Baba Brinkman - Gilgamesh lyrics

Run your fingers over the stones of this ancient city These temples of worship and places of business And picture them falling into desolation Just drifting sand and standing walls and vacant buildings You can't take it with you where you're going But someone who comes here in five thousand years Exploring might unearth a recording That tells the world your story Some confabulation of words stored in a subterranean Purgatory could well emerge to tell those Who still dwell on earth that you were born And that your works were worth reporting Well this is the first story; not the oldest Told by troubadours, but the oldest in written form ‘Cause who can say whether troubadours don't improve Their sources, of course the story's origins are oral But it was preserved for thousands of years In Akkadian verse tablets and Sumerian cuneiform Preserved like Cuban cigars in a humidor So we can be sure that it's true to its source Not a folk story transformed in ten thousand villages But a relic of the ancient world, preserved with diligence The oldest narrative that still exists The epic of Gilgamesh When the gods created Gilgamesh, they gave him a perfect body Like Arnie when his films were still impressive Like Conan the Barbarian, physical brilliance Like sculpted steel as flesh The gods endowed him with strength and courage and fine Features; like a work of art, perfectly designed Brad Pitt would have looked liked a turd beside him He was one third mortal, and two thirds divine And as an aside, I guess the Sumerians when this poem was written Were not aware of chromosome division Or Mendellian genetics; no organism That reproduces s**ually is two-thirds of anything Maybe they calculated paternity as a percentage Of the number of men that the mother had been with before she got pregnant Which is the case with certain indigenous South American Indians Increasing the incentive for the men to collaborate on parental investment But when the gods are involved these calculations are irrelevant Because they're practically omnipotent And Gilgamesh was a mortal man with two-thirds god genes In the Sumerian catalogue of kings He's listed as the fifth ruler of Uruk after the flood came And washed away all things So our story begins with Gilgamesh in charge of the peace And the people of Uruk, not pleased And why were they less than pleased? Because Gilgamesh was an extreme s** fiend To put it simply, he deflowered every virgin And slept with the wife of every peasant and the daughter Of every nobleman whenever he felt the urge and For the people of Uruk, this was a heavy burden In fact, the original version only says That the men found it a heavy burden Which begs the question: was the consent of these women earned Or did he just take it? My inclination is to stay with the basics Nowhere is he referred to as “Gilgamesh the Rapist” Which means he had game and the men were jealous haters But don't these questions always plague men of status Was he Bill Clinton-esque or Tiger Woods with a waitress? Or was he Roman Polanski or Mike Tyson dangerous? I can't possibly say from these ancient pages But I'd prefer to work with a sympathetic protagonist So in my version, he gets the benefit of the doubt Gilgamesh impressed the women with his physical prowess But his s**ual endowments were hateful to his people So they huddled in their houses and prayed for relief To the gods, like “Please, make him an equal!” And the gods heard their pleas, and created Enkidu Now, Enkidu was a wild man He was Tarzan of the highlands His body was covered in hair in fine mats He knew nothing of civilization and finance A feral child, he ran with the Ibex And ate nothing but plants, plus he was ma**ive He had this habit of releasing animals from traps And snares whenever they got captured And eventually one of the trappers ran back to The city to ask Gilgamesh for some answers He said: “There is this ma**ive hairy man Who keeps smashing the traps we set in mountain pastures He's either half an animal himself, or he's an animal rights activist But either way I'm at my wits' end, any suggestions?” And Gilgamesh said, “Yeah! Here's what you do You go to Ishtar's temple and you get a prostitute” Now, Ishtar was the Goddess of love, and destruction too And her priestesses offered free s** to the multitude Maybe religion is something even Christopher Hitchens Would've gotten into if that's what it offered you So Gilgamesh said, “Yeah, you get this temple ho This child of pleasure, and you get her to go with you Down to the watering hole, and you get her to take off her clothes And this wild man, well, he won't be wild no mo…” Whoah, forgive the Ebonic Inflections, but I just always wanted To use the word “ho” in an Epic Anyway, it happened exactly as Gilgamesh predicted Enkidu came down to the lake to take a drink And he saw this beautiful, soft, naked being This succulent, supple lady And she embraced him and… shwing! For six days and seven nights they lay by the lakeside Insatiably shagging, and it was his first time! But after when he tried to go back to his animal friends They just looked at him and fled Innocence lost Enkidu's intimate frolics with the temple harlot Had cost him his connection with nature – never again Would his animal friends look at him as one of them And from that day forward he was civilized The prostitute fed him bread and wine And said “Enkidu, you are wise, why sleep in the wild When there's shelter nearby?” And she took his hand And led him like a child to the shepherds' tent And bade him step inside and she clothed and bathed him And he stayed with the shepherds for a stretch of time And protected them from lions But only for a while; soon word arrived From the city that there would be a great Sumerian wedding And Gilgamesh wasn't the groom, but he was claiming his birthright The privilege of “First Night” That is, the right to be the first to fertilize The bride on her wedding night, just like The English did to the Scottish before 1305 When William Wallace kicked their a**es, which served them right Well, the Sumerian groom was also quite perturbed by This incursion into his personal life and when word Of their plight reached Enkidu, he turned white With anger and traveled to Uruk, determined to fight The bridal bed was made A virgin lay within it, a trembling, nervous babe As Gilgamesh approached the house, determined to get laid But Enkidu stepped in front of him and blocked his way Clash of the Titans Their grasps were like vice grips as they grappled and tightened Their ma**ive biceps, striving like angry bison Each man trying to gain the upper hand on his rival This was no battle of words, no east coast west coast Rivalry on wax, no Bad Boy / d**h Row It was a wrestling match that cracked the keystones In the walls of Uruk and shook the ziggurats And the foundations of peoples' homes But in the end, Enkidu was thrown Enkidu paid his respects to Gilgamesh for besting him And Gilgamesh was impressed that someone had even tested him Because every man he'd ever met until then was estrogen And from then on he treated Enkidu like his next of kin Now, Gilgamesh was obsessed with legacy building He wanted his name to be etched on bricks Where the names of famous men are written So he embarked on a campaign of adventurism Together they traveled to the Lebanese hills To the cedar forest, where they cut down trees And defeated Humbaba The evil demon guardian of those sweet resources Everyone tried to warn them off this quest People said: “Don't go! The demon's jaws are d**h When he says “humbaba, humbaba, hum-humbaba!” It's like he has napalm for breath!” But no one could convince them to stop Because Gilgamesh believed he was on a mission from God Which is a sure way to get drawn into wars constantly Gilgamesh had a neo-con foreign policy And when they reached the demon, its defenses were weak They overpowered the demon with superior weaponry Humbaba surrendered, and fell to his knees Pleading like a pathetic refugee Just like Saddam, a fugitive in a spider hole Begging for mercy, but they were icy cold They executed the demon with three precise blows And turned their eyes towards home Other adventures awaited, Ishtar tried to Seduce Gilgamesh by offering herself to him naked But he rejected her and she flew into a jealous rage Determined to take vengeance She released the Bull of Heaven, a personified drought Which they defeated with a sword strike, somehow But Gilgamesh was really swelling with pride now So the gods said: “It's time to take this guy down” They took the side route; they knew that Enkidu was His Achilles heel, because he was the key to his Feelings, so the gods decreed that Enkidu would Soon cease to exist, and he fell into a deep sickness And had a feverish dream vision of life after d**h In which he was a feathered wretch, sitting in pitch Darkness, staring ahead at an endless stretch Of time, and he cursed everyone he'd ever met Since he left the wilderness, the prostitute, the trapper Everyone except for Gilgamesh Who stood by his side singing a d**h lament Until Enkidu's final breath was spent For the rest of this story, Gilgamesh Is an emotional wreck in a state of perpetual mourning On a desperate quest to make his flesh immortal And it's interesting, but it isn't worth reporting It's fragmented and repetitive and it never really finishes Although it does contain a fascinating parallel with Genesis It includes a Sumerian flood narrative Which the Bible must have just inherited Suffice to say, immortality eluded him Gilgamesh returned to Uruk in a state of disillusionment And lived out his life just like the rest of us do By having children and making civic improvements So he didn't live forever, but he did leave descendants Which means the genes of Gilgamesh probably now Make up one tenth of one tenth of one percent of One hundred thousand current Middle Eastern residents The man was prolific, but if that's immortality Well then it's pretty frickin' divisive And he left us his story, the Epic of Gilgamesh Which he chiseled into the walls of his city while building it And it tells us that this human obsession With living forever in the face of certain d**h Is something we've always wrestled with Which tells us something about what it is to be human If immortality exists, ladies and gentlemen Well then I guess, you're listening to it