Beast beneath the cover: Dante's Adam

πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει

Many things are singular, none moreso than man

Told that the fourth light that has joined Peter, James and John is Adam, Dante speaks first: 

 E cominciai: “O pomo che maturo
 solo prodotto fosti, o padre antico
 a cui ciascuna sposa è figlia e nuro,

divoto quanto posso a te supplìco
 perché mi parli: tu vedi mia voglia,
 e per udirti tosto non la dico.”

Talvolta un animal coverto broglia,
 sì che l'affetto convien che si paia
 per lo seguir che face a lui la 'nvoglia;

e similmente l'anima primaia
 mi facea trasparer per la coverta
 quant' ella a compiacermi venìa gaia.

And I began: "O apple, that mature
  Alone hast been produced, O ancient father,
  To whom each wife is daughter and daughter-in-law,

Devoutly as I can I supplicate thee
  That thou wouldst speak to me; thou seest my wish;
  And I, to hear thee quickly, speak it not."

Sometimes an animal, when covered, struggles
  So that his impulse needs must be apparent,
  By reason of the wrappage following it; 

And in like manner the primeval soul
  Made clear to me athwart its covering
  How jubilant it was to give me pleasure.  (Par. 26:91-102)

To step back: Dante was blinded when, thanks to a false rumor, he tried to see the earthly body of John, the Bible's final inspired voice, the author of Revelation. When the pilgrim's sight returns, and judgment saves him from a kind of panic attack, the new lume turns out to be the first man -- the original first edition human to whom we owe exile from Eden, labor, suffering, sin and death, the entire aiuolo that Dante, when looking back on it, had to add, "that makes us so fierce."

Finding our general sire here, with the three apostles most loved by Christ, the pilgrim clearly is moved. Likening the first man, the prime template of anthropos, to a struggling covered animal comes out of a strange place. In a sense, to see Adam is to see us all, and more. In the image and likeness, says the Word, of the Creator, are we fashioned.

In fact the simile is complex (there's much more than what this post can address). Nicola Fosca offers a prose paraphrase that seems mostly on target:

Accade talvolta che un animale coperto (coverto) si agita (broglia), in modo che ciò che sente dentro di sé (l'affetto) appare di necessità all'esterno (convien che si paia), perché l'involucro che lo copre (la 'nvoglia) asseconda (per lo seguir che face) i movimenti del suo corpo (a lui); similmente l'anima del primo uomo (primaia), per il tremolio della luce che la copriva (per la coverta), mi faceva trasparire quanto essa fosse lieta (quant'ella... venía gaia) di soddisfare la mia richiesta (a compiacermi). Una similitudine molto strana . . .

This animal is agitated, says Fosca - Longfellow has "struggles." This sense of tumult appears to be a secondary meaning, though. The dictionaries suggest that the first meaning is "intrigue, fraud." The lines certainly convey strained movement, something working under duress, and the hint or coloration of fraud might deepen this first glimpse of Man, a covered creature, one whose dark workings might agitate his cover, but also conceal something we can't quite make out.

Dante uses coverto twice: this is an animal that is covered by something other than its own native coat. The non-naturalness adds to the strangeness.

If ever a son had reason to have mixed feelings for a long lost father, it would be this poet, whose entire life has been a profound study of Adam's threshing floor.

If we consider, for a moment, the parallel here of Adam, the ill-fated trier of fruit, with Ulysses, his infernal counterpart who could talk anybody into anything, including the mad flight to know a mondo sanza gente - well, isn't that the literal "knowledge" that Adam acquired as he stepped out of Paradise into a world without people?

The figure of Ulysses as the Greek striver, actor, liar, hero (recall how, within his flame in Inferno 26 there's a struggle for language to come forth) is enriched by this parallel. In the garden, Adam had everything except the knowledge that he had everything. That came with the awareness that he was uncovered, before exiting Eden into a world of lack.

Robert Hollander notes that Ulysses and his small crew "are the first mortals to see the mount of purgatory since Adam and Eve left it." To Ulysses, the empty garden is what the empty world beyond Eden was for Adam and Eve. Almost full circle.

Just prior to Adam's appearance, the pilgrim spoke to John of the leaves - fronde - that in this fallen world he can and does love, to the extent they are good:

"Le fronde onde s'infronda tutto l'orto
de l'ortolano etterno, am' io cotanto
quanto da lui a lor di bene è porto.”

Adam will speak of leaves and language, and men and death. Consider what might well up in a man who has seen the depths of human depravity, as well as the perfection of Eden, were he to confront his father, the prime mover of our fallen threshing floor. With this encounter, the pilgrim's talk of loving the fronde of the fallen world is put to the test.

The "strange simile" -- which some commentators judge harshly, while others approve -- returns us to the same ungrounded suspense that Dante described earlier, in comparing the return of vision to an awakening. Both moments in this canto bring us face to face with something not yet descried. With the covered animal we don't know what to expect -- it could be a monster, a wild beast, a madman. That moment of uncertainty is Dante's apprehension of something about our nature -- a quizzical, unruly, secretive, wild, insistent thing like nothing so much as what we find in Sophocles' ode to man: δεινὰ -- strange and wondrous, extravagant and wily, stubbornly doing things his way -- all suspended in the unknowing vehicle of the simile -- before resolving into Adamic bliss:

How jubilant it was to give me pleasure. 

quant' ella a compiacermi venìa gaia.

The oedipal moment passes, but this poet knows himself and us far too well not to sing, in the interval between tenor and vehicle, likeness and thing, our truth.

With these late cantos it's hard not to write long. The last part of this enigmatic canto seems unlikely to provide smoother sailing.

"Those bites of love": Enter Adam

E come a lume acuto si disonna 
per lo spirto visivo che ricorre 
a lo splendor che va di gonna in gonna,  

e lo svegliato ciò che vede aborre, 
sì nescïa è la sùbita vigilia 
fin che la stimativa non soccorre; 

così de li occhi miei ogne quisquilia
fugò Beatrice col raggio d'i suoi,
che rifulgea da più di mille milia:

onde mei che dinanzi vidi poi;
e quasi stupefatto domandai
d'un quarto lume ch'io vidi tra noi. 

And as at some keen light one wakes from sleep
By reason of the visual spirit that runs
Unto the splendour passed from coat to coat,

And he who wakes abhorreth what he sees,
So all unconscious is his sudden waking,
Until the judgment cometh to his aid,

So from before mine eyes did Beatrice
Chase every mote with radiance of her own,
That cast its light a thousand miles and more.

Whence better after than before I saw,
And in a kind of wonderment I asked
About a fourth light that I saw with us.   (Par. 26:73-81)

At the center of Paradiso 26, the canto of love / caritate, Dante's vision returns - he sees "better after than before."

What preceded this moment with its showy simile has been the catachetical Q and A with John, the eagle of Christ, about love. Dante has just spoken of "those bites" - quei morsi - that turned his love towards God. They are some of the most beautiful lines in the Commedia, and speak of the fallen world, its devouring of our being, as a giant Edenic garden whose fronde - leaves - Dante avers he loves:

"quanto da lui a lor di bene è porto.” (66)

"As much as he has granted them of good."

"quanto . . . è porto": Proportion and number proliferate in this canto of love. Somehow caritate and our ability to see even our fallen world as Edenic seem to be bound up with quantity.

"He" of course is the ortolano etterno. The world we have -- our being and time -- has teeth that strangely turn us toward the garden's maker.

Dante's vision (vista) was consunta in trying to see the material body of John. Are we on earth devoured in our mad flight to grasp something we cannot possibly imagine, let alone experience?


Enter Adam

The loss of Eden surely is factored into those morsi. If we stand back a bit, we note that the entire sphere of the stars is bracketed by two moments. In both, Dante looks back upon Earth, upon the entire course of his journey. We've spoken of the first, in canto 22. In another post, we'll compare it with the latter retrospective gaze in 27.

The point now is, between these two moments of closure, of taking "it all" in (each time the "all" is, paradoxically, more) - Dante has this return to vision. He likens it to an awakening from unconsciousness that begins with the terror of total absence of judgment, of stimativa - a word that surely conveys the power of measure, estimation, as well as judgment.

More precisely, can we call it "vision" when we see nothing that our minds can make sense of? Dante is dramatizing a moment that isn't so much vision as a sort of blind seeing - he experiences a sensory datum devoid of any intellectual or cognitive dimension, and it provokes fear.

As Beatrice, with a radiance that shines more than mille milia, clarifies his sight, Dante realizes that the three figures of theological virtue have been joined by a fourth light. Beatrice's words introduce the first man:

E la mia donna: “Dentro da quei rai
vagheggia il suo fattor l'anima prima
che la prima virtù creasse mai.”  (26:82-84)

The primacy of Adam is underscored. Another eye-catching simile likens the pilgrim to a fronda - again a leaf or branch, in any case an offspring of a tree - being bent by wind, that now springs back by its own virtù:

Come la fronda che flette la cima
nel transito del vento, e poi si leva
per la propria virtù che la soblima,

The pilgrim reels, amazed - stupendo - but he gathers himself, burning with questions for Adam, questions he knows he need not ask.

The next simile is itself stupendous. It will be the incipit for the next post.

Paradiso 26 and undemonstrative enigmaticity

Our group meets every other week, but our progress in Paradiso has slowed. The cantos of the theological virtues might seem simpler than some of the earlier, more complexly plotted and allusive work we have already encountered, but no. They are devilishly closely written -- the poet has not lost any steam, or poetic "chops."

A poet who can write a tercet like this is clearly all there:

"Le fronde onde s'infronda tutto l'orto
de l'ortolano etterno, am' io cotanto
quanto da lui a lor di bene è porto.”

Longfellow tries, but is sensible enough to not attempt the intricate echoes:

"The leaves, wherewith embowered is all the garden
Of the Eternal Gardener, do I love
As much as he has granted them of good." (Par. 26:64-66)

It's tempting to see these cantos as somewhat didactic, or pedantically subservient to biblical texts that form the doctrinal elements of the pilgrim's encounters with Peter, James and John. But each canto offers much more than catechetic tedium. The poem, as we've argued here before, never simply states its burden. It acts out its import.

A clear example is how all is going well in Paradiso 25, until St. John appears. There's a haunting, uncanny moment of cessation of all Paradise -- likened to a ship whose oarsmen suspend their work. The pilgrim turns to Beatrice only to see he has been blinded by John's revelatory brighness. The canto ends with the pilrim's disorientation and fear. The mettle of his soul's hope is being tested.

Before looking at a couple of passages from Paradiso 26 in detail, it might help to spend a few words tracing a pattern that recurs when reading certain non-obvious parts of this poem.

It seems to me that much of the Commedia - certainly the Paradiso - is written "slant," as Dickenson might say. Certain cantos conjoin elements that, prima facie, have no business going together.

To get to the "fruit" (or frui) within the somewhat dry integumentum of these passages, it never seems to hurt to ask childish questions. This is not a task that the poem marks by drawing attention to itself. Unlike the famous appelli ai lettori (addresses to the reader) that direct us to read beneath the versi strani (Inf. 9.63), a canto like Paradiso 26 at first might not seem enigmatic. It takes a while just to notice its several parts don't quite hang together in ways that, from reading the poem, we have come to expect.

In 26, for example, how is it that some derivative platitudes about the Good and love are interspersed with extraordinary similes (a couple of which we'll look at below)? Of all people, what is Adam doing here? Why does Dante encounter him precisely here, after the pilgrim has "passed" his oral exams and experiences renewed, stronger sight? For that matter, what's with all the numbers and quantitative language in this canto? What does caritate - the greatest of the virtues - have to do with Adam, the fall, the length of time he spent on earth, his language and reflections on it, and the duration of his innocence before being sent into exile? Why are there echoes of Cacciaguida in Adam's conversation, and why does our general father open with one of the poem's strangest hapaxes -- parhelion (107-108) -- a double singularity if you will?

Dante was surely doing something other than showing off, or spinning wheels, or filling space before the big finale. When we come across a canto that seems to lose its thread, or veers to an unexpected close, or combines thematic materials from disparate and seemingly unrelated topoi, it's a good idea to ask why. As the imagination works on the question of how these seemingly unrelated elements connect, the result can be a sudden falling into place, acceding to a perspective from which all these disparate elements suddenly swim into signifying focus, often with an unexpected comic "pop."

The "empirical" pattern of such a reading might go something like:

1. naive first reading
2. childish questions
3. noting unusual linguistic features
4. attending to concurrent motifs through the canto

Now if all this is going well, but the text still seems a bit aimless or dispersed, that's pretty much how we felt after spending two entire sessions on 26, without even discussing the last several tercets in any detail. Of course along the way one consults the commentators, who often proffer excellent clarifications and suggestions. But most important is to stick with it:

5. careful re-reading

At some point -- usually thanks to the more unusual (often seemingly gratuitous) passages, images, or motifs -- something we'd not fully taken into account, something not properly weighed, or now seen from a different angle, moves into view. Often it's a connection between a highly leaned theme on one hand, and a very basic human, vernacular reality, common to all. The connection can be epiphanic, uncoiling with the impact of comedic surprise.

To attempt to pin down whether we're dealing with a specific genre, or mode, would take us far afield. Let's give it a simple name for now: Wisdom literature. Writing that draws upon all manner of indirection in order to challenge the reader, to drive us to our own hard-won "eureka moments" would be the sign and pleasure of this mode. It might not sing in epic tones, or seduce with lyric music, but it is always working on something that, when finally reached, yields a potent reward.

We'll look next at some moments in Paradiso 26.