kylec | Slow Havamal: 13

In the thirteenth verse, Odin likens inebriation to a “memory-stealing heron” who waits overhead when we drink, and dips down to steal our minds. He says that he’s been trapped in the feathers of this heron when at Gunnlod’s house.

It’s a powerful image: an invisible heron crouches just above my head, and each time I raise the glass to my mouth, he dips to pluck away another bite of my mind. The first half of the verse describes the heron’s food as both “memory” and “mind.” This offers a clue to what happens as we imbibe in our passions. Memory, as best I understand it, is not a complete and static data set stored somewhere and reproduced with perfect fidelity on command. When something happens, we retain a vague impression of it. Even the most significant memories of our lives are absent many of the details. Only what was important to us at the time remains, and it can degrade, or be reproduced with great confidence despite being flat-out wrong. It might help to think of memory as a story we tell ourselves.

If I pay careful attention and repeat it often with focus, I can remember quite a bit about something for a long time. Without that attention, or the repetition, it becomes much more diffuse, if it doesn’t disappear entirely from conscious recall. My entire identity (identities, plural, to be more honest), all of the experiences that I reference to guide me through life, come from my memories--these stories I tell myself about who I am and how I got here. They play a big role in determining how I will act in any given situation, as I’ll usually default to something that worked in the past, and avoid something that failed in the past.

As discussed in verse 12’s essay, wisdom is a structure of related experiences. We can see that memory makes up a fundamental part of that structure, though there are other things in there that aren’t strictly memories of events. (I think. Let me think on that one.) If I can’t access a memory, my wisdom is diminished by all connections that ran through that node. So it’s difficult to have good wisdom without a good memory. Mind, according to Gregory Bateson, is an aggregate of interacting parts and components, among other things. It’s a system with feedbacks. Memory is part of mind, and when you remove access to parts of the system, you lose feedback, and things change. To imbibe in passions is to forfeit part of the structure that makes us who we are in favor of something less complex. Sometimes less complexity actually works better, but basic sense shows us that this isn’t the case when we “drink.” The process is not linear, but it does happen in increments. So the poem urges moderation, as each sip costs us more of our minds.

Next, we get a first-person anecdote from Odin, in which he references the myth where he steals the mead of poetry from the giants. It’s a complicated story, but the blurb is that he seduced Gunnlod, daughter of the mead-owner Suttung, and convinced her to let him have three drafts of the mead. He downed the three vats in three drinks, then escaped to bring it to the Aesir and to Man. What he was drunk on in this case was a positive thing, but he could also be referring to his desire to own the mead, his desire for Gunnlod, his tricks, etc.

What’s interesting to me is that throughout this poem, Odin is more than willing to admit his mistakes, even to let us feel as if we have something in common. He actually recounts a memory of a time he succumbed to the memory-stealing heron. Like I mentioned in the last essay, a mistake is a great source of future wisdom. Beyond that, I don’t know what to make of these last lines. The myth is complex and I’m positive its meaning eludes me. The advice may even seem contradictory, as who wouldn’t want to be drunk on the mead that gives the gift of beautiful poetry? Or to encourage inebriation in certain circumstances. But most significant is that this isn’t a prohibition from a faultless being, but friendly advice from one who speaks from experience.

I’ll add that going slowly through a rich poem like Havamal makes each verse, and what I learn from it, much easier to remember in greater detail. It stands to reason that the more memories we have, the more difficult the task of the memory-stealing heron.