“Ever has the river risen and brought us flood,
The Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet X
the mayfly floating on the water.
On the face of the sun its countenance gazes,
then all of a sudden nothing is there!”
Enkidu of the wild would be the only one who could measure himself against Gilgamesh. The gods brought his existence as a counterweight to Gilgamesh’s strength. But in their struggle, Gilgamesh stood as the victor. In the encounter with this Other, Gilgamesh found himself, or so he thought. Yet Enkidu remained merely a mirror; Hegel’s slave constructed through friendship.
Gilgamesh had found an equal, and together with this equal he wished to build a monument that could reflect his own greatness. Therefore, in hubris, they defied the gods together and killed Humbaba, the guardian of the cedar forest. Ishtar herself, dazzled by Gilgamesh’s feat, asked for his love. But Gilgamesh did not desire the love of the gods; he was not receptive to the negativity of love that Byung-Chul Han unmasks in The Agony of Eros (2017), for love presupposes death—the submission of the self before death. Ishtar became enraged, not out of pride, but because of Gilgamesh’s self-love and vanity, and thus sent the Bull of Heaven in a failed attempt to punish him and Enkidu. With one of the bull’s own limbs, Enkidu humiliated Ishtar, which was punished with a divine death sentence.
In Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh saw his own mortality. Enkidu had given Gilgamesh the eyes of an Other with which to behold himself. Through the death of the Other, he now saw the fragility, a crack, within the self. In Enkidu’s death, he became certain of his own powerlessness as master over slave. He wandered through the wild, seeking the clay that could piece the self together; to make it whole and eternal, and rid himself of existence’s immanent incompleteness. And in the moment he believed he had found it, a serpent stole his hope and shed its skin.
Heidegger was right in his analysis that death is one’s own. It is not possible to understand one’s own death through another. Gilgamesh’s moment of “aletheia” was only made possible through his dialectical relation to Enkidu. The Self—all singularity of becoming—is inherently negative (I am willing to step down from my throne of Deleuzianism, forgive me my beloveds). Just as one cannot find a lost object where it is not located, one can never find a negativity that is already present. Death as such is always present as a watchful dark precondition for our existence. The self is thus always haunted by something other than itself: its own end.
Monumentalism is a curse. It conceals death with a veil. Through the will to create permanence, through the murder of Humbaba, a distorted lie arises that prevents the self from seeing itself. We live among all these damn monuments. They are stacked upon each other and refuse to disappear, obscuring our sun and its desert.
Monumentalism praises its own lies. It justifies itself by being a documentation; a “I was here” carved into a filthy toilet. But Kilroy was no builder of monuments. The concern of monumentalism is not memory, but the archive—perhaps memory as a computer remembers. But for the one who cannot forget, there is nothing to remember. It creates an impossibility of mourning. A grief that was never allowed to be experienced (sad that I mourn mourning). In the same way that contemporary love is not love but a kind of pornographization of love—a sort of love without suffering, as Byung-Chul Han argues—monumentalism carries a kind of pornographization of our own death:
“Death, like mourning, has become obscene and awkward, and it is good taste to hide it, since it can offend the well-being of others. Etiquette forbids any reference to the dead. Cremation is the limit point of this discrete elimination, since it minimalises the remains. No more vertigo of death, only dereliction [désaffecté]. And the immense funeral cortège is no longer of a pious order, it is the sign of dereliction itself, of the consumption of death. In consequence, it grows in proportion to the disinvestment of death. […]
Speaking of death makes us laugh in a strained and obscene manner. Speaking of sex no longer provokes the same reaction: sex is legal, only death is pornographic. Society, having ‘liberated’ sexuality, progressively replaces it with death which functions as a secret rite and fundamental prohibition. In a previous, religious phase, death was revealed, recognised, while sexuality was prohibited. Today the opposite is true. But all ‘historical’ societies are arranged so as to dissociate sex and death in every possible way, and play the liberation of one off against the other which is a way of neutralising them both.” (Baudrillard, Jean. 1976. Symbolic Exchange in Death.)
Love requires a submission to the Other, and grief requires an abandonment of the self; our own life. Ironic, I know. “To will that there be life only is to make sure that there is only death” (ibid).
It is not true that authenticity has died in this necropolis of stacked monuments. Death is my own. It is the constant possibility of my own impossibility. To murder is to steal someone else’s death; the most radical form of enslavement. Even a slave owns their own death where they do not own their life; in the master-slave dialectic, the slave is the one who clings to life:
“Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave describes the battle for life and death. The party who emerges as master does not fear death. The desire for freedom, recognition, and sovereignty raises the master above concern for bare life. It is fear of dying that induces the future slave to subordinate himself to the Other. Preferring servitude to the threat of death, the slave clings to bare life. Physical superiority does not determine the outcome of the struggle. Instead, what proves decisive is the ‘ability to die,’ or a capacity for death. Those who do not have freedom unto death (Freiheit zum Tod) do not risk their life. Instead of ‘following through to the point of death’ (mit sich selbst bis auf den Tod zu gehen), they remain ‘standing alone within death’ (an sich selbst innerhalb des Todes stehen). The slave does not venture as far as death, and therefore becomes a vassal who labors.” (Han, Byung-Chul. The Agony of Eros. 2017)
To be authentic is to overcome this dialectic—something not even Gilgamesh managed. I am not romanticizing death with my silly little words. Yet in order to honor life, we must honor death and thus, to be authentic, we need to integrate our negativity into virtue; we must love our fate.
Art may be dead in this world of digital data registration, where art is monumentalized. But what is still possible is to create a mayfly on the river. A poem that only I get to read. A symphony for deaf ears and a work of art on an abandoned wall. Nothing has been stolen; we only need to learn to open our eyes to events. To learn to open doors where the new may arrive and the old may be forgotten. The band The Grateful Dead was such an arrival. (Half-formed thought: if we must imagine Sisyphus happy, then we must imagine the dead as grateful).
This kind of event should perhaps be called imago; the Latin word for “image,” but also the origin of the English “imagine”—to envision. These “images” stand in contrast to Baudrillard’s “simulacra,” as they are temporary openings of something new—thus not copies. An imago is a metamorphosis of the old, which allows death and celebrates its own fate as mortal. It is within this concept that we can mourn: to allow ourselves to be incomplete. By confronting our own negativity and letting the old die in ecdysis. But just as love forces us to die in the Other, we must have the courage to let ourselves die in what is arriving.
Alas! Down with monumental art, and long live the imaginal. For we are all mayflies on the river.