The Papyrus on the Mountain
When you look across the political landscape in 2022, you see no end of problems—we all know what they are. But when you scratch below the surface, you discover two things: a) the actual problems we face, and have always faced, can be counted on one hand—this is the whitepill; and b) these problems are for all intents and purposes insoluble—this is the blackpill.
When I look at the moon sailing across the blue vault, I take some comfort knowing that some Babylonian slave looked up at the same moon sailing over a ziggurat 4,000 years ago, as did some Siberian shaman 4,000 years before that. I’m not quite sure why I find this comforting, maybe it’s that the experience connects me across the “black seas of infinity” to others who struggled as I do with the world as being fundamentally a mystery. It’s the same comfort that I take knowing that, as far back as the historical record shows, men have struggled with the question of civilization vs. barbarism.
There’s an idea that the tension between the civilized and the natural is a new thing in human history, that it had a birthdate. Usually, this birthdate is said to have something to do with Christianity, and to be sure, there is a tension in Christianity between nature and the human world, as there is in its mother, Judaism.1 However, this is to ascribe a special status to these religions as nature-skeptical that is simply not warranted—this tension was noted long before either Christianity or Judaism, and is at the heart of some of humanity’s oldest stories.
One such story is the Tale of Sinuhe, dating from the golden age of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom. It’s a rich and fascinating tale of an Egyptian functionary who travels abroad and for political reasons finds himself unable to return to his homeland. For an Egyptian, so tied to the soil, whose entire theology is based on the distinction between the world of order that is the “black land” of the Nile Valley and the world of chaos that threatens from without—for such a man, there is no terror greater than the thought of death and burial outside of Egypt. So as death approaches, Sinuhe prays for homecoming, eventually being laid to rest in his own necropolis.
What’s of interest to us here is a question posed in the tale, almost a riddle—WHAT CAN ESTABLISH THE PAPYRUS ON THE MOUNTAIN? For the Egyptian, the papyrus stands for all that is civilized and human; it obviously stands for writing and literacy, but also for everything rooted and fixed in place. When Maistre says that “wherever there is an altar, there is civilization”, he might as well be an Old Kingdom scribe. The altar stands for everything fixed and sedentary—we could think here of Deleuze’s “striated space”. By contrast, for the Egyptian, the mountain stands for everything wild. Upper Egypt, the site of much of the tale’s action, was close to Nubia, a place of danger, rough waters, and rough uplands. The mountain represents everything untamed, undomesticated, and barbaric, as well as everything open and unbounded—Deleuze’s “smooth space” of the nomad and the piratical open sea. And the question what can establish the papyrus on the mountain means this: how can civilization be planted in the soil of barbarism?