The Still Point Of The Turning World by Emily Rapp Read Free Book Online

so we could still get some exercise if we ended up staying home more. Terri and Jules helped Rick collect the machine in Terri’s truck. All of this help was offered by people I didn’t know well (yet) at all. I was grateful.
    But when I told people what was happening in our little world on Sol y Luz Street, I felt a great divide—between me and other people, and also within me. As I said
my baby is dying
(from the very beginning I refused to sugarcoat), as those words left my mouth, I was conscious of the fact that there was a “me/mother” before I knew Ronan was sick and a “me/mother” now anticipating his death, and that these two people didn’t know each other at all, and so I no longer understood how to relate to the person standing before me, waiting and wanting to help, even if it was someone I respected or even adored. With Rick, too, I felt as if I were shouting through a tidal wave of water and fire to connect with him, or trying to have a conversation in the middle of a tornado.
You have to stick together,
our friends and family told us. How, when we could hardly hear each other? All day my jaw hurt as if I’d been chewing the air.
    When I got home from the gym, Ronan was sitting on my dad’s lap, perfectly content. Rick was in the kitchen, where he’d begun to retreat on a daily basis, whipping up elaborate vegan meals, in order (I think) to have something to do with his hands. Chores were getting done at lightning speed. There wouldn’t be one tissue in a wastebasket before he’d be dumping it out. “What are you doing?” I’d ask after a Xanax-induced nap. “Organizing the forks,” he’d reply. Now he tossed onions into the skillet and I wandered into the bedroom, anxious to set my mind on something, anything, else.
    I tried reading one of Rick’s fantasy novels. Nope. I tried my usual go-tos: McCullers, Ondaatje, even Tolstoy failed me. I browsed through my small selection of fluffy, tra-la-la books. All narratives felt inane and pointless, even those with the obvious goal of being both.
    I felt guilty reading at all, in fact, knowing that Ronan never would, that he would never understand stories, or at least not in the way that writers like me struggled and strained to make them known. And then I fell upon
Myths from Mesopotamia
sitting on top of the stack of books by my bed, a book I’d been reading in preparation to teach a Bible as Literature class. Stories that nobody could agree on! Perfect.
    I cracked open the book and found precisely what I was looking for: big, bad distraction in the form of ancient myth. Royal epics translated from Akkadian! Accounts of historical kings from the second millennium BCE! Good old Gilgamesh in his fugue of grief after the loss of his dearest friend, his epic quest for immortality! Baal and his nasty nostrils! Never before—even while I was in divinity school—had I been so interested in the literary history of Babylonia and Assyria, these tales and fables that were precursors to many of the stories in the Bible.
    Akkadian myths and epics and tales got shorter as they aged, not more elaborate. Later scribes simply included signposts, like an outline, for the teller, who was forced or, I guess, invited, often in the spirit of competition, to embellish the text with his or her own asides and ideas and performative techniques. The stories were cyclical and elliptical. Bony. The vocabulary in these later stories was crappy, the storytelling was sloppy, and the plots were ridiculous, at least in written form. The teller was left to fill in the blanks.
    The people of Mesopotamia, a land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in modern Iraq, made myths and stories, they told tales and fables—as we all do—in order to understand who they were, who made them, what their purpose on the earth might be, and where they went when they died. And then there were those gaps. In some cases they intentionally left their history full of holes, in others the tablets