Tuesday
I dread the political aftermath of the riots we are witnessing. I deeply sympathize with those mourning the death of George Floyd and others killed by police and white vigilantes, and, if any of them are engaging in property destruction and vandalism, part of me invokes Marat’s line in Peter Weis’s play Marat/Sade: “What are a few looted mansions compared to their looted lives?”
[Important caveat: I do not extend my sympathies to those who are shamelessly piggybacking on the demonstrations for their own psychological and political agendas, people who care nothing for George Floyd or, for that matter, the communities or the livelihoods that they are trashing with their wanton destruction.]
My fear is what happened after America’s 1960s riots. Richard Nixon took full advantage of American racism to lock in an electoral advantage that has continued for decades, his “Southern Strategy.” The strategy helped elect our current president, and I worry that Trump will use it to eke out another victory. George W. Bush, after all, got reelected on a national security platform after plunging us into a senseless war.
In Weis’s play, playwright Sade sarcastically points out to Marat that, instead of a liberating revolution, France instead got “fifteen glorious years” of Napoleonic rule.
For those protesters who, in their anger and sadness, causes mayhem so that others will feel their pain, Beowulf provides a cautionary tale. The archetype of grief turning violent is Grendel’s Mother.
GM has lost her son and is determined to make someone, anyone, pay. She lashes out and kills Aeschere, who has had nothing to do with the killing of her son:
She had pounced and taken one of the retainers
in a tight hold, then headed for the fen.
To Hrothgar, this man was the most beloved
of the friends he trusted between the two seas.
She had done away with a great warrior,
Ambushed him at rest.
She leaves behind heartbreak:
The bargain was hard,
both parties having to pay
with the lives of friends. And the old lord,
the gray-haired warrior, was heartsore and weary
when he heard the news: high higest-placed adviser,
his dearest companion, was dead and gone.
Further on, when Beowulf asks the Danish king about the cause of his sorrow, Hrothgar replies,
Rest? What is rest? Sorrow has returned.
Alas for the Danes! Aeschere is dead.
He was Yrmenlaf’s elder brother
and a soul-mate to me, a true mentor,
my right-hand man when the ranks clashed
and our boar-crests had to take a battering
in the line of action. Aeschere was everything
the world admires in a wise man and a friend.
Then this roaming killer came in a fury
and slaughtered him in Heorot. Where she is hiding,
glutting on the corpse and glorying in her escape,
I cannot tell; she has taken up the feud…
The monsters in Beowulf are archetypes of the violence that exists at the core of Anglo-Saxon society, so we see out-of-control vengeance at work throughout the epic. For instance, the spirit of Grendel’s Mother haunts the so-called Finnsburg Episode, involving the Frisian king Finn and the Danish king Hnaef. Previously, a fragile peace has been worked out through a diplomatic marriage, but it falls apart when Finn’s allies, the Jutes, attack the Danes. Hnaef is killed in his subsequent battle with Finn, as is Finn’s half-Danish son, but since neither side wins a decisive victory, they have to co-exist in uneasy proximity. For our purposes, think of them as reactionary police and communities of color.
Finn, like a big city mayor, knows he’s sitting on a tinderbox and does everything he can to maintain peace between the Frisians and the Danes. He swears a solemn oath “that battle survivors would be guaranteed honor and status” and that “no infringement by word or deed, no provocation would be permitted.” In a decree that sounds like the banning of hate speech, he says that any of his Frisians who “stir[ ] up bad blood with insinuations or taunts” will experience “the blade of the sword.”
Grendel’s Mother lurks in the hearts of the Danes, however, and it’s only a matter of time before everything explodes. Hengest, Hnaef’s brother and now Danish leader, has been brooding the entire time:
Hengest stayed,
lived out that whole
resentful, blood-sullen
winter with Finn,
homesick and helpless.
With spring comes the time for revenge:
Thus blood was spilled,
the gallant Finn
slain in his home…
The wildness in them
had to brim over.
The Hall ran red
with blood of enemies.
Finn was cut down,
the queen brought away…
While the matter seems to end there, Beowulf as a whole makes it clear that the thrust and counterthrust of vengeance never ends. The last third of Beowulf is filled with a non-ending blood feud between the Geats and the Swedes that lasts for generations. Here’s a characteristic passage, described by Beowulf:
Then over the wide sea Swedes and Geats
battled and feuded and fought without quarter.
Hostilities broke out when Hrethel died.
Ongentheow’s sons were unrelenting,
refusing to make peace, campaigning violently
from coast to coast, constantly setting up
terrible ambushes around Hreosnahill.
My own kith and kin avenged
these evil events, as everybody knows,
but the price was high: one of them paid
with his life. Haethcyn, lord of the Geats
met his fate there and fell in the battle.
Then, as I have heard, Hygelac’s sword
was raised in the morning against Ongentheow,
his brother’s killer. When Eofor cleft
the old Swede’s helmet, halved it open
he fell, death-pale: his feud-calloused hand
could not stave off the fatal stroke.
If Beowulf at the end of his life is driven to dragon depression, which is how I read the final monster, it is because he looks back and sees nothing but one damn death after another. He reminds me of those who are looking at the latest clashes between cops and black communities and wearily wondering whether they will ever end. “How long, oh Lord, how long?”
In the epic, Beowulf defeats Grendel’s Mother by wielding a sword forged by warrior giants in the golden age before the flood—which is to say, by higher warrior ideals. I see our version of this sword as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Unfortunately, when he is old, Beowulf loses faith in this sword and can no longer confidently slay monsters with it. He needs the younger generation to help him out.
That’s what I’m hoping for in our current circumstances. We cannot yield to Grendel’s Mother’s violent grief but must, like the young Beowulf, invoke higher ideals when we confront murderous police and a racist president. Playing on their turf will only swallow us up in a never-ending blood feud. To defeat them, it will also take old and young working together. Therein lies our final hope.
Further note: Here’s Joe Biden making a similar point in Tuesday’s Philadelphia speech about turning to higher ideals when we are in mourning. I can’t think of a better contemporary illustration of how Beowulf slays destructive grief:
Just a few days ago, marked the fifth anniversary of my son Beau’s passing of cancer. And there’s still moments when the pain is so great, it no different than the day I sat in that bed as he passed away. But I also know that the best way to bear loss and pain is to turn it into, that anger and anguish into purpose. And Americans know what our purpose is as a nation, it has to be guided, it has to be guided, it’s guided us from the very beginning.
It’s been reported the day that president John F. Kennedy was assassinated, little Yolanda King came home from school and jumped in her daddy’s arms and said, “Oh daddy,” she said, “Now we’re never going to get our freedom.” Through daddy was reassuring, strong and brave, he said, “No, don’t worry, baby. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be all right.” Amid the violence and fear, Dr. King, he persevered. He was driven by his dream, of a nation where justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. Then in 1968, hate cut him down in Memphis. Two days before Dr. King was murdered, he gave a final Sunday sermon to Washington, where he told us that though the arc of the moral universe is long, he said it bends towards justice. And we know we can bend it because we have, we have to believe that’s still, that’s our purpose. It’s been our purpose in the very beginning, to become a nation where all men and women are not only created equal, but they’re treated equally, not just created equal, but treated equally, to become a nation, to find in Dr. King’s words, not only by the absence of tension, but by the presence of justice. It’s not enough just to not have tension, but justice.
