Be Transformed

The oldest story we have is about one person being known by another. That is the ultimate quality of a meaningful relationship, and I cannot get over it.

The Epic of Gilgamesh reaches back more than four thousand years, nearly to the beginning of recorded human storytelling when it was recorded. Before the novel, before Shakespeare, before most of the stories we use to explain ourselves to ourselves, someone pressed cuneiform into clay and preserved the story of a powerful king who had everything except someone who could meet him where he was.

Gilgamesh is unmatched, and his inability to be matched has made him destructive. He is powerful, restless, excessive, unchecked. For the gods, the answer to the Gilgamesh problem is Enkidu. He’s created specifically as his equal, as someone strong enough to stand against him. Before they make contact, they are dreaming about each other, and fondness between them grew. They each were hoping for a friend of the heart. Then, when they finally meet, they fight. Ha!

Strength meets strength until Gilgamesh encounters something he has never experienced before: another human being who can hold his ground, who does not need Gilgamesh to become less powerful in order to stand beside him. He has been matched. And in being matched, he is known. They can see each other eye to eye.

We spend a great deal of time trying to label relationships: friendship, brothers, romantic love, erotic love. The relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu has carried all of those interpretations, but the intimacy between them resists our desire to put it neatly into one category because the category is not the point. The point is recognition.

There is no greater human desire than to be known.

We want someone capable of seeing the whole of us without requiring us to become less than we are in order to be understood. We want our strange corners recognized, our contradictions held side by side, our strength admired rather than feared. We want the rare experience of looking at another human being and realizing that we do not have to translate ourselves. There you are.

I know this experience exists because I have lived it. Being known changes you, and I have been changed because of it.

Gilgamesh changes because of Enkidu, not because Enkidu teaches him a lesson or fixes what is wrong with him, but because profound recognition changes the way we understand ourselves. Once someone has met us in a place we did not know someone else could reach, we cannot ignore that this place exists.

But, then Enkidu dies. And Gilgamesh is devastated, destroyed, and… transformed again.

His grief is enormous because what he has lost is enormous. He stops caring for himself, wanders into the wilderness wearing animal skins, and becomes consumed with death. Eventually, he goes searching for Utnapishtim, the man who survived the great flood and was granted immortality.

On the surface, Gilgamesh is searching for the answer to death. But, I think he is searching for the answer to grief. He has lost the person who knew him, and now he needs someone to tell him how a human being survives that. I know this experience exists, too.

There is a particular violence in losing someone who has known you deeply because the loss is larger than absence. The world continues exactly as it did before while something fundamental about your experience of being in it has changed. Your person is gone, and somehow you are expected to keep buying groceries, answering emails, making appointments, washing your hair.

Gilgamesh crosses the world because surely there must be an answer more substantial than that. He reaches Utnapishtim. He hears the story of the flood. He learns how this one extraordinary man escaped the fate waiting for everyone else.

And when all the stories have been told, Gilgamesh is still there.

Enkidu is still dead.

The grief is still his.

He says, What now?

Not, How do I become immortal?

What do I do with this grief? How do I carry this? How do I live now?

Gilgamesh has traveled to the edge of the world for an answer worthy of the size of what happened to him, and the answer is almost absurdly ordinary. First, he sleeps. Then he is told to wash himself, shave, change his clothes, care for his body and go home. Then, start living again.

I love this part of the story because it refuses to give us a satisfying answer. There is no revelation large enough to make Enkidu's death acceptable, no explanation that turns the loss into something Gilgamesh should be grateful for, and no wisdom capable of returning him to the person he was before.

There is a bath.

There are clean clothes.

There is home.

There is tomorrow.

And there is a Gilgamesh who returns to Uruk without Enkidu but who can never return as the man he was before Enkidu. That man no longer exists because Enkidu happened. The relationship happened. The knowing happened. The loss happened. And all of it transformed him.

This is what astonishes me about reading Gilgamesh more than four thousand years after someone first decided this story was worth preserving. Almost everything surrounding the human experience has changed, while the thing underneath it has remained remarkably the same.

We want to be known.

When we encounter someone capable of truly knowing us, we are transformed by the experience. When we lose someone who has known us, we are transformed by the loss. We spend enormous energy trying to undo the second transformation, calling it recovery as though the goal is to return to the person who existed before. We want normal again. We want ourselves back. But, there is no going back.

And I don’t think there should be.

I have been known. I have been loved in ways that changed me. I have also lost relationships whose absence changed the landscape of my life, and I spent enough time believing survival meant finding my way back to the person I had been before them. But, she is gone.

And… good.

Because there are experiences in this life profound enough that we should not survive them unchanged. Gilgamesh does not get Enkidu back, but neither does the world get the old Gilgamesh back.

He takes the bath.

He washes his hair.

He puts on clean clothes.

He goes home.

He lives.

Not because what happened has become less significant, but because it was significant enough to become part of who he is. That is the oldest story we have.

Be known, and be transformed by the knowing.

Love, and be transformed by the loving.

Lose, and be transformed by the loss.

Take care of yourself. Get dressed. Go back into the world carrying the evidence of what happened to you. Do not go back.

Stop trying to become the person you were before. Accept that you have changed.

BE TRANSFORMED.