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.

Opening Paradiso 1-6: A working hypothesis

Raffaello Sorbi: Piccarda taken from the convent

Often close reading is a matter of attention to words -- their nuances, quirks of sense, their sound or metrical emphasis, even their literal appearance (their shape in letters and fonts). Sometimes a single word can connote a great deal.

In a recent post about Justinian's retrospective view of Roman glory, for example, we noticed certain features of his speech that didn't seem consonant with a vision of a secular state of mankind in harmony with the providential destiny of Christian souls. His dream of justice might be divine, but the reality of the armies of Rome racing behind the rapacious bird of prey seemed to fall short of that ideal.

Along the way in that speech, Caesar Augustus is called a baiulo, a porter. Whatever Augustus might have thought of that term, it does bump him down a bit. Behind this proletarianization of Rome's great emperor might lie the suggestion that humans taking credit for the existence of Justice in the world -- or historians who credit humans with such single-handed achievements -- risk falling into that irrelevant portion of law that Justinian calls il troppo e'l vano, and which he labored to excise.

A question for any reader is to consider what part of a story she/he might be missing. A good deal of commentary on the Commedia takes the canto as its basic unit. Each canto is read, annotated and commented upon, then one moves on.

Horizontal view across all three canticles

Some readers have begun to read the poem in a more dynamic mode. Hollander, for example, notes that the theme of Justice appears across all three canticles, precisely in canto 6 of each. Calling this a "horizontal" reading, he and others have illuminated how, as we progress from Ciacco to Sordello to Justinian, there's a recurrent concern with Justice, played out at different scales:

Inferno 6:  Ciacco -- city -- Florence
Purgatorio 6: Sordello -- nation -- Italy
Paradiso 6: Justinian -- empire -- Troy-Rome-Holy Roman Empire

The differences between Francesca, La Pia, and Piccarda in their respective cantos are similarly meaningful. Each canticle benefits from comparison with the others, and the sense of an exponential scaling up, from intimate local concerns (Ciacco's entire life revolves around his stomach) to a perspective that looks across all known time and space, contributes to the sweep of the Commedia as a whole.

So the reader will listen, compare, contemplate the echoes and differences across the canticles and find plenty to think about.

Dynamic development within groups of cantos

There's yet another way of approaching the poem to consider, one that breaks the cantos' frames to explore the movement between them in search of the structuring logic of larger "plot" components. As argued in several earlier posts here, the initial movement of the poem explores matters of knowing, illusion, and natural grounds for belief. it then moves to the nature of the will, which leads to an inquiry into the nature of vows.

Standing back to look at this development on a more macro level, we can describe a movement from interiority -- the self grappling with questions of what it can know and will -- to volitional acts -- nuns' vows as an example of all vows, intentions, promises -- which leads to a concern with external action, rule, judgment, and the deployment of power over the peoples of the world.

Formally the poem goes from early dialogue between Dante and Beatrice to the more drama-like encounter with Piccarda and Costanza, and Beatrice's clarification of doubts arising from their words. Then, passing from the fickle moon to self-concealing Mercury, we find no dialogue, but a compressed vision of history spoken by one speaker.

This development takes the form of the extraordinary leap from the cloistered consciousness of the nuns to the emperor who imposed reason upon the imperial code of laws. Dante has given us two extremes -- between them is the space given to human intellect and will to think, decide, and act.

So at least for now, given our reading of Paradiso 1-6, I offer a tentative working hypothesis that Dante opens the third canticle with a procession of themes that move from epistemology to praxis, contemplation to action, interior reflection to the imposition of rule -- and the rule of rules -- upon the world. The logic of the development is quite clear; I'd argue that it flows with an internal necessity. In a later post, I'll try to talk about why this is the case.

As this opening movement has unfolded we have seen the will as fire, the intellect as wild beast (fera in lustra). Although we are in Paradiso, beyond the earthly limits of time and space, what is under examination is the same human nature we find right here, right now, every breathing moment.

Nothing as of yet in the opening development of this canticle depends upon Revelation, divine grace, or power from a source beyond the human. Beatrice might find her truth in the Deity, but what she has taught us so far helps us understand ourselves, and see the lengthening shadow of mankind moving through time, on Earth.

Justinian: Mosaic at Ravenna

Spelling doom: Writing, Heracles and Deianira

ὧν ἐγὼ μεθύστερον, 

ὅτ᾽ οὐκέτ᾽ ἀρκεῖ, τὴν μάθησιν ἄρνυμαι. 710-11

. . .too late for it to be any use, I reap the knowledge

Throughout Women of Trachis, Deianira points to the moment of consciousness, the dawning awareness that comes from suffering, then from reflecting upon the experience. She tells the chorus:

You have heard of my trouble, I would guess, and that has brought you here. But the anguish which consumes my heart—may you never come to know it through your own experience!—to that now you are total strangers. (141-144)

First she distinguishes between hearing of trouble (in this case, hers) and actually experiencing it for oneself. This difference between knowing-through-hearing and direct experience is the difference between being a young girl and being a wife:

Yes, a young life grows in those sheltered regions of its own, and the Sun-god's heat disturbs it not, nor rain, nor any wind. Rather it takes up a toilless existence amidst pleasure, until such time as she is called “wife” instead of “maiden”, and takes her portion of anxious thoughts in the night, fearing for husband or for children. At that point a woman could understand the burden of my misfortunes by recalling [σκοπῶν: looking, considering] her own experience. (144-150)

One's own experience sheds light upon that which one hears about from others, enabling understanding.

It's precisely that light of experienced understanding that is eclipsed in charms. The "precepts" of Nessus, carved in her memory, banish all light:

I neglected no part of the precepts which the savage Centaur gave me when he was hurting from the bitter barb in his side; they were in my memory, like the graven words which no hand may wash from a tablet of bronze. Now this was his order to me, and I obeyed it: [685] to keep this potion hidden in inmost recesses always away from fire and untouched by the sun's warm ray, until I should apply it, newly spread, where I wished. So I had done. And just now, when the moment for action had come, I performed the anointing secretly in the rooms of the house [690] with a tuft of soft wool which I had plucked from a sheep of our home-flock; then I folded up my gift, and laid it, unvisited by sunlight, within its hollow chest, as you saw.

Just previously she had spoken of the tablet carved with strange signs that Heracles had shown her. The signs could not be read, at least by her - they are dark, but they contain the fate of Heracles. But after she's finished composing the charm in perfect darkness, an accident brings light, and something unexpected:

But as I am going back into the house, I see a thing inexplicable by words and beyond the knowledge of the human mind to understand. [695] For somehow I happened to have thrown the ball of wool, with which I had been anointing the robe, into the full blaze of the sun's rays. As it grew warm, it ran all into confusion, and quickly crumbled to powder on the ground, like nothing in appearance so much as [700] the morsels left by a saw's teeth when wood is cut. It lies just so, fallen. And from the earth, where it lay exposed, clotted foam seethes up, like the rich juice of the blue fruit from the vine of Bacchus when it is poured on the ground. (680-704)

This event - much like a chemical reaction in an experiment - triggers thinking:

And so I am distraught, and I do not know to which side my thoughts should fall. I only see [ὁρῶ] that I have brought a terrible deed to completion. For why or in thanks for what should the monster in his death-throes have shown good will to me, because of whom he was dying? Impossible! No, he was enchanting me in order to destroy the man who had shot him.

Into the dark spell of the charm-making stabs a ray of sunlight, and immediately, because Deianira is no fool, she sees what she has been doing in an entirely other "light." The script of the charm was precisely like those inscrutable symbols on Heracles' tablet, until the sun not only brings it to light, but acts upon the tuft of wool. In an instant, her mind is changed, the illusion is consumed in a flash of insight. Then come the words printed above:

 ὧν ἐγὼ μεθύστερον, ὅτ᾽ οὐκέτ᾽ ἀρκεῖ, τὴν μάθησιν ἄρνυμαι.

And now too late I gain the knowledge of this, when it can no longer help.

Deianira sees that she was blind when she acted, but that doesn't change the act. It is "too late": the lethal effect of the deed executed in ignorance cannot be reversed in the throes of consciousness, although its meaning can be, and is.

No clearer example of the tragic divorce of power from knowledge, action from thought, is necessary. Sophocles is never more Sophoclean than when this divorce is what is on offer on his stage. He wishes us, epigones of both Chiron and Nessus, of divine logos and dark magic, to "see" that while we are creatures that know and creatures that do, it is perfectly possible that we have no understanding of what we are doing, and no power to do anything about what we've done once we understand, too late, what it was.

Later on we learn that Heracles wrote down the prophecies he heard at Dodona:

It was foreshown to me by my father far in the past that I would perish by no creature that had the breath of life, but by one already dead, a dweller with Hades. So this savage Centaur in death has killed me alive, just as the divine will had been foretold. And I will show you how later oracles tally with the first and testify to the old prophecy. I wrote them down [εἰσεγραψάμην] for myself from the mouth of my father's oak of many tongues [πολυγλώσσου] in the grove of the Selli, who dwell on the hills and sleep on the ground. (1159-69)

Can Zeus's "oak of many tongues" in fact be unambiguously translated into unequivocal writing? It's one thing to write down what one hears, another to know how to read what's written. By the time Heracles knows what his writing says, it is, once again, too late.

The Centaur who kills Heracles is dead, but his precepts, "like the graven words which no hand may wash from a tablet of bronze," live on. Automata working beyond the end of the tongue that spoke them, Nessus's words charm beyond the grave.

Both Deianira and Heracles discover that they had utterly misread signs that they were given - signs from Zeus in Heracles' case; signs from Nessus for Deianira. The pattern beautifully described by Deianira of the young girl who must experience suffering before she can understand life holds: we act, then suffer discovering what we were doing, or what was being done to us.

The joint errors of Deianira and Heracles bring the play to a climactic impasse. What can Heracles do, other than die? Yet the play doesn't end quite that way. He acts again before his end.  The effect of that remains to be seen.

Deianira and the brutal charms of Aphrodite

Women of Trachis 458-59:

τὸ μὴ πυθέσθαι, τοῦτό μ᾽ ἀλγύνειεν ἄν: τὸ δ᾽ εἰδέναι τί δεινόν;

it is not learning the truth that would pain me.

But to know it, what is terrible in that?

Deianira is trying to wrest the truth from Lichas, after learning from a local source that Lichas, the official herald of Heracles, has not been entirely -- or even remotely -- straightforward about Iole.

The queen here sounds like Oedipus. She wants to "unconceal" what is hidden, in this case the fact that Iole is no mere sexual dalliance, but in reality another queen, another Deianira. It is with this oddness of the doppelgänger in mind that we can hear a richer sense of δεινόν here. It's tending toward the full complexity found in the Ode to Man sung in the Antigone:

πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει

Many things are uncanny, none stranger than man.

It was Heidegger who caught the sense of Das Unheimlich (the uncanny) in the Ode to Man -- a sense rife with tension between something wondrous and something strange, to the point of inducing a weird combination of exaltation and terror. The ode from the Antigone crosses into the territory of the sublime.

Deianira is not quite that far from the commonplace, but she's moving in that direction. If anyone ever married a strange, wondrous and terrible man, it was she, and now he's bringing to her another her. She does not know this yet. At this point, she thinks there can be no terror in knowing.

The Oedipal urge to know is, let's be clear, not peculiar to Oedipus, or to kings of Thebes, or to males of the species. In the Women of Trachis, where so much is a matter of waiting (ἀναμένω) and wanting to know, the suspense begins at the play's very beginning:

λόγος μέν ἐστ᾽ ἀρχαῖος ἀνθρώπων φανείς, ὡς οὐκ ἂν αἰῶν᾽ ἐκμάθοις βροτῶν, πρὶν ἂν θάνῃ τις, οὔτ᾽ εἰ χρηστὸς οὔτ᾽ εἴ τῳ κακός:  
(lines 1-3)

There is a saying among men, put forth long ago, that you cannot judge a mortal's life and know whether it is good or bad until he dies.

The space of waiting for the truth to appear is where the Women of Trachis takes place. It is found at every turn, as, for instance, when Deianira tells the chorus that she has applied the "charm" given her by Nessus:

Deianira
and yet, I cannot know until I am in close quarters [προσωμίλησά] with experience [πείρᾳ]   (590-91)

Deianira here uses πείρᾳ - "experiment, experience" in speaking of how, and when, she will know whether the charm works. πείρᾳ is the root not only of experience, but of "empirical." The queen is in fact articulating a scientific commonplace -- one does not know the truth of an experiment until the result is experienced.

The chorus concurs, using a verb form of the same root:

Chorus Knowledge must come through action. You will never
be sure unless you put it to the test (πειρωμένη).

Deianira says she cannot know until she is προσωμίλησά  -- "until I have come to close quarters with" is a reasonable translation. One might wish not to ignore, however, that προσωμίλησά has another meaning, or a further development of its first meaning, i.e., "to have intercourse with." The Greek sense of knowing through experience reaches a more intimate mode here, one that may or may not be susceptible to the rigorous hygiene of scientific clarity.

Oedipus only comes to "know" who he is when he has grappled so intimately with his origin as to discover he is married to her -- he is both husband and son, Jocasta is mother and wife, and the uncanniness of their coupling is a doubling whose impropriety neither can bear.

For Deianira, the suspense is not who she is, but whose. Her opening speech recounts the terrible memory of how she waited in suspense to learn who'd bear her away -- Achelous the frightening river god, or Heracles. Further on, not long after she says it can't be terrible to know, the choral ode that begins on line 499 evokes that agon even more vividly. It begins:

μέγα τι σθένος ἁ Κύπρις ἐκφέρεται νίκας ἀεί 

Great is the power of the victory Cypris bears away.

It continues:

οἳ τότ᾽ ἀολλεῖς ἴσαν ἐς μέσον ἱέμενοι λεχέων: 
μόνα δ᾽ εὔλεκτρος ἐν μέσῳ Κύπρις ῥαβδονόμει ξυνοῦσα.

These two then met in a mass, lusting to win a bride, and the Cyprian goddess of nuptial joy joined in as umpire in the middle. (513-15)

Aphrodite here is doubly potent -- not only has she triangulated these hearts -- the god's and the demi-god's -- to Deianira, she's also the umpire. As both motivator of the contest and official who decides its outcome, she has already considerably complicated the "experiment." What appears to be a test or contest of "well-matched rivals" to see who wins the girl could remind us of Aphrodite's appearance at the opening of the Hippolytus, making it clear that she wrote the script and knows its outcome before it begins.

So as Deianira sits far off, her far-beaming eyes viewing the struggle they have caused to occur, she might not quite appreciate how unclear it is whether she's witnessing a fair fight in close quarters, or, quite possibly, one that has been fixed from the start, that is, scripted, like a potion, or charm, worked up in order to bring about a certain preconcerted conclusion. She is doubly suspended -- neither sure of the outcome, nor whether there is any doubt about it to begin with. If it's a fair fight, the empirical method will bear true knowledge. However -- and this is relevant to the action of Nessus' charm -- if the game is rigged beforehand, the outcome will prove nothing. In that case, there is no empirical truth to learn, no knowledge born of experience. The witness might as well be blind.

The choral ode stages the fight as a knock-down, drag-out affair:

τότ᾽ ἦν χερός, ἦν δὲ τόξων πάταγος, 
ταυρείων τ᾽ ἀνάμιγδα κεράτων: 520ἦν δ᾽ ἀμφίπλεκτοι κλίμακες, 
ἦν δὲ μετώπων ὀλόεντα 
πλήγματα, καὶ στόνος ἀμφοῖν. 

ἁ δ᾽ εὐῶπις ἁβρὰ 
τηλαυγεῖ παρ᾽ ὄχθῳ 525ἧστο, τὸν ὃν προσμένουσ᾽ ἀκοίταν. 

ἀγὼν δὲ μαργᾷ μὲν οἷα φράζω: 

There was clatter of fists and clang of bow and crash of a bull's horns mixed together; [520] then there were close-locked grapplings and deadly blows from foreheads and loud deep cries from both. 

The delicate beauty with far-beaming eyes sat on the side of a hill, awaiting the husband that would be hers.

So the mad battle rages, as I narrate.

Note the superb glide from the brutal grapplings of head-butts and fists and wrestling holds, and all the clatter and clash of it, to the beautiful eyes, τηλαυγεῖ: "far beaming" of the girl sitting far off on the hill, waiting.

The ode finishes on a note that might be less surprising if we consider that the girl awaiting her fate is in no way able to control it, despite her being both its origin and goal:

τὸ δ᾽ ἀμφινείκητον ὄμμα νύμφας ἐλεινὸν ἀμμένει: κἀπὸ ματρὸς ἄφαρ βέβακεν, 530ὥστε πόρτις ἐρήμα.

But the face of the bride which is the prize of the strife awaits the end in piteous anguish. 

Straightaway she walks from her mother like a solitary calf.

How strange that the play of beauty and brute force ends like this. No festive description of awarding the "prize" to Heracles (the victory belongs to Cypris), no joy lighting up Deianira's face as the bestial fight reaches its decision. The titanic bout for the most beautiful woman on Earth ends with the prize isolated, walking, not towards her man, but away from the only love she has known. Moving not with the pride of one betrothed, but like a calf. Sophocles never does the expected -- if we can be open to his strangeness, he'll teach us something about reading.