Slow Havamal: 32

[kylec]

In the 32nd verse, We learn that though men are often kind to each other, they will fight at a feast. Conflict will often arise, and a guest will fight a guest.

This is a timely verse for me. The reason I missed last week’s update is that I was traveling for a fight. I had good experiences with my teammates and my wife, hanging out, watching them fight. I even found the other competitors to be friendly and sporting in most cases. Ultimately, I got to experience the wrong end of a TKO. I wondered when I first read this verse what I would learn from it. It’s been my experience with this poem that it often seems pretty basic until I actually sit down and put fingers to keys. It’s also been my experience that it always opens up for me when I’m ready, and that occasionally means calling up the very same issues in my life for me to address.

It seems odd at first glance that we can be both kind to on another and rearing for a throwdown at the same time. Some people would read this to mean that the congeniality is a farce to hide a vicious nature. I disagree. I’ve spoken to people I fought before and after, and held nothing against them on either occasion. I’ve also had the experience in my pre-Holocene school days of harboring a growing resentment for someone for his actions, but once we finally traded blows, feeling that animosity evaporate, and having a good relationship with him every year since.

The fact that men will fight “at a feast” suggests that we will enter into conflicts in situations when one would expect everyone to be happy. We’re drinking and gorging ourselves in rare form. Why stop the fun to take a few shots to the face? Maybe the extremes are inseparable. We look for trouble in a good time, and good times in trouble, as if the appearance of one heralds the other not far behind. However far the pendulum swings one way, we can count on the return trip. I’ve noticed that training martial arts has always made me calmer and less prone to anger outside the gym. I wonder if forcing yourself to be a beacon of kindness who turns the other cheek wouldn’t also stir a repressed violence within. It would be impossible to conceive of kindness without ill-treatment, and vice-versa. I could choose to look at the two natures as two points on a rolling ball, each passing over the ground in turn.

Odin says that “a guest will fight a guest.” It’s notable that the host is left out. Apparently their manners are at least that good. The people we fight are our peers. They have about as much as us, want similar things, and dine in the same place. Where we find conflict or attraction, we can be sure that person holds a valuable mirror if we care to look at it. That’s not to say these people are the same, nor even exact complements. But since not everything draws our ire, when it is drawn, there’s something to learn. To know half of the whole is a big clue to the missing part. We don’t hear how the wise men handle things in this verse, but I imagine they never fight the same man twice.

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

Interesting meditation. Violence is a thorny subject. Just out of the gate, the "drinking" aspect you noted seems likely.

Not to make this post all about me, but: I do not remember a time in my life—perhaps only as a little child, a true innocent—where there wasn't the threat of violence (in school, generally, and the world at large). I realized the other day, having spent ~3/4 of my life in some kind of study of violence, that I've perhaps inadvertently handed off that hypervigilance and cultivation of violence to my children, for good or ill. That's the culture we came up in, and I guess that is how culture perpetuates. But I had a moment there where I was able to step outside and look at it as though an outsider.

As an aside: boxing or MMA? I have been on the wrong side of a TKO/RSC myself, but only ever the former. Not fun.

Axé

[kylec]

It was muay thai.

Drinking definitely leads to its share of fights. In my case, it actually made me less likely to fight, though. When i drank a lot, I would become more gregarious, letting offenses roll off and enjoying myself. I think it probably just lowers inhibitions, and if you're guarded, you might become friendly, whereas if you're angry, you might fight.

I can relate to that vigilance of violence. Not sure I've come close to parsing this verse yet. There are a lot of angles that leap out at me. It makes sense that an awareness of violence, structuring our actions to find it or even to avoid it, in some way begs it forth. I obviously don't think violence is all bad. If anything, I just think those conflicts and fears of conflict occur at the point where a will is checked, and there's something to be discovered as in a mirror. To know WHY we fight the other guests.