What really happned at the Tower of Babel?
An interpretation for what really took place!
From Uruk to Babel: How Ancient Writing Development Shaped the Account of Dispersal open.substack.com/pub/elysedeb...
#babylon #uruk #towerofbabel #ancienttrade #firstwriting
50. Leaving each door moments later, she seems older, and walks differently than she did the door before. She is applying her knowledge of the world in these new rooms, keeping what works and discarding the rest...
#FirstWriting
49. Upon each door is marked a name: Josephine, Michael, Andrew, Davide, Thomasina, Melissa, Andreas, Oliver and others. In a rapid burst of sentences, Alex is led to, and passes through each door and spends a short amount of time there.
#FirstWriting
48. Innately she seems to understand a need for otherness, and this room is a large space, cavernous and segmented by walls of varying lengths and colors. Within each wall is a door.
#FirstWriting
47. Chapter Two: the Room of Adolescence. At some point, Alex has stopped reading, responding perhaps to an inner sound, heard only with another sense, the sixth sense, the sense of balance.
#FirstWriting
46. She battens upon them as a mushroom upon soil, fecund with possibility and a myriad of worlds. Her time in this room lasts only until the sun goes down, and her lights dim.
#FirstWriting
45. She is aware of her parents as helpful librarians, guiding her toward the stories she wants, free of charge. Her mannerisms then must come from the books she reads, an amalgam of behaviors both rude and refined, adapted to each situation as it presents itself.
#FirstWriting
44. She stares at the pages with expressions of intent concentration and frequently frowns, though her smiles are not uncommon. She never receives visitors, so she never needs to learn how to be with others.
#FirstWriting
43. Seen in that light, she is a burning girl, her cloud of vermillion tresses casting a glare of color around her like a cloak, warm and serene. Her skin also glows, diffuse and lambent, as though she were lit from within by a holy light.
#FirstWriting
42. Instead, she sits, mostly, and reads, turning like an anti-sunflower, keeping the light at her back, through the windows; the windows out of which she never looks.
#FirstWriting
41. Where she never gets stains on the carpeting, lush and green like grass beneath a Summer sun.
#FirstWriting
I'll release these sequential passages 10 at a time. I think that's quite enough.
#FirstWriting
40. Looking back, I find Alex’s life a story, a novella, solid and sturdy, and composed of chapters, as a great hall is composed of passages and rooms. Chapter One: the Room of Childhood, where Alex rarely runs, is never loud as a child normally is.
#FirstWriting
39. His forever companion is Alexandria Temple, a woman, once, but now truly a house of pain sheltering Josiah within her silent blue walls and beneath her hushed and purple roof.
#FirstWriting
38. This is Josiah’s legacy, that he is the twin who has lived, while the other body rots and decays beside him, still attached, and only he can smell the necrosis.
#FirstWriting
37. It will only rail against itself, a house of loyalties divided and wanting nothing more than to live as it once did: simply, lonely, defiantly.
#FirstWriting
36. ... tripping and stumbling its crazy infatuation with reconciliation and unity, Dopplering its way to a shattered and uneasy peace. Once joined, this body may never be torn asunder.
#FirstWriting
35. Feel the texture of the walls, how muscular and fibrous its two-toned cables, clenching and releasing their heartbeat for two. Hear its rhythm, bespeaking the cadences of separate lives, a broken morse code of desperate longing, a beaten tattoo in a race with itself...
#FirstWriting
34. It’s a Siamese twin: two whole lives somehow uncomfortably joined at the heart. See the inner branchings of the network of arteries, how carefully intertwined the frayed ends, how claustrophobically intimately the fleshy follicles enmesh and invade each other.
#FirstWriting
33. And after the cavity is exposed, and the humors released, who appears to be at fault? These organs pump and pulse still, these veins pass both satisfaction and curiosity in equal measure, though the cadaver never moves from its slab.
#FirstWriting
32. Who was responsible, ever? The autopsy provides clues with no fingerprints, only the random eruptions of desires suggested and held in abeyance. The tissues seem inflamed and ruptured, yet hold together by some horribly miraculous tensile strength previously only guessed at.
#FirstWriting
31. Like probing the space where a tooth once sat, unsettling yet compulsive, the repetition of blame and assigning of broken moments never ceases to capture the attention; the skin wears smooth with each successive passing of hands.
#FirstWriting
30. A healthy body, yet marked over and again with the telltale scars of pathology. It is endlessly possible to open the shell and revisit the wounds, made of those things that were said and done, hoping to secure some intimation of immortality.
#FirstWriting
29. At times, it seems to take a shape. It appears to hold a form, coarse yet definite. The anatomy of loss: a body made mostly of moments, of memories and thoughtful reminiscing over cups of tears.
#FirstWriting
28. Josiah’s patrons gorge upon his throwaways and cast-offs, relishing the forgotten tang of regret.
For Josiah Walker, the flavor coats the tongue and taints the air; he moves in a cloud of effluvia, breathing it, tasting it, living it.
#FirstWriting
27. The kinds of people who believe that expressing concern is the same as acting upon it. Patrons who live days of indulgence, sheltered forever in rooms without corners, bereft of windows with glass that cuts, without chairs that break.
#FirstWriting
26. His virulent, unwanted vision supplies his numbed and wealthy audience with opportunities to suffer vicariously through him, to lead comfortable lives, unsullied with true experience. A way to say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I”.
#FirstWriting
25. Nightmares make for an interesting story if it isn’t one’s own. They make a healthy career for Josiah, of self-parody without humor, of bitter revelation without catharsis.
#FirstWriting
I'm all about public shame, as you can see. I'm hoping this will prevent me from making the same kinds of writing mistakes on display in my #FirstWriting
24. Then he remembers that she’s dead, and he cries helplessly, like a child.
#FirstWriting
