Inanna, her powers

Inanna is that we are here together at all. Among the powers she connived from her father early in her life in a drinking game and stole away with by boat and brought to the docks of the great Sumerian cities were —

dagger and sword
black garment
colourful garment
loosening of the hair
binding of the hair

art of the hero
art of power
art of treachery
art of straightforwardness
plundering of cities
setting up of lamentations
rejoicing of the heart

She’s how a meal is more than feeding a hole and sex more than rutting and shelter more than reeds against the wind. She’s all the powers of civilization including the power to pull down a civilization. Not good or bad but bigger and smaller than that. The voice from the whirlwind when the voice is in roughly equal measures Leviathan and Coyote and they who made them.

As she readies for her trip the underworld she gathers the powers (me) drawn to the fore of her by good times with her shepherd king Dumuzi. An array likely to make her nether sister Ereshkigal (sexually voracious apparently and intensely lonely) more rageful than welcoming.

She placed the shugurra, the crown of the steppe, on her head.
She arranged the locks of hair across her forehead.
She tied the small lapis beads around her neck,
Let the double strand of beads fall to her breast,
And wrapped the royal robe around her body.
She daubed her eyes with ointment called “Let him come, Let him come,”
Bound the breastplate called “Come, man, come!” around her chest,
Slipped the gold ring over her wrist,
And took the lapis measuring rod and line in her hand.

Archaic but still kind of hot. I picture her with a hardhat and an orange safety vest carrying a surveyor’s tripod.

For this point in the book I need a broader account of her powers — need to say how great a disaster her departure is — so I’ve gone back to the survey of her me in her drinking game with her father. I’ve posted this once before but here it is again, somewhat improved. The first page —

And the second —

Why junk mail. A fertility myth tells how grain gets from the ground to your table to your belly. At some point it invokes sex (and not metaphorically, what those grasses are doing in the wind is fucking) and at some point it acknowledges the marketplace — grain’s not going to get from the ground to your gut without being bought and sold as a commodity, not anymore, not by the time such a myth as this comes about.

Junk mail is one mark of the marketplace in our day. It is somehow all at once ephemeral (who stops to read this shit before tossing it in the recycling?) and archaic (print? in envelopes? in my mailbox? really?) and omniscient (how on earth did they find me?) and omnipresent (day in, day out, my lord). So, that, and, too, if I can comedically resacralize the peacock by turning the Comcast logo into a funny hat, well, that’s a small whee for me.