Ancient stories in modern dress: Gilgamesh
On Saturday, Silk Road will present Gilgamesh, the “world’s oldest story,” in a recent version by Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa and dramaturg Chad Gracia, at the Oriental Institute in partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival and the Poetry Foundation. Among its treasures, the Oriental Institute houses a mummified body roughly the age of the story, Mesopotamian prayer statues, and clay tablets with cuneiform writing that may depict Gilgamesh standing on the head of the vanquished monster Humbaba.
For those who don’t remember or never encountered this epic in their early education, it’s the tale of a king of Uruk (a man who actually did live nearly 4000 years ago), who according to legend was a cruel and corrupt king, until the gods created a man to balance him. They battle, they become friends. They take on monsters. The friend dies. Gilgamesh, having just learned how to care about another person, undertakes a wild quest to find the man who survived the great flood, who might share with him the secret of immortality. Frightening creatures block his journey (Komunyakaa’s scorpion people rehearse in the photo, below).
Yet Gilgamesh does find the immortal plant. And then, suddenly, after all the trouble, he puts it down for just a moment, and a snake comes along and eats it.
At the first rehearsal of this staged reading, the cast asked: what’s the message for us today?
The question of Gilgamesh is quite simple: We must go on epic impossible quests. Through them, we learn humility, we learn to care for others, and we learn, and relearn, and teach one another how to live in the world as humans, with other humans.
More information about the reading, and about Komunyakaa’s remarkable work, here:
http://poetryfoundation.org/programs/events.html