COOKED — DRAFT.

I want you to leave Cairo, the sand, the desert,
Negarestani, Hoppitiher, Nile, Nilehralik.

CD: Fantasy is okay, but my job is to keep you on the right track. We are after the facts: on the clay complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir, temporarily on loan from the British Museum to the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi, we see that cookedness seems to be as old as human civilisation itself. This 12cm relic, dated 1750 BC, was found in the ruins of Ea-nāṣir’s home in the city-state of Ur, in Mesopotamia. There, a disappointed customer, a man called Nanni, dissatisfied with the quality of the copper sold to him, decided to write this complaint. A right-handed individual, as signalled by the visible crookedness of the rows of cuneiform text, and by extension, rather blunt and sangvin by nature, he decided to confront the copper merchant. We do not know the outcome of this quarrel. What is certain is that Ea-nāṣir decided to keep this complaint rather than throw it away. This has led some scholars to believe that the merchant contested the claim and kept the tablet as evidence of sorts. Was there such a thing as slandering one's copper nuggets?

All parties involved in this minor, but ancient, quarrel were cooked: Nanni, having paid for copper and not accepting what Ea-nāṣir had sent him, Ea-nāṣir being called out as a crook and his product subpar, and also the scholars debating this topic thousands of years later. Human life, action, and preoccupation always entail a higher degree of entropy in any given system. Just imagine the heated confrontation over the bad copper. People raising their voices, gesticulating, speaking out of turn. Their words igniting the air around them. Now imagine the physicist hearing this ill-conceived metaphor, and ever so slightly boiling on the inside. All cooked.

Cut back to me, adding more gasoline to the cinder. ‘Neo-Prometheus arrives from the future’: the Promethean legend needs to be understood in reverse. Rapid oxidation not as a gift from a rogue deity, but as a subtle action of metaphysical geo-strategy. The goal: arming the gods’ enemies. Giving them the means to instrumentalise an everlasting flame, literally catalising humanity’s incandescent desire for heat, energy, locomotion, commerce, and completely blazing the Outside. Are you still with me, Mr. Fisher? Are you following the sound of my voice?

MF: The trip has made me restless. I cannot sleep. Water, water everywhere... and not a drop to drink…

CD: Don’t you find it a bit ironic that at the heart of the Indo-European Hydro-Civilisations is the flame? Please don’t suspect me of trying to convert you to a kind of Post-Zoroastrism. It is not my intention.

MF: What is it then?

CD: To return to Ea-nāṣir. Don’t know if you were privy to a meme that started circulating in the mid 2010s. It shows an image of one of the statues from the Tell Asmar Hoard (c. 2900–2550 BC) along with a caption reading: It’s never too late, remember Ea-nāṣir became famous 3700 years after his death. The video version of this meme usually attaches an audio snippet from Peter Pringle’s reconstruction of an old Sumerian song. The verses are, of course, from Gilgamesh: Ud rēa, ud sura rēa. Ngi rēa, ngi bara rēa. Mu rēa mu sura rēa! (In those days, in those distant days. In those nights, in those ancient nights. In those years, in those distant years!) Funny how ‘in those days’ is ambiguous enough to refer to both Ea-nāṣir’s times, the 2010s, and also right now. The limits of our language, and so on, and so forth. *sniffs* But, the true incandescent element is not the varying, unstable, and culturally generated semantic value, but the ambiguity which surrounds it. It’s lining. Mr. Fisher, where are you?

MF: Europe. It must be. Ten, eleven, twelve... Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen…

CD: Do you wish to continue?

MF: I have to.

CD: Conflict, friction, ignition. Haven’t you ever wondered why the alien from Predator (1987) utilises thermal vision? The thermal camera is an epistemological model: it lets you see culture radiating, curing, fizzling away in parts, and spontaneously combusting in others. Critics are still obsessed with the enshitification of (both hot and cold) media because the field of production is in a state of permanent desertification. Our predicament: not seeing the forest for the trees whilst they are all ablaze. Our realism: Aggro Dr1ft (2023). Our anthem: Burn baby burn!

There circulates this rather niche category of memes, especially on TikTok, that problematise doomscrolling. It does so by way of narrative: Enkidu c'est moi, et toi, et tous ceux que nous connaissons. It imagines our constant scroll as a literal κατάβασις and attempts to short-circuit it by way of a joke. One might simply be an anthropomorphised cat telling us to stay hydrated whilst descending, others might suggest that we have reached the halfway point, or simply applaud our Stephanovist endeavour to reach (‘and hook up with’) the Urth's metal plasma core. In our descent, fueled with thermosophical desire, we feel the temperature around us rising more and more, the (social) pressure building up, until our minds are ready to implode.

MF: I want to wake up now.

CD: Doesn’t it bother you that the cooked/let them cook dichotomy implies that things are essentially different depending on which side of the frying pan you are on?

MF: I want to wake up now. Are you there? You can wake me up now.

CD: And what are we supposed to find at the end of the descent? Gravity? The molden metal core? Normcore, grindcore, corecore?

MF: You can wake me up now!

CD: Deep frying memes for sustenance.

MF: Are you there?

CD: Type shit.

PS. Did you know there is a Globish translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh? Here are the opening lines:

Cristian Drăgan

Editor