Tuesday, June 15, 2010

The Book of Sumerian Disquiet



Written by an unnamed assistant bookkeeper in the city of Ur

If you ask me whether I am more important than a farmer I would have to say yes. If you asked me why, I would say because I can read and write. But if you push me further on the topic my philosophies on life tend to fall apart. This is why I try not to talk to people too much and prefer to skim stones out to sea in my time off.

This afternoon after finishing my inventory of the grain store I was sent to retrieve the books from two Summers ago so that my boss could compare them. Diligently doing as I was told, I made my way out to the store room located behind the main office building. The sun was rolling accross the sky and beginning to dip slowly toward the horizon. I tried to make a mental note of its movement and colours for a fiction piece I am working on at the moment but I quite often forget life's details as I don't carry note clay.

Inside the store are rows upon rows of baskets filled with stone tablets. Most of the baskets are well labeled, at least they have been since I started, but I find people on the whole to be unreliable, and who knows if my filing system bears any resemblance to the methods assumed by the guy two years before me. The room is neat at least. I'm half proud and half terrified that the great Sumerian legacy, passed down through generations, will be the filing cabinet.

The 'fiction' I'm working on at the moment borrows a little from legend and a little from imagination. It's healthy this way I think, I don't want to pretend to be an original. There's an old story in which the Goddess of Love is the younger sister of her arch enemy the Goddess of Death. I'm trying to write a love story that runs between them, confusing the boundaries and forcing the two girls to swap positions. Will it become myth? Who knows.

Of course the filing baskets are more jumbled the further back you go. I climb to the top shelves where the Summer 3250 BC records should be. Nothing.

Whenever I'm ordered to go to a store room I very rarely expect to find what's needed and I'm very rarely disappointed. It's funny though because I wouldn't write myself off as a pessimist, I still get that tingle of possibility whenever I'm stood in the doorway - the feeling that a system has been put in place and that if I just follow the filing records to the correct date there's absolutely no reason for me not to find what I need.

I return to my boss and explain the situation to him. What do you mean you can't find the tablets? He says. I stay silent.

When he marches me back to the storeroom we find the basket of tablets marked 3250 BC in two minutes and shooting me a look which I take to mean he thinks I'm an idiot, he hands me the basket to carry back to the office. I'm reluctant to share his belief in my idiocy, I mean some people are good at finding things, others aren't. What worries me is that, if I am an idiot, I know I would draw the same conclusion and deny it. Maybe accountancy isn't for me.

In my story the love interest is going to be a fat man in his early forties. He is going to be the boss of a large firm specializing in grain shipment and I am going to kill him off.

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