Aphorisms #4
~~~
“You are like the man who lay down to give his shadow a rest.”
~~~
This proverb in the second person feels like the application of a fable: ‘you’ are being criticised by way of comparison to a fable. But there is no such fable, nor indeed is there a ‘you’ because the object of the criticism is yet to be found. The proverb is armed and ready, if you can find occasion.
What does it mean? Don’t ask me I merely wrote it. [Answers, please, in the comments.]
It seems I am fascinated by shadows, particularly those that accompany us, attached but uninvited, as we walk the streets. At times, on a bright summer day, our shadows are doubles, following us, preceding us, slipping alongside, getting under our feet. Other shadows swallow them. They vanish into ginnels and alleyways, dissolve in the leafless gaps of hedgerows. Who knows what else they get up to? A photographer will tell you they disfigure portraits and must be managed, redirected, softened.
The man who lay down to give his shadow a rest was making an excuse for his own wish to relax. He projects it onto his shadow, which is itself a kind of spontaneous projection, as the shadow felt the exertion of his body’s movements and would at some point be fatigued by all the contortions it must perform. It’s foolish, dare I say, whimsical. But really it’s an example of someone making an excuse, pretending a generous motive for an act which gratifies them.
BACK TO BABYLON
The form of this aphorism was inspired by the fragments of Sumerian proverbs I discovered last week. A number of these were rendered in the second person:
“Like the ox, you do not know how to turn back.”
“Like the wild bull, you only do what pleases you.”
“You go like an elephant to raise a sunken boat.”
Many of these proverbs are rooted in the imagery of agriculture—oxen, donkeys, ploughs—which was no surprise coming from the rich arable lands between the Tigris and the Euphrates (aka Eden). What struck me, and I confess amused and delighted me, was the promince of scatalogical motifs. (See the boastful, defecating elephant of the fable.) Thinking about it now, it should not have been so unexpected. Farmland is full of manure, dung, and the fable was not high-brow literature, the literature of the poets, metaphysics and myths; indeed, not so much literature, as collected oral sayings and stories.
The meaning of some is obscure, others intriguing, while many reveal the consistency of folk wisdom through the ages; some things just don’t change.
“The wild bull is taboo for the plough.”
“No one walks for a second time in the place where a lion has eaten a man.”
“If the lion heats the soup, who would say “it is not good?”
“Imagine a wolf is eating. Utu looks down on it and says: “When will you praise me?” “When I’m fat!” would be the answer.
and my personal favourite:
“The dog gnawing on a bone says to his anus: “This is going to hurt you.”
Think on that.
~~~
