For YL: Lecture notes, partie deux

Here is the second installment of lecture notes for the two lectures I gave for EK's Dante in English class. Delivering these lectures was one of the hardest but most rewarding things I have done in graduate school yet. I think I'm finally done with D, though I still have a draft with the last few lines of Paradiso-- and they're telling me that I know they're among the most beautiful lines of poetry ever written.

VITA NUOVA, PART II

•    Start with where we ended last time, and the figure of the old.
•    Love= misery, nosos, Cavalcantian view, there was no allegory in love.
•    Love in this way was non-transcendant. Today, we’re going to look at how it becomes T.
•    What didn’t get across last time: Love, no matter which one, still has a premise in physical beauty. Idea that dates back to Plato. How this physical beauty is processed is then dependent on the kind of love. If Beatrice= Medusa, this love, not happening. What enters for Dante is the essence of beauty, through Beatrice, and what enters for C. is love itself.
•    Purgatory XXX, pg. 368 and Beatrice’s reprimand. Fits in perfectly with this idea of Dante mistaking B in VN—Dante had a chance to benefit from her physical beauty and turn it into a spiritual love, but instead the D of the VN doesn’t understand and falls under the spell of Love and not B.
•    Purpose of lecture today: Arrival. We embarked from the old. By the end of the lecture we should be able to look back at the old from the view of the new. Dante arrives at the figure of Beatrice and love. To say the same thing in terms of the self: we’re journeying back to the pre-Lapsarian moment, after recognizing how we exist in the post-Lapsarian. To do this:
•    Vita Nuova, death of Beatrice, entrance of another feminine figure, look briefly at the Convivio, and then form an idea of Beatrice.
•    We’re going to do this in the following way:
1.    The presence of dreams and visions as suggestive of Prof. C’s idea that D had always been aware of the nature of B, and the love she represents—he just needed to understand it.
2.    Dante’s Boethian moment—and think of this as the moment of movement from his despair to salvation. Love can become transcendant. This is briefly visted in VN, so we’re going to talk a little bit about Convivio—interim work, not about B.
3.    And then arrive at the figure of B, and try to make a decisive statement. B as a secular figure. If there is time, we’ll take a quick look at how D was received by his peer, GC.
•    DREAMS: Beatrice’s death and the final VISIONS: (SHOW IMAGE). Try to form a hypothesis about how they relate to D’s greater idea of love.
•    Three dreams, conveniently to fit in with 3s that encompass B.  B and Love, eating the heart; the dream in which love instructs him to clear up his priorities and decide who it is he really loves; and the dream of Beatrice’s death.
•    Dream takes precedence over actual narration of he event. Prophetic nature of the dream. Often seen as religiously significant. Dream is prophetic, but its form becomes a means to express the literal, the non-allegorical love. This Love has a figure in the dream—D and L can communicate—interesting to think about how this old figure of Love has a space only in an unreal space—but what’s more interesting—how the nature of the dream changes in Purgatory, becomes prophetic, but also instructive. 
•    The dream of Beatrice’s death stands in utter contrast of the Purgatory dreams. Whereas they address the nature of the self, this one has a sense of the self obliterated, D is ruled by love, and on Pg. 623, wants to join B in death, in the bodily death, not realizing what he can do with the legacy she leaves him.
•    If the dream isn’t transformative, than what is? The vision. D borrows this from Boethius who in C of P has a vision of being visited by Lady Philosophy, and St. Augustine who in Confessions is moved to read the Bible when a mysterious voice speaks to him.
•    Two visions. The first, pg 645, in which D is reminded of HER, as opposed to of LOVE. Element of this vision, SHAME, the first stage in a conversion. First step towards being saved. Also first inkling that D is writing love poetry to a dead woman, something that Cav is not going to like. This is the vision in which D understands the utter disconnect he has, but because he feels shame, he can transform.
•    Second vision, pg 649, where we don’t know what he sees. But it goes along nicely with this idea of not knowing how to write either. In other words, only when he can see inside himself, will he be able to write about B.
•    Difference between a dream and a vision in VN: dream is prophetic, tool of the artist, means of representation. Vision completely rocks the text, and the world. It makes people take U-turns. Augustine. D on the road of love, feeding his body, makes a U-turn and heads back to the pre-lapsarian.
•    ON THE WAY to the pre-Lapsarian, there has to be something that will make love transcendent. Something that will make him understand the true nature of love. Comes in Section 35, pg. 640, The “gracious lady” or the “donna gentile,” who “has seen into the nature of my darkened life.” Crucial line. She had seen, and she makes him see. She makes three appearances and D doesn’t get it. Who is this woman?
•    Her story older than D’s and she is a reconfiguarion of Lady P. We’ve already seen Boethius in the Sphere of the Sun, along with St. Thomas Aquinas. B, 5th century Roman, charged with treason, finally executed, but during imprisonment wrote a work called Consolation of Philosophy. Last influence on Christian ethics. Lady P visits him moaning and groaning in prison. Over a series of sonnets and lectures, Lady P leads B back to himself and to God.
•    How Boethius mapped out existence? Four levels of existence, sensation, imagination, reason and divine. Humans on the level of reason.  One that what is in this world is material good. Often this material good isn’t controlled or reflective of our actions. But FREE WILL can help reach for a divine good, and go from the human level of reason to the divine. It is through the here and now that we can eventually be divine.
•    D’s Lady P—appears in moment of distress. Though her role is undeveloped in VN, D will devote an entire work to her—Convivio. Beatrice mentioned only once in C, because he still hasn’t found the words. Focuses on the “donna gentile” philosophy instead.
•    What is the gist of it? For one, it apologizes for the VN, calling it “fervid and passionate” and tells us that Convivio will be “tempered and mature.”
•    He also declares that it is inspired by Boethius because it is a desire to defend himself, he was in exile. And by Augustine, because he desires to spread virtue.
•    In the C, D tells us to love Philosophy, which in itself is a love of wisdom. When a human being loves wisdom, he is being the best earthly being he can be. And because this love of wisdom is an infinite process, once you have become the best earthly being, you transcend into harmony with the divine. Partially derives this idea from St. Thomas
•    Now this idea of being in dialogue with a divine creator isn’t purely Christian, it’s actually pretty flexible. St. Thomas—reconciled pagan philosophy with Christian ethics. Aristotle with the Christian world. Suggested that the two look for the same end, and can complement each other. Philosophy and theology are basically different starting points of getting to the same end, he argued, God. The nature of a human being, or the idea of goodness, can be explained both through religion, and through logic.
•    Other important St. Thomas idea, that allows us to read the Comedy as a book about the here and now, human soul is separate from the human body. Not to say that two have nothing to do with each other, but the soul is what makes the body a human body. When the body dies, the soul goes on living possibly. That’s how figures like Cunizza can make it to Paradise—because despite enjoying their sensuality, they don’t lose grip of their soul. She never loses her soul to Love, the independent figure. She is able to forgive herself, ie she knows she’s sinned and is willing to pay for it.
•    And now, finally, after these travels, we can arrive. WHO IS BEATRICE? 

(Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Blessed Damozel")

•    Here’s the argument we’re going to make: She is constructed as a figure of Catholic salvation, but in truth, she’s deeply secular.
•    From the VN on, we’ve seen her surrounded by 9s and 3s. Explained in terms of the trinity. 9, prime number. There is the image of a pilgrim pg. 649.
•    Pg. 625, he has compared her to Christ. READ this Joan derives from John the Baptist, he who comes first, and she is Christ. This, to footnote, is still before he actually realized her meaning.
•    She is what we call a figure Christi or a Christ Figure. She dies for his salvation. She is not a saint, but she has come into her role of beatifier. 
•    What makes her secular with all this theology? She is Dante’s personal savior. Her numbers occur in relation to Dante—for example, she meets him at nine and then after nine years. She changes as he changes. Her narrative does not exist without his,
•    Later on, she chooses to take him through the three stages of the Comedy. Why Dante? Because in a way, she would not be Beatrice the beatifier without him, for she can only save the figure who loves her, not just anyone.
•    In other words, there is a Beatrice for everyone, if they are willing to find her. It isn’t necessary that she be the exact same as Dante is, just as Paradise is not the exact same as Dante imagines it to be. Beatrice’s nature as imagined, I think, more and more highlights the idea of Paradise as characterized by how each person in it sees it. In this life, the here and now, our actions must signify the desire to move up this path, to be looking for a connection with the divine, whether we do it by embracing our sensuality or whether we do it by defending the principles we stand for.
•    At this point of arrival, we have more symmetry, VN, Convivio, Comedy together also form a kind of trinity—the individual’s journey to his end goal.
•    LASTLY: If we float down to earth. Yes, in the VN, we have the new Dante writing in the old, the new converted Augustine calling the old Augustine a sinner, we have a confession which leaves the old D behind, but what does the Old think of the New?

•    Cavalcanti’s response: Sonnet XXIII
To Dante rebuking him for his way of life after the death of Beatrice
I DAILY come to thee uncounting times
And find thee ever thinking over vilely
Much doth it grieve me that thy noble mind
And virtue's plenitude are stripped from thee
Thou wast so careless in thy fine offending
Who from the rabble always held apart
And spoke of me so straightly from the heart
That I gave welcome to thine every rime
And now I care not sith thy life is baseness
To give the sign that thy speech pleaseth me
Nor come I to thee in guise visible
Yet if thou It read this sonnet many a time
That malign spirit which so hunteth thee
Will sound forloyn  and spare thy affrighted soul

For YL: Lecture notes, partie une.

One of my close friends, and earliest and most devoted readers of my blog told me that if I wasn't writings posts these last couple of weeks, I could at least put up the lecture notes for the lectures I was delivering on Dante's Vita Nuova.  I didn't take him seriously at first, but here you are Yukes, I think it's kind of a neat idea. They may not make much sense, but they're a wonderful memory.

VITA NUOVA

•    Moving back in Dante’s oeuvre, Vita Nuova is one of his early works, produced around 1293-94. This is twenty years before the Inferno, which 1314, and three years after the death of Beatrice Portinari.
•    Generally speaking, the Vita Nuova is a series of poems from Dante’s youth that he started writing for Beatrice nine years after he met her, and that are presented with prose explanation to us in the Vita Nuova. The poems, however, were written much earlier than the prose that accompanies them. When we read Vita Nuova then, this is something that needs to be kept in mind.
•    The Vita Nuova is also the only apparently biographical material we have on Dante’s life.
•    Over the next two lectures our goal is going to be to try and understand who exactly Beatrice is. Is she Beatrice Portinari, the actual woman who in Dante’s lifetime was married to someone else? Is she the muse of reason and philosophy inspired from earlier works such as Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy? Or is she a figure created specifically in the tradition of medieval love poetry, who eventually becomes a central figure of Dante’s masterpiece, the Comedy?
•    The answer to these questions, I’m going to suggest in this lecture and next, lies in forming a conception of Love—and love as it is seen by Dante the poet. In other words, what we’re going to try and do is trace the process by which Beatrice becomes synonymous with love. It’s a process by which Beatrice transforms from Beatrice Portinari to the essence of what it means to be Beatrice, or one who can bless, and love transforms from the Lapsarian moment, professor C identified in his lecture to the pre-Lapsarian conception of love that Dante finally, finally achieves in Paradise.
•    In today’s lecture, we’re going to begin the journey towards the realization of Beatrice’s nature in the first three stages:
First is to have an understanding of what it means to have a Vita Nuova in the first place? How is the Vita Nuova, a new life? And in how many different ways can it be read as a new life? Of course, in order to have a complete understanding of the new, we have to be able to recognize what is it that has become old, what have we left behind, what are we rejecting?  And thirdly, what is it that has happened that has caused for this rejection to take place? What is the seminal moment that causes the rejection of the old?

Some basic ideas to keep in mind:
•    VITA NUOVA: poems from early in D’s career. Cavalcanti’s influence. Tradition of medieval love—secrecy, married lady, a lover who could also be married, Lancelot. Prose after B’s death. VN is pre-1290 and post-1290 text.
•    Phrase, Vita Nuova, never occurs in the text. Vita =Life. Nuova derives from the Latin novus, which can mean new, youthful, young, marvelous etc. D tells us he finds it in his “Book of Memory” which he intends to rewrite in the text we have today. Think about this?
•    But is this the New Life or the New New Life? 1. Beatrice 2. Understanding who Beatrice is. Love to Love as Salvation New life= Being a poet. New New Life= being a poet who reinvents poetry.
•    We will always be able to see VN as both New Life and New New Life, depending on the angle. If we take Dante the narrator’s than it’s just the New Life. If we take, Dante the man’s, from what we know historically, than it is the New New Life.
•    Also think of it as the “young life” for this is how the phrase appears in Purgatory XXX, line 116 (pg 368), Beatrice reprimanding Dante about wasting his Vita N. His “youthful life” or his “new life--” which seems to be a direct reference to the moment at which he sees her in the mortal world. And now it can mean yet another new life, where B because she has realized her role as a “Beatrice” or a blesser, can try to save him through her love.
•    One other way to think about—if we think in terms of the lecture on Tuesday—it is a book of return. In which case wouldn’t the title be an inversion? This last question we’re going to readdress in detail next Tuesday by thinking about it in terms of similar genres and works such as Boethius’ Consolation of Phil and Augustine’s Confessions.
•    We’ll get to these and Beatrice’s role of blesser in the next lecture. In this lecture what I suggest we do is establish a way to get to the new. What does it mean to have something new? What do we need to possess in order to have a new?
•    PAUSE
•    Need an old. An obsolete. That can no longer suffice. Old view of love, and old figure of Beatrice. What is the old view? Guido Cavalcanti. (SHOW IMAGE)

(Dante Gabriel Rossetti," Giotto Paints Dante's Portrait")
•    GC: Love= misery, loss of self, disaster, tears, an occupation of the rational part of the soul. The “beloved” mostly unimportant, just the medium that inspires love.

•    Donna me prega, ,
I
“Because a lady bids me I would speak/
Of an insubstantial thing that is so fierce
And  powerful it bears the name Love...
II
...Love is given shape by a darkness born of Mars
---it takes a sensate name/
It enters when an object caught by sight/
Takes up in the potential intellect.

•    What is this poem saying? He has been inspired by a woman. Love and sight, physical desire, the senses. This is literally what he means. No allegory in his poems.
•    Who have we already met as Cavalcantian lovers? F and P. Love enters through their eyes. And it takes over their minds.
•    But what F and P do in Canto V, D also does to a degree in his poetry.
•    Character called love= first poem, 592. (LOVE IMAGE)
•    597, imitating love
•    598, love begins to fuse with him
•    Here is perhaps the reason Dante faints when he meets them. His love too is physical.
WITH THIS IN MIND, we can ask the question, WHO IS BEATRICE THAN?
•    There are a number of ideas on this. Erich Auerbach has suggested she probably didn’t exist. She could have been the typical Florentine lady. Or she could have been what D made her out to be. But given historical circumstances like different marriages, his exile, her early death etc. probably more made up than anything else.
•    Let’s see what he tells us in the biographical information: they meet when they are nine, he falls in love with her, (GARDEN IMAGE) nine years later, she acknowledges him one day, he sees this as a reason to go on, but then, given that he tries to protect her virtue by going after other women, she is offended and refuses to acknowledge him. And then she dies. 

(Henry Holiday, "Dante and Beatrice" 1883)
•    And what does he tell us in his poems?
•    Well actually very little. Most of his pre-B death poetry is about love, not her so much.
•    Pg 606, B as the typical coquettish mistress (her rejection, show WEDDING IMAGE)
•    Pg 615, physical being that she is
•    Pg 616, back to the gaze, the eyes, the love transformation of Cavalcanti
•    And that’s all really.
•    We’re back at the question, WHO IS BEATRICE?
•    Here’s my answer: The earthly Beatrice is no one significant, in fact, I want to argue that she is a symbol left in by Dante to serve as a comparison to the true Beatrice. She is just the representative of Cavalcante and Guinizelli and Dante’s predecessor poets and their tradition.
•    When we read Beatrice like that, the VN is very much both a text of inversion, and of reinvention. It is the text in which D starts the trend for a return to the pre-Lapsarian moment, the old moment, one won’t be completed till the end of Paradise. But it is also very very new, because in this we have the Dante of old, arriving at the juncture of the New Dante—Boethius, and St. Augustine. 

(All page numbers correspond to Mark Musa's A Portable Dante, Penguin, 2003)

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.

Et tu, Dante?

"As pilgrims wrapped in meditation pass
someone they do not know along the road
and turn to stare and then go quickly on,

so, from behind us, move swiftly, came
and passed us by with a quick look of doubt,
a band of spirits, silent and devout,

their eyes dark-shadowed, sunken in their heads,
their faces pale, their bodies worn so thin
that every bone was molded to their skin."
Purgatory, Canto XXIII.
Two repeats today: Gustav Dore and Dante Alighieri. On reading Purgatory and Paradiso, I realized that these canticas are far more complex and spread out than the Inferno. Whereas those damned to eternal punishment exist in structure those half forgiven and those rewarded seem to occupy (naturally) a far more sprawling and meandering route to Empyrean. But T. S. Eliot has summed up Dante in one very powerful sentence, "Dante's is a visual imagination." One way of understanding Dante, specially if one exists outside of his historical and political loop is through images that resulted from artists' immediete understanding of Dante's elaborate word.
The Gluttons are amongst the groups that roam the higher echelons of the Mountain of Purgatory-- their sin is one of excess, but interestingly enough is told through the element that will later dominate completely the journey through Paradise, i.e. love. Purgatory, then, is the place of imbalanced love and the gluttons are amongst those who had an excess of it. Directly after introducing this group, Dante characterizes them through Ovid's King Erysichthon who out of starvation ate first his daughter and then his own flesh, and Josephus's Miriam who during the seige of Jerusalem ate her infant son. It is this likening, this establishment of relationship that interests me the most here. Even though Dante encounters a literary colleague Forese Donati as one of the group, his first instinct as a narrator is to remove this group from "the journey of our life." Of course, the Divine Comedy is rife with this trend, but when it comes to the gluttons Dante is deeply torn. They are at one point a group who is devout, and penitent, and yet their punishment, and their state of starvation is worse than that of the man who ate his own flesh. So the question that comes up here how can a character at once be so damned and so close to redemption? Or if we shift this to the level of the narrative, how is it that Dante achieves this peculiar neutrality in his telling of the gluttons' state?
I want to read this moment in Purgatory through the figure of Dante himself. I read Dante as succumbing to the sin at this point in the narrative as he pesters Donati for information. Donati's presence is an additional reminder of Dante's own earthly misdemeanours (see Robert Hollander's commentary on this episode). I want to think of Dante no longer as a special guest, but as one of the many characters he encounters throughout his journey. Also of note at this point is that Dante walks with not just Virgil, but also Statius, an early A.D era poet who forms a kind of bridge between Virgil's paganism, the pre-Christian moment, and Dante's own desire for a Christian salvation. In other words, Dante's own figure is failing at this point. His guides are not guides, but companions.
I would answer my own question then by thinking about the figure of a narrator as it becomes engrossed in its own narration. It would also be of interest to think back to other figures in the Comedy who were somehow related with food-- Ugolino comes to mind. How does Dante's figure change with respect to Ugolino? Similarly, does Paulo and Francesca's earthly love somehow attract Dante in the earthly moment of the Inferno?
I haven't said much about Dore, except for using him as a means to understanding the layout and words that run in the Divine Comedy. I'll leave this image up-- it suggests a complete opposition to what I've just argued.

The infernal

THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST.
JUSTICE URGED ON MY HIGH ARTIFICER;
MY MAKER WAS DIVINE AUTHORITY,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND PRIMAL LOVE.
BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS
WERE MADE, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY.
ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE.

(Inferno, Canto III)

There are a couple of things that jump out immediately from this inscription on the Gates to Hell in the Inferno: the first is that the gate demands to be read, it does not speak to those standing before it, neither is the visitor prescient. The second thing that strikes me is this idea of a self-narration, the story of oneself as told by the self-- what is this story? why is it that the story of the self often the most untrue? and why, most importantly, does the self tell a story? The gate, then, is an active agent of telling and narration whose unchanging act suggests that it somehow remains consistently engaged with the rest of the telling in the Inferno. In other words, the gate and its story of hell is one that is echoed and altered with each sub-narrated story-- eternal pain, the way of the lost, the abandonment of hope? Are these all really themes of the Inferno, or can we perhaps argue that these are themes it wishes it has, yet ones that it is fearful of embracing?


Curiously enough, the inscription of the gate is a memory of the future-- it is meant to remind us of what is to come. We haven't met the characters populating the Inferno, but the gate is not a prophecy of them, it is an altered memory of their state of being, and thus an element of the narrative that creates an important distinction between the narrative of a memory by a self and the narrative of a present. Either way, the characters are narrated by another figure. The narration of the gate, however, is unique in the way that it anticipates the narrative, telling it already but without us as the readers yet knowing it.

These are just a few ideas I've thrown out there about how to possibly approach the gate as a kind of ante-narrative or ante-Inferno, a parallel but brief vision of hell that stands at the point at which we enter. There is something else that calls out to the reader, and that is the last line of the inscription: Abandon every hope, who enter here. It might just be the translation but this one line reminds me of modern poetry, and Eliot's poems in particular. Somehow the gate seems to want to read hell as the landscape that the modernists would obsess about later on. It is a kind of wasteland where the living and breathing rot over and over again. The wasteland, of course, would be on earth for the modernists. Eliot's rotting souls utter the same words again and again: hurryup hurryup as if to somehow accelerate their torture. Yet, I would think that they are numb, feelingless compared to the characters of the Inferno who seem almost to savor this torture, to live in the future and memory of the full lives they lived. Hell is the consequence of the lives of Odysseus, Paolo, and Ugolino. Hell on earth, Eliot's Wasteland, is the consequence of a life that possibly never was, that cannot care for torture because it still cannot feel the pain.

Ugolino, II

"But after we had reached the fourth day, Gaddo,

throwing himself outstretched, down at my feet,

implored me: "Father, why do you not help me?"

And there he died; and just as you see me,

I saw the other three fall one by one

between the fifth day and the sixth; at which,

now blind, I started groping over each..."

(Inferno, Canto XXXIII)

We're back with Ugolino and the penultimate events that led up to his punishment in the Inferno. But here is a man who is already punished, and I want to try an understand whether this earthly punishment of seeing each child starve and die before his eyes is somehow worse than the eternal ordeal of gnawing helplessly on the bones of the man whose betrayal led him to the death and dying acts that he had. The most arresting part of this brief excerpt is Ugolino's blindness coming directly after the deaths of his children. In other words, his punishment is to see, and to a lesser extent, to hear, the excruciating deaths of his children. There have been other blind fathers before Ugolino and there will be some after him-- Oedipus comes to mind in the former category and Lear in the latter. Their blindness, however, is a kind of gift. Lear carries Cordelia's dead body without seeing his daughter actually die. The blind Oedipus is led by Antigone whose death comes after his. Ugolino, however, must see each child die before blindness sets in. The role of the auditory is equally interesting here: what is heard cannot be responded to. Gaddo's plea for help, for some kind of rescue or relief from not death, but the pain of dying, paralyses his father, who only after the death of his son, possibly does what he was asking him to do in the first place.

It is to touch and taste that Ugolino must turn in the last few moments of his own life-- senses that incidentally are closely associated with sin-- lust and gluttony. In Hell, Ugolino is the glutton who is never satiated, gnawing and chewing but never, ever will his hunger end. But let's come back to my original issue with this passage: is the earthly punishment somehow worse than the eternal? I think, yes, for the eternal is a kind of reprieve from what Ugolino hesitated to do on earth. In hell, Ugolino is a saintly figure, who saves even the dead from their fate. On earth, he was suffering towards this sainthood, tested for the spiritual by the deeply physical.

Ugolino, I

"As soon as a thin ray had made its way

into that sorry prison, and I saw,

reflected in four faces, my own gaze,

out of my grief, I bit at both my hands;

and they, who thought I'd done that out of hunger,

immediately rose and told me: "Father,

it would be far less painful for us if

you ate of us...""

(Inferno, Canto XXXIII, Dante, translated by Allen Mandelbaum)

I've decided the Inferno and its slightly less infernal siblings should get more posts than some of the other books I've talked about. Two reasons: 1. c'est Dante, and 2. I'm teaching a course on Dante next quarter, never hurts to have some thoughts about the guy. We're coming towards the end of the Inferno here, and maybe in other posts, I'll go back to do the famous P and F scene as well as the scene of Dante's induction as an officially great poet of Western civilization.

This is, of course, one of the most heart-rending scenes of the Inferno, Count Ugolino is seen uncontrollably gnawing on a skull-- supposedly that of one of his sons who sacrificed themselves to their father's hunger and to their own misery by allowing their imprisoned flesh to become sustenance for the Count. Allen Mandelbaum asserts that it is not quite clear in either the Italian or in his translation whether Ugolino actually consumed his children or not, and I'm not going to be the one to decide. What I do want to talk about here is the effeminized figure of the father, and idea of the sacrificial flesh of sons. I don't want to make this into a discussion based off of Christian theology though I will talk about it briefly. Right now I want to think about the figure of Medea in comparison to Ugolino-- the mother who destroys her children in order to save them from a father's second marriage and to avenge herself upon an unfaithful husband, and then, the figure of a father who dying of starvation with his children thinks to appease his sons' misery by consuming their flesh. In Euripides' immortalizing play, Medea knifes her children to death and then flees to Athens where King Aegeus has promised her refuge. Here, Ugolino cannot escape the remnants of the bodies which begged his aid in their destruction. What stands out, when we place these two figures side by side, is the way each takes on characteristics of the opposite sex. In other words, these unnatural parents are unnatural also in that they evade the binds of their own gender. Medea physically kills her children, but more importantly, promises fertility to Aegeus, i.e. she takes on the male association of abundant seed. Ugolino, on the other hand, regressed to femininity attempts destruction of his own body before taking that of his children. His punishment, however, seals this gender transformation through the body: Ugolino's body will forever hold those of his children, a perverse spin on the image of pregnancy.

While I do want to briefly mention the reflection of the Christian idea of the son's sacrifice of his flesh in order to preserve, in a sense, the father or the image of the father, that idea isn't given much credence here. For this is not a divine father, but a very human one who instead of immortalizing the flesh takes it for his own private survival. The other transformation that goes on here, of course, is of the young dying before the old. It is the children who offer, (and succeed horribly) in giving their father posterity. It is on their name that he lives instead of perpetuating the generations by offering his body to his name-bearing sons.

I'm going to stop here with this passage now. On thinking more as I wrote, I've decided to do a second post about the Ugolino's continued narrative.

Roland's unmindfulness.

"Count Roland lay down beneath a pine tree

He has turned his face towards Spain.

Many things began to pass through his mind:

All the lands which he conquered as a warrior,

The fair land of France, the men of his lineage,

Charlemagne, his lord, who raised him.

He cannot help weeping and heaving great sighs

But he does not wish to be unmindful of himself."

(The Song of Roland, translated by Glyn Sheridan Burgess, Penguin Classics)

It's a long jump from Augustine to a world where there is suddenly a concept of France and Spain-- the first signs of Europe as we know it start showing in the Song of Roland. Technically speaking, I shouldn't be a big fan of this 12th century French poem-- it's all about Muslims and Christians bashing each other, God knows I'm not a fan of that. But I still love it-- I love it because even though it's madly macho and full of hate, it has these amazing moments where the human in these warriors shines through, and the power of this transformation is what reminds me that underneath our tough skins, we're all the same. 

Here, Roland, Charlemagne's nephew and a brave fighter, lies dying on the battlefield. This is without doubt one of the greatest deaths in literature (for a full appreciation of it, I'd suggest reading the whole scene). But I want to read this death as just Roland's death, the death of an individual who even as he feels life leaving him, "does not wish to be unmindful of himself." I want to try and understand what it means not to be unmindful and what is the self that guides us towards rejecting this state of abandon-- even when the sustaining force of narrative is about to depart. In other words, is their any virtue to the narrative of death and dying? 

In the moments before he is arrested by this thought of unmindfulness, we entertain the idea that Roland is allowing himself to be human, to engage in the luxuries that memory allows, and most importantly, to allow these thoughts to capture his being in such a way that it is no longer existing in the present, but rather attempting to see the future through the eye of the past. In other words, when we die, it is the past that informs our emotion not the present moment. 

So what is the role of the present moment, then? That's where unmindfulness seems to play a role-- Roland's arrest of his unmindfulness moment is to attend to the present of death. Unmindfulness, essentially, lures the dying man away from the urgency of the present, towards the possibilities silhouetted by the past. It reduces, rather than gives agency.  Roland's snatch for the present is a kind of "Death be not proud" moment, insisting on his sense of living each moment as it comes rather than taking death's kind anesthesia of memory.

On the other hand, it is the "weeping and heaving of great sighs," that make him human-- and thus immortal in a sense of the word, for it is the ability to feel that continues on in the species, undisturbed. Does he weep, then, in the present or for a past that tells him of the future that's been closed to him? Is his weeping possibly for the utter lack of a present he experiences-- the extreme distance of all things close and beloved? Or is Roland more alive than we can imagine in the way that his wishes still inform his actions? I would think in death, Roland is perhaps the strongest he can be because of the way all three spaces of time are suddenly captured in his form-- and experienced so powerfully in his mind. If we can be three places at once, no matter, the pain, are we not superhuman for just that small moment in time? But we don't live to tell it, and I think maybe that adds an extra element of the super. 

Augustinian angst.

"For what can be more wretched than a wretch who has no pity upon himself, who sheds tears over Dido, dead for love of Aeneas, but who sheds no tears for his own death in not loving thee, O God, light of my heart, and bread of the inner mouth of my soul, O power that links together my mind with my inmost thoughts? I did not love thee and thus committed fornication against thee..."
(Confessions, Book 1, St. Augustine, translated by Albert Outer)

If Montaigne is the person whose lonely thoughts constantly make me want to comfort him, than St. Augustine is the person whose constant struggle with ideas of love simultaneously attracts and repulses me-- only to keep me circling in his struggling orbit. Here Augustine is bemoaning the shallow emotion of empathy for it seems to have dulled and interrupted the greater emotion that later enters his soul-- love of God. If he cried for Dido upon learning of her bereavement than surely this was a kind of infidelity to his later and eternal master. But this is Augustine's reading of himself-- in this post I want to make yet another an attempt to reconcile his conflict: are his free-flowing tears for Dido one step towards loving God, or are they in fact, the expression of a fully-blossomed love of God already? In other words, can Augustine's immense pity for a weeping queen be read as a kind of human godliness?
If I went into theological definitions of Augustine's concept of God and other such scientific things, maybe this blog post would be more concise and perfect. But I want to explore the idea of God on a more basic level, as I always do, and try to make clear on this other level, the connection that DHR once made-- Augustine is very much like Aeneas, a wanderer with a cause. A simple description of Augustine's pre-conversion state of mind would be this: he loved God without knowing. I say this because I read Augustine's movable state, his ability to weep for an unloved one, as one that encapsulates all of the characteristics of God that we turn to-- modified for the human form, of course. If the form of God is able to show mercy that is powerful enough to change circumstance, than the most divine of human forms is able to weep in the face of another's misfortune.
A wretch who has no pity on himself may be wretched indeed, but isn't that perhaps the most godly of all human beings--God, as I see him, is a figure whose entire self is devoted to the care and love of a creation that is so much less than him. The human being can't really make that assumption but don't we all nevertheless, aspire to the image of God? In Islamic thought, there can be no real love of God, unless there is a love for his creation. The whole let's-leave-the-material-world-behind train of thought sometimes strikes me as people getting ahead of themselves--it's not original sin that brought us here but rather our own connection with each other and the things around us, God's creation. I'm not sure whether we've been sent to this world to make up for that one mistake in the Garden of Eden, but rather, I think we've been sent to learn how to love each other for aren't we all, in our various guises of religions, just God's creation?