31:T14e4,ERESHKIGAL and KATHARINE come to find FORAGER and FRIEND, who are still stuck. KATHARINE
Hello. ERESHKIGAL
This is Katharine. She’s an archeologist. FORAGER & FRIEND
Hello KATHARINE
Amazing. So they were on Ebih when Inanna killed it. Are we - inside Ebih? ERESHKIGAL
Yes. So, you’re familiar with being in the earth - KATHARINE
To an extent. In channels, ditches in the earth. The earth we were in was quite dusty, it had this smell. Bones and gold and the ghosts of things emerging all haphazard out from the floor. No worms. ERESHKIGAL
I’m confused about the worms. KATHARINE
There’s worms in this soil. ERESHKIGAL
Yes but there shouldn’t be. Inanna was clear - total destruction. How could she forget the worms? FORAGER These worms - Sparganophilidae… KATHARINE
As an archeologist, I started to think about the ground under my feet a lot. I’d notice that no one else did. People forget about what’s underneath them. ERESHKIGAL
You were finding gold? KATHARINE
Sure. ERESHKIGAL
But also just old stuff? KATHARINE
When you dig something up, it has meaning. Resonance. It raises big questions. FORAGER
The fungal threads hold the soil together under everything. The darkness comes up into- ERESHKIGAL
So Katharine tell us about what you found. KATHARINE
We were on an excavation in southern Iraq, in the 1920s. We pulled a city out of the ground, out from the flood and clutch of the earth. The men, Leonard especially, and I could feel it. We knew Ur as a living place. We’d walk around saying ‘what was the argument that lead to this broken vase in a doorway?’ ‘running errands from this house would have been a breeze!’ ‘I can almost smell the fires that would have burnt here’. It was all so very long ago, what we were finding. We felt those long ago people in their minutia. The haphazard way things get left behind. The fingerprints. What is a haunting? This mix between the sweat of moving dirt and the hours of delicate brushing, reconstruction… The long soft brushes over the layers covering it, and then they were all flattened by the weight of all those thousands of years of sediment. So it was this imagining of dimensions. Of course, if one is always imagining more dimensions than one can really see, it can get quite confusing for one’s normal life. Sometimes I’d be bent looking at something half uncovered and my body would feel in that action of my mother bending to plant bulbs in her dreary garden beds. This feeling of hedgerows would come to me, instead of the high walls of dirt. I’d feel small and drab and ignored and I would wait for Alawi to notice and he’d take my hand to assist me. He always noticed. The other memory which comes to mind is that whenever we found bones curled up, people who had died in the great death pit, for example - bones that weren’t laid out, but had simply died in place - I would remember my first husband. That’s how we came to the conclusion that they were some sort of suicides. We found her writing. Enheduanna’s. ERESHKIGAL
Enheduanna. FRIEND
Dirt. Delicate. Dimensions. ERESHKIGAL
Enheduanna was the first writer. KATHARINE
She wrote about Inanna. She wrote the first literature. Everyone knew about her then. They talked about her for at least a thousand years after she lived. As the first writer. And she wrote herself into it. She talked about what was happening to her. She was trying to make sense of how the world was changing. We discovered the Enheduanna calcite disk the year we were married. Later, we found seals with her name on. Then the alabaster piece. Then we found her. In the Isin-Larsa levels. She was the first writer. We think that the people of Ur thought the world of her. I did. I dreamed of her. Her looking at her own death offering. Her outcast. ERESHKIGAL
‘What I have created, no one had created before’. That’s how she thought of it. It’s true. First writer. But such pride… If she’d written about me, maybe she’d have seen. KATHARINE
That the disaster was unfolding? ERESHKIGAL
5,000 years of this sort of death. But you know that. You had your papers burnt. What sort of archeologist burns her personal papers? You’d spent your life going through other people’s discarded ephemera and then - you realized. KATHARINE
We haven’t ever listened. To the earth. We’re always pulling things out of it. Coal. Evidence. Gold. Everything I ever wrote in my papers was a distraction. FORAGER & FRIEND
A distraction. From hearing. Listen! ERESHKIGAL
Listen… FORAGER
Rot. Let go, friend. KATHARINE
What’s happening? FORAGER
Let Ebih come. ERESHKIGAL
Let the dead walk the earth? FRIEND
Let the earth take you? KATHARINE
How will this one let go? FORAGER
Ebih comes. ERESHKIGAL
Death in life. FORAGER
It has always been. The mushrooms are older than any of our stories. Death and life. Like a flush of mushrooms from the fallen tree. We are returning. The force is in the stones and streams. EBIH
I come. There is no leaving. FRIEND
I feel them come. KATHARINE
Are you - FRIEND
The mountain’s biome is more than me. FORAGER
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