[In case you missed it, here is The Fist (part 1 of 3)
On the sixth day of our journey, Babel rose in the distance. The city was surrounded by agricultural lands, around which pastoralists tended their flocks. After these wide bands of fields came a ring of sprawling encampments for fieldworkers and semi-nomads. These settlements—comprised of tents and shanties—fell beyond the boundaries of Babel, and if those walls the messenger mentioned had been built, they would have drawn a clear border between the city and these peripheral spaces. It occurred to me that the lack of borders indicated a strange condition. A city is most often identifiable through the relationship between two points: its outer border and its center. What did it mean for Babel to lack walls and to have at its center the emptiness of Tower Square?
Soon we entered the city proper. The shift in the environment was immediately apparent. Tents gave way to brick constructions. Winding and narrow dirt pathways became paved streets. The streets were wider than in Enoch, ran straight for the most part, and intersected each other at right angles, forming an orderly grid. But just as the observer’s eye tired of the predictable view, an irregularity presented itself and refreshed the gaze. Like the streets, the buildings formed a general architectural unity without succumbing to drab sameness. There were five basic building styles, then a host of minor styles, possibly reflecting the aesthetic preferences of the major and minor nations. My view that the styles related to the nations was strengthened as we continued, for when we’d pass from one quarter to another the dominant style would shift. It wasn’t just a shift in the architecture. The whole texture of the space transformed—methods of ornamentation, use of color, attention to detail, and so on—perhaps mirroring the national characteristics of the people dwelling there.
As a master craftsman of the decorative arts, I have a keen eye for aesthetic embellishment. I was struck not just by the ubiquity of embellishments but by the excellent craftsmanship of the local artists. Some pieces were so well done that even I, recognized by many as the greatest master throughout Shinar, could not have done better. If the city contained an artistic culture of this level, I thought as we moved through the streets toward the city center, why would they need a foreigner, a stranger, to design and produce a coat of arms—and perhaps, with any luck, a complete heraldic achievement?
My assistants and I were provided lodging not far from Tower Square. My assistants had rooms on the first floor of the inn, I above them on the second. The room was pleasant and opened onto a small balcony facing an inner courtyard containing four rows of four date palms. On the ground floor was a restaurant, where, by the terms of our agreement with the city’s council of elders, the assistants and I could take our meals. The council had also provided us with a workshop. It was a nice space and a short walk from the inn. It had the equipment we’d need to design and produce our work.
The question was how I was to achieve what the Babelites themselves had failed to achieve for generations—unity through symbolic representation of a shared identity. Naturally, I queried the messenger, but he was of no help, telling me that it wasn’t the role of a messenger to express thoughts about these weighty topics. If it got back to the council of elders that he’d attempted to prejudice the process, he was likely to be punished.
My assistants and I were on our own to find the solution. On the day after my arrival in the city, I insisted on speaking with the members of the council of elders. It was a necessary but foolish move, necessary because the members of the council most likely expected I appear in front of them, and foolish because if the council had the capacity to solve the problem, they would not have needed to take the extraordinary step of summoning me, an outsider, to invent the civic iconography. When the council meeting was over and it was clear there would be no shortcut to the endpoint, I resigned myself to the unpredictable and fickle fate of artistic inspiration. There was no telling how long it would take for inspiration to strike. Weeks or months were not uncommon. One might say that I could simply settle for something less than an ideal solution, or to put it in more positive terms, I could develop the best available idea I had at my disposal. That, of course, was not a serious option. In the first place, the city would reject a suboptimal solution to this vital task. This rejection would place me and my assistants at risk. Even if the people did, at least temporarily, accept the suboptimal idea, the idea’s inevitable failure would do irreparable damage to my reputation. And what is more valuable to a master craftsman than his reputation?
On the other hand, my plan to wait patiently for inspiration possessed two dangers. The first, the most immediate, was that the council of elders would lose patience. They had pledged significant resources in the form of my fee and were now bearing the costs of room, board, workshop space, and supplies for me and my assistants. How long would they allow us to exist in the city without demonstrating progress was unknown. My experience tells me, as a rule, that city leadership does not look fondly on foreigners who appear to be idling away. No city can tolerate such a situation without at least a vague sense of when it is expected to come to an end. The second danger was more acute. It concerned my assistants, especially the moldmaker. When bored, as I said, he had a tendency to lose himself in drink. On three previous occasions, I’d rescued him from the repercussions of a drunken mishap, which were always made worse by being in foreign lands. One night in Tubal, despite our work moving along at a steady (albeit slow) pace, he drank himself into a frenzy, wandered to the temple, and smashed a statue of Enki, the god of water, with a hammer, knocking off a chunk of the god’s head. If it weren’t for the masterful quality of our work on the city’s heraldic achievement, it is almost certain he (and probably I) would have been put to death.
Each morning, after breakfast at the inn, I set out into the city, usually alone, occasionally with one or both of my assistants. I wandered aimlessly, moving down one of the wonderful streets only to quickly turn right or left when a pang of something drew me off my course. The goal, if I had one, was to experience the city, to immerse myself in it, to feel it through the total array of my sensorium.
On these excursions, I’d talk to anyone who would talk to me. I wouldn’t talk to them about city issues, and certainly would never mention the task of constructing the iconographic representations of the city’s identity. I needed to get at those bigger topics through the details of people’s daily lives, their individual hopes and dreams, their memories, their visions for the future, their worries, their fears, their troubles. Slowly, the blurry picture of Babel began to come into focus.
Over the preceding generations Babel had developed into a rich and powerful city. The average family in Babel, compared with Tubal or my native Enoch, swam in the waters of luxury and abundance. Sure, on the outskirts of Babel among the semi-nomads there was poverty, but there is no city on earth that doesn’t have poverty on its outskirts. Inside the ring of tents and shanties, within the brick and mortar of the city itself, comfort reigned. Houses were spacious. Markets were full of goods. Tradesmen from Shinar and beyond packed the inns, bringing silks and spices and other delicacies across land and sea to satisfy the demands of Babel. There were items one would never dream of seeing in Enoch.
One might think that amid this general abundance there would be happiness. This was not the case. The problem was not the general abundance. It was the division of the general abundance which created tensions and conflicts. Each nation wanted an ever-increasing share of the general abundance, and no matter how large a nation’s share grew, it was never enough. Competition was strongest among the five largest nations, each of which always felt the others were exploiting some advantage to increase their share. The competition among the five major nations was to the ultimate detriment not so much to them as to the numerous minor nations in the city. By some counts, there were twelve minor nations, by other counts twenty-four. The small nations sink into poverty, their representatives would say, while the rich nations grow fatter. To sum up the point: the richer Babel became and the more abundance the city contained, the more greed there was among the nations, and the less happiness among the people.
Related to the issues of abundance, competition, and greed was anxiety among Babelites about the status of the fieldworkers and semi-nomads. There were many tangible benefits to their presence along the rim of the city. They provided labor at the lowest levels of the building trades—mainly digging and hauling. Their work in the fields and pastures was vital, for who else but the fieldworkers and semi-nomads would provide grain and meat for the lush tables of Babel? And yet even those who understood the great benefits of the shanty and tent-dwellers also hated and feared them. “Those beyond the wall,” a Babelite would say, though there were no walls surrounding Babel, “don’t belong in the city. They are an unfortunate necessity, and when they are no longer necessary, we shall remove them.”
I wasn’t surprised by this attitude. I’d encountered the same hostility in other places, not least in my native Enoch. The strongest opponents of “those beyond the walls” were the members of the smallest of the small nations, who lived in the outer rings of Babel. Many of these nations could remember times when they were “outside the walls,” and while one might think this communal memory would make them more tolerant and understanding of their former brethren, more often the opposite was the case. Once “inside the walls,” the new minor nations would turn their backs on the fieldworkers and semi-nomads. They, much louder than the major nations, would call for the hardening of boundaries between inside and outside. They feared that without actual walls and gates one day their nation might crumble into the surrounding settlement, returning to the original “disorganized” state.
The division between “inside the walls” and “outside the walls” did nothing to lessen the bitter divisions between nations on the inside. Not even the unifying force of excluding the peoples “beyond the walls” was enough to produce internal cohesion. An example: debate raged about which nation was the true founding nation of Babel. Whose ancestors had been the brave souls who migrated “from the east” to settle in Shinar? All five major nations claimed to be able to trace their lineage back to the founders. Each had its own “table of nations,” which made precise connections from one generation to the next. Of course, the small nations also had such tables, but their authenticity was rejected. The only small nation whose table of nations was not rejected by the five major nations was the Marites. It was undisputed in Babel that prophets and priests from the Marite line could be authentically traced back at least to the early generations. It goes without saying that these lineages, these “tables of nations,” including the Marite table, were sheer nonsense. They were nothing but fables—the “Marite table” most of all. But the more fabulistic such a thing is, the more vehemently people cling to it as truth.
At the heart of everything in Babel was the tower. It would be a mistake, a major mistake, to assume that the issue of the tower was at the forefront of people’s minds. No. One could talk to a Babelite for hours and the topic of the tower would never come up. The tower was below the surface; the tower was not the topic of the discussion but the essence of the discussion. Conversations, which had nothing to do with the tower, were, in fact, primarily about the tower. I set out to gain the fullest possible understanding of the meaning of the tower. I sensed that if I traced this meaning to its root, I’d discover the unifying principle necessary to complete not only the city’s coat of arms but its complete heraldic achievement.
Everyone I encountered in Babel agreed that the tower should be built “to heaven.” This was, as the messenger had told me, the original impulse, and to lose sight of it would make the concept of the tower meaningless. What would it mean for the tower to reach heaven? Here, the consensus splintered. For some, the tower to heaven was an actual, physical gateway to the divine realm. The tower, by reaching heaven, would join heaven and earth and shatter the boundary between the two, giving the human world access to the divine world of purity and goodness. For others, the tower to heaven wasn’t meant to penetrate the divine space but only to reach the boundary of heaven, thus bringing the human as close as possible to the gods while still maintaining the division. For these people, closeness was essential for true worship, especially for sacrificial practices. Others interpreted “heaven” not as the divine realm but as “sky,” and argued that the tower was meant to be a “very high tower” in relation to the size and scale of the city. Its function was to rise over the city from its central position on Tower Square, thus allowing city dwellers a pleasing perspective on the tower from any point in and beyond the “walls.” Most agreed—no matter what they thought about the tower’s height—that the tower would function as a temple, that it would have otherworldly significance, even if it didn’t reach or aspire to reach the heavenly realm. On the other hand, there was a minority, cutting across all national groups large and small, which denied the tower any holy meaning or cultic function. The tower, for them, was an expression of human ingenuity. The tower would communicate to Babelites and foreigners that the city of Babel was the most technologically advanced city in the world. The tower would sparkle with Babelite genius. This faction was especially concerned with delaying construction. Just around the next bend, just over the visible horizon, they believed, was a far superior building method, a method that would make our current method appear antiquated and comical. A tower built in what would soon become an antiquated and comical way would represent not Babel’s strength and genius but its weakness and stupidity. Finally, there was a small group which saw the construction itself as the meaning of the tower. The meaning was in laying brick on brick. They didn’t mean method, as the technologists did. They didn’t mean materials. They meant the human action, the labor, the human energy, involved in the building. The building process would embody the working people. For these people, opposite the technologists, the failure to begin construction was appalling, the emptiness of Tower Square intolerable.
The status of Tower Square was similarly divisive. Two extreme positions formed the poles of the debate. There were those, like the labor faction, who saw the square’s emptiness as abject failure, as the betrayal of the city’s foundational promise. And there were those, like the technologists, who saw the square’s emptiness as containing the full and pure realization of Babel’s utopian future.
In sum, underlying any belief in Babel was a perspective on the tower’s presence and the tower’s absence. The yearning for relief from this intolerable existential condition—a looming but imaginary tower, the full yet empty Tower Square—generated what my assistants and I understood as a visceral hatred for the city. This hatred led to a desire for the city’s destruction. As usual, the tower was at the center. A legend formed and went like this: no sooner would the tower of Babel reach heaven then it, along with the entire city, would be obliterated. With the laying of the first brick, therefore, the eschatological countdown would begin. The end of the building process would be the end of time—apocalypse. At the markets, in the inns and pubs, along the streets, in private rooms and shaded courtyards, on the squares and in the public parks the longing was the same. It was the longing for a force to intervene to unmake the sick place Babel had become. The question was how to represent this desire for destruction graphically on a coat of arms such that the interested parties, foremost the council of elders, would accept it.
The calligrapher, for example, suggested destruction should come through a foreign king’s invasion and conquest. This was out of the question. If Babelites hated each other, they hated outsiders even more. Survival, however odious, was preferable to being conquered. The moldmaker came up with the idea of fire—a fire that would sweep through the entire city, burning it to the ground. This seemed like a good idea, and initially I was enthusiastic (and even began some preliminary designs) but when we took it to the people, we learned there was a problem with fire’s symbolic implications. Fire, for most Babelites, evoked purification, and purification was a concept the Babelites rejected entirely, for, in the words of one respondent “it implied the possibility of redemption, and there would be no redemption for Babel.” The opposite means of destruction, flooding, suffered from the same critique.
Day after day, I found refuge in the workshop. In the first weeks, the assistants would come and spend mornings debating ideas. When it became clear these discussions were leading nowhere, they started to leave early, well before lunchtime. Eventually, they stopped coming at all. I continued to unlock the workshop each morning, if only to symbolically enter it. Often, I left after an hour or less. I wandered the streets, sometimes to the periphery of Babel where people spoke more freely. The semi-nomads spoke most freely of all. “The Babelites are doomed,” they told me with a fair amount of pleasure. “They live outside nature. They are at war with nature. The declaration of their intent to build a tower to heaven is a declaration of war against the gods. The end of Babel,” they concluded, “was sewn at its inception.”
If Babel is destroyed, I asked them, what will you do? Don’t you depend on the city to sustain you. Isn’t that why you are here, camped permanently on its border?
They laughed. The city, they told me, sustains them far less than they sustain the city. It was another mistake of the Babelites to assume the semi-nomads were parasitically feeding on the host. They, the semi-nomads, were the vital conduits between Babel and the world. “Without us,” one semi-nomad leader said, “Babel’s luxury would be exhausted in a day.”