Godzilla 2014...big, beefy, and an environmental reminder

Well, Godzilla has returned and overall has garnered some good reviews. 

"Godzilla: why the Japanese original is no joke"

How could Japan take a man in a suit so seriously? As Gareth Edwards's Godzilla is released, Tim Martin looks at the nuclear nightmares that created the 1954 original

by

Tim Martin

May 15th, 2014

The Telegraph

 Western audiences have spent more than half a century thinking of Godzilla as a joke dinosaur in a rubber suit, a Japanese trash-culture ‘King of the Monsters’ locked in endless battle with giant moths, dragons, armadillos and skyscraper-sized robots. Against this camp backdrop, then, it may seem surprising to hear Gareth Edwards, the director of this summer’s Godzilla film, declare his intention to portray the monster as “a force of nature, like the wrath of God or vengeance for the way we’ve behaved”.

But the idea of presenting Godzilla as the harbinger of man-made apocalypse isn't simply another gritty reboot for an age in which children’s franchises have become big-budget adult entertainment. It harks back 60 years to an almost forgotten chapter in the franchise’s history: the tragic story of nuclear paranoia told by the original Gojira in 1954.

Released in the same year as Seven Samurai, directed by a colleague of Kurosawa’s and starring one of Japan’s most famous actors, the film Gojira was a far cry from its B-movie successors. It was a sober allegory of a film with ambitions as large as its thrice-normal budget, designed to shock and horrify an adult audience.

Its roster of frightening images — cities in flames, overstuffed hospitals, irradiated children — would have been all too familiar to cinemagoers for whom memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still less than a decade old, while its script posed deliberately inflammatory questions about the balance of postwar power and the development of nuclear energy.

 To its first viewers in 1954, Gojira also evoked a disturbingly recent catastrophe. In March that year, the crew of a boat called the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon 5) had been fishing off the Marshall Islands, the string of atolls in the Northern Pacific that had been captured from Japan by the US during the Second World War.

Just before dawn, they saw a blinding flash in the sky and heard what sounded like a thunderclap. Before long a white ash began to settle on the decks of their vessel, which the bewildered sailors shovelled into heaps and dumped over the side. By evening, several of them were vomiting and covered in strange burns. When the Lucky Dragon limped back to its home port of Yaizu a fortnight later, it was clear that the men were suffering from radiation sickness.

It was less than two years since Japan’s American occupiers had made their exit from the country, and memories of the A-bomb attacks that had ended the war were still painfully fresh. When the US acknowledged that the crew of the Lucky Dragon had been caught in the fallout from its secret hydrogen bomb tests on Bikini Atoll, the Japanese reaction was immediate and furious. Other fishing boats were soon found to have been similarly exposed, and the bottom dropped out of the lucrative tuna market. When the Lucky Dragon’s radio operator died that autumn, 400,000 people went to his funeral.

In this tense atmosphere, the opening scenes of Gojira could scarcely have been more provocative. Thudding drumbeats and unearthly howls accompany the stark opening titles, before the scene changes to the deck of a fishing boat in the Pacific, where the crew are relaxing, chatting and playing guitar. The ocean begins to boil. The men are blinded and burnt as they flee in terror. Tapping out his desperate SOS below decks, the ship’s radio operator is the first to die. Once again, Gojira suggested, the Japanese people was being attacked in its homeland by history’s greatest superweapon.

 But why cast such an incendiary political statement as a monster movie? The answer lies with Tomoyuki Tanaka, a producer at Toho Studios in Tokyo, who in early 1954 found himself faced with a professional catastrophe. The film he was preparing, a co-production between the cinema industries in Japan and Indonesia, had just collapsed after the Indonesian government cancelled visas for the main actors.

Tanaka was confronted with a gaping hole in his autumn release schedule, but he had been an admirer of American monster movies since King Kong in 1933 and had recently read about the latest example, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, released the year before. Could he, he wondered, use a similar conceit to explore Japanese fears about the use of nuclear weapons in the postwar age?

Tanaka hired the science-fiction writer Shigeru Kayama to produce a script. Initially, this document made no bones about its influences: its Japanese working title translates as Big Monster from 20,000 Miles Beneath the Sea. More importantly still, Tanaka began to discuss the project with two other Toho regulars: the special effects supervisor Eiji Tsubaraya and the director Ishiro Honda.

Each came from an unusual background. Tsubaraya was a mechanical genius who claimed to have built his first film camera as a child. During the war he had also specialised in modelmaking for Japanese propaganda films. So realistic was his re-creation of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, according to legend, that the American occupying forces assumed it was real and sent it home to be used in newsreel footage. Tsubaraya was as fond as Tanaka of the nascent genre of monster cinema in America. In fact, he clung on for some time to the early suggestion that the antagonist in Gojira should be a giant octopus.

Tsubaraya agreed to undertake the vast task of recreating and destroying a model Tokyo in return for equal billing with the film’s director. This was Ishiro Honda, a former colleague of Akira Kurosawa’s who had assisted him on films such as Stray Dog (1949) and directed several features of his own.

Honda was an ex-soldier who had survived the firebombing of Tokyo, had been captured and imprisoned in China and, on his return to Japan, had passed through the devastation that the A-bomb had wrought in Hiroshima. “There was,” he later said of the experience, “a feeling that the world was already coming to an end. Ever since I felt that this atomic fear would hang around our necks for ever.”

Honda recruited another screenwriter, Takeo Murata, to develop these ideas in the script. At some point, too, the men changed the title to one less baldly revealing of its American origins. The word Gojira is a portmanteau of two Japanese words for gorilla (gorira) and whale (kujira) but it is not clear who decided to apply it to a radioactive dinosaur the size of a mountain. One legend runs that it was the nickname for a burly member of the film’s technical crew, but no one has ever explained exactly who; and, as Honda’s wife later observed, the filmmaking team “loved to joke around with tall stories”.

Planning the destruction of the capital was not without its problems. Two members of the team were detained by security guards as they stood on the roof of a department store, discussing the trail of devastation that Gojira would cut across the city. Back in the studio, Tsubaraya was working on the problem of his lifelike monster.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms had already demonstrated the stop-motion animation that would make Ray Harryhausen a legend among 20th-century animators, but Tsubaraya chose to employ a different approach. He built a latex dinosaur suit, fortified with bamboo spars, with jaws that could be snapped at will by the technician inside. He would, he decided, shoot the monster scenes at double speed, then slow them down to give an impression of stomping inertia.

 This technique came to be known as "suitmation", and became an integral part of the camp allure of subsequent Godzilla films. The actors playing Godzilla based their lumbering performance on the bears at Tokyo Zoo, but the thick rubber monster suit, combined with the fierce set lighting required to shoot at double speed, placed drastic limits on their performance. Neither could spend more than two minutes inside it, and both fainted frequently from the stress. One of them lost 20lb on the shoot, and found himself pouring a cupful of sweat out of the suit at the end of each take.

With the film well under way, the producers turned their attention to the music. Akira Ifukube, a university professor and one of Japan’s top composers of classical music, was recruited to develop a score that complemented the doom-laden, apocalyptic tone of the film, as well as to provide the noise of the monster’s footfalls and the sound of its roar. He did so by covering a leather glove in rosin and rubbing it across the strings of a double bass, producing an unearthly dissonant howl. Applying an electronic echo to the instrument’s deep sounds created a noise like thundering footsteps.

For Honda and Tanaka, the allegorical aspect of Gojira was paramount: “Mankind had created the Bomb,” as Tanaka later commented, “and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind”. Contemporary references abounded (“First contaminated tuna,” complains one woman to her neighbour on the train, “and now Godzilla”) and the film’s protagonists carried on a running debate about the validity of using violence against violence.

The final lines abandoned indirectness for a cliffhanger warning: “If we keep conducting nuclear tests,” intoned a wise old palaeontologist over the monster’s remains, “another Godzilla may appear somewhere in the world.”

The sternness of this message made the film a divisive proposition in Japan. Audiences turned out in droves, attracted by a sinister radio drama that was broadcast on national radio for weeks before the film’s release, but many critics felt that its grim scene-setting and overt references to the Lucky Dragon catastrophe were simply too close to the bone.

Its thematic preoccupation with nuclear energy proved even less acceptable to the American distributors who, after buying the film, began an extensive reshoot and recut for Western markets. Scenes were inserted featuring the actor Raymond Burr (later famous for his roles in Perry Mason and Ironside) as an American reporter covering the destruction of Tokyo, while references to American testing and the dangers of radioactivity were assiduously hacked out.

But this radical intervention would prove strangely influential on the franchise's development. Released as Godzilla, King of the Monsters! in 1956, it was panned by critics (one of whom complained of “a dinosaur made of gumshoes and about $20 worth of toy trains”) but a hit with the public, who flocked to see what the posters called its “psychotic cavalcade of electrifying horror”. Bizarrely, this recut version was even exported again to Japan, where audiences turned out once more to watch it with subtitles.

What the public wanted, it seemed, was not grim nuclear allegory but more monster movies, and Toho Studios was there to oblige. In the years that followed, Tanaka found himself presiding over the development of the most famous creature in a new genre of so-called kaiju (monster) movies, battling a cast of bizarre foes in films that soon became a cultish pleasure for children of all ages. In the adventures of Mechagodzilla, Mothra, Son of Godzilla and a host of city-stomping animal freaks, the political philosophising and existential terror of the first film soon became little more than a black-and-white footnote.

William M. Tsutsui, an American historian and Japan expert who has written extensively on Godzilla, explains that the series was at its wackiest and most humorous “in the decades when Japan’s economy was booming. In the Sixties and Seventies, when Japan was growing at 10 per cent a year, the monster became a sort of happy monster, a protective monster, a goofy monster, not a threatening one.”

Despite the giant lizard’s growing international fame, the Godzilla films in the intervening years have appealed more to dedicated fans of monster combat than to mainstream cinemagoers. Toho has insisted on using physical effects rather than CGI, and while Godzilla aficionados may treasure the way in which this limits the films to puppetry and so-called ‘suitmation’, they look fascinatingly low-tech in an age of CGI.

 The human cast, meanwhile, seem wearily conscious that their cheesy lines and daft situations are only there as placeholders before the biff-pow gigantomachy resumes, and low receipts have twice forced Toho to call a halt to its flagship series. Godzilla took a nine-year holiday from 1975-1984, and after the disappointing 50th-anniversary special Final Wars in 2004 Toho demolished its main water stage and refused to license or make any more films for a decade.

Recent events, however, suggest that the moment may be right for Godzilla to return. “In the days immediately after the Fukushima disaster in 2011,” Tsutsui observes, “Google hits on Godzilla spiked. People went back to look at the movies, and look at the lessons filmmakers had been bringing forward about the fears of untrammelled nuclear energy and weapons testing.”

Gulliermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, released the next year and dedicated to Ishiro Honda and to Ray Harryhausen, suggested a renewal of the fitful interest in the giant-monster movie that had been stirring in America since the millennium with films such as Peter Jackson’s King Kong and JJ Abrams’s Cloverfield. (Even Godzilla fans prefer to forget Roland Emmerich’s disastrous attempt to reboot the franchise in 1998 with a giant iguana.)

Ultimately, though, Pacific Rim was more of a eulogy to the tradition than an exercise in political comment. “I want the joy I used to get seeing Godzilla toss a tank without having to think there are guys in the tank,” del Toro commented. “There’s global anxiety about how fragile the world is, and the safety of citizens, but the film is in another realm.”

This year’s effort, set in the aftermath of a Fukushima-like nuclear meltdown and evoking the panic and disaster of a decade of natural disasters, looks a more serious proposition. As Tsutsui points out, though, the franchise “allows filmmakers to reflect on the tensions and problems with society, and how those can be brought to the surface through a gigantic irradiated lizard walking through a city,” and has, even in its darkest moments, trod a certain line between absurdity and acuity.

It remains to be seen where on this scale Gareth Edwards’s contribution to Godzillan history will fall. But if there’s one thing the franchise has delighted in proving over the past 60 years, it’s that Japan’s most famous monster is always capable of rising again. 

"Godzilla is the latest blockbuster to punish the sins of mankind"

Gareth Edwards' take on the classic joins Noah and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes as another of summer's anti-humanist fables

by

Tom Shone  

 
May 15th, 2014

theguardian.com

My favorite quote from the trades last week was, "Warner Bros has avoided making Godzilla out to be a monster movie." What else are they going to make it out to be? A coming-of-age picture about the Summer that Changed Everything? A Merchant Ivory flick? Actually, the new film arrives in cinemas boasting the highest pedigree of any creature feature hitherto, with an Alexandre Desplat score, and roles for David Strathairn, Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche, thus making it the first and surely only time “Juliette Binoche” and “300-foot lizard” will ever be uttered in the same sentence. It’s a good movie – maybe too good, with its visual sophistication leaving its B-movie roots poking through. Was Godzilla ever meant to have $200m spent on him? Wasn’t the original a warning against American technological know-how?

We are a long way from the man-in-a-rubber-suit who wobbled through a model Tokyo in the 1954 original. Newly scaled up to keep pace with the latest skyscrapers, Godzilla is glimpsed teasingly, through Cloverfield POV shots for the first hour, before finally taking centre stage to defend mankind from MUTOs – giant nuclear mutants that look like the queen alien in Aliens and snack on nuclear missiles like Twinkie bars. The scenes of cataclysm, most of them at night, have a sulphurous power, as if director Gareth Edwards had prepared by boning up on Gustave Doré's engravings for Paradise Lost. At one point we see a mountain – or a silhouette our eye had taken to be a mountain – move, in one of the best such sleights of hand since Spielberg’s headlights-in-the-rearview-mirror gag in Close Encounters. If only Edwards had held it longer.

Needless to say, all human scale is obliterated. Cranston, as the nuclear engineer reduced to conspiratorial babbling, may be the smartest casting choice of the summer: when even Walter White throws a hissy fit, you know things are bad. He and Binoche hold the screen for as long as they are allowed, but soon have to make way for the demographically-approved chosen ones, Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Taylor-Johnson is a physical actor who likes to storm into a room and pace its four corners like a lion, but when faced with the sight of two giant nuclear mutants treating masonry like meringue, he wears an expression of mild consternation, as if remembering he’d left the oven on. He spends most of the movie trying to catch a train to get back to Olsen, but we couldn’t care less. Unlike King Kong, this was never a story scaled with a human adversary in mind. “What are we supposed to do?” asks Navy Commander David Straithairn. “Sit back and watch?”

Well, actually yes. What makes Godzilla such a curious summer blockbuster is it rootedness in failure – specifically the feeling of stunned national impotence that gripped Japan in the aftermath of the second world war. Cultural studies professors like to peel back the keloid-scarred skin of the series to reveal the lurking atomic bomb subtext lurking underneath, but there’s no “subtext” about it. That’s what Godzilla was about. It’s the text.

“The theme of the film from the beginning was the terror of the bomb,” said producer and Godzilla creator Tanaka Tomoyuki. Passing through the ruins of Hiroshima upon his repatriation to Japan, the 1954 film’s director Honda Ishuro noted “a fear the earth was already coming to an end”. He filled his movie with visions that directly summoned the spectres of Nagasaki and Hiroshima: families pulling cart-loads of possessions, children being relocated in army trucks, hordes of injured refugees, churches of widows and orphans, hospitals overflown with the dead and the dying, the camera lingering on a little girl her eyes glazed in shock whose irradiated body sends the geiger counter off the scale.

“Godzilla functioned not simply as a figure of war incarnate or a metaphorical admonition of nuclear annihilation, but also became a reproachful symbol embodying the spirit of Japan’s war dead,” writes William Tsutsui in his book Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of the Monsters. Very little of this, needless to say, made it through into the bowdlerized, American edit, which smoothed over the moral crisis of radiation with the calming tones of Raymond Burr recasting Godzilla as just another monster on the loose, recalled to the screen again and again for what amounted to prolonged bouts of monster-on-monster pro-wrestling. Mankind was relegated to the status of stupefied observer, like those cavemen that cowered in the corner of Ray Harryhausen epics while the dinosaurs duked it out above.

Edwards has more than honored the spirit of the original. Those hospitals are now filled with Americans and tended to by Elizabeth Olsen, while refugees collect in giant sports stadiums that recall the aftermath of Katrina. The American psyche wold appear to be in roughly the same state of disrepair as that of Japan in 1954. We’re ready for Godzilla in a way we weren’t in 1998, when Roland Emmerich rolled out his remake. If the cycle of disaster movies that gripped audiences in the 1990s were notable for their jocular oops-apocalypse tone – “Ha ha! It's the wonder of nature, baby!” boomed Phillip Seymour Hoffman, as tornadoes ripped up the south in Jan De Bont’s Twister – our contemporary variants are joke-free zones in which mankind isn’t just threatened with extinction. We're told we deserve it.

Not only do we bring our own nuclear doom upon our heads in Godzilla, but in a few weeks' time, we stand in the dock once again, indicted for crimes against the primate in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. And this just a few Sundays after God annihilated the Earth on account of our wickedness in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. “The wickedness is not just in them, it’s in all of us,” insisted Russell Crowe’s prophet. “It had to be what He wanted – a world without men. You see that, don’t you?”

The right went into its usual tizzy over Aronofsky’s film, with Glenn Beck saying, “it’s just so pro-animal and anti-human, and I mean strongly anti-human,” but for once, the nut fringe was basically right. The blockbuster has finally gone post-human. The Godzilla movies always tilted audience sympathy towards the monster, of course, but as Edwards' lizard takes a bow and slips into the ocean once more at the end of the film, I felt something else: a nip of the old Avatar blues. The first true hero of summer and he doesn’t even say goodbye.

Daigo Fukuryu- Maru [Wikipedia]
 
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“The Epic of Gilgamesh” and the flood

"Marina Warner on 'Gilgamesh,' the flood and what remains"

by

David L. Ulin

February 27th, 2014

Los Angeles Times

“Myths, like inquisitive children, keep asking: why?” Marina Warner observes in an essay posted at the London Review of Books. “They answer with stories of origin and destiny, luck and catastrophe.”

If anyone should know about this, it would be Warner. A professor at England’s University of Essex, she may be our foremost authority on fairy tales. This is not, lest we think otherwise, kids’ stuff; what Warner is after, rather, is what we might call the substance of our imaginative DNA.

“Stories come from the past but speak to the present (if you taste the dragon’s blood and can hear what they say),” she has written. “… I hope, I believe that literature can be ‘strong enough to help’, to borrow Seamus Heaney’s wonderful comment about poetry.”

I share that belief, in literature as a source of solace, understanding, even (or especially) when it seeks to disturb.

This is part of the point of Warner’s essay, which uses accounts of the flood in various cultures, from Mesopotamia to the Bible, to riff on what we leave behind us, on the value of what remains. That there are so many flood stories, she suggests, does not indicate “one single universal deluge — this is accepted now even by Biblical scholars.” And yet, in the overlap of narratives, we learn something about our desire for history to cohere.

Writing of George Smith, who discovered “The Epic of Gilgamesh” in the 19th century, Warner observes that “his joy was occasioned above all by the independent corroboration the poem offered to the historicity of the Bible. He was a fervent Christian and longed, as many did, for archaeology to prove the scriptures’ reliability.”

Now, however, “Gilgamesh” stirs a different sort of promise — that of rediscovery. When Smith first shared it with the public in 1872, Warner points out, it “was the first time the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ had been heard and understood after an interval of two thousand years: the longest sleeper ever among the world’s great poems.” What this means, she continues, is that we read it as representing a kind of “double history, as an ancient epic and a modern narrative poem.”

This is important, for it allows us imagine “Gilgamesh” as both story and artifact, to understand that its survival was not inevitable but a function of fortune, luck. That, in turn, reminds us of just how random our pattern making efforts are, reliant on a “jumble of stone bits and pieces,” on the serendipity of what survives.

What will linger after we have disappeared, Warner wonders, and what will it say about who we were?

“The tablets dug up at Nineveh happen in shape and size to resemble mini-iPads,” Warner notes. "If our ‘tablets’ are still there in the mud in four thousand years’ time, and humans are still around, they’ll have a hard puzzle in front of them, should they wish to recapture our words, our laments, our tweets.”

"Short Cuts"

by

Marina Warner

March 6th, 2014

Vol. 36 No. 5

London Review of Books

In the most ancient stories of the Flood the gods are annoyed by humans making a racket and keeping them up at all hours: these gods are unreconstructed adults who don’t hold with negotiating but relish inflicting punishment, while humans are lawless, partying teenagers. The poem Atrahasis, written down at some point between 1702 and 1682 BCE by ‘Ipiq-Aya, Junior Scribe’ (we know his name!) tells how Enlil, the father god, starts his regime of terror against humanity by plugging the springs and bolting the earth and the air and the sea. The ground dries up, the seed corn rots, and famine and plague are visited on the nuisance noisemakers:

    The dark pastureland was bleached,
    The broad countryside filled up with alkali …
    Their faces [become] cover[ed] with scabs (?) like malt,
    Their faces looked sallow,
    They went out in public hunched

(Stephanie Dalley’s translation.) The poem is uncannily prescient about extreme weather events around the world (storms, droughts), the rise in global mean temperature and the threat to water resources in so many places.

Myths, like inquisitive children, keep asking: why? They answer with stories of origin and destiny, luck and catastrophe. In the epics from Mesopotamia, which are written in Akkadian (the script that looks like wading birds’ skittering feet on the ebb tide sand), a prolonged drought precedes the great flood which Enlil and his fellow deities then decree. The story seems to have originated in the fertile basin of the Tigris and Euphrates, where locals were accustomed to swelling rivers and rising tides, rich in alluvial deposits. It dramatises the symbiosis of land use and water flow, and the danger to survival if that relationship is disturbed. In the Epic of Gilgamesh the king is a culture hero, who builds a magnificent walled city, founds a library and, above all, digs wells.

In other epics from Babylon and Sumer, the gods set out expressly to cure overcrowding by exterminating (almost) everybody – a religious rationalisation of disaster. In other, less nasty stories, the Deluge brings to an end the immortality that human beings once enjoyed in the image of the gods. The book of Genesis seems to know its antecedents, and although the mortalising aspect has disappeared from the surface of the Bible version of the Flood, traces of the plot seem to linger on in the extreme longevity of Adam (930 years). Noah, who is the favoured survivor in the Judeo-Christian version, is already 600 years old at the time of the Flood and he carries on afterwards (as do Methuselah et al), for the Bible, unlike its Babylonian forerunners, doesn’t establish in so many words that post-diluvian life expectancy has been shortened. From this angle, the myth of the Flood is another attempt to understand the reality of death, and the dangers of extreme weather are metaphorical means to tell a just-so story about ordinary human lifespan, not the subject of the myth itself (the story of the Fall isn’t about the apple).

Andrew George, the editor of the Oxford Classics Epic of Gilgamesh, writes that ‘in the main the function of the poem is not to explain origins. It is more interested in examining the human condition as it is.’ For Thorkild Jacobsen it is a ‘story of learning to face reality, a story of “growing up”’. In this respect Gilgamesh is existential in spirit, whereas the flood story in the Bible is religious: God is put back into the picture and his actions justified in ways not found in the ancient epics. The gods are called dogs and flies, like ‘parasitical scavengers’, Andrew George writes; their eternal realm clogged with dust.

Versions of the Flood from around the world record memories of different disasters, not one single universal deluge – this is accepted now even by Biblical scholars. But the different accounts share several dramatic elements: the figure of the one man who is chosen to survive, the extraordinary hope placed in the building of a boat, its measurements and vast size, and the processes of caulking and stocking it. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the ark is a six-decker vessel; in the Bible, the specs seem so exact they inspired many believers to attempt to make models. Atrahasis is the name of the hero who is spared and wins eternal life in the poem that Ipiq-Aya, Junior Scribe, pressed into the wet clay with his reed pen. In Gilgamesh, the survivor is called Uta-napishti, and Gilgamesh meets him when he is travelling to the underworld in order to bring back from the dead Enkidu,the wild man whom he loves. But the half-divine hero fails, and although he is told how to pick a magic coral-like plant from the seabed, which will guarantee his immortality, he loses it when he is bathing in a pool: a snake comes by and takes it.

The Babylonian Noah tells Gilgamesh how he survived the rains; in Atrahasis he sees in a dream that he must build an ark; in the later Gilgamesh, the counsellor god Enlil whispers the warning in secret:

    Load the seed of every living thing into your ark,
    The boat that you will build.

(John Gardner’s version, 1984.) The animals do enter two by two in some versions, but here the ark is a sperm bank, a granary. The Epic of Gilgamesh was deciphered from cuneiform tablets in the British Museum which had been excavated in the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. Thousands of chunky manuscripts, chipped, friable and defaced, more like knapped flints than books, were dug out of the alluvial strata by Henry Layard and Homuzd Rassan in the 1850s and laid out on trays in the museum. George Smith was an engraver of banknotes for Bradbury’s, the printers, which specialised in playing cards and had the commission from the Mint to issue banknotes. The workshop was near the museum and the story goes that George took to haunting the Assyrian collections in his lunch hour, until he caught the eye of the keeper, who asked him what he was doing, coming so regularly. ‘I am reading,’ he replied. So this startling decoder was set to work on the jumble of stone bits and pieces until one day he cried out in ecstasy and ran round the room tearing off his clothes. George Smith had found Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which told the story of the Flood, and his joy was occasioned above all by the independent corroboration the poem offered to the historicity of the Bible. He was a fervent Christian and longed, as many did, for archaeology to prove the scriptures’ reliability. Later that year, 1872, he delivered a paper to the Society for Biblical Archaeology, and read out the account of the flood from the epic. This was the first time the Epic of Gilgamesh had been heard and understood after an interval of two thousand years: the longest sleeper ever among the world’s great poems. Four years later, Smith died in Aleppo at the age of 36.

The work’s interrupted chronology, so different from the destiny of the Upanishads or even Homer, gives Gilgamesh a double history, as an ancient epic and a modern narrative poem. The most recent rendering, by the OuLiPian poet Philip Terry, is simply called ‘DICTATOR’. Terry has pared it down, in keeping with cuneiform’s prime usage in legal documents and accountancy, to the bare life of contemporary business-pidgin, known as Globish.

    Six day | and sev | en night
    the wind | cry and | the storm | roll through | the land
    After | seven | day … | the storm | break off | from the | battle
    which like | a wo | man la | bour to | give birth
    The sea | grow qui | et the | storm still | the big | water | stop …
    I look | out at | the day | and all | be still
    All the | people | lie dead | … in | the dirt* (?)
    *or ‘water’
    The ground | be like | a great | flat roof
    I op | en the | window | and light | fall on | I face
    I sit | down and | cry …
    The tear | flow down | I face

More of the epic would be discovered under the sand as time went on. In 1990 Stephanie Dalley added more lines to her edition from newly recovered pieces, but most of what’s left has probably been smashed in the course of the Iraq wars. It seems proper that a place of fire and dust, its skin scarred by warfare, should be the origin of the story of the Flood today: devastation in negative, flood and drought bound together.

In Genesis, Yahweh resolves to exterminate man, since ‘every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.’ The judgmental tone doesn’t help clarify current thinking about managing water, or the stewardship of resources in general. On the one hand, it gives the impression that floods have always happened so no need to act differently now; on the other, only nutters believe that floods are visiting vengeance from heaven upon us. The secretary of state for the environment can play the calm, pragmatic rationalist who refuses to be swayed by superstitious fanatics. This is a case in which the underlying blueprint for a narrative – the story of the Flood – is sending the wrong signals.

The tablets dug up at Nineveh happen in shape and size to resemble mini-iPads. If our ‘tablets’ are still there in the mud in four thousand years’ time, and humans are still around, they’ll have a hard puzzle in front of them, should they wish to recapture our words, our laments, our tweets.

The Epic of Gilgamesh [Project Gutenberg]

Remember her...the Tooth Fairy

"Very American Creation"

The tooth fairy first appeared around the turn of the 20th century

by

Colin Schultz

February 13th, 2014

smithsonianmag.com

In the United States, kids drop a lost tooth under theirs pillows, and the Tooth Fairy brings them a monetary reward. But, says Michael Hingston writing for Salon, “every recorded human culture has some kind of tradition surrounding the disposal of a child’s lost baby teeth.” Globally, these tooth-shedding rituals are as diverse as you'd expect. So how did Americans end up with the Tooth Fairy?

According to Hingston, the Tooth Fairy is a wholly American creation, an amalgamation of the traditions other cultures, blended together and sparked up with a bit of Disney magic.

At the core of the Tooth Fairy is a mouse:

    Perhaps the most widely practiced ritual, one that has been documented everywhere from Russia to New Zealand to Mexico, involves offering the lost tooth as a sacrifice to a mouse or rat, in the hopes that the child’s adult teeth will grow in as strong and sturdy as the rodent’s — a wish for transference that anthropologists call “sympathetic magic.””

 
    … In many countries around the world, children continue to leave teeth out in the hopes that a mouse will come take them away in exchange for money or some other gift.

Layered on top, says Hingston, is the veneer of the fairy, a traditionally European folk character. But just like Coca-Cola had a hand in defining the look of Santa Claus, it was Disney that helped the Tooth Fairy stick.
 
It’s no coincidence that at the same time the tooth fairy was starting to gain traction in the United States, Disney was also releasing animated films like “Pinocchio” and “Cinderella” — each of which features a benevolent, maternal fairy with the power to make wishes come true. Pop culture helped solidify the tooth fairy in the mainstream, and she’s been a fixture there ever since.

Tooth fairy [Wikipedia]

Say it isn't so...Nessy gone?

"Loch Ness Monster sightings decline. Time to panic?"

2013 was the first year in 90 years in which there were no sightings of the Loch Ness Monster, prompting some to worry that the venerable cryptid has packed up and left.

by

Benjamin Radford

February 10th, 2014

The Christian Science Monitor

A veteran custodian of Loch Ness monster sightings is concerned that Nessie has not been seen in well over a year, and may be gone, according to a news report. This is the first time in nearly 90 years that such a lengthy lag in sightings has occurred.

Gary Campbell, who lives in Inverness in the United Kingdom has been keeping records of Loch Ness monster sightings for the past 17 years and has put together a list of sightings that goes back some 1,500 years, according to the BBC News. 

"It's very upsetting news and we don't know where she's gone," BBC News quoted Campbell as saying. "The number of sightings has been reducing since the turn of the century but this is the first time in almost 90 years that Nessie wasn't seen at all." (Apparently three reports of possible Nessie sightings in 2013 were discredited after closer scrutiny, The Inverness Courier reported.)

This is not the first time Nessie has been a no show; in fact, there are no reports of the beast until less than a century ago. The Loch Ness monster first achieved notoriety in 1933 after a story was published in a local newspaper describing not a monstrous head or hump but instead a splashing in the water that appeared to be caused "by two ducks fighting." A famous photograph showing a mysterious head and neck brought Nessie international fame, but was revealed to be hoax decades later.

Some claim that the Loch Ness monster was first reported in A.D. 565, when St. Columba turned away a giant beast threatening a man in the Ness River, which flows into the lake. However it is only one of many Catholic Church legends about righteous saints vanquishing Satan in the form of serpents and dragons.

There are many myths lurking in the cold Scottish highlands, including legends of "water horses" — creatures associated with rivers and lakes that resemble normal horses, but are actually both magical and deadly: Should anyone try to mount a water horse, it will accept the rider, then gallop to a nearby lake or river, drown its rider, then eat his flesh, one myth goes. Though some of these legends and stories may have inspired some of the claims about the Loch Ness monster, Nessie is, of course, not a magical horse, but instead believed to be a very real, living and breathing aquatic creature resembling a long-necked dinosaur.

Skeptics would suggest there is likely no monster in the lake at all. But this news about the lack of sightings poses a big problem for those who believe in the creature's existence. The fact that no Nessie report has been registered in 18 months means that, even if it existed, it is likely no longer there.

Though people often speak of Nessie as a solitary (often female) animal, if it exists there must be more than one in the lake — at least dozens if not hundreds. This changes the equation and deepens the mystery, because with so many of them allegedly living in the lake they should be seen much more often. It defies logic to believe a group of unknown monsters lives in the lake — which has many local residents and tens of thousands of monster-seeking tourists all around it — and not a single one surfaces to be seen. Think of it this way: If over a year went by without a single sighing of a giraffe, rhino or horse, the most logical — and the most tragic — explanation would be that they had all died out. Extinction is the only reason that large animals simply vanish like that.

This is especially true for the Nessie creatures, which are, after all, confined to a lake that is only a little over 20 miles long and about a mile wide (32 by 1.6 kilometers) for much of its length. Unlike birds (which can migrate hundreds or thousands of miles) or terrestrial animals (which may roam for a few hundred miles), the Nessie creatures are presumably locked in the lake. There are no underground waterway exits to the ocean or anywhere else. In short, there is nowhere else to go if they are not being seen in the lake.

But fear not, monster lovers and Inverness Tourism Board: If history is any indication, eventually there will be more sightings of Nessie, whether they exist or not. There are enough things in the lake that can be mistaken for a monster, including large fish, strange waves, and even the occasional hoax, to keep the sightings going and the tourist dollars coming.

Zeus' existence

"Did Zeus Exist?"

by

Gary Gutting

July 31st, 2013

The New York Times

When my children were little, they liked to play “Mother, May I?” At one point, I combined the game with an early introduction to classical culture, changing the key question to “Zeus, May I?” with an imaginary thunderbolt throwing back anyone forgetting to ask permission.

Reminiscing about this recently, I asked the kids if they had thought that Zeus was real.  “Well,” one said, “I knew he didn’t exist anymore, but figured that he did back in ancient Greece.” This set me thinking about why we are so certain that Zeus never existed. Of course, we are in no position to say that he did.  But are we really in a position to say that he didn’t?

The standard line of thought seems to be that we have no evidence at all for his existence and so have every right to deny it.  Perhaps there is no current evidence of his existence — certainly no reports of avenging thunderbolts or of attempted seductions, no sightings around Mount Olympus.  But back in the day (say, 500-400 B.C.), there would seem to have been considerable evidence, enough in any case to make his reality unquestioned among most members of a rapidly advancing Greek civilization.

Further, as this civilization developed the critical tools of historiography and philosophy, Zeus’s reality remained widely unquestioned.  Socrates and Plato criticized certain poetic treatments, which showed Zeus and the gods in an unworthy light.  But they never questioned the very existence of the gods, and Socrates regularly followed the dictates of his daimon, a personal divine guide.  There were many questions about the true nature of the divine, but few about its existence.

Why did belief in the gods persist in spite of critical challenges? What evidence seemed decisive to the ancient Greeks?   Robert Parker, in his recent authoritative survey, “On Greek Religion,” emphasizes the role of what the Greeks saw as experiences of divine actions in their lives. ”The greatest evidence for the existence of gods is that piety works . . . the converse is that impiety leads to disaster,”  with by far the most emphasis given to the perils of ignoring the gods.  There were also rituals, associated with the many cults of specific gods, that for some worshippers “created a sense of contact with the divine. One knows that the gods exist because one feels their presence during the drama of the mysteries or the elation of the choral dance.”  More broadly, there were “epiphanies” that could “indicate not merely a visible or audible epiphany (whether in the light of day or through a dream . . .) but also any clear expression of a god’s favor such as weather conditions hampering an enemy, a miraculous escape, or a cure; it may also be used of the continuing disposition of a god or goddess to offer manifest assistance.”

Most of us do not find our world so filled with the divine, and we may be inclined to dismiss the Greeks’ “experiences” as over-interpretations.  But how can we be so sure that the Greeks lived in the same sort of world as we do?  What decisive reason do we have for thinking that for them divinity was not a widely and deeply experienced fact of life?  If we cannot eliminate this as a real possibility, shouldn’t we hold a merely agnostic position on Zeus and the other Greek gods, taking seriously the possibility that they existed but holding that we have good reason neither to assert nor deny their existence?

Let’s consider some objections.

1. Once you take seriously the possibility of Zeus, you have to do the same for all the other gods that some people somewhere have worshiped.  Reply: This is a problem only if you have a predisposition to monotheism, and even the great monotheistic religions allow for a variety of lesser supernatural beings (angels, demons) variously allied or opposed to the hegemonic deity.  Or the plethora of local gods can be regarded as various manifestations of the One God.

2. The fact that many people have believed in Zeus does not show that they had any evidence for his existence, and there’s every reason to deny the existence of something for which there is no evidence.  Reply: Yes, but the people who worshiped Zeus claimed to experience his presence in their everyday lives and, especially, in their religious ceremonies.  There’s no reason for us to accept this claim, but we have no reason for thinking they were wrong.

3.  But we do have reason for thinking they were wrong. Their society inculcated them from infancy with belief in Zeus and the other gods.  There was constant affirmation and no tolerance for doubts because divine authority was the basis of social and political authority.  Given this brainwashing, it’s no surprise that people thought they experienced Zeus, even though they didn’t. Reply: Yes, but why did the society so insist on belief in the gods?  We may assume it’s simply for the sake of social control.  But the reason could just as well be that everyone was rightly convinced — from their own and others’ experiences — that the gods existed.  Then the control would derive from the belief, not vice versa.

4.  We know that all manner of religious experiences can be produced by electrochemical alterations of the brain.  There’s no reason to assume that anything else was going on in the Greeks’ alleged experiences of Zeus.  Reply: In principle, any experience of our daily lives can be produced by electrochemical alternations of the brain, but this does not show that, for example, I did not actually eat breakfast or talk to my wife this morning.

5. The modern development of science leaves no rational room for appeals to supernatural forces.  Unlike the Greeks, we have good reason to believe that everything in their world could have been explained by natural laws, with no divine intervention.  Reply: This response has force only if we assume that there is very little likelihood of a world that contains supernatural forces.  But we have no a priori basis for such an assumption.   We may well think that our world contains little or no evidence of the supernatural.  But that is no reason to think the same was true of the Greek world.

On reflection, then, I’m inclined to say that an atheistic denial of Zeus is ungrounded.  There is no current evidence of his present existence, but to deny that he existed in his Grecian heyday we need to assume that there was no good evidence for his existence available to the ancient Greeks.  We have no reason to make this assumption.  Further, supposing that Zeus did exist in ancient times, do we really have evidence that he has ceased to exist?  He may, for all we know, just be in hiding  (as Heine’s delightful “Gods in Exile” suggests), now that other gods have won humankind’s allegiance.  Or it may be that we have lost the ability to perceive the divine.  In any case, to the question, “May we properly remain agnostic about whether Zeus ever existed?” the answer is “Yes, we may.”

[Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960,” and writes regularly for The Stone. He was recently interviewed in 3am magazine.]

Santa thoughts by Stephen Tobolowsky

"The Santa Conspiracy"

My first crisis of belief.

by

Stephen Tobolowsky

December 14th, 2012

Slate

To believe or not to believe, that is question this time of year. In 2011, Stephen Tobolowsky wrote this personal essay about growing up Jewish in Dallas and learning that Santa isn’t real—but choosing to believe anyways. The original piece is reprinted below. Read Elizabeth Weingarten on spoiling Santa Claus and ruining Christmas for third graders.

I have observed there are two different types of fairy tales. There are the good ones, in which loyalty is rewarded with love and kingdoms are granted to simple but honest souls. And then there are the perplexing ones—where the children are eaten, the treasure is turned into straw, and the princess is poisoned and sleeps for a thousand years.

When I was a child, my mother or father read to me every night before I went to sleep. I never knew which type of story I would get. It was a crapshoot. The ratio of happy to horrible bedtime stories became detectible in the frequency of my nightmares. Uncertainty is the subtlest form of tyranny. Eventually, I became afraid of the dark. The product of my terror was a monster that took up residence in my room. His name was Eye the Monster.

Eye was terrifying to me. But occasionally he hinted that his task was not to threaten but to protect. He promised to come out of the closet whenever danger was near. One night when I was very young I heard a noise on the roof that woke me up. I ran down to Mom and Dad’s room for help or intervention if necessary. Mom woke up and told me, “Stepidoors, don’t worry. It’s just a night noise.”

That didn’t help. For all of you new parents out there “night noise” is not an explanation that brings comfort—it was the kind of thing that you would find in one of the bad bedtimes stories. Mom told me to go back to my room and go to sleep. Nothing would hurt me. I was unconvinced. I went back and pulled the covers up over my head. That’s when I heard Eye.

He called my name. I began to cry. I forced the covers back. Shaking with fear, I got up to investigate. I opened the closet door, but he wasn’t there. Then I heard his voice behind me. I turned. Nothing. Then Eye spoke. He told me he had moved under the bed. He wanted to be closer when I slept. But there was no comfort in that. I was still unsure as to whether Eye was my fear or my savior.

I always wondered what happened to Eye. He was such a constant companion when I was 3, 4, and 5. It took a lot of energy and imagination to create and sustain him. If you believe what scientists tell us—that energy cannot be created or destroyed but merely changes form—what form did Eye change into? Where does our fear of the dark go?

My guess is that somewhere in human history it turned into science, art, and religion: science, to measure the darkness; art, to show us its beauty; and religion, to tell us that light is around us all the time. We just have to believe in it to see it.

During the era of Eye the Monster I tried many things to ease my fear of the dark. I tried science in the form of a nightlight. I tried art in the form of more good bedtime stories. And eventually I even discovered prayer.

I had never prayed in my life. I didn’t even know what it was. But in our first grade reader there was a series of pictures showing what “good” children did. This was important to me. Besides the dark, the main stress factor in my life at that time was the Naughty and Nice List that Santa kept. In the last month, I had opened my eyes during rest period in homeroom and had my cookie taken away as a result. I had to stand in the hall for using my desk as a set of drums, and once, at home, I even made Mom cry. I felt like I was on the verge of falling onto the dark side of the ledger, and I was ready to take the book’s suggestions to heart. Chapter 1 said that a good start to the day was to wash your face; brush your teeth and comb your hair; to say “please” and “thank you”; and at night, to say your prayers.

I asked Mom what a prayer was. She said it is when you talk to God. I wasn’t sure this was such a good idea. I was already scared of Santa. In the book they had a picture of a very clean, blond boy kneeling in his pajamas by his bed with his hands folded. I showed Mom the picture and said, “I want to do that.”

After dinner I got all dressed for bed, I knelt down and asked Mom what do you say when you pray? Mom thought about it and then said, “Here’s one. ‘Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’ ”

I was horrified. This is what I was supposed to say to feel better? If I should die before I wake? Were they serious? I’d rather take my chances with Eye the Monster.

That was the last time I said that prayer. My fear increased. Now I was certain I would die in my sleep and be on the Naughty list. It was under this dark cloud of circumstances that I encountered my first conspiracy theory: the possible collusion between Mom, Dad, and Santa Claus.

We were Jewish and by all rights should not have celebrated Christmas. We also did not have a chimney, which should have made any Santa contact problematic. But we lived in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, home to exactly three Jewish families. My mother and father were very sensitive to anti-Semitism and were fearful that other children would taunt us if we appeared different. But secretly, I think Mom and Dad were afraid of our being “different” whether we were taunted or not. “Different” was not something that was considered good back in the late 1950’s. “Different” was not the proud banner we wave today. Back then being “different” had to be remedied.

Mom and Dad decided to go with the Santa scenario and give us presents on Christmas morning. That way we wouldn’t have to feel like outcasts at school. However, it wasn’t going to be as simple as celebrating Christmas in the good, old-fashioned, non-religious, strictly commercial way—with a tree, presents, carols, and hot cocoa. Mom felt guilty that she was betraying her Jewish roots. As a compromise, we had no tree, and in its place, thanks to a thought process that still baffles me, we got our presents under the dining room table.

Like all children on Christmas we were up at dawn. We raced into the dining room and started crawling in between the chairs under the table, looking in the dark for presents that had our name on them, occasionally banging our heads on the hard mahogany.

I remember once during this era I mustered up the courage to ask Mom the tough questions I had always been afraid to ask: “We have no chimney. What is Santa going to do?” Mom said she put a note out for Santa to use the back door. That disturbed me. It meant either we were leaving our house unlocked, which seemed unsafe, or that Santa had our key, which seemed creepy. I then asked what Santa was going to do without a tree? Mom said Santa was fine putting the presents under the table. I said, “But why? Why would Santa want to crawl under the table to put the presents there? That was a lot of extra work.” Mom said that Santa didn’t mind the work. He just didn’t want us to feel different by not having our presents under something. I said, “Mom, we’re still different. No other kids get presents under a dining room table. And kids who have trees don’t crawl under the tree to get their presents. The presents are around the tree.”

Mom paused to reflect and then did what most people do when they rely on selling a conspiracy theory as a basis for reality: She passed the blame on down the line. She said, “Stepidoors, we wrote Santa about the chimney and the tree and he said leave the door unlocked and he would put the presents under the table. I don’t know why. That’s what he said. That’s where he wanted to leave them.”

Mom’s passing of the buck to Santa worked for a while, or at least until I was 5 ½ and in first grade. My nagging doubts troubled me deeply. I had no one to talk to about it—until one afternoon after school right before the Christmas holidays.

It was a sunny, cold December day. I was heading over to Daugherty’s Drugstore to read comic books before I walked the half-mile home. I heard a classmate call out, “Hey Stephen, where you going?” I turned around and to my surprise it was Dwayne. I usually didn’t play with Dwayne. In fact this was the only time in my life I spoke to him one-on-one. He didn’t live in our neighborhood. He was a very special kid. He had already turned 6, and I imagined him to be a much wiser fellow than I. He was handsome. He always made good grades. The teachers liked him. He never played the bongos on his desk or got into trouble. He was awarded “Best Citizen” of the entire first grade. He was given a blue ribbon by our school. Today, he was wearing his ribbon, pinned on his sweater, and it was flapping in the cold wind. I was shocked when he joined me. Frankly, I was a little starstruck.

As we walked, Dwayne asked me if I was looking forward to Christmas. I gave him an enthusiastic but highly conflicted, “Sure.” Dwayne paused, looked off in the distance, and then turned back to me and said very seriously that he believed in Christmas but wasn’t sure he still believed in Santa.

A fellow skeptic! I didn’t tell him about the presents under the dining room table; I just swallowed hard and told him I was on the fence about Santa, too. Dwayne nodded respectfully and said, “Yeah, it’s hard not to be.” I mentioned that last year I thought I heard something on the roof. It could have been a sleigh.

“Do you have a chimney?” said Dwayne.

“No.”

Dwayne shook his head, “Well, if you don’t have a chimney, Santa won’t stop on the roof. It was probably a squirrel.”

“Probably,” I said. We stopped at the curb. Dwayne looked both ways for approaching traffic. I blurted out, “Dwayne, I just really want to believe in Santa.”

Dwayne turned to me and put his hand on my shoulder, “I know, Stephen. Me, too. But it’s always easier to want to believe in something than it is to say it never was true.”

I was staggered by the profundity of the remark.

Dwayne looked at the deserted playground for a moment and then back to me, “Don’t get me wrong, I love Santa, but this will probably be the last year I believe.”

I’ve always remembered this exchange. For years I thought it was because it was the only real talk I ever had about Santa Crisis. But as I look back, it was more likely memorable because it was my first crisis of belief.

That was 50 years ago and many crises of belief have come and gone. Last year, around Christmas time, I went back to Dallas. It was not for anything as festive as enjoying the holiday season under the old mahogany table. I came because it was near the anniversary of my mother’s passing, always a hard time for my family. A trip back home would give me a chance to see Dad, reminisce with my brother and sister, and give me another opportunity to sleep in my old unsleepable bed. The very same one I had as a child. When that salesman told Mom and Dad my bed would last a lifetime, they took him at his word.

A trip to Dallas also holds the potential of discovery in an archaeological way. Over the years Mom saved everything and tucked it all in the most improbable places for safekeeping. After she passed away we became painfully aware she never left a map.

Sure enough, on this visit, I found an old manila envelope at the bottom of my underwear drawer under a pair of pajamas last worn when I was in junior high school. Inside the envelope was an edition of my elementary school newspaper: the Jefferson Davis News.

I looked through the little paper. On the back page was a picture of our first grade class taken in front of the school. I studied it and there was Dwayne, sitting next to me with his Best Citizen ribbon pinned to his shirt. It is the only picture I have of him. I silently thanked Mom for one of the best Christmas presents ever.

I wrote Dwayne’s words in the margin of the picture out of fear that one day I may forget them. It had an unexpected effect. I looked at the photo of all of those 5-year-old faces standing in front of Jefferson Davis Elementary, surrounded by the words: “It is always easier to want to believe in something than to say it never was true.” It became a grim school motto.

Dwayne’s proverb warned about false prophets and the mechanism they use to enter our lives. His wisdom still shook me to the core—but then again, he was 6. I put the paper down on the little broken bedside table and turned out the light.

As I began to drift off, I had a passing thought: We often find things when we need them. Maybe all the scraps of paper Mom had saved over the years weren’t a product of her nuttiness at all but were meant for me to unearth every now and then as some sort of amulet of protection.

I sat up in the dark. I turned on the light and looked at the class picture again. Truth operates in an opposite curve from conspiracy. The further one gets from conspiracy the more preposterous it looks, while distance only gives the truth more clarity. I saw something new. Buried in Dwayne’s words: “It’s always easier to want to believe in something than it is to say it never was true”—was also hope. Dwayne was saying the ability to believe is always present, always available. Belief gives us a power to see beyond the obvious. In the face of loss or disappointment, it is the source of renewal and endurance, the foundation of the science of second chances.

I was momentarily startled by a night noise. Now I recognized it as the central heat kicking in. Knowledge is the ultimate protection against the dark. But I admit I laughed when I realized my first thought was to wonder how Eye the Monster was doing.

I lay back down and closed my eyes. In an instant I was with Dwayne about to cross the street on that cold afternoon before Christmas. He laughed and put his hand on my shoulder. We looked both ways and ran across the street to Daughtery’s Drugstore. I felt like I was in one of the good bedtime stories. I went to sleep and had pleasant dreams.

[Stephen Tobolowsky is an actor and writer who has appeared in more than 200 movies and TV shows. He performs his stories on The Tobolowsky Files at Slashfilm.com and on iTunes. His first book of stories, The Dangerous Animals Club, has just been published.]

The Dangerous Animals Club

by

Stephen Tobolowsky

ISBN-10: 1451633157
ISBN-13: 978-1451633153

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12 Days of Christmas gifts exceed $100k

Bubble lights

Giants

"When Giants Roamed the Earth"

by

Mark Rose

November/December 2005

Aracaeology

In the golden age of hoaxes, petrified men came to life

Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols are nowhere listed among the heroes of American archaeology, but the discovery they made on October 16, 1869, captured the nation's imagination. Digging a well on the farm of William "Stub" Newell in the hamlet of Cardiff, New York, they hit stone three feet down. Clearing the soil, they recognized the shape of a foot, and one of them uttered the immortal words, "I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!"

Soon they had unearthed a colossal stone figure more than 10 feet from head to toe. What Emmons and Nichols didn't know was the stone man was the creation of Binghamton cigar maker George Hull, who was Newell's cousin, and that Hull and Newell had planted it there nearly a year before. Hundreds of people flocked to see the marvel. Newell set up a tent over it and started charging 25c a head. Business was so brisk that he increased it to 50c two days later.

Andrew White, first president of Cornell University, later described his visit: "The roads were crowded with buggies, carriages, and even omnibuses from the city, and with lumber-wagons from the farms--all laden with passengers." The giant was an impressive sight. "Lying in its grave," wrote White, "with the subdued light from the roof of the tent falling upon it, and with the limbs contorted as if in a death struggle, it produced a most weird effect. An air of great solemnity pervaded the place. Visitors hardly spoke above a whisper."
 
White nonetheless recognized immediately that the giant was a hoax: it was obviously a statue, and not a very good one, and there was no reason for the two laborers to have been digging a well at the spot they found it. Even so, White overheard "a very excellent doctor of divinity, pastor of one of the largest churches in Syracuse" declare that, "Is it not strange that any human being, after seeing this wonderfully preserved figure, can deny the evidence of his senses, and refuse to believe, what is so evidently the fact, that we have here a fossilized human being, perhaps one of the giants mentioned in Scripture?"

"Therefore it was," recalled White, "that, in spite of all scientific reasons to the contrary, the work was very generally accepted as a petrified human being of colossal size, and became known as 'the Cardiff Giant.'"

Evidence of giants in America was nothing new. The Massachusetts Puritan Cotton Mather believed that mastodon fossils found near Albany, New York, in 1705 were those of giants who had perished in Noah's flood. "The Giants that once groaned under the waters," he wrote, "are now under the Earth, and their Dead Bones are lively Proofs of the Mosaic history." Nearly a century later, when Connecticut farmer Pliny Moody discovered foot-long three-toed tracks in a sandstone ridge on his land, his pastor identified them as from Noah's raven, which had "rested on that ledge and probably slept there before resuming the dangerous journey back to the Ark." The same cleric later deduced that dinosaur bones found to the south were "probably the remains of giant humans."

Thomas Jefferson had his own interest in fossils, and in 1804 he even set aside a room in the White House for his collection of extinct elephant, giant ground sloth, and bison bones, teeth, and tusks. Earlier, he had convinced Yale College president Ezra Stiles that such remains were of animals rather than giants. Fascinated by an immense claw of a ground sloth, Jefferson wrote to a friend, "I cannot...help believing that this animal, as well as the mammoth, are still existing."

For Josiah Priest, writing in his American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West, ancient North America had been crowded with Egyptians, Romans, Lost Tribes of Israel, "Hindoos," and others. And giants? Priest cites Scripture on giants and notes, "There are those who imagine that the first inhabitants of the globe, or the antediluvians, were much larger than our race at the present time." And he reports discoveries such as one in Indiana of "several sculls, legs and thigh bones, which plainly show that their possessors were persons of gigantic stature." Laughable today, American Antiquities was a bestseller when it appeared in 1835, going through five editions and 22,000 copies.

At midcentury, Charles Darwin's ideas of natural selection would challenge the idea that species were never-changing and undermine the biblical account of Noah's flood and the belief that fossils (including those of "giants") were evidence of life forms obliterated by that flood. Darwin's Origin of Species appeared in November 1859, almost exactly a decade before the discovery of the Cardiff Giant. But what impact did it have on the general public? Publisher John Murray, fearing a financial fiasco, had balked at the 500-page manuscript, and initially asked that Darwin cut it down and focus the work on pigeons because "everybody is interested in pigeons." Murray's fears proved unfounded, and the book went into a second edition in 1860, but it was handily outsold by Samuel Smiles' Self-Help.

George Hull is one person who might have read Darwin. In 1866, Hull was in Ackley, Iowa, looking into why his brother-in-law was late paying for a consignment of 10,000 cigars. While there, Hull, an atheist, got into a heated argument with Rev. Mr. Turk, a Methodist revivalist. Hull later recalled spending the night "wondering about why people would believe those remarkable stories in the Bible about giants, when suddenly I thought of making a stone giant, and passing it off as a petrified man."

Secrecy was critical to his plan, so Hull decided to make the petrified man far from New York. Back in Iowa in June 1868, he found suitable stone near Fort Dodge and hired men to quarry out an 11-foot-long block of gypsum. Fearful of a leak, Hull told them that the stone was for a monument to Abraham Lincoln in New York. Shipped by train to Chicago, the block was carved by a German stone cutter, who was sworn to silence. The finished giant, weighing almost 3,000 pounds, went by rail to a station near Binghamton, and from there went to Cardiff in November 1868. It was duly excavated there the following October by Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols, who were directed to the spot by Newell. After the discovery, Hull found out that Newell had told others about the hoax. The secret wouldn't last long, so he sold the giant to a syndicate of businessmen led by a David Hannum, receiving altogether $23,000. Hull's timing was impeccable. On November 5, the syndicate had the giant dug up and shipped to Syracuse, later taking it on the road, heading toward New York City. But there was trouble on the horizon in the form of P.T. Barnum.

A ruthless competitor, Barnum capitalized on the Cardiff hoax in a masterful fashion, as told in his Funny Stories (1890): "One thing was certain--it was a great attraction, visited by hundreds of people daily, and I thought that so great a curiosity should be exhibited under proper management in New York city. I therefore approached the proprietors, and said, 'I will give you fifty thousand dollars for your Cardiff Giant, as it is.'"

When they declined the offer, Barnum decided to make an exact copy of the giant. He sent an undercover agent to the exhibition who covertly modeled the giant's shape in a lump of wax. Creating a plaster replica based on the model and the giant's measurements, taken from advertisements, was easy. Barnum arranged for his copy to be shown at a museum in New York, where it was, he wrote, "a considerable attraction, and drew crowds of visitors, while the original was lumbering along down the North [Hudson] River, stopping at towns on the way."

Commenting on those who paid to see Barnum's fake giant, Hannum remarked, "There's a sucker born every minute." The syndicate sought an injunction against Barnum, but the judge told them, "Bring your giant here, and if he swears to his own genuineness as a bona fide petrifaction, you shall have the injunction you ask for."

The courtroom loss was just one of several setbacks. On November 25, Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh wrote a scathing denunciation of the Cardiff Giant: "It is of very recent origin, and a most decided humbug.... I am surprised that any scientific observers should not have at once detected the unmistakable evidence against its antiquity." Then, on December 10, Hull confessed all in the press.

Hull was not, in fact, the originator of the petrifaction idea. There was a petrifaction spoof in the newspaper Alta California in 1858. Written as a letter from a bogus German scholar, Friederich Lichtenberger, M.D., it tells of an unfortunate prospector named Ernest Flucterspiegel, who drank a half-pint of fluid he found inside a geode. Returning to camp, he had pains in the "epigastric" and "left hypochondriac" regions. He was soon dead, inflexible, and stone. Dissecting the corpse with a hatchet, the scientific Lichtenberger found the heart "strongly resembled a piece of red jasper."
 
Better known is Mark Twain's parody of the discovery of a petrified man published in the Territorial Enterprise in October 1862. It began with a deadpan: "A petrified man was found some time ago in the mountains south of Gravelly Ford. Every limb and feature of the stony mummy was perfect, not even excepting the left leg, which has evidently been a wooden one during the lifetime of the owner." If the wooden leg wasn't enough of a tip-off, Twain described the seated petrifaction as thumbing his nose. Surprisingly, eight of the twelve newspapers that picked up the story gave no indication that it was a spoof, intended to make fun of other petrifaction stories then current. Twain followed this with a brief update a month later: "Mr. Herr Weisnicht [know-nothing] has just arrived in Virginia City.... He brings with him the head and one foot of the petrified man, lately found in the mountains near Gravelly Ford. A skillful assayer has analyzed a small portion of dirt found under the nail of the great toe and pronounces the man to have been a native of the Kingdom of New Jersey."
 
In 1870, Twain took on the Cardiff Giant in "A Ghost Story," set in a hotel room in Manhattan into which barges a large and clumsy phantom--the ghost of the Cardiff Giant. The sad-sack spook wants to be reburied on Newell's farm, but is confused and is mistakenly haunting Barnum's museum. "Why you poor blundering old fossil," exclaims the hotel guest. "You have had all your troubles for nothing--you have been haunting a plaster cast of yourself--the real Cardiff Giant is in Albany! Confound it, don't you know your own remains?"

The Cardiff Giant gave rise to at least a dozen similar hoaxes. Ticket sales and the possibility of a quick sell for big money seem to have been the motives for most. One such was "The Solid Muldoon." Found near Beulah, Colorado, in 1876, it was probably named for William Muldoon, the strongman and boxer. Muldoon's petrified namesake was exhibited at 50c a ticket, and whether he did or not, it was claimed that P.T. Barnum offered $20,000 for the petrifaction, lending it the great showman's approbation. A disgruntled insider revealed that the perpetrator was none other than George Hull, creator of the Cardiff Giant, assisted by William Conant, a former Barnum employee. The Muldoon was solid, made of a mixture of rock dust, clay, plaster, ground bones, blood, and meat that was kiln fired for days. Yale's Othniel Marsh reprised his Cardiff role, examining the hoax and consigning it to scientific oblivion. One giveaway was the fact that Muldoon had a tail, perhaps a nod by the atheist Hull to Darwin.

Giants also had value as marketing gimmicks. In the mid 1870s, there was a mortal struggle between Taughannock House and Cataract House, two hotels at Lake Cayuga, New York. In 1877, the Taughannock's owner hired a local foundry worker to cook up a petrified man, then had it planted where laborers widening the hotel's road would find it. They did, and the giant drew crowds to Taughannock House. But the hotel's newfound prosperity was only temporary. One of those who helped bury the giant spilled the beans while drunk in a bar. P.T. Barnum's agent was supposedly among those present and promptly left town. Worse, iron filings were one of the giant's main ingredients, and on exposure to air it began rusting.

Petrified men continued to be moneymakers, but the game was wearing thin. In 1892, drawn by the silver boom, Jefferson Randolph "Soapy" Smith moved to Creede, Colorado. A con man, Soapy soon ruled over Creede's vice industry, pickpockets, and riffraff. He played the petrified-man hoax for a quick kill. His concrete giant, nicknamed McGinty, was buried and then found at nearby Willow Creek and displayed in his saloon, the Orleans Club, for an exorbitant $1 a head. There was no attempt to maintain the hoax in the face of scientific inquiry. By the time an expert arrived to examine the petrifaction, it had disappeared. Soapy later disappeared from Creede himself, ending up in Skagway, Alaska, where he was gunned down in 1898.

But just when a subject seems exhausted, someone takes it to a higher level, winning a jaded audience and overcoming growing skepticism by making the story more incredible than ever. That is what happened in 1899, when a petrified man was found near Fort Benton, Montana. Local newspapers marveled at its "neatly trimmed sideburns and mustache" and features "so perfect that a person who knew the dead man in life could not fail to recognize him now." Eventually, he was identified, as reported in the Bozeman Chronicle: it was General Thomas Meagher. An Irish and Civil War hero, Meagher had been named territorial acting governor for Montana, but proved to be unstable. Paranoid, he believed that there was a conspiracy against him, and he drank too much. On the night of July 1, 1867, he fell off a steamboat into the Missouri near Fort Benton and drowned. An alternative identification--"Liver Eating Johnson" thought he recognized his old partner, "Antelope Charlie"--was rejected.

"General Meagher" headed through Chicago to New York, where he was the headline story in the World's Sunday supplement. But times were changing. Placed prominently on page one was a box titled "Proved by X-Ray to Be a Genuine Petrified Man." According to one Edwin S. Kellogg, M.D., the bones were in place, even though the brain was "atrophied through petrifaction." Businessman Arthur Miles, Meagher's owner, said he would consult with the Smithsonian on whether his man was genuine, but somehow never did.

Skepticism and a flooded market led to the devaluation of petrified men. Where Barnum admitted offering $50,000 for the Cardiff Giant in 1869, his supposed offer for the Solid Muldoon seven years later was only $20,000. By the 1890s, petrified men were cheap: one found at Wind Cave, South Dakota, went for $2,000 and another, found near Fresno and exhibited in the Popular Drug Store there, sold for $1,000. Arthur Miles was told by his father in 1899 that he knew of one for sale at "a dollar six bits." Petrified men had lost their financial punch. The game was over.

Relegated to a barn in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, the Cardiff Giant made an appearance at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, but it was a flop and attracted little attention. A Des Moines, Iowa, publisher bought it, but in 1947 he sold it to the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, where it is now displayed beneath a tent that duplicates the one under which it was exhibited at Stub Newell's farm in October 1869.

Why had the petrified men succeeded at all? The belief in giants and search for evidence of them had a long history. Andrew White, who witnessed crowds at Cardiff, wrote, "There seemed no possibility even of suspending the judgment of the great majority who saw the statue. As a rule, they insisted on believing it a 'petrified giant.'" There was, he noted, a "joy in believing" that was "increased by the peculiarly American superstition that the correctness of a belief is decided by the number of people who can be induced to adopt it." White could have been writing of Mary L. Day Arms, who recorded her impressions of the Solid Muldoon in The World As I Have Found It (1878): "throngs of wonder-seekers were irresistibly drawn, all of whom, as if entering the presence chamber of the King of Terrors, seemed awed by this silent 'representative of the dead past,' and with hushed voices and bated breath, lingered over the lineaments of one, which, if it had been known at that time was not a real petrifaction, would perhaps have excited only feelings of ridicule and words of derision. We were willing to be humbugged with the rest."
 
Ken Feder, author of Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries (2001), says, "The most obvious explanation is that the Cardiff Giant confirmed biblical stories of giants. Then there were folks who probably knew better, the smart businessmen in Syracuse--they saw that people were coming in to see the giant, using hotel space and buying food." Another possibility, he says, is that it is like reading the National Enquirer today. People didn't really believe it, but were willing to pay 50c to see the Cardiff Giant because they thought it was interesting. Feder's own experience at the Farmer's Museum is also enlightening, if discouraging. "They have the giant in a tent with a sign outside saying 'World's Greatest Hoax' along with displays inside explaining it. A couple came in and walked around the giant. As they left the wife turned to her husband and said, 'So is that real?' And the husband shrugged and said, 'I guess so.'"
 
Somewhere, George Hull and P.T. Barnum must still be laughing about the Cardiff Giant, and perhaps David Hannum is thinking, "There's a sucker born every minute." 

Cardiff Giant [Wikipedia]

Previous Halloween treats...

Blood suckers of Connecticut

H. P. Lovecraft treat..."The Alchemist" 

BE AFRAID...the Vampire Squid

H. G. Wells treat..."The Star"

Animation land Halloween cartoons  

Witch Hazel 

The mirror
 
Kwaidan..four ghost stories

 
Edgar A. Poe treat..."A Tale of the Ragged Mountains"