The life that chose me

Gilgamesh, and the joy of dying to be born again

Hi, friends,

On Sunday night, I performed in an all-night production of Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest surviving written story.

Hundreds of us piled into a small theatre at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, with our sleeping bags and pillows, and settled in for twelve performances, one for each of the story’s surviving tablets. The show started at 8pm and went through to 6am.

Something happened in that room.

A statue of Gilgamesh at Sydney University

Gilgamesh is a reckoning with mortality. We can’t know exactly what happened in the stories people told before Gilgamesh, the earliest oral stories—but in the oral stories and traditions that remain today, there’s often a sense of the permeability of worlds; of constantly crossing the threshold to the otherworld. With this comes a sense that the human soul might be immortal; that the mortality of the body is, in truth, a technicality.

But in Gilgamesh, a mighty, tyrannical Sumerian king is forced to confront the certainty of death, through the death of his friend Enkidu. The story seems to mark a shift in the way humans understood our place in the world. As we settled and civilized, we seem to have come face-to-face with our own sure death.

There is deep grief in Gilgamesh—and so there is the potential for deep joy. Because without mortality, there can be no joy. It’s the sense of an ending that makes the present moment worth anything at all. This is why the gods envy us our deaths.

As the night wore on, everyone in that theatre descended into the underworld, together. And together, we stared death in the face. There were electrifying performances. Will Keen spliced his tablet with a devastating account from a soldier fighting in the Bosnian War: of the split-second decision to risk everything for the life of his friend. It must have been midnight already by the time he took the stage, but I’ve never felt more awake. Every hair on my body stood on end. The whole theatre held its breath.

And when my teacher and the mastermind of the evening, Alice Oswald, performed a long, transcendently beautiful poem to a rapt theatre, I was transported to the same place Blake took me to a few months ago. Some otherworld of imagination where all the alienation of this world is repaired, healed, made whole again.

Singing the sun up after a night of Gilgamesh. Photo: Jess Langton

It’s my birthday on Monday. I’ll be 39. I certainly didn’t plan for my life to end up the way it has. I didn’t want to get divorced and have to start over at the age of 36.

And I’ll be honest: sometimes I still feel pretty lonely.

But if none of that had happened—if I hadn’t descended into the underworld and reckoned with the death of everything I’d hoped for—I wouldn’t have the joy of this. Of transformative teachers and friends and stories. Of a deeper, richer knowing of art and limitless imagination than I ever dreamed was possible.

This isn’t the life I’d have chosen. I’d have taken the easy path, given half a chance. God knows I tried hard enough to cling on to the stability I once had, until well after I knew I had to let go.

But it’s the life that chose me, and I’m so glad it did. With one year until I turn 40, I am ready to sing the sun up, in my own full, true voice.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Love,

xx Ellie