In Memory

Let's say you are Ug's poetry memorizer/reciter.

You keep in memory the Great Hunt Exploit (jogged by your meditative viewing of the Great Hunt Painted on the Cave Wall), you hold in mind his own hymn "The Day I Made the Lightning Mine" (Ug has an ego, folks).

Plus, you keep the tribe's hymns, chants and seasonal odes Oa has composed ready to recite. (She keeps the lullabyes, berry-gathering lays and open-pit-cooking songs to her own store.)

Then, something terrible happens. The tribe two hills over has decided your tribe has a good thing going and has also decided it's time to make it theirs. This tribe decided that (a) asking your tribe to teach them would be too much work (that learning and memorizing stuff is hard) (b) making war on your tribe would be too expensive (plus, their tribe might lose) so (c) kidnapping you is their best bet.

You don't notice those smug-and-smelly evildoers over there by the bushes as you take a break to take care of your business. And -bang- before you know it, they've got that animal skinbag over your head, and off you go to the really smug-and-smelly-bad tribe two hills over. (They're smelly because they don't believe in baths, and they're smug because they believe this personal choice makes them the superior animal.)

Nestled in them thar hills is a lotta bad stuff gettin' hid from plain sight. And you couldn't help but notice -- as you are forced to teach the smug and the smelly your language, which they didn't want to learn in the first place -- they have Ug's pretty cousin thought eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger actually tied up over in Cave 3a where the s'n's boys 'r makin' her make them some babies, and Ug's medicine man's long-lost brother over down in the Cave With No Number makin' him do spells for the Two Hills Over Tribe.

And you know what's coming. War.

And war comes. And it's a long one. It does to both tribes what war has done ever since. You, the memorizer/reciter, survive -- barely.

And, years later, you decide you're going to make your Last Stand composing a poem that links all the elements you've so carefully shepherded all your life. It will call together all your narrative, hymnic and lyric skills to pull off. Plus, your memories of happier days. And your memories of ones less so.

Once you get started, you have to make sure your apprentice (another bare survivor) gets it all down, because this is the Long Poem About the Good Tribe that Was. And how its members had to Go Bad to Get What Was Theirs Back. And how one son of Ug got through it all and lived to carry on.

We now call those poems "epic". The Greek word is one for "word" or "song". Your epic becomes the basis for all learning the tribe experiences henceforth, as it struggles toward a form of organization intended to prevent warfare (and, inevitably it seems, fails) called "civilization".

Epics have changed over the centuries. They have dealt with all sorts of struggles -- ethical, spiritual and even philosophical (see, again, The Top Ten {April 14, 2010} for more). But those changes haven't diminished human society's need for them.

I'm not sure epic poems are necessary nowadays solely to help schoolchildren develop good memory skills (along with the good reading, writing and overall learning skills that accompany a good memory). But knowledge of what epics are probably is needed for composing the poems of the future that will help make whatever they learn more meaningful.