Dede Korkut is the mythic warrior-bard of the Oghuz Turks. He invented stringed instruments and singing; all folktales are traditionally attributed to him. One legend says that Korkut was an ambassador of the Khan to Mohammed: he rode with the Prophet on his campaigns and was the first of the Turks to accept Islam. But the book also says that he made strange prognostications that all came true, that he brought news from unseen and unseeable places, and that he personally heard the voice of God. A soothsayer; maybe a shaman. He has his feet in something older than Islam. He was in some contact with the other world, the one that lies just across the mirror of ice in the tundras and taigas of Siberia. Maybe he didn’t like what he saw there. According to tradition, Dede Korkut was terrified of death. Rashid al-Din says he lived for nearly three hundred years because he simply refused to die. The story goes that Korkut, ancient, withered, used to wander through the wastelands of Asia, fleeing death. Whenever he came to a town, he would find gravediggers at work. He would ask them whose grave they were digging, and they would reply: ‘We heard there is a man called Korkut who is looking for his grave; here it is.’ Finally, his wanderings took him to the place where he was born, and one of those holes in the ground claimed him. His mausoleum is outside Kyzylorda in Kazakhstan, on the banks of the Syr Darya. It was built by a team of Soviet architects and physicists in 1980, and contains a series of long tubes and pipes: whenever the winds blow across the steppe, the grave produces the sound of a lonely bow falling across the strings of a kobys. In a way, Dede Korkut got what he wanted: now he sings forever.
I pilfered some of this information from Geoffrey Lewis’s introduction to the 1974 Penguin Classics edition of the Book of Dede Korkut. It’s a great book. But I have some serious issues with the blurb. This is what it says:
The Book of Dede Korkut is a collection of twelve stories set in the heroic age of the Oghuz Turks. The stories are peopled by characters as bizarre as they are unforgettable: Crazy Karchar, whose unpredictability requires an army of fleas to manage it; Kazan, who cheerfully pretends to necrophily in order to escape from prison; the monster Goggle-eye; and the heroine, Boghazja Fatima of the forty lovers. Geoffrey Lewis’s translation retains the odd and oddly appealing style of the stories, with their mixture of the colloquial, the poetic and the dignified, and conveys magnificently the way in which they bring to life a wild society and its inhabitants.
It’s true that the Book of Dede Korkut is a collection of twelve stories set in the heroic age of the Oghuz Turks. It’s also true that Geoffrey Lewis’ translation magnificently conveys the world of a much wilder society than our own. But everything else in this blurb is a lie, and it’s a lie that actively tries to blot out what made that society a wild one. It tells you very little about what mattered to the Oghuz Turks of the mountains and plains. It does, however, say a lot about us, about the modern world that tore up the turf of the steppe and planted grain, built cities, made machines, and set down the old tales in the pages of a book. But that world is now ending: the earth is swallowing it up. Already, small pieces of it are crumbling. Like how just this month, Harvard University started to dissolve back into the infinity of the steppe.
Anyway: the people in the Book of Dede Korkut are not particularly bizarre or unforgettable, and the stories are not nearly as whimsical as the blurb makes out. Crazy Karchar is the brother of the Lady Chichek, who the hero Bamsi Beyrek of the Grey Horse wants to marry. As a bride-price, Karchar demands a thousand camels, a thousand stallions, a thousand rams, a thousand dogs, and a thousand fleas. The fleas don’t manage his unpredictability, whatever that means; Beyrek delivers the other animals and then pushes Karchar into a flea-infested sheepfold. Kazan isn’t a particularly distinct figure at all; in some of the stories he’s basically interchangeable with his son Uruz. The monster Goggle-eye, or Tepegöz in Turkish, is literally just Polyphemus; most of his story is lifted whole-cloth from Homer’s Odyssey. And Boghazja Fatima of the forty lovers is not a heroine: she gets exactly one mention in the entire book, as part of Chichek’s wedding party.
In fact, the characters in the Book of Dede Korkut are barely even characters. They all have the same personality, which is brave but rash and obsessed with vengeance. They all have the same hobbies, which are going on raids, spilling blood, cutting off heads, sometimes hunting, and sometimes being captured and imprisoned by the infidel king Shökli of the Georgians. They all speak in exactly the same way. Here’s how Beyrek of the Grey Horse describes his ideal woman:
Father, find me a girl who will rise before I get to my feet, who will be on horseback before I mount my well-trained horse, who before I reach my enemy will bring me some heads; that’s the sort of girl to find for me, father.
And here’s a completely different figure, Kan Turali son of Kanli Koja, in a completely different narrative, describing his ideal woman:
Father, you talk of getting me married, but how can there be a girl fit for me? Before I rise to my feet she must rise; before I mount my well-trained horse she must be on horseback; before I reach the bloody infidels’ land she must have already got there and brought me back some heads.
Everyone does the same thing immediately before battle, even when enemy horsemen are about to ambush them: they wash in pure water, press their white foreheads to the earth, and invoke blessings on Mohammed of beautiful name. Everyone’s eyes are chestnut. Everyone’s father is white-bearded; everyone’s mother is white-haired. Everyone’s daughters are swanlike. Everyone’s head is dark; everyone’s face and limbs are white. Everyone uses the same stock of metaphors. Here’s Kazan, bewailing Uruz’s capture:
Summit of my black mountain, my son! Flood of my black river, my son!
Here’s Uruz, begging his father to save himself:
If all is well with the black mountains, the people go up to the summer-pasture. If all is well with the blood-red rivers, they overflow in blood-red spate. If all is well with the horses of the paddock, foals are born. Let all be well with you and with my mother And God will give you sons better than I.
Here are the companions of Kan Turali, singing his praises:
Kan Turali, you rose from your place and came You mounted your black-maned Kazilik horse You took your chestnut-eyed warriors By night you climbed the many-coloured mountain that lies askew By night you crossed its swirling river.
Here’s the warrior Begil telling his wife about his day:
I rose up from my place I leaped onto my black-maned Kazilik horse I climbed by night the many-coloured mountain that lies askew I forded by night the lovely eddying river.
Later, Begil is injured in a hunt, and he laments:
What has befallen my dark head! The news has climbed the darkling mountains The news has crossed the blood-red rivers.
Here’s the mother of Segrek:
Your black mountain yonder Had fallen in ruin; it has risen at last. Your beautiful eddying river Had run dry; it has welled forth at last.
And finally, here’s the formula with which each of these stories end:
I shall pray for you, my Khan: may your firm-rooted black mountain never be overthrown, may your great shady tree never be cut down, may your lovely clear-flowing river never run dry, may the tips of your wings never be broken, may God never put you in need of unworthy men, may your grey-white horse never stumble as he gallops, may your pure black steel sword never be notched in the fray, may your God-given hope never be disappointed, may the end not find you apart from the pure faith.
You get the picture. I guess what you make of this stuff really depends on you, but for what it’s worth I find it all very beautiful. The great symbolic mountain, rising and turning, black in misery, bursting with colours in triumph. The entire range of human emotions, expressed in terms of a river, trickling, eddying, bursting its banks. When the Oghuz poets want to indicate the passing of time, they repeat the same phrase: ‘The horse’s hoof is fleet as the wind; the minstrel’s tongue is swift as the bird.’ I love it. But then I also keep naming my blogs after songs by the Fall. ‘Repetition in China! Repetition in America! Repetition in West Germany! Simultaneous suicides!’ Not everyone shares my taste. Whoever wrote the blurb to my Penguin Classics edition in 1974 did not trust the reading public to appreciate this kind of writing. That’s why it doesn’t promise the slow lulling rhythm of figure and phrase, repeating cadences like the hoofbeats of a galloping horse, the great constant churn of a world beyond history, where one man or another may rise up and be famous or fall down and be forgotten but all the forms of human life are eternal, as clear and cold as the black mountain and its river fringed with ice, as holy as the sky. Instead, it offers you a bunch of wacky characters that don’t actually appear.
The secret behind the total lack of any Oghuz interest in character is that the Book of Dede Korkut was not originally a book: it was a collection of songs. They were written down some time in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, once the nomadic, illiterate, sky-worshipping Oghuz had become the settled, literate, God-fearing Turkomans. At some point, a stratum of Muslim piety was spread over the narrative, and stories that had probably been set on the northern borders of China were transposed to the eastern borders of Rome. It was probably only when they were written down that Homeric elements entered the text: Tepegöz, but also Bamsi Beyrek’s return from captivity, which directly mirrors Odysseus’ return to Ithaca. (Lewis writes that ‘the alternative is to imagine that Homer borrowed some themes which he found circulating orally round western Asia Minor and which, still circulating after two millennia, were borrowed once more.’ He shrugs: ‘Well, it is not impossible.’) They add a kind of pedigree: the tales of the cold steppes are now sewn into the respectable literary culture of the Mediterranean.
But the Homeric epics were themselves originally sung. You can tell by the epithets: the dawn is rosy-fingered, the sea is loud-roaring, Odysseus is much-enduring, and Telemachus is godlike, in the same way that the warriors of the Oghuz are chestnut-eyed and their Kazilik horses have black manes. In oral cultures, a poet is supposed to be able to perform an entire epic narrative from memory; it’s an article of faith that each poet recites the material in exactly the same way every time. But obviously, they don’t. In the 1950s, the Harvard ethnomusicologist Albert Lord produced a vast collection of recordings of the illiterate bards of Yugoslavia; he found that they never once gave the exact same rendition twice. But they remembered stock phrases, conventions, formulaic units. A poet’s skill was about arranging these units together in a pleasing way, and absolutely not about creating anything new. The Greek word for the recitation of epic poems was rhapsody, and rhaptein meant to stitch together. At the end of every chapter in the Book of Dede Korkut, we hear how ‘Dede Korkut came and told stories and declaimed; he strung together this tale of the Oghuz.’
Lord also found that when a bard learned to read—and a lot of illiterate people were learning to read in the new socialist Yugoslavia—he lost the ability to sing his songs. Once the notion of a complete and genuinely unchanging text is stuck in his mind, it loses its elasticity; he keeps stumbling over the precise wording. In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong points out that oral societies often lack the concept of a word. ‘The sense of individual words as significantly discrete items is fostered by writing, which is diaeretic, separative.’ For an oral poet, the smallest unit of meaning might have been the black mountain, the bursting river.
These stories were constantly changing, from generation to generation, while everyone steadfastly pretended that they were doing no such thing. Which means that for every formerly oral text—the Homeric epics, Beowulf, the Book of Dede Korkut—we have lost every single version except one. There were infinite Iliads; only one was written down. We stopped telling and retelling the story in different ways, and started referring to the book: the exact same words, repeated in almost the exact same way, for nearly three thousand years. But if they had been set down a few years later, every generation since would be reading a completely different text.
(Incidentally, the Qur’an was also an oral text for its first few decades. Today, a hafiz is someone who has committed the entire book to memory, but they can only do this because they’re working from a written material. That text was compiled under Uthman, the third Rashidun Caliph, around 670 AD. Islamic tradition holds that before then the Qur’an, being the pristine revelation of God, was perfectly preserved by the early Muslims, all of whom were hafiz, until it was written down. But oral memorisation doesn’t work like that, and some of the hadiths paint a different picture. In the Sahih al-Bukhari, Ibn Mas’ud narrates: ‘I heard a person reciting a Qur’anic verse in a certain way, and I had heard the Prophet reciting the same verse in a different way. So I took him to the Prophet and informed him of that but I noticed the sign of disapproval on his face, and then he said, ‘Both of you are correct, so don’t differ, for the nations before you differed, so they were destroyed.’’ Of course both are correct: in an oral culture, any interpretation can be correct. When Uthman compiled his Qur’an, he had the diverging versions collected and burned.)
Writing gives you a different kind of repetition: not within a text, but a text that can repeat itself with total fidelity in different circumstances. (Because I burdened myself with a graduate degree in this stuff, at this point I’m required to vaguely gesture at Derrida’s notion of iterability.) New rhapsodies emerge. For a very long time, most new books were selections and compendiums of texts that already existed. A medieval treatise on agriculture would primarily consist of fragments from the Bible, Hesiod’s Works and Days, and the De re rustica of Columella. Plenty of very original material was produced during this period, but even the lurid hallucinatory visions of Hadewijch or Mechthild of Magdeburg (who were, as women, excluded from the Latin literary-theological tradition) made good use of conventional figures and phrases. We remember that Catherine of Siena had a mystical vision of Christ’s foreskin, which he placed on her finger as a wedding ring to mark her vows as a nun, but she was only reworking a familiar Catholic motif. There was no expectation that someone who dared to write things down ought to have something new to say, and to put it in new words. Chaucer’s static, cyclical world:
For out of olde feldes, as men seith, Cometh al this newe corn fro yeer to yere; And out of olde bokes, in good feith, Cometh al this newe science that men lere.
Print started to change that. No more copying by hand, no more delicate threads of transmission. Machines can do it instead: suddenly every book appears out of nothing. But the implications of print took a while to percolate through our brains. (McLuhan notes that in the early days of printing, people would buy an incunabulum and then take it to their local scriptorium, to be copied out and illuminated by hand.) If there’s a hinge-point, you may as well place it within Thomas Browne’s 1658 Urne-Buriall. The essay has five chapters: the first four try to explain the disovery of some Anglo-Saxon tombs through a dense tissue of quotations on how various vanished societies handled their dead. So we learn via Gagunius that the Sarmatians burned their dead, and via Saxo and Olaus that the Sueons and Gothlanders did the same thing. We hear that ‘the Scythians who swore by winde and sword, that is, by life and death, were so farre from burning their bodies, that they declined all interrment, and made their graves in the ayr: And the Ichthyophagi or fish-eating Nations about Ægypt, affected the Sea for their grave.’ The Gospel of Mathew tells us that ‘the rigid Jews were wont to garnish the Sepulchres of the righteous.’ And so on. But the fifth chapter is a devastatingly personal reflection on the inevitability of death and the futility of all our attempts to survive ourselves. You can build huge monuments to yourself: time will wear them down. One day, rot will claim the singing grave of Dede Korkut. You can have children, but ‘Generations passe while some trees still stand, and old Families last not three Oaks.’ You can perform great deeds; they won’t last. The time is coming when every book will be lost and every song will be forgotten. ‘The greater part,’ Browne writes, ‘must be content to be as though they had not been.’ It’s a true and awful line. I think about it a lot. I think about it every day.
The era in which we really expected things to be original was a brief one. It was already dying fifty years ago in 1974, when someone at Penguin decided to pretend that the Book of Dede Korkut was really a collection of quirky and inventive characters. It’s roughly coterminous with the age of the novel: starting with Don Quixote; maybe starting to collapse with Pierre Menard, who could produce a word-for-word replica of Don Quixote that was an entirely different text, simply because it was written by Pierre Menard and not by Miguel de Cervantes. As of 2024, that age is very definitively over. You people are—not illiterate, exactly, since you do still consume large quantities of text, but maybe paraliterate. You might be reading, but you’re certainly not reading books. Even the rare people who do read books sometimes strain with the unexpected effort it requires. It wasn’t so difficult when you were a kid! And not only because when you were a kid, you were reading cool stories about teenage spies, and now you’re an adult you have a copy of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate by your bedside, nine hundred pages thick, silently shaming you every single evening for not having even bothered to skim through the translator’s introduction. When you were a kid—sorry, but it’s true—we didn’t have all these phones. Digital text has calcified your brain in the same way that written text calcified the Yugoslav bards’. It’s not a question of attention span, because the dominant discursive modes online seems to be the multi-hour-long video essay or the interminable live stream in which literally nothing is said. But digital text makes the distemporality of ordinary text unbearable. To sit still and read a book for hours on the trot, you have to suppress the rising itch that starts on your fingertips and spreads everywhere over your skin. Make this responsive! Make this refresh! You’re experiencing the agony of the dead word of the book, where the future is already set down, waiting for you on the final page, where nothing changes… Digital text, meanwhile, is writing that functions like speech. Like speech it happens in real time, right in front of you, and then afterwards it sinks into the unreachable abysses of the feed. It’s present, it’s alive, while writing is always spectral and disjointed from itself. (Again, see Derrida to learn more than you ever wanted to know about différance and the ghostly metaphysics of non-presence and the other now-irrelevant features of this obsolete world.) This is why digital writing seems to make people much angrier than ordinary text: it seems to be addressed to you in a way that the words on a piece of paper do not. This is also why everything that appears on the internet is, from the perspective of the age of individuality and the novel, so boring. This medium does not favour originality. New versions of the epic formulas. We call them memes now: endlessly repeating pictures of frogs. Or TikToks where different people mouth along to the same words. Or the frothing opinion-mongers, serving up the same formulaic phrases in service of the same predictable positions. Everyone fights their rhetorical battles over and over again. In the Book of Dede Korkut, the infidel king Shökli is killed three times; another time he’s captured and converts to Islam in exchange for his life. It doesn’t matter. As soon as the next tale begins, he’s back where he was, in his evil fortress beyond the Iron Gate.
I used to be very miserable about this transformation. Now I don’t mind so much. It felt miserable when I was still reading too many novels: nineteenth-century records of definite action, Eliot, Balzac, Turgenev; twentieth-century slabs of words in precise combination, Beckett, Woolf. Or Joyce, with his fine sense for the tiny delicate implications of the words fixed on a page. Grossbooted draymen roll barrels dullthudding. The snow falling faintly and faintly falling. Lovely sentences! ‘Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters.’ One of those lovely sentences is the tagline of this blog. But that age is over, and these days I don’t spend too much time remembering it. I read tales instead: Ovid, Arthur, the lais of Marie de France, the Book of Dede Korkut. Stories with their feet in oral tradition. Far more than the great works of modernity, these resemble the present. But Kafka too, with his stories shaped like long cruel jokes: he also belongs to their wilder world.
There are some places, though, where the old world of modernity is still trying to fight off our second steppe. One is the university. As I write, Harvard president (and GDG Béton concrete dynast) Claudine Gay has been forced to step down after revelations that sections from her academic works, including her doctoral dissertation, were lifted directly from other texts without attribution. These revelations were the fruit of a broad right-wing campaign to discredit Ms Gay, prompted by an incredibly stupid furore over a purely hypothetical case of campus antisemitism. This makes things more complicated. The campaign to unseat her was spearheaded by the professional culture warrior and generally tedious insect-minded man Chris Rufo. Gay’s defenders argue that she faced a double standard as the first black woman to head the university, and maybe they’re right. Luckily, we don’t need to care about any of that. This event comes draped in a heavy coat of politics, but it’s very easy to simply shove it to one side. Power is not actually all that important. All we care about right now are words: the mode of reproduction of words.
Here’s a passage from Claudine Gay’s 1997 doctoral dissertation, Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics:
The idea behind the “method of bounds” is that the beginning point for any ecological inference should be the knowledge a researcher has for certain. This knowledge includes the fact that any proportion is by definition bound by 0 and 1. Furthermore, the marginals of a table, X (black population density) and T (total turnout) dictate the minimum and maximum possible values of the cells in the table. King’s method makes direct use of this information to establish absolute bounds on the values of the quantities of interest.
And here’s a passage from Racial Polarization and Turnout in Louisiana: New Insights from Aggregate Data Analysis, which was presented to the Midwest Political Science Association conference in Chicago by Bradley Palmquist and Stephen Voss in April 1996:
The beginning point for any ecological inference should be with the knowledge we have for certain. Almost from the beginning of methodological work in this area, researchers have used the fact that proportions must by definition be between 0 and 1. Recently, Gary King has emphasized the particular advantages of using the precinct-by-precinct constraints. Making direct use of this information to establish absolute (i.e. not probabilistic) bounds on the percentages of the internal cells is entirely straightforward. For any single table (either of a precinct or of the state as a whole), the marginals dictate a minimum and maximum possible value for each of the cells.According to Rufo et al, Gay has directly plagiarised from this passage. The list of elements she’s claimed to have lifted includes phrases like ‘the beginning point for any ecological inference should be,’ ‘minimum and maximum possible value,’ and ‘0 and 1.’ And they’re right: Gay obviously read Palmquist and Voss’s paper and incorporated elements of it into her own, without referencing them once in her bibliography. According to the standards of contemporary academia, she is indeed guilty of plagiarism, which is why she’s now out of a job. But what about the standards of a warrior-poet of the teeming Oghuz?
I think a warrior-poet of the teeming Oghuz would respond to the Harvard fiasco by cutting off the heads of everyone involved and then carting away all their stuff, and it would be hard to disagree with him. But I think he would also be mystified by the notion that Gay had done anything wrong. It is bizarre to pretend that someone who repeats the phrase ‘minimum and maximum possible value’ is trying to pass off someone else’s work as their own, but if they rephrase to ‘highest or lowest number you can get,’ they’re engaged in legitimate original research. But the most extraordinary purloined phrase here is ‘0 and 1.’ Sorry, but these are numbers! You cannot plagiarise a number! There is no better way of expressing the concept ‘0 and 1’ than with the string of characters ‘0 and 1’! So much of the copied material is like this: obvious, default wordings; outright cliché; literal numbers. The closest thing the bookbound world has to the majestic formulas of the bards.
Of course, the dirty secret about academic plagiarism is that literally everyone does it. Shortly after Gay stepped down, Business Insider revealed that the celebrity academic Neri Oxman—who’s married to the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, another of the people gunning for Gay’s head—had lifted entire sections of her own doctoral dissertation from other texts. (Again: if you want to say that the solid part of most plants is made up of cellulose, lignin, and hemi-cellulose, while animal tissue is largely collagen, keratin, chitin, and minerals, is there really any simpler way to put it than ‘the solid part of most plants is made up of cellulose, lignin, and hemi-cellulose, while animal tissue is largely collagen, keratin, chitin, and minerals,’ even if someone else happens to have produced that wording before?) In retaliation, Ackman pointed out that Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, which publishes Business Insider, had been accused of copying passages in his doctoral dissertation. And on it goes. Everyone means everyone.
The reason everyone does it is that the university presides over a regime of composition that is utterly, utterly insane. It’s a regime that makes this kind of constant low-level plagiarism inevitable, but sporadically punishes individual plagiarists for expressing its own structural contradictions. Academic writing is basically medieval, based on formulas and clichés, and absolutely packed with needless references and quotes from other works. (It’s all politics; everyone wants citations, so you suck up to your departmental allies by repeating their hideous sentences.) But it pretends to be something else: pioneeringly original insight. And your advancement in the academy, where hundreds of people can compete for every miserable low-paid gig, hinges on constantly publishing: a frenzied, psychotic vomit-stream of publication. The content of what you publish hardly matters. We just need words, more words, a surging black river of bountiful words. (This is a major factor in the replication crisis, which is science’s name for the fact that most published scientific research appears to be genuinely worthless, drawing conclusions that are often entirely untrue.) But since everyone is constantly writing their own papers, nobody really reads anything that gets published. Half of all peer-reviewed papers are read by exactly two people: the author, and the peer reviewer. So many of our (notionally) brightest minds are engaged in the intellectual equivalent of digging ditches and then filling them in again. Chances are that nobody read Claudine Gay’s dissertation until Rufo decided to go after her, not even the committees that hired her. (Meanwhile, a few ideologues claim that these same academics have been the motive force behind all cultural shifts over the past century. You can decide how plausible this seems.) In a way, there’s something very beautiful about this deranged activity. Imagine a society of poets, where everyone spends a lifetime quietly perfecting their art until they produce reams of shatteringly beautiful verse—but nobody ever shows anyone else what they’ve written, and in the end each poet’s body is burned on top of a pile of his works. The difference, though, is that academics desperately want to be read, to be cited, to take their place in the great chain of repeated words. So they plagiarise. It’s not just to cut corners; it’s not just because nobody’s checking. They’re yearning for that other world, the one that sings in thundering hoofbeats across the dusty plains.
Oral societies produce wildly different wordings and pretend they’re exactly the same. The university produces strangled, identical wordings and pretends they’re wildly different. The obvious solution is to give up the pretence and return to orality: to legalise and encourage academic plagiarism. This would make everyone much happier and more creative, and also, incidentally, be far more in keeping with the true purpose of the university than what we have now. As I’ve mentioned before, people have a weird habit of acting as if the university is an institution of the Enlightenment, dedicated to the free enquiry of the individual intellect. It’s not! The university, alongside the capitalist mode of production, is one of the only major institutions that come to us out of the Middle Ages. It belongs to the age of repetition: the era of Dede Korkut. Maybe, once the stock phrases have had a few generations to roll around, academics will stop writing phrases like ‘the beginning point for any ecological inference should be,’ and start writing phrases like ‘flood of my black river, my son!’
I don’t think we’ll miss these things: the novel, the individual character, the inventive turn of phrase, the cruel demand to make things new. They’ve already vanished without too many people noticing: still used as a political weapon, sure, but not for much else. The digital technology that dragged us out of our individual neuroses will probably not last much longer. We are becoming a tribal, pastoral people, and pastoralists have no need for technological progress. Still, we might be amazed at the new kinds of communication that become possible. In one of the tales of the Book of Dede Korkut, Yigenek son of Kazilik Kojab learns that his father is being held captive in the castle of the infidel king Direk. Yigenek gathers the Oghuz warriors to rescue him, but that night in his dream he has a vision of the great champion Emen, who also happens to be his maternal uncle. The dream-Emen tells Yigenek not to attempt this rescue:
Where my fleet horse reached, the wind could not go; Like wolves of the tangled slopes were my warriors; Seven times I went there but failed to take that castle. You will not prove a better man than I, my Yigenek! Turn back!
Yigenek replies that it would be unmanly of him not to face his enemy, and then he wakes up. Usually, when you have this kind of vision, the person you witness is dead: they’ve been swallowed by the other world, the one we glimpse in dreams. Maybe Emen died in his seventh rescue attempt. But in the morning, the real Emen arrives to join Yigenek’s army and storm the castle one more time. He’s alive. He had the same dream. He was won over by Yigenek’s argument, somewhere in the common wordless caverns of the night.