“This Story Starts at the Beginning of Time.”
Image by Markus Spiske/Unsplash
From its beginning, this blog has been about borders—understanding them, crossing them, finding ways to think about them. The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World by James Crawford examines borders through history. About the oldest known remnant of a border, a single pillar covered with Sumerian cuneiform inscriptions, Crawford says, “This story starts at the beginning of time.” Snippet:
No man’s land.
Today, the words evoke history gone wrong. They cut to the heart of humanity’s troubled nature: our endless capacity for fighting over space. And here the phrase was, carved into our oldest surviving border marker, in our earliest form of writing, in one of our formative attempts at recording history.
Here lies our first story. Once upon a time, across no man’s land, there was a border.
What I appreciated about this writer’s approach, from the prologue onward, was his personal engagement with the material. He not only observes this wall artifact. He engages with it and he makes the reader part of that interaction. Not knowing how to read cuneiform, he must depend on the expertise of others to decipher it. But what he does is what we can all do. He copies out the script, so he can feel its shapes and be better able to locate it on the chiselled inscriptions covering the pillar. Find it he does.
I couldn't stop looking. Under magnification, the crystalline limestone glistened like spun sugar. This was a beautiful object. Beautiful, and terrible.
The Edge of the Plain reads like poetry, even when it can’t decide whether to admire the borders it sees or to make explicit their poignancy and essential one-sidedness. Borders, after all, are meant to display two faces and only two. They are designed to be seen from one of two perspectives at a time. You’re meant to either be protected by them or excluded, even if sometimes, like the Berlin Wall or the borders of Gaza, they contain you and are intended to stop you from leaving. Borders can be fault lines.
Today, we can look down on the borders humans have created. Crawford describes the Great Wall of China as it’s seen from space like a legendary dragon guarding its territory.
Other lessons can be learned from panning out in time. A three-pointed cairn in Arctic Sami territory marks the meeting point of the borders on Finland, Sweden, and Norway. It’s both a cartographic curiosity and “a symbol of how a territory that has been known and occupied by countless generations can be claimed and marked out by incomers.” Reading this book during the time of war in Israel/Gaza/the West Bank makes for an especially unsettling experience. And for that reason, maybe a necessary one.
Because borders can be cruel. They represent the curse of “one land, swallowed by another, then swallowed by another.” An idea presented as a reality and then turned into one. I have seen this play out in my lifetime in more than one country and what’s more, it’s clear to me that borders are very much a part of who we are. Startlingly early in their lives, toddlers learn to say, “Mine!” Humans have been marking territory for millennia, and we’re not the only species to do so.
The question is, how do we want this aspect of us to be remembered in the future?
