Neal Stephenson Quote
He sounds like kind of a hacker. Which makes his nam-shub very difficult tounderstand. If he was such a nice guy, why did he do the Babel thing?This is considered to be one of the mysteries of Enki. As you have noticed,his behavior was not always consistent with modern norms.I don't buy that. I don't think he actually fucked his sister, daughter, andso on. That story has to be a metaphor for something else. I think it is ametaphor for some kind of recursive informational process. This whole mythstinks of it. To these people, water equals semen. Makes sense, because theyprobably had no concept of pure water -- it was all brown and muddy and full ofviruses anyway. But from a modern standpoint, semen is just a carrier ofinformation -- both benevolent sperm and malevolent viruses. Enki's water --his semen, his data, his me -- flow throughout the country of Sumer and cause itto flourish.As you may be aware, Sumer existed on the floodplain between two major rivers,the Tigris and the Euphrates. This is where all the clay came from -- they tookit directly from the riverbeds.So Enki even provided them with their medium for conveying information -- clay.They wrote on wet clay and then they dried it out -- got rid of the water. Ifwater got to it later, the information was destroyed. But if they baked it anddrove out all the water, sterilized Enki's semen with heat, then the tabletlasted forever, immutable, like the words of the Torah. Do I sound like amaniac?
He sounds like kind of a hacker. Which makes his nam-shub very difficult tounderstand. If he was such a nice guy, why did he do the Babel thing?This is considered to be one of the mysteries of Enki. As you have noticed,his behavior was not always consistent with modern norms.I don't buy that. I don't think he actually fucked his sister, daughter, andso on. That story has to be a metaphor for something else. I think it is ametaphor for some kind of recursive informational process. This whole mythstinks of it. To these people, water equals semen. Makes sense, because theyprobably had no concept of pure water -- it was all brown and muddy and full ofviruses anyway. But from a modern standpoint, semen is just a carrier ofinformation -- both benevolent sperm and malevolent viruses. Enki's water --his semen, his data, his me -- flow throughout the country of Sumer and cause itto flourish.As you may be aware, Sumer existed on the floodplain between two major rivers,the Tigris and the Euphrates. This is where all the clay came from -- they tookit directly from the riverbeds.So Enki even provided them with their medium for conveying information -- clay.They wrote on wet clay and then they dried it out -- got rid of the water. Ifwater got to it later, the information was destroyed. But if they baked it anddrove out all the water, sterilized Enki's semen with heat, then the tabletlasted forever, immutable, like the words of the Torah. Do I sound like amaniac?
Related Quotes
About Neal Stephenson
Stephenson's work explores mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. He also writes nonfiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired. He has written novels with his uncle, George Jewsbury ("J. Frederick George"), under the collective pseudonym Stephen Bury.
Stephenson has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (founded by Jeff Bezos) developing a spacecraft and a space launch system, and also co-founded the Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project The Mongoliad. He was Magic Leap's Chief Futurist from 2014 to 2020.