Unreal Beowulf

Spurred to write by news, but not about the news:

In the slaughter at the country music concert in Las Vegas or the school shooting down the road in Freeman, detecting echoes of Grendel's atrocities in Heorot. In the places supposed to be for joy and peace, the incursions of pain and hatred mark and mar. And soon enough, all will be forgotten, and in the case of the old poem even the language it is written in, unless people take the time to remember.

In some throwaway comments from the Tolkien Professor on the affinities between Germanic heroic verse and American hip hop, catching a glimpse of the relevance and red herrings of race as a focus for social justice. The celebratory focus on greatness in the midst of pain, the exultation in being awesome, as James likes to say it makes you feel awesome to listen to it, and this is universal. After all most of the music is bought by the white kids, and the poets and skalds were making it a thousand years ago in the cold North after their own fashion. So that would be something to share, together with the family histories, the migrations, poverty and richness that are more than skin deep.

In the No Fault Zone posited by the Nonviolent Communication Trainer, considering whether this means a No Story Zone, too. She had us tell stories of giving, times we were given something or gave something with no expectation of being able to repay. She had us sit in a circle and tell why we were there, then she told us her reasons: for her assumption was that we are all interconnected, meaning that we win or lose together. But all the tragic and comic stories from which our cultures derive their values run counter to that assumption. Heroes win or lose, representing us as ideals but not absolving us from making the same movement for ourselves. Our interconnections run only so far before attenuating or breaking down, so that what looks like winning in one country, or on one block, means losing over in the next. The same story being told in both places would have totally different meanings, supposing it could even be told, would even be listened to. Still, perhaps the story of the nonviolent communicator's ideals could be a story precisely about this movement between zones, a creation myth of the No Fault Zone, or a pilgrimage of getting out of one zone and into another, making it to the No Fault Zone--but perhaps as an infiltrator, a ravager, a stepper of the borderlands.