The Oddness of a Small Italian Coincidence

Up, up from the Inferno and through the Purgatorio we climb with Dante, our fearless tiny band of readers, and as we climb I realize more and more the aspects of this work that speak most clearly and compellingly to me. They are not the long inventive passages, the pictures conjured out of the poet’s imagination. No, those I labor through, like one lost in a dark wood, but from time to time I fall upon a sunlit clearing where fresh breezes play.

Even as sheep that move, first one, then two,

then three, out of the fold—the others also

stand, eyes and muzzles lowered, timidly;

and what the first sheep does, the others do,

and if it halts, they huddle close behind, 

simple and quiet and not knowing why....

Do you see them, the simple sheep? What about these gamblers?

When dicing’s done and players separate, 

the loser’s left alone, disconsolate— 

rehearsing what he’d thrown away, he sadly learns; 

all of the crowd surrounds the one who won....

Whenever Dante describes something of this world, our world, it rings familiar and true to me, though I am no more a sheep farmer or shepherd than I am a gambler. The parts of the Purgatorio that mean the most to me are not otherworldly at all but this-worldly, as when in the Inferno he recalled a busy shipyard or used the analogy of Italian rivers to drive home the point of his vision. So too when in Canto VI of the former he apostrophizes his native land--

Ah, abject Italy, you inn of sorrows,

you ship without a helmsman in harsh seas,

no queen of provinces but of bordellos!

--it is his native land on earth that grieves his spirit, just as Wordworth poured out his sorrow in “” when he wrote--

MILTON! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

O raise us up, return to us again,

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power!

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart; 

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life's common way, 

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart 

The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

Harsh seas or stagnant marshes, both poets turn to nature—earthly nature—to express their desperate feelings for their governments and the politics of their times, and however little we know of the details of those periods we have a sharp sense of the writers’ discontent and longing from the figures of speech they use, for nature is nature from one century to the next.

The small coincidence came yesterday, when David picked up some magazines left behind to be picked up by anyone who wanted them in the lobby of our public library. One of them that caught my eye on the table last night after dinner was the September 2011 issue of Harper’s, its cover promising something on Dante within! Opening eagerly, I turned to a piece by Elif Batuman, the story of her participation in a “Danta Marathon” in Florence in the spring of 2009. As I read, I was wondering if this would be something to take to our group meeting on March 1, something to share with the other toilers through Dante’s three-tired afterworld, but then, near the end, the writer turned on its head what has been written by a couple of famous Dante interpreters:

For both Lukács and Auerback, meaning and truth in Dante’s world reside in the afterlife, where figurae are fulfilled and totalities formed. Mortan existence is, by contrast, incomplete, illusory, secondary. But I think the opposite can be said, with equal accuracy: it’s the afterlife that is a tissue of illusions. Dante’s afterworld may be highly structured, but he invented that structure himself, synthesizing classical mythology, Christian theology, and medieval demonology. Dante’s afterworld, drawing attention to its own eccentricities, paradoxes, and loopholes—it’s Dante’s afterworld, based in his own experiences. Seen from this perspective, the only thing that’s indubitably real, the only thing everyone can see and agree on, is the stuff of this life—all the stuff that Dante himself studied with such interest and love. Is Paradise more real than all that? Is it better? Is Paradise enough to compensate for the loss of the world?

Batuman’s view is not at all a denial of Dante’s poetry. She simply points out that what gives the poem life springs from this world and are ever part of it.

Postscript:

I used to think it was a shame that my own beautiful part of the world is not better known, its lovely corners and vistas not as famous as those of the Italian hills or the English lake country or even the states on the American Eastern seaboard. In my view, northern Michigan lacks nothing in a comparison of beauties. What is absent here are the associations: We have no centuries of battles, no lives of world-famous, no buildings dating back centuries. But if we did? Would life be better for those of us who live here?

Now I've changed my mind, and it isn't resignation. I am thankful for the historical and literary obscurity of my home ground. In the woods I may come upon an old rock that looks to me like a grindstone from pre-European times, or a former small clearing now filling in with young trees may reveal, among the weeds, an old iron tractor wheel, and those signs of earlier lives are quite enough. They are quiet signs. No stone fortresses on hills, no rivers running with blood or fields littered with ghosts of fallen bodies. Just woods and orchards, seeps and creeks, people now as then quietly going about keeping themselves and their families alive. We have stories here, but they are stories of ordinary people.

Racing Through Pages

The frost on the porch windows yesterday morning was still there in the afternoon and later on, in the evening, when we returned from our second night out in a row, this time to the Northwest Michigan Regional Juried Exhibition at the Dennos Museum in Traverse City, where David scored an honorable mention, a result that pleased us both. It was a huge field of work, with all kinds of media represented. We saw many old friends, as well as a sea of strangers.

Tonight will be the third night out in a row for me, and I must spend the day getting ready for it. Preparations will not involve extensive wardrobe considerations or experiments with hair or makeup. No, I’ll be reading all day. Four of us (one will be absent—and greatly missed!) will be getting together to discuss Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, and I have only reached Chapter 8 so far!

So, time to lay Dante aside and postpone further getting into Carol Gilligan’s new book (more of that in the near future) as I return to World War II and the life of Louis Zamperini. Not a moment to lose! I am only on page 82! I will only take time to note that on page 40, as runners all over America are straining to run a 4-minute mile, the author makes these observations:

His coach predicted Louie would take that record [4.06.04] down. The only runner who could beat him, the coach said, was Seabiscuit.

It tickled me that Hillenbrand was able to get in that casual and certainly appropriate reference to the subject of her own former best-selling nonfiction book.

No more dilly-dallying now, however: it is time to read, read, read! Outdoor fun in the snow must wait, too, Sarah!

Dante and My Nemesis, Nietzsche, Come Face to Face

A friend e-mailed last week to congratulate me on reading Dante's Inferno, a classic of the Western canon, and then went on to excoriate the poet and his work!, confessing her “long hatred” of both, “most of all, the savage imagination that reveled in that so political and score-settling Hell.” There is no denying the joy the poet takes in giving “savage” punishments to those of his own time and country in the other political camp. Take that out of the work, and not much would remain. So I thought of my friend's reaction as I continued my reading.

It isn’t as if I hadn’t already had my doubts about Dante. The whole Beatrice thing—somewhere I heard or read that he practically stalked the poor girl--and he did have a wife and children, after all, none of whom are mentioned at all, let alone glorified (beatified!) in his poetry! My friend who hates Dante refers to her feminst outrage over his use of the term mulierculae, “little women,” “womanlets,” or “mere women,” indicating the lowbrow audience he hoped to reach, “while of course knowing,” she adds, “ that his writing occupied a very high plane.”

But I need to shift gears for a moment now and introduce a phrase much bandied about in academic philosophy: the principle of charity, which has to do with the way a philosopher is supposed to interpret the work of another. If, for example, I am reading something in Kant that initially makes no sense to me, I am to remind myself that Kant was no fool but a highly intelligent man, and that it is therefore unlikely that what he wrote was nonsense. I then look for an interpretation in which it would make sense. Okay, that’s the principle. Got it?

In practice, the principle is applied very selectively. My use of Kant as an example is a case in point. Kant's status is legendary! He could not be talking through his hat! And who am I to criticize one of his stature? In similar fashion, as I have written elsewhere, we are urged by his defenders to stretch our powers of understanding when dealing with the writings of Nietzsche. Hence my observation:

If a writer is (a) famous and (b) dead, the principle of charity is almost always invoked.

Philosophers tend to be much less charitable when criticizing their contemporaries, and any undergraduate knows that a professor rarely appeals to the principle of charity when reading a student paper. Yes, students are quite often guilty of sloppy thinking, hasty generalization and a host of informal errors, but occasionally, I feel certain, there is a kernel of thought not yet fully blossomed, a seed that could use nourishing, something “vague and inarticulate” (in the words of the immortal William James, a philosopher who had unusual sympathy for the vagueness of ordinary human thought) that simply has not yet found its most felicitous expression. And didn’t the immortal Henri Bergson (can you tell that these are two of my favorite philosophers?) write somewhere that every philosopher really only says one thing—or, rather, spends his life trying to say it, in the best cases circling ever nearer and nearer the elusive goal?

So now, having appealed to James and Bergson, allow me to bring in Aristotle, my “main man” among the ancients, for the purpose of asking the following question: If charity in interpretation is the virtuous mean, what are the corresponding vices of deficiency and excess? Deficiency would obviously be a lack of charity, i.e., assuming the writer or to be a fool scribbling nonsense, but what would an excess of charity be? Perhaps putting the writer on a pedestal? Treating his work as equivalent to the Ten Commandments, not to be questioned or criticized at all but only revered? Reverence?

This, it seems to me, is too often the fate of any work designated as a classic: When a work enters the canon, its author is canonized. Now the writer is beyond criticism, above reproach, and the work can have no faults. At this juncture, let’s hear from my critical friend again:

Each time I've read it I've been more appalled, until I no longer care how beautiful it is.  "Wild notions" [here she is quoting my earlier blog post] are a gentle way to see some of these descriptions of physical pain.  I've become a complete literalist about it.  I've come to think it isn't enough to read The Inferno in a critic's ‘enlightened’ way, passing quickly to the beautiful language after a chuckle at the man's (absolutely serious) convictions.  What a cruel long life they've had in our history....

When I re-read that she thinks “it isn’t enough to read The Inferno in a critic’s ‘enlightened’ way,” I am reminded forcibly of my anguished struggle with Nietzsche, Part II of which I have yet to write up for “Books in Northport.” There seemed no rush, as philosophy more often drives away readers rather than drawing them in, and Part I was a case in point, but Part II, if I ever write it, will tell in detail just how hard I tried to read Nietzsche in the enlightened manner, “bracketing” (i.e., setting aside) his most appalling passages and focusing narrowly on questions that seemed amenable to less repulsive conclusions. My conclusion--in a nutshell, unadorned--was that the task could not be accomplished. With the least offensive passages, on the most innocuous of subjects, the same monsters still reared their heads. The poison penetrated every corner.

So I know what my friend means when she tells me she hates Dante, and perhaps for each of us there is one nemesis, and Nietzsche is mine, Dante hers. I fear that philosophers' ideas are more easily adopted and adapted by ideologues, but perhaps literature has a different but equal power to effect thought. Actually—this occurs to me only now, slogging through my vague, subterranean responses to both—there is something peculiar shared by both these canonized giants. --I need a new paragraph here. I want this point to stand out.

Neither was a giant in his own time—not rich, not powerful, not heralded throughout the world as a genius. When Nietzsche chose ressentiment as the ugliest of human motives, surely he knew firsthand whereof he spoke. How could he have failed to resent the honors granted to toadying academics, while he, the genius, was passed over? Dante’s gloating over his enemies’ suffering is but thinly veiled in the pity he claims to feel for them. Do we believe his pity is real? After all, it is he who invented the macabre punishments of his literary vision, so how sorry can he be for the sinners? And why is he so eager to publish their names among the living, if not to punish them himself?

My friend hates Dante. Maybe because philosophy rather than literature is my field, or maybe because the role of Nemesis in my life is already filled by Nietzsche—or maybe because I was not raised Catholic, which my friend seems to think is important to her response—but I cannot find it in me to hate Dante. The descriptions in bloody Canto XXVIII of bodies being torn and carved to pieces, bleeding, entrails exposed did not entertain me at all, as had some of the more fanciful punishments of earlier Circles; they are too easily imaginable, too realistic, too much what happens to human beings at war on earth. I would remind my friend, however, that neither the Bible nor the Catholic Church threatened believers (or unbelievers) with the dreadful fates Dante images. It all came out of his head! His head! Mandelbaum points out in a note that the punishment Dante imagined for Fra Alberigo did not conform to orthodox Christian doctrine, and the history Dante attributes to Ulysses is much different from what we get from Homer.

It is only in writing that Dante could get revenge, as only in writing could he be united with his love object, as only in writing could Nietzsche claim to be so far in advance of the rest of humanity in his thinking that no one born could yet understand him. Nietzsche died mute, insane, possibly as a result of syphilis. (No one knows for sure.) Dante, condemned to death in absentia, died in exile. Both lives came to unhappy ends. Little wonder they felt resentment, scorn, anger and hatred for so many of their contemporaries. Only in their imaginations and their brilliantly fevered writings could they dream of triumph. In real life, both were defeated, except that they "got their work done" (as a professor of mine noted) and left that work behind. 

Having only read The Inferno, I cannot yet address the place of Beatrice in Dante’s thought and writing. In defense of my earlier hypothesis that sins of language are punished most gravely in The Inferno, I note that the giant Nimrod in Canto XXXI is assigned to the Ninth Circle of Hell for having splintered humanity into a multitude of languages, and his punishment is that he is cursed with what we might call a “private language” (cf. Wittgenstein) that no one else can understand.

But the snow has arrived. Forecast for 10 a.m., it did not begin until almost 4 p.m., but now it falls, gently, thickly. Lentils simmer, David reads, Sarah works over a rawhide bone, and towels slosh in the washing machine. We are not in hell. Far from it.

Down into Darkness, Up into Light: A January Paradox

In that part of the young year when the sun

begins to warm its locks beneath Aquarius

and nights grow shorter, equaling the days,

         when hoarfrost mimes the image of his white

sister upon the ground—but not for long,

because the pen he uses is not sharp—

         the farmer who is short of fodder rises

and looks and sees the fields all white, at which

he slaps his thigh, turns back into the house,

         and here and there complains like some poor wretch

who doesn’t know what can be done, and then

goes out again and gathers up new hope

         on seeing that the world has changed its face

in so few hours, and he takes his staff

and hurries out his flock of sheep to pasture.

Dante, The Inferno, Canto XXIV

We are indeed in January, with cold nights and slowly lengthening days, so in that sense we are coming into the light. To read The Inferno, however, is to descend ever deeper into darkness and misery, visiting sinners in their abode of eternal punishment. And as Dante’s descent was supposed to have begun on Good Friday (1300 CE), his journey partook of a similar paradox.

With Canto XXIV, we are still in the Eighth Circle of the Inferno, the place of torment for men who were deceivers of other men. In preceding “pouches” of this Circle (and I have not written before of any particulars of this work, so did not explore earlier Circles in detail) we encountered panderers, seducers and flatterers (those guilty of “ordinary fraud”); simonists (corrupt churchmen); corrupt politicians; diviners, magicians and astrologists; grafters; and hypocrites. In Canto XXIV we shall pass from hypocrites to thieves, and as this passage begins Dante seems a poor, frightened sheep, soothed by his shepherd guide, Virgil, who capably leads him down a craggy, treacherous path.

It is interesting that sins of violence—whether against one’s own self, against others or against God—are punished less severely by Dante’s imagination than sins of fraud. So too lust and gluttony, “deadly” sins by the reckonings of the Church, occupy only the mildly punished Second and Third Circles, just below Limbo (Limbo that First Circle occupied by otherwise good people who unfortunately died without baptism or lived prior to its Christian possibility). Frauds, grafters and hypocrites, behold your place in Dante’s scheme of things! Your sins are worse than murder and suicide! Worse than the punishment meted out to heretics is your fate! Why did Dante see it (or wish to see it) so?

My first thought was that a blasphemer, a murderer or a suicide, like a lustful person, may have been taken by momentary passion, whereas fraud requires steady, cold-blooded intent, but the friend I tried out this answer on (another reader in our group and more studious than I by far when it comes to secondary literature) objected that murder also may be planned and executed in cold blood. True. And so my first speculation fell to ground.

Can it be that flatterers, seducers, corrupt churchman and lying politicians, grafters and hypocrites and the like spread their harms more widely because their use of language to deceive undermines the very possibility of truth, which is itself the necessary condition of justice? This is my new hypothesis—a philosopher’s hypothesis, to be sure--and I’ll be watching to see if it holds up as I descend to the Ninth Circle.

Meanwhile, strange as it seems, I don’t mind lingering a while in the Eighth Circle, since at this depth I seem to have broken through more completely than before to the wonders of the poet’s invention. The diviners, astrologers and magicians, for instance, because they “wanted so much to see ahead,” to tell the future, are punished by having their heads fixed on backwards, “...so awry that tears, drawn from the eyes,/bathed the buttocks, running down the cleft”! Tears running down their butts! What a wild notion! Introducing the fifth pouch of this Circle, in Canto XXI, Dante begins with a description of an Italian shipyard in winter--

         As in the arsenal of the Venetians,

all winter long a stew of sticky pitch

boils up to patch their sick and tattered ships

         that cannot sail (instead of voyaging,

some build new keels, some tow and tar the ribs

of hulls worn out by too much journeying;

         some hammer at the prow, some at the stern,

and some make oars, and some braid ropes and cords;

one mends the jib, another, the mainsail)...

 --to set the stage for the punishment given to politicians who took bribes: they are submerged in boiling pitch, and if they so much as dare to lift a hair above the level of the pitch, their tormenters push them back down under, like cooks “...force the meat with hooks/deep down into the pot, that it not float”! And don’t you think they deserve it, too? And can you wonder now that I am tempted, when at last I reach the end of this book, to turn back to the beginning and spend more time on the analogies, some given in a word, others in a phrase, still others in long, multi-stanza passages of description?

Phew! It’s hot down there!

Beginning, Somewhat Confusedly, in a Dark Wood with Robert Burns

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,

I found myself within a shadowed forest,

for I had lost the path that does not stray.

Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,

that savage forest, dense and difficult,

which even in recall renews my fear:

so bitter—death is hardly more severe!

But to retell the good discovered there,

I’ll also tell the other things I saw.

-      Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

Yes, I began the new year this morning by preparing to descend into Dante’s “Inferno,” as our small, intrepid band will be discussing this section of The Divine Comedy in less than three weeks. We are reading Allen Mandelbaum’s translation, and he dedicates this first book to “Elisa Jane Mandelbaum and her generation,” with the epigraph: A RIVEDER LE STELLE (“And beheld once again the stars”). My apologies to poet and translator for my difficulties with formating stanzas and indentations.

Eugenio Montale, whose essay introduces the volume, gives a complicated argument concluding, “Dante cannot be repeated.” Who would attempt to refute such a statement? I can’t help wondering, however, if any great writer or artist or work of art can be "repeated." Emulated, borrowed from, etc., but repeated? Surely not. Another question is posed as to whether or not the poem may be considered an epic, though it strays from the epic form by mixing styles and not maintaining a tragic tone throughout, and there are many questions about the historicity of the work. Finally, Montale approaches the possibility of miracles. Might not Beatrice actually have appeared after death to the poet? Might not the work itself constitute a miracle? Montale has no problem allowing these possibilities.

Historical questions are inevitable when dealing with Dante, as they are with Shakespeare My own preference is to meet the work on its own ground, and by “its own ground” I mean not only (but not excluding, either) the ground which gave it forth but also that on which it has lived through the ages and continues to live today, part of a universal human experience, anchored firmly—despite the allegorical title of the entire work and of its three books—in life on this earth, both sensual and cultural, social and individual. Who “of a certain age” has not been metaphorically lost at least once in a shadowed forest, a dark wood?

Our discussion group host has asked each of us to examine the successive rings of the Inferno and determine where we might be currently headed, on the basis of how we have lived and are living our lives--then, how in the coming year we might change course to avoid such a grim fate! This is one question we will be keeping in mind as we read. Another thought assignment is to reflect as we read on why Dante undertook the work. What was his aim?

Another “thick” midwinter book I pulled out for reading at this turning time is Wing-Tsit Chan’s A Source Book in Chinese History, turning first to Mencius (371-289? BCE), many of whose ideas put me in mind of Aristotle, but I'll save reflecting on that for another day.

Before closing, though, can I possibly turn from the old year to the new without Robert Burns? That (ç) was, of course, a rhetorical question, as is this (è): “Should auld acquaintance be forgot,/And never brought to min’?” You know the answer. Nay, lassie, nay, laddie, we’ll no’ forget!

For auld lang syne, my dear,

For auld lang syne,

We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,

For auld lang syne. 

My little book of the poems of Robert Burns lost its cover long before it came into my hands. The front hinge is completely destroyed. I wrote the name myself with ballpoint pen on the remains of the front board. A “reading” copy is all it is, i.e., without any value as an object, valuable only for its contents. But oh, what contents! And seriously? I wouldna gie it up for ony bright, new book!

Reading Group Going to HELL!

I mean it. No kidding. Six of us met the other evening and came to a momentous decision: the next book we read together will be Dante’s Inferno. 

Our merry band originally formed to read James Joyce’s Ulysses, which a couple members said they could never hope to get through without support, and we were emboldened by our success (due largely to Steve’s leadership) to go on to read plays by Shakespeare, Molière and Beckett, then Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina. I was the wimp on the last round, sitting out Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, pleading too many other commitments for the fall season.

But now—Dante! We launched ourselves into the mood by looking at Steve and Lauran’s photo albums of their trip to Italy and by hearing about Marilyn’s more recent Rome-to-Florence adventure. The rest of us were nonplussed when Marilyn said that Dante’s name was originally Durante. Like Jimmy? Imagine that!

More serious consideration on our first Dante evening was to decide which edition to read and whose translation. In the end we agreed that we didn’t need to worry much about everyone reading the same English words with this particular work, as we can refer to a canto by Roman numeral and, within cantos, to numbered lines. So it is that four of us are committed to Mandelbaum’s translation, while Steve will be using his trusty Binyon, which features a synopsis of each canto immediately preceding it, rather than endnotes, and the sixth member will rely on an audio version. It will be interesting to experience more than one version of the work in our discussion.

If all goes well when we meet in January, we may proceed to the other sections of The Divine Comedy in the spring. But maybe not, too. As someone scrawled in the back of my paperback copy of Paradiso:

Is it easier to describe sin, horror and death? Satan in Milton the most interesting angel--the tortures in Inferno very creative, graphic, in terms of earthly bodies that we would understand--Paradise just a bunch of lights.

Well, that's one person's anonymous opinion. How do you see it? Are sinners most interesting than angels? And where would you put saints on that continuum?