that has an a priori existence. It's the realest part. The Scholar/Translator is a fiction, a farce; so are the anonymous authors of the texts the Scholar/Translator translates and annotates.

What is the difference between form and format? Both a sonnet and an archaeological treatise are structures that organize and hierarchize knowledge. Both make arguments. Yet in the realm of poetics, we can imagine a discussion of a form becoming a discussion of Form: it can be abstracted into a more symbolically charged form of itself. The same cannot be said of format: there is no Format with a capital F.

In the passage quoted above, Schwerner's “to however small a degree” points to the source of the sadness he feels. Because the poem must be made, it cannot imagine transcendence, the way metaphysics can.

Yet there is also a Schwerner who would agree with Michel Foucault who says “I'm mortally affected by others' categories; they damp up my ease; they are a prioris. Fuck them. They constitute authority” (129).

Like The Tablets, categories are leaky vessels for knowledge.

Whether we see The Tablets as having a form or a format matters to the extent that it shows us what conversation they are participating in: the one in which the negotiation of form and content might lead to vision, or the one in which philosophical thought leads to enlightenment.

Or rather, our answer shows us what conversation we're participating in.

“METAPHYSICS” WITHOUT COSMOLOGY
The past is a foreign country, wrote L.P. Hartley. They do things differently there.

In choosing ancient Mesopotamia as the civilization that “produced” his “original” text, Schwerner deliberately chose a civilization whose ways of understanding its place in the world were radically different from those of European cultures. We're accustomed to thinking of this civilization as the genesis of writing, of astronomy, of the Abrahamic religions, and indeed of civilization itself. We're therefore predisposed toward seeing continuities between it and ourselves. But Schwerner's project lives in the difference between our ways of thinking and those of Mesopotamia, in ways so fundamental as to be invisible to us until we see ourselves reflected differently in the mirror of Schwerner's Mesopotamian fiction.

Just what is a “world,” and what assumptions are involved when we claim a place in it? The Assyriologist Francesca Rochberg tells us just how different the Mesopotamian understandings of these questions were. In the Mesopotamian world, we cannot properly speak of a natural or physical world, because, where “Greek philosophical culture focused on nature (physis), first in the sense of primordial matter and second the processes inherent to material things,” Mesopotamian culture did not: “The Mesopotamian orientation to the world of observation and experience was not in relation to such a concept, and must be conceived of without appeal to it” (305).

History asks of us, in other words, something we're used to being asked by philosophy and theory: to dismantle the categories of Western thought.

Nor can we speak of a cosmos, because the Mesopotamian worldview was not characterized by “communion and friendship, orderliness, temperance and justice,” the qualities Socrates assigns to the cosmos in the Gorgias (305). The ideas of order and adornment buried in the etymology of the word cosmos did not obtain in Mesopotamia:
There was no music of the spheres, and no intellectual mechanism by which microcosm could be related to macrocosm. Further, “[a]ll celestial bodies, stars, constellations, and planets were called stars. The planets were further distinguished by a term meaning a kind of sheep,” because the planets wander while the stars are fixed (315). But the specific paths they wandered were not an object of inquiry, and so the planets were ordered by characteristics rather than by position in the heavens:
“In the Babylonian sources, however,” Rochberg continues, “the order in which the planets were enumerated in texts had nothing to do with geocentric order, but rather with their attributes as gods”: Jupiter and Venus were thought beneficial, while Saturn and Mars were malevolent. Mercury (in keeping with its place in Western myth) shuttles between.

If things do not happen due to natural causes, as we generally understand them to, why did what happened happen? “Divine design, decree, and judgment were conceived as the means by which order and disorder were brought upon the world,” Rochberg writes (310). Things happened because of human and divine agency (divine agency being modeled on human kingship, as we shall see), not because of natural processes producing outcomes, not because of destiny demanding them.

In short, the human life did not unfold within a grand cosmic scheme. What we call nature was neither ordered nor random, but arbitrary. Arbitrary like a tyrant. A world like Kafka's.

GILGAMESH DREAMS OF ENKIDU
The absence of a cosmic frame around the world did not diminish the magical power of objects or the prophetic significance of events within it:
It's funny that the comet comes directly to Gilgamesh and falls right at his feet, something that never happens in biblical or classical myth: though in life the dream does come directly to the dreamer.

Scott Noegel notes that the word Andrew George translates as “before me” is in fact tseri, meaning “on top of me”; tseri also means “born of the steppeland” (50). Not just the presence of the comet is significant, but also the manner of its falling, which says that the one who is coming is from a different climate, a harder and less forgiving world.

Dreams know how to use our language for their purposes before we do.

But what does Enkidu represent? Enkidu is a paradox, a wild man created by the gods to moderate Gilgamesh's tyrannical kingship. What does it mean for the wild man to be a moderating force? One could say that a tyrant approaches civilization in an uncivilized way. Civilization, civil discourse, civic life are essentially lies that cover up the brutal truth beneath: life is about dominance.

Schwerner, whose cousin Mickey Schwerner was one of three civil rights activists murdered during the Freedom Summer of 1964, surely had no illusions, but he holds on to the belief that release from pain is possible:
Schwerner alludes here to Wallace Stevens's “This Solitude of Cataracts”:
Stevens identifies the music of the spheres with the destroyed, the mundane, the base: aren't the stars simply dragging all this ruin along with them? And if we want perfect stillness, don't the planets have to stop moving too? And at that point doesn't the cosmos fail to be a cosmos? So, Stevens concludes, “the center of time” has to be constructed (as Schwerner puts it in the passage I used as an epigraph), and exists only as art: bronze and azure.

Is this sad? For Stevens it is sad, but it is a sadness fortified by tragic knowledge. Farewell to an idea. But for Schwerner the comedian, it's a different story.

STRANGE FISH
What is Schwerner doing in this very strange passage? Why would one, in earnest or as farce, reassign the directions of the compass to fish? The directions of the compass are a hallmark of an ordered cosmos: if you know true north, all the rest fall into place within the total cosmic system. Fish are just the opposite: they are effectively an infinite series (“too many fish in the sea”) which can be ordered any number of ways but do not have to be. Further, none of these fish is particularly associated with Mesopotamia.

Around the same time Schwerner was writing the fish-directions passage, Michel Foucault encountered a passage in Borges which concerned
Like Schwerner, Borges has introduced an infinite series into a system that claims to hold a totality of knowledge, an encyclopedia: but “[i]n the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that” (xv). Borges's animals, Schwerner's fish: “where could they ever meet, except in the immaterial sound of the voice pronouncing their enumeration, or on the page transcribing it? Where else could they be juxtaposed except in the non-place of language?” (xvi-xvii).

The fish-compass passage points us toward perhaps the most obvious difficulty with Schwerner's text: it has no secure textual or archaeological basis for interpretation. The tablets “themselves” are understood to be broken, incomplete, and often illegible; this illegibility is compounded by translation, and particularly the possibility of inept translation; the “original” text contains anachronisms that may be the result of bad translation or may be Borgesian impossibilities.

Pale Fire could become a classic because it merely had an unreliable narrator. The Tablets has an unreliable epistemology: a much larger problem.

A fragment of Tablet I reads “hanging-mackerel-tail-up-smoke-death.” A fish—the fish that represents the south—hangs upside-down (so in some sense indicates north?), and this is related to “smoke-death.” A note, however, qualifies the fragment as
Is it the case that, when we replace north-south with up-down, that death becomes “dying-becoming”? Does that constitute a step closer to life? And can that happen elsewhere than in language?

WHAT WAS GILGAMESH?
The great Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobsen places the historical Gilgamesh in 2600 BCE. According to Jacobsen, Gilgamesh, like Arthur, was a king, in whose person were united the roles of magus and warrior. Gilgamesh the mage and Gilgamesh the warrior each developed separate oral literatures. For this reason, the standard text begins twice, first by introducing Gilgamesh the magus (“He who saw the Deep” (I.1, George), then by introducing Gilgamesh the warrior (“Surpassing all other kings, heroic of stature / brave scion of Uruk, wild bull on the rampage!” (I.29-30, George). The opening lines were added to the beginning of the older version.

The standard version dates to ca. 1000-1200 BCE; the version that begins with “Surpassing other kings” dates to ca. 1700 BCE.

What is a king and what is a god? In the third millennium BCE, as population increased and with it competition for resources, wars broke out; war became far more common than it had been up to that point. Wars required kings to lead men into battle. These purely secular figures nonetheless embodied for many certain features of the numinous: majesty, tremendous power. And so divinities begin to take on the qualities of kings, with a concomitant reunderstanding of their role and power.

Does Neptune embody the sea? No, Neptune rules the sea.

Behind a personal god, there is a personal king. Just as writing begins with commercial transactions.

In the beginning was war.

EXPERTS
The best-known part of Gilgamesh is Tablet XI, which describes events very like those in the Noah's Ark story in Genesis. When it was discovered by the British Assyriologist George Smith, he tore all his clothes off and ran around the room shouting in delight.
It will please the academics among us to learn that in the original version, an entire faculty of experts was saved along with the gold, silver, kith, kin and beasts.

Not only nature, but knowledge too must be preserved.

Unlike our culture, which arrogantly assumes that science lies in nature, like oil or rare earth metals, patiently waiting for us to discover it, the author of Gilgamesh understands that knowledge lives in culture just as animals live in nature—because the author does not distinguish between culture and nature.

Knowledge is not a given; it is a gift.

ADAPA
Adapa was the first of the seven sages charged by Ea with teaching the arts of civilization to humankind.^[1] Adapa is one of the Annunaki, the superlatively wise: he fished, he baked, and he was priest of the Temple of Ea. One day when he was out fishing the South Wind came up and threatened his ship. In response, Adapa breaks the wind's wing and the South Wind ceases to blow. This comes to the attention of Anu, who sternly summons Adapa. Ea advises Adapa: You will go to the Temple of Anu where you will be met by two gatekeepers, Dumuzi and Gizzida. They will ask why you wear mourning garb. You will say it is because two gods have vanished from the earth. Who are the two gods? they will ask and you must answer: Dumuzi and Gizzida. They will laugh amongst themselves, but they will let you in. Now, once inside the Temple, they will offer you the bread of death: you must not eat it. And they will offer you the water of death: you must not drink it. But they will give you a garment—put this on—and they will anoint you.

So it happens just as Ea says, with one difference: Adapa is offered not the bread of death but the bread of life. He refuses, though he accepts the ritual garment and the anointment. Why didn't you eat? Why didn't you drink? Didn't you want to be immortal? Anu demands. Take him and send him back to his earth.

The story raises questions we cannot answer. Did Ea intend to trick Adapa out of his immortality by instructing him to refuse the food of death? Or did he have kind intentions and simply got his prophecy wrong? Or was Adapa not listening closely, and made the mistake? Would you rather have a cruel god or one that's inept? Are life and death each so much the other that Adapa is damned either way, and it makes no difference how he answers?

Is the problem historical—the answers to these questions were lost to the archaeological record—or mystical—the answers are withheld, concealed, never there to begin with?

We are not permitted to know.

And what really is Adapa's relation to fish? When the South Wind attacks his rudderless boat, it says, “Send him (?) to the fishes' home,” (184). Sleep with the fishes! But a footnote adds: “Or, 'home of his master.' The cuneiform signs are ambiguous,” (187). That the footnote's phrasing belies the overwhelming irony it introduces into the text would have amused Schwerner.

In the many-sided prism of language, the fish can be the master.

And what are we to make of the riddle of Dumizi and Gizzida? In “Tablets Journals / Divigations,” Schwerner quotes Paul Valéry:
Dumuzi and Gizzida, Kafkaesque gatekeepers at the Gate of Anu, exist in a kind of quantum indeterminacy in that, as “the two gods that have vanished from the country,” they are absent on earth, but present at the Gate of Anu (185). Perhaps this is where Hölderlin's gods withdrew to, or ours; perhaps they too will giggle at us when we re-encounter them. Why do Dumuzi and Gizzida seem to enjoy this joke so much, despite the fact that they know the punchline in advance? They seem to have a secret among themselves: they look at each other conspiratorially. Their comedy is hermetic. It conceals, it reveals, it opens.

MUD
A river overflows its banks, then recedes. What's left is alluvial mud, a substance that may be more solid or more liquid. Mud makes agriculture, and therefore civilization, possible. It is also the medium in which cuneiform literature is written. A stylus made from a reed is pressed into the soft tablet. Tablets were small, hand-held, many-sided; British archeologists called them prisms. This essay is a twelve-sided prism. The reed itself comes from the riverbank: you could say it marks the midpoint between water and earth, solidity and fluidity. Sometimes the river floods, with apocalyptic consequences. So the writing implement itself is already symbolic, symbolic of the ancient Mesopotamian world at large, including its apocalypse, before it even begins to write.

Mud is a mixture of earth and water (even as the human is a mixture of earth and spirit); it adheres to us, and it moves beneath us. In The Tablets, base matter, in the form of mud and its corporeal adjuncts–-blood, saliva, shit, pus, piss, vomit, “vagina-musk,” etc.—appear seemingly on every page:
Here is a kind of blazon, where each part of the body is a source of debasement: throat (“you will choke”); mouth, stomach, heart (“you will puke out your heart”); stomach again, this time with emphasis on its networks of nerves (“the pit of your thinking stomach”); feet (“feet caught in the swampy muck”). So the human image itself is cast in terms of the abject, of base matter.

In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva contrasts the abject with the object. If the object has a definite relation to a subject, giving meaning to the symbolic order, “what is abject, on the other hand, draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” and where “I am at the border of my condition as a living being,” (2-3). The abject rests below the object because it exists in relation to a higher part of the self: “To each ego its object, to each superego its abject,” (2). For this reason, “[a]bjection accompanies all religious structurings and reappears, to be worked out in a new guise, at the time of their collapse,” (17). Yet the abject has much to teach us: “There is nothing like the abjection of the self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded,” (3).

Where do we find the abject?
And let us not forget Eliot: The Waste Land is about a drought, begins with a much-needed rain, and ends by summoning the thunder and then finally a “Damp gust / Bringing rain.” But, in contrast to Kristeva, Eliot does not see the possibilities for renewal that lie in the abject. For him, it is simply “ruin” (as in “fragments shored against my”). Rain is good in Eliot because it relieves abjection and ushers in fertility, in Kristeva because it creates abjection (mud) and ushers in the possibility of renewal.

OBSCENITY
One keeps waiting for the radiant gists to emerge from the archive, from the silence; they do infrequently, and when they do, Schwerner is quick to undermine them. One way he does this is by fragmentation. Another is obscenity, often laced with humor:
The fragment begins with prophecy and ends with a cringe-inducing pun on bullshit. But when one thinks about it for a moment, it has much to say to us. Bullshit is mendacity, but it is also fiction, it is also improvisation (“I'm just bullshitting . . . “). And it is just these qualities which set The Tablets apart from the work in ethnopoetics going on around Schwerner and the broader tradition of Poundian mythopoesis that precedes it: you could say The Tablets are fertilized by Schwerner's complex fiction and his performances.

Obscenity comes from the Latin for ill-omened. So then obscenity lies opposite the kinds of omens Gilgamesh gets from the stars. Fiction and improvisation—disruptive activities—are on the side of the bad omens.

Schwerner’s use of obscenity reminds us that the genre he is working in, or in relation to, has a historical arc. It begins as fin-de-siècle aestheticism yields to twentieth century horror: it begins with the gorgeous word “Gongula” and ends perhaps with:
This irresolvable contradiction is not elegant like an aphorism. It does not hold out the promise of enlightenment, even an ever-deferred promise. Light does not attach to it, as it does to Wittgenstein's fragments and aphorisms.

What then is Schwerner doing?

The line is partly about paradox, or perhaps the conjunction of opposites (wet, dry) so basic and stark that they do not even rise to the level of paradox.

Confronted with the “old Water Dryer,” the reader can think in terms of logical abstraction; in terms of occult enigma; or in terms of literary allusion.

Instead of proceeding in any of those directions, Schwerner reaches for the concrete: what could be more concrete than “ooze,” which brings into the poem solid, liquid, air, a way of moving, perhaps a stickiness, a sickness . . .

This gets back to Schwerner's metaphysical sadness.

MODERNISM
Schwerner connects mud to modernism on the first page of the book:
Much of what characterizes the poem as a whole emerges here: the call-and-response between the voice of the “original” poem and the voice of the Scholar/Translator (who enters like Enkidu heralded by a star, the asterisk); the intersection of literary and religious culture (“(scholarship?) (meditation?)”); anachronism in the original text (socks); anachronism apparently introduced by the Scholar/Translator (modernism); scatological humor (is the underwear dry?); an interest in the fate of Anglophone literary modernism; and lots of mud.

Let us dwell a moment on modernism. The Scholar/Translator identifies part of the text—let us say just the sentence “Little squish; and wet socks,” though there is no reason the asterisk can't “apply” to the whole passage beginning with “I made a mistake”—as an instance of “modernism.” This is an anachronism: and yet what does modernism do if not find itself in images of primordiality? To this way of thinking, how else could you identify modernism than the way the Scholar/Translator does here? And so the Scholar/Translator has piled one anachronism (modernism) on top of another anachronism “already” in the “original” text (socks)—or perhaps in the Scholar/Translator's mistranslation?—in order to tell a truth about the relationship between modernism and the archaic. Schwerner: “Eliot and Pound structured ironic and tragic commentaries by confronting past and present. Why not go further, I thought, and recreate the past itself, in a series of subjectively ordered variations suggestively rooted in the archaic?” (135). But Eliot and Pound were already recreating the past, as Eliot acknowledged when he acknowledged Pound as “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.” And indeed, what is Cathay if not “a series of subjectively ordered variations suggestively rooted in the archaic?” Schwerner isn't doing the modernists one better by inventing a past, but by inventing a farce.

It is difficult to read The Tablets without reckoning with Guy Davenport's claim that “What is most modern in our time frequently turns out to be the most archaic,” (21). In his essay “The Symbol of the Archaic,” he lists the large number of modernist heavyweights whose work is derived from archaic sources: Picasso, Stravinsky, Khlebnikov, Tatlin, etc. He writes: “Behind all this passion for the archaic . . . is a longing for something lost, for energies, values, and certainties unwisely abandoned by an industrial age,” (24). There is a name for this passion, this longing: nostalgia, for the heady modernist moment already fading when Davenport was young, as well as the nostalgias that were part of modernism, though he concedes that “our search for the archaic may have contributed to our being even more lost,” (28).

What does it look like when a modernist loses his way? In 1929, Mary and George Oppen visited Pound in Rapallo:
Can we conjure a better image of Schwerner's Scholar/Translator than the ridiculous figure drawn by Mary Oppen?

THE SWIMMING ANIMAL
For the Scholar/Translator, the value of his life's work lies in its having demonstrated that human self-consciousness—which underwrites the life of the mind, which makes us cultural—existed earlier in history and so represents a more significant part of our human patrimony. It is as if the further back we place the mirror, the stronger the claim the image we see in it has on us, for it has been projected across a greater gulf of separation. Here the Scholar/Translator comes close to the logic of Wallace Stevens's “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”: “I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard or felt came not but from myself; / And there I found myself more truly and more strange” (51).

Is it more truly because more strange?

Truth and strangeness are strange to each other. And true to each other.

For Yeats, it was the Celtic Twilight; for Pound it was the troubadours and the Chinese; for Heidegger it was the Presocratics; for Olson the Mayans—again and again the twentieth century makes desperate attempts to outmaneuver history, to reacquire, as if by sheer force of anachronism, a basis upon which to ground culture. It never works, because the cultures of the past do not in fact lay themselves open to us as the fictions and conventions of our knowing would lead us to believe.

Modernism recoils from modernity. It is no more surprising that this recoil should take the form of an embrace of the archaic than that it should take the less humane forms of futurism or, in our time, the Silicon Valley apocalypticism of Peter Thiel.

Schwerner sees the folly in this enterprise; in any event, he does something different. The Tablets do not pretend to convey truths; in fact, they foreclose the possibility of conveying truths because every perspective in the text undermines both itself and every other. The Tablets do not renew values or reclaim certainties or redeem losses. You cannot build anything on them: all you can do is read them.

Just so, “a fish can only swim. If a poem is a fish it must discover that swimming's what it does. Sympathy. Sympathy” (136). This sentence from Schwerner's “Tablets Journals/Divigations,” calls to mind Pound's and Creeley's tormented tautologies, e.g. “Listen to the sound that it makes” or “A foot is to kick with”: the identity of form and content, and the Whiteheadean idea that process—in his case, the process of constructing anthropological knowledge—reveals reality, mark Schwerner as part of the Poundian / Black Mountain tradition. But Schwerner continues: “But how about that ocean, the world, where it gets harder and harder to set up categories of the real and unreal as tenable hypotheses?” (136). This question marks the place where Schwerner moves beyond the tradition he's a part of and becomes most himself as a poet:
But no sooner does he arrive at this moment of Romantic afflatus than the humble and even base actions of the body bring him soberly back to reality:
CONCLUSION: THE PRESENT
The Tablets reveal a poet caught between the imposing legacy of modernism and the bracing skepticism animating postwar culture. To that extent it allows us to see in microcosm much of the course of experimental poetics over the decades in which The Tablets were written and beyond. One way to tell that story is as follows: after WWII modernism was hijacked by “French theory” under the pressure of the academic job market, morality became relative, words lost their meanings, and poetry no longer speaks to humankind. But the clownish figure of the Scholar / Translator allows us to see that this shift from, for lack of better terms, vision to skepticism, represents, not unlike the advent of Enkidu, a moment of moderation. “We are not talking about a gesture of rejection,” writes Foucault in “What Is Enlightenment?” “We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers” (45).

Pound, like Eliot, believed in the presence of the past. This belief underwrites the exhilarating early journals collected by Richard Sieburth in A Walking Tour of Southern France, where Pound travels Languedoc to see by the same light by which the troubadours saw, as much as it does his embrace of fascism's nostalgic fantasy. If we turn back to L.P. Hartley for a moment, we see that, for all we associate him with the “poem including history,” there is in fact no history in Pound.

Our conventional way of thinking, steeped in cancel culture, holds that Pound is monstrous because he was a fascist, and so we, certainly not fascists, are therefore not monstrous, either. Case closed! But if we work the other side of the equation, and start by saying that Pound was a fascist because he was monstrous, not the other way around, we leave ourselves open—as we must—to our own moral cuplability. We also, because we have not closed off discussion, gain more insight into Pound's particular monstrosity. And I would argue that he was monstrous, in part, because he did not know how to think historically.

Foucault's “What Is Enlightenment?” originates in a lecture from 1983. “Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements,” he writes, “but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude—that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our era,” (46). The character of this attitude, which Foucault elaborates from Baudelaire, is less important than the fact that it is an attitude, and not faithfulness to a doctrine we adopt when, under the pressure of a past that is different from and unassimilable to the present, we proceed into a future that is indeterminate, open, and perhaps free.

WORKS CITED
Ed. Dalley, Stephanie. Myths from Mesopotamia. London: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Davenport, Guy. The Geography of the Imagination. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.

Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.

—. The Order of Things. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Random House, 1970.

Ed. George, Andrew. The Epic of Gilgamesh. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Treasures of Darkness. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.

Noegle, Scott. “Dreams and Dream Interpreters in Mesopotamia and in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). In ed.

Kelly Bulkeley, Dreams and Dreaming: A Reader in Religion, Anthropology, History, and Psychology. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave-St. Martin's Press, 2001, pp. 45-71.

Oppen, Mary. Meaning a Life. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1978.

Rochberg, Francesca. “Mesopotamian Cosmology.” In ed. Daniel C. Snell, A Companion to the Ancient Near East, second edition. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2020, pp. 305-320.

Schwerner, Armand. The Tablets: Selected Poems and Translations. Edited by Michael Heller. Chicago: Verge Books, 2026.

Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. New York: The Library of America, 1997.

Stephen Williams is the author of four books, most recently Is and Isn't (selva oscura, 2026), and a chapbook, Scholar's Rocks (OLAH, 2026).He lives in Chicago and teaches at the School of the Art Institute.

^{[1] The Adapa story is adapted from Stephanie Dalley's Myths from Mesopotamia (London: Oxford University Press, 1989).}