See through my eyes.

"He also told Don Quixote that in his castle there wasn't any chapel where he could keep the vigil of arms, because it had been demolished to build a new one, but he knew that in case of need, vigil might be kept anywhere and Don Quixote could do so that night in a courtyard in the castle..."
"... Don Quixote promised to do exactly as he'd been told and then was given orders to keep the vigil of arms in a large yard on one side of the inn; and he gathered his armour together and placed it on a water-trough next to a well, and taking up his leather shield and seizing his lance, he began with a stately bearing, to pace back and forth in front of the trough; and as his pacing began night was beginning to fall." --- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (Book 1, Chapter 3, translated by John Rutherford)


(Gustave Doré, Don Quixote Guards his Armour)

I've chosen this passage from Don Quixote, not because it ever stood out for me in my readings, but because I fell deeply in love with Doré's rendition of the scene. We have a lonely old man, and his makeshift sword pointing upwards towards the moon, upwards as it always does, a full moon up above, and an armour sitting atop a stage that serves beasts by day. What struck me in the image was the exquisite loneliness that is embodied in Don Quixote's person-- a loneliness that is so beautifully portrayed by the artist who understands how thin the old man must be, yet how regally he holds his probably aching back, and how graceful his poise remains as he extends his lance to threaten any and all who come for his armour and his honor.
In the text, of course, Don Quixote is performing the vigil that is the final task he must fulfill before being knighted by the innkeeper, yet, when I see this image, I wonder to myself whether that is exactly what he's doing. So what I'd like to do in this post is to somehow try to envision vision-- what Don Quixote's sees within and outside himself, and how the reader-artist sees his figure. Don Quixote, I would think, is an artist in himself, only the images and sounds he is able to produce remain within his mind and are enunciated in his speech and actions. In other words, what Don Quixote sees and does is directly a response to a reimagining that takes place in his mind. As a character in the text, he behaves in accordance with his own narration rather than that of a narrator's. Windmills, then, become giants taken almost directly out of the Inferno. A humble inn becomes a castle. Friars become enchanters abducting a princess. In an earlier post, I called Don Quixote, "the reader;" in this one, I'd like to call him "the writer." His figure is of the artist who having read everything turns to produce his own art-- an art that comes to us in what his friends and neighbours see as madness.

But if Don Quixote's art is visible in only in his performance, or possibly in his knowledge that he is being written, what does Doré's image tell us about our own limits. I think it tests our limits in all kinds of ways, actually. For one, I was reminded more than anything else of Pygmalion praying that his statue come to life. I had all kinds of ideas floating in my head about the armour as a kind of ghostly lover that accompanies Don Quixote throughout his travels. More importantly, though, I think Doré's image puts forward a fascinating match between madness and the right not be mad. The full moon represents so much more so Don Quixote's mental infirmity in the real world, but the lance that extends outward almost threatening the moon is the madness that knows itself.
As I see this post, it says two almost oppositional things in the same vein-- there is the idea that Don Quixote is essentially a lonely figure whose incredible belief in his self renders him the subject of an image so potent. And then we can read him as a figure on par with Cervantes, guiding the text through an eye that reenvisions what it sees; and as a figure who, particularly, in the image dares for there to be a greater insanity than his own.
Cervantes has never been one of my strengths when it comes to reading, so if this post comes of as somewhat incoherent, it's because I had a conversation with my friend AR earlier today where she told me that this text makes her want to be better at Spanish-- and that inspired me to give Cervantes another shot. I don't think there's any higher compliment one can pay a writer, so here's to hoping I've done some justice to C, to DQ... and to A.

Now show me something pretty.

"... they saw that dawn had already come to the east, with the beauty and color of a rose, and all the stars had been scattered, save only the lovely mistress of Heaven, Venus, who guards the confines of night and day. From there, there seemed to come a delicate breeze, filling the air with biting cold, and among the murmuring woods on nearby hills wakening the birds into joyous song." -- The Book of the Courtier, Baldassar Castiglione (translated by George Bull).

"And first of all Aristophanes dropped off, then, when the day was already dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to sleep, rose to depart; Aristodemus, as his manner was, following him. At the Lyceum he took a bath, and passed the day as usual. In the evening he retired to rest at his own home.
Symposium, Plato (translated by Alexander Nehamas).

Tonight, I'm going to blog about sunrise. Given the intense nature of my last post, I think this week is for things-that-are-not-infernal (though I might break my pledge about not doing more D). The first excerpt is from the ending of a famous Italian Renaissance text called the Book of the Courtier-- a group of courtiers, men and women both, sit with their Duchess and discuss what form and practice the ideal courtier should take. The second excerpt is from the Symposium, a text by Plato, in which a group of men, attended to by women, sit, drink, and discuss the ideal forms of love. There are various similarities between the two texts, but the one that interests me most, and that stood out for me even as a college freshman is the use of sunrise, dawn, a new day to mark conclusion. A month or two after reading The Courtier, I was to read Madame Bovary (all in the much-beloved HUM Sequence at Princeton), and this time I would see sunrise on the occasion of Emma's funeral, and once again, it would hit me-- why a new beginning at the point of ending?
As a freshman, I had various theories about this, dawn as a metaphor for gender reversals, dawn as a device for peripeteia in texts that wish to either imitate or parody the classical tradition etc. Right now, I want to put forward a simpler reading: something has gone horribly awry in these texts right before the moment at which they are meant to end; something that when written has become problematic. The richness of dawn and possibilities of a new today, then, are devices meant to soothe not only the reader, but also this very perturbed text. True enough, in the Book of the Courtier, an argument on the abilities of women to love had just begun, in the face of the court's duchess. In the Symposium, Socrates has just rejected the advances of his friend Alicibiades whose speech on love only confirmed and elaborated upon his own. I don't want to write too much about Madame B. just yet, but indeed, her death, though coming, is both disturbed and disturbing.
Sunrise, I am inclined to think at this moment, would not be a necessary element of the text if it had progressed without rupturing so close to its conclusion. This idea of a text's rift with itself, of course, gives birth to a thousand other questions--why would an author not be careful? why should he lack divine control over his creation etc.? There are several answers to this one-- the text could be based in reality (as has been argued in the case of the Symposium), or the text wants to have a kind of reality and is still not mature enough to handle it, or that the author himself craves dissonance the size of a tiny tragedy-- too small to be noticed, small enough to be painted over with shades of daybreak.
Of course, we have two completely different kinds of text-soothers here. The Renaissance sunrise is highly stylized, and deeply sensual. Socrates' sunrise, on the other hand, lasts only a second. But it marks his decision to normalize, to spend a day in the baths, in his home, in the lap of the ordinary rather than a night orchestrating the battle between eros and philos. They are both equally relevant here, however, because they both give rise to the idea that light, new days, baths, and breezes can somehow fix the mistakes of the night before. A day spent in the intense beauty of the ordinary is somehow required for the mortal who has stumbled briefly while testing his limits. In other words, the bodily and the earthly are very much a part of the spiritual and the ethereal. And sunrise, as often as we sing, paint, write and dance about it, is deeply ordinary, the beautifully ordinary.


P.S. I couldn't resist an image for a post about something so often painted. Up there is Aurora Taking Leave of Tithonus (Franceso Solimena, 1704, Getty Museum)-- in other words, the dawn goddess taking leave of her Trojan lover. I am not quite sure how it informs the argument I've just made, but it's something worth thinking about.

Dante's low moment.

"See how Mahomet is deformed and torn!
In front of me and weeping, Ali walks,
his face cleft from the chin up to the crown.

The souls that you see passing in this ditch
were all sowers of scandal and schism in life,
and so in death you see them torn asunder."

(Inferno, Canto XXVIII)

This is probably the last post I will do on Dante in while, simply because I think that there is too much of him on this blog--this is an important post though, because it seeks to address one of the most troubling and (in our world) possibly unbeautiful set of verses in the poem. I also want to add that the crucial idea in this post belongs to EK one of the more erudite and exceptional teachers I have had in the past few years. EK's understanding of characters in the Inferno is based on the premise that it is not the largesse of the sin that causes Dante to place them in the Hell or Purgatory, but rather that in the act of sinning, a character has betrayed his or her own self. They go not against God or Church but against their own nature and thus are sent to a place where they radiate from their bodies, what it was that they did to harm their whole.
For the longest time, there was one figure who I failed to fit into this larger theory and that was Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. In the Inferno, he is doomed to one of the lower and hence worse circles of Hell, accompanied by his own nephew and early convert, Ali. The question kept coming up-- how has a figure like him betrayed his self? It is not the later Islamic conquests that Dante evokes, but the early figure of Islam himself.
I communicated this anxiety to EK who also reads this as an ugly moment in Dante's writing, but who did provide the following important fact about Dante's world: Dante did not see the Prophet Muhammad as living in a pagan world, but rather as a Christian who actively broke with the Church to found a new religion against Christianity rather than one in conjunction with it. In the medieval imagination, everyone was Christian. There was very little sense of geography and culture. Rather there was the Christian world and there was not. Muhammad came into the former category and is then a figure who causes "schism" and "sows scandal." We have seen a similar approach to Islam in Le Chanson de Roland-the twelfth century French poem-- and it will continue till the Renaissance when the Western world begins to better understand what is outside of itself.
This explanation, as I hope my readers already know, is not a way of excusing or diminishing the gravity of accusation and portrayal. It is, however, an attempt to help [many of] us to continue accessing a text that has inspired vision and voice; and that has preserved the sinner and transported the virtuous. It doesn't make Dante's medieval anger okay but if it brings us closer to his figure as he wrote the Commedia (the image of a medieval Florentine coffee-shop is amusing), and if it helps us just a little bit to understand his art, then I think this would be a good place for me to stop dwelling on the Inferno, and maybe institute a move to the humanists we haven't got enough of.

Reigning in Hell

"Is this the region, this the soil, the clime
Said the lost Archangel, this the seat
That we must change for Heaven; this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since he
Who now is Sovereign, can dispose and bid
What shall be right; furtherest from him is best,
Whom reason hath equal'd, force hath made supreme
Above his equals. Farewell happy fields,
Where joy forever dwells! Hail horrors! hail,
Infernal world! And thou, profoundest Hell,
receive thy new possessor! one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
A mind in its own place and in itself
can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."
(Paradise Lost, Book 1-- John Milton)

To continue the English trend, here is Milton's Satan right before he utters his famous mantra, "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." The above excerpt is one of the many views we get into Satan's mind-- in the case of this particular one, it is a view into the mind of a fallen angel as he finds a new space in which to exist. While Satan's moral outlook, his approach towards the supremacy as established by God, and his quest to be more than just a being has been discussed enough times, I want to use this post to briefly examine what it means to establish another space, and whether Hell is truly a place that can exist free of Heaven.
Satan very clearly hesitates upon arriving in this new geography-- one that clearly lacks the elements that we now use to define God--light being the foremost among them. Where he is now is lightless and therefore God-less. Yet, it is the space where all who dwell shall be equal, and share equally in what is "infernal" and "joyless." At the same time, this new Hell is given a changeability that depends not upon its maker but upon its occupier. Whosoever happens to be in Hell can imagine it as a Heaven in itself-- for Satan's Heaven is a changing place, it is also a place that is inconstant for it is Heaven at the very same moment that it is Hell.
While Dante, Homer, and Virgil have all given their Underworlds a powerful sense of nationality by their use of geography and identity-- Milton's Satan comes of as the ruler of a homeless people with no particular promised land in mind. Hell is where God isn't. It is a place that can be Heavenly if seen that way. It questions what constant is-- is it the God who refuses to share his divinity with one of his creation, or is it a Satanic mind so persistent that it impoverishes the body in order for its desires to be satisfied? In other words, does Hell really exist outside of the mind? To take this notion a little further-- does being in Hell mean having only one's mind as a supreme figure, as solace, as a friend, a space, a family?

What Satan wants, then, is to define himself against God-- he really wants to become an "other." Perhaps one could argue that the very figure of the divine insists on others, yet the divine can also be read as being the anti-other or the embracer. If we stick with the latter, then Satan is possibly trying to achieve the impossible: define himself and his kingdom against a figure that constantly absorbs and grows and thus resists the possibility of having an other to itself.