The Sunlight Aria

I am on a semi-lucid search for yet another well thumbed natty paperback from my tribal imagery days (huh? I see you, puzzled, asking what I am alluding to), John Gardner's Grendel, and I am not succeeding. I could, probably should, given the age of the paper, my marks on the typeface, just buy the much more expensive etext, but my used paperbacks are important, they provide clues, and Grendel survived the building renovations, unlike my health; where it was last escapes me. Gardner himself died quickly, violently, days into my swelling freshman breast, and I've clung to his memory ever since, my most beloved post-modernist, even if not the most profound. I have talked myself into an etext edition while my hunt pauses in digging through my musty bins, the paper trail of drafts, the certainty of checking account statements. Gardner, much like Lessing, is interested in the obscurity of origin, but where Lessing sees violence as an innate repression in the evolution of homo sapiens, Gardner has a more problematic view, as does the original epic from which his derivative masterpiece stems. Grendel and his *dam*, if I remember correctly the curious and hard word for the Teutonic view of the feminine, are monsters, perhaps obscure survivors who formed our myths, created our heroes, formed the basis of our territorial empires, the muscle of our modern powers, which, in Gardner's view, is a geocidal insanity (Beowulf as the rationale for the systemic extermination of the Vietnamese), one that makes Grendel a curiously sympathetic, disruptive figure.

Within this paradigm, Grendel's violence is the catharsis necessary for survival, whereas the personality cult evolved around the hero is a horrific, deadly excess. Where applicable, violence is unavoidable, targeted as a means to an end, but when it is senseless, it then becomes tragic. Ajami, versed in feeding our penchant to look for reasons, soothes the Western mind with timelines that provide insight, but I'd ask the Muslim world how it is that you forget the fabulism within your own traditions? Everyone knows the enchantment of Shahrazad's narrative loom, and its cures for palliative erosion that festers due to disillusion, and how European literary traditions copied from it, evolved.

I pity Nakoula, without endorsing his need for a polemic; he was used as a covet instrument, a cover as another means to an end. Vomiting Islamic traditions against liberalism, even into it, for the purposes of identity, is only a devaluation of virtue.