Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel
What if
instead of relying on facts like yellow cake from Niger and those Winnebagoes of death that led to the invasion of Iraq; on history, to prove man has always been at war and therefore always will be at war, on the reification of Molly Pitcher and Jessica Lynch to shore up words like patriot and hero,
What if
we relied on intuition, love, hope, and poetry;
What if
we believed change were possible;
What if
we changed the way we spoke and thought and began to think like poets, to see the interconnectedness of things, to find the metaphors in our lives?
What if
we all began to speak like the Children of Tama?
The television program Star Trek dabbled in metaphor. In the Fall of 1991, in the “Darmok” episode, viewers were introduced to the Children of Tama whose language was indecipherable, even by the Universal Translator. They spoke only in metaphor. After failed attempts at communication, the Tamarians kidnapped Captain Picard and beamed him to the surface of a hostile planet along with their own captain, Dathon, hoping to bridge the language gap through archetypal, intense shared experience. What follows is a story of the struggle to understand. In the end, while Dathon lies dying, Picard tells him an abbreviated version of part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, whose story reminds us that we are all companions. Like Enkidu and Gilgamesh we are some part human, some part divine. None of us are worthy. All of us are sacred.