Zeugma. From the Greek, zeugnynai, to join together; from
a pair of animals linked at labor;
yoked oxen. The Greeks, of course, for whom beginnings signified
better than endings, alpha & omega, for whom
x was just another letter: xiphoid, xerophagy, xenophobia, xoanon.
Civilization, perforce, is abecedarian.
When Xenophon’s hoplites charged the Persians at Cunaxa he
denied the agency of local gods, mistaking
vox populi for vox angelica, voice of a suffering populace
entirely freed of fleshly yoke,
uplifted in exquisite agony. Such are the costs of transmigration.
Fish demand ladders, wooden horses
transhumance, referring to reindeer but apropos in Ilium,
green-fingered Lydia or Mesopotamia,
stage for the tidal clash of cultures & languages, ebbs & floods
hardly unique to Persians & Greeks.
Recall the illiterate Pizarro against the hummingbird-feathered
Inca Atahualpa, sun-god & moon-
queen trampled into Andean dust by a few dozen Spaniards
jointly with their horses, gunpowder, &
priestly blessing to sanctify such slaughter in the name of the king of
kings. Back to Xenophon & the Ten Thousand:
on the retreat now, following the Tigris, they come to a ruined city,
Larissa, inhabited by Medes, thought to be
none other than Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, hippogriffs become
Medean in the wake of serial conquest,
median point on their march from Babylon toward the hills of Armenia,
none cheered by that barren vision, dire
Larissa, omen of defeat, citadel of political impermanence.
On the next day, great Nineveh, abandoned:
kings, seneschals, satraps, jesters, fletchers, peltasts, potters,
priestly & noble classes—vanished con-
jointly into equitable oblivion, weaver & wool, smith & tool,
queen & fool. So much for the Assyrians.
Ink, a luxury, so no texts but wind-scoured stone remain to help us
recall them, our contemporary ignorance
hardly less monumental than Xenophon’s self-serving chronicle,
scene by scene inventing ancient history.
Green no longer, that Fertile Crescent, mislabeled by an en-
tranced human stab at metaphoric order.
Fish into amphibians, logograms into syllabaries, seas into lands
uplifted in autochthonic agons
entirely unwitnessed, template free of cartographic correlatives,
vox barbara or vox nihili, celestial music
denied in our fury to claim an alphabet forged from the metals of chaos.
When the ox moves, the plow moves.
Civilization, perforce, is boustrophedonic: x-y-z; z-y-
x. Better the blue mud of the Euphrates,
better the raw ore of belief than these chains of syntax, this
yoke of definitions. Xoanon:
a primitive idol resembling the rough block from which it was carved.
Zeugma: maker & vessel, master & slave.