If this is what the gods said, everything
a mirror we live in, yes, working
against the harsh needs we slide across
– then the story’s not believable. Yet
OK, we’ll rearrange it, oscillating
gently within a blue bowl, almost translucent or
vibrating within the utterance of that god
or just living tenderly inside some empty room.
One thought on “50. A Fragment Newly Translated out of the Language of the Gibberim”
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Gibberim: could be speakers of gibberish (who? – me?), could be plural of “gibber” (also “gebber”), used variously in the Old Testament to refer to “strong men”, “warriors”, (Exodus 10:11), even god (“eli gibberim” of Ezekiel 32:21), also “giants” (Job, 16:14, and Genesis 6:4, linked to the the pre-Diluvian giants or nephilim – vide also Ezekial 32:27 – “gibborim nophlim“: “the mighty that are fallen”): anything you want, really. And I’ll throw in gratuitously, the unlikely but unforgettable hypothesis that the word “gibberish” commemorates the famous 8th-century Islamic alchemist Jābir ibn Hayyān, whose name was Latinized as “Geber”, and who quite possibly never actually existed, and certainly never wrote the half of what has gone under his name.