Nine Dantesque Essays

"To fall in love is to create a religion with a fallible God."

Paradiso by Mœbius

It is common knowledge that poets proceed by hyperbole: for Petrarch or for Góngora every woman’s hair is gold and all water is crystal. This crude, mechanical alphabet of symbols corrupts the rigor of words and appears to arise from indifference of an imperfect observation. Dante forbids himself this error; not one word in his book is unjustified.

Jorge Luis Borges
Prologue
Nine Dantesque Essays

Virgil’s lips confess that he will never enter heaven. Dante still calls him Signore & Maestro. He loves Virgil all the more for being lost. The typical poet equates the darkness of the seventh circle of hell to mean that men must squint to see. Dante instead reports men gazing at each other beneath a dim moon, an old tailor threading a needle. The eternal love that binds Paolo and Francesca was without knowing, soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto, a coupled mysterious reading revealing all.

Nine concentric circles spin around the Earth. The first seven are the planetary bodies, The Moon, Mercury, Venus….rotation the perfect form of movement, & the sphere the most perfect body. The eighth, Heaven of the Fixed Stars, & the ninth—Crystalline Heaven. Behind the door of the Rose of Just, is the brightest light, an immovable point, a God who is also the universe.

Below the heavens lies Mount Purgatory & below that below; furthest from God’s light, the nine circles of hell. This was not meant to be cosmologically accurate but to represent the free will of the soul as it purifies itself from vice to virtue.

How does Dante show who Dante is? He is everything in the book. He is Virgil, he is Satan, he is Judas being eaten & the aforementioned eater, he is Beatrice, he is God, he is the angles & the fixed stars….To make the book more Dante he inserts Dante into the book who questions the very judgments he has written, disguising himself as the witness to a universe he has created.

Dante loves Virgil, loves the noble pagans, yet he cannot condemn them for they are lovely & he cannot affirm them for they are not part of the Christian faith. Past the do-nothings who are hated by heaven & hell lies Limbo. They do not suffer & are kept well by the light of their own reason though it pales to the light of God. Virgil is the avatar of logic & reason.

E dentro da la lor fiamma si geme
l’agguato del caval

And in the flames they groan
for the ambush of the horse.

In the pit of the deceiver, Ulysses & Diomedes endlessly burn in two-pronged flame. He is punished for leading men to their deaths, varco folle d’ Ulisse, the rash & senseless route of the fool. He promised his men that they were doing great things but all he strived for was personal glory.

Dante is taken aback. He sees himself as the new Ulysses. Temo che il mio viaggio sia una follia. Io non Enëa, io non Paulo sono. I fear that my coming may be folly. I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul.

But Homer’s words are as costly and admirable to Homer, as Agamemnon’s victories are to Agamemnon. The poet does not wait for the hero or sage, but they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Poet
Essays: Second Series

Dante must begin to see himself as the hero in the hero’s journey. Must think it through (Virgil) & arrive at faith (Beatrice). Must see that he is being guided by a higher power. Ulysses was physical acts of selfishness. Dante is the God-given mental-physical creation of his book.

By the time Dante has reached the top of Mount Purgatory, he has seen the fire both temporal & eternal. He has purified himself in a wall of flame, faced his fears and his demons. Yet he cannot face—what comes next.

A veiled woman approaches in a carriage, her dress is like a living flame. Like a child at the threshold of what he knows he must do yet wishes not, he clings to Virgil’s robes.

Ma Virgilia n’avea lasciati scemi
di sè, Virgilio dolcissimo patre,
Virgilio a cui per mia salute die’mi

But Virgil had left us bereft
of himself, Virgil sweetest father,
Virgil to whom I gave myself for my salvation

It is the lady Beatrice. The love of Dante’s life since he was nine. She has only one question to ask. How dare he step foot on the place where man is happy?

She had searched for Dante in his dreams but the man has fallen so low that salvation only lay in experiencing the damned. He must give up reason & cling to faith if he expects to enter heaven. He does so & he is guided by Beatrice from planet to planet, her beauty increasing with each conquered sphere. They climb and climb until the very stars are below & above only an eternal heaven made of light. It is there at the Zenith of his journey that Dante realizes he must lose both Virgil and Beatrice. Standing before God, Beatrice smiles at Dante for a moment & then turns to face God forever.

I suspect that Dante constructed the best book literature has achieved in order to interpolate into it a few encounters with the irrecuperable Beatrice. More exactly, the circles of damnation and the austral Purgatory and the nine concentric circlers and the siren and the griffin and Betrand de Born are the interpolations; a smile and voice—that he knows the be lost—are what is fundamental.

Jorge Luis Borges
Beatrice’s Last Smile
Nine Dantesque Essays

Not even in God’s wildest dreams can Dante imagine that he will be happy with Beatrice. Though his pen has free will to report whatever it wants, it must report the truth. The taking of his love Beatrice by death is one that words cannot even describe, not even all the words in his Divine Comedy. Though he has acquired the knowledge of God he is still full of jealousy for Paolo & Francesca buffeted by winds in the second circle of hell but at least they are forever united in their agony. Questi, che mai da me non fia diviso. This one, who never shall be separated from me.