Destination Thank You

Stories

In the Dead Sea Scrolls reads, inter alia, that when Adamath was called to give a name to all things and animals, acquired this power over them.

Among the gypsies, the Chinese and Celts is considered a great naivety to tell someone you do not already know his real name (the Chinese in particular have always heteronym least one officer and two or three nicknames) because this knowledge gives this person a power (magic value, for the gypsies and the Celts, is an irrefutable reality. In the case of the latter, they used to require every new baby a secret name known only to parents and the druid who imposed it, so that no one could curse him correctly).

Epic of Gilgamesh (a version not yet translated, written in Hittite by that Hattusili) states that Uruk was founded when people discovered new seeds and gave names to things that they did not, because there were so many that the world was young.

Try to imagine a world so young not to have written stories or so, because the writing had just been invented, in the form of triangular markings etched on clay tablets (derived from even older signs that were scratched directly on the rock , in the caves of the Indus Valley, which have not yet been discovered) but were used to record other things (lists, inventories, accounts of wars and crops) and non-stories, for those there is only the oral tradition.

And try to imagine (if you want) someone who convinced the scribes to record these stories were passed down and why were not forgotten, and he could tell and invent new ones.

Could it because he was a judge, a priest and a king, three roles once gathered and defined by a word that is written and pronounced ensi "elder."

One day maybe I'll want to tell that story, and write it the old fashioned way, with a pen of bronze on the smelling fresh and clay, as taught to the people of the black heads many, many years ago. Then cook in the sun and let the tablet where it can be found only in a millennium or two: in the catacombs of Rome, or in an underwater cave near Nebida, or in a crevice in the ice on Mont'Elmo, or in a closed and forgotten underground station in London, or in a display case on the bottom of Lake Victoria, or in the beautiful desert of the moon, or at any place between Ulan Bator and Ushuaia, Shamballah and Lemuria, Shangri-La and Xanadu.

Until then, good wind.