Processing similes and prophetic speech in Paradiso 12

Dante devotes five cantos to the Sun - Paradiso 10-14. We've looked at the first three to some extent (here, here, and here), and the remaining two will add to or alter our sense of the place of the sun in Dante's Creation.

Over the course of the 5 cantos, the chariot (biga) of the Bride of Christ, the church, is assembled through what might be described as the poesis of Paradise. Dante, Beatrice and the reader see a complex image composing itself: it starts with one wheel, adds a second, and, though it's supposed to be a surprise, we can disclose that a third mystery wheel appears before the travelers leave the Sun for Mars.

The composition begins with the appearance of one group of flashing lights (10.64) like ardent suns; a second circling group appears in 12; both groups become millstones, which are then transformed into the wheels of the biga as they are explicitly identified with Dominic and Francis:

Se tal fu l'una rota de la biga
in che la Santa Chiesa si difese
e vinse in campo la sua civil briga,

ben ti dovrebbe assai esser palese
l'eccellenza de l'altra, di cui Tomma
dinanzi al mio venir fu sì cortese.

If such the one wheel of the Biga was,
In which the Holy Church itself defended
And in the field its civic battle won,

Truly full manifest should be to thee
The excellence of the other, unto whom
Thomas so courteous was before my coming. (12.106-111) 

Francis and Dominic, it is argued, balance each other. The direction of the Church, spatially, temporally, administratively, takes its guidance from the interaction of the mendicant orders they founded.

To be balanced, however, the wheels should be equal -- whether one considers that by some measure of power, wisdom, zeal, or something else. But are they? We already know that these wheels are very different -- like East and West, heat and light, nature and culture.

With this question in mind we'll look at the initial appearance of the second wheel in Paradiso 12. It's a memorable apparition, presented through an enigmatic procession of nested similes and allusions that are sufficiently complex to call out for attention:

Come si volgon per tenera nube
due archi paralelli e concolori,
quando Iunone a sua ancella iube,

nascendo di quel d'entro quel di fori,
a guisa del parlar di quella vaga
ch'amor consunse come sol vapori,

e fanno qui la gente esser presaga,
per lo patto che Dio con Noè puose,
del mondo che già mai più non s'allaga:

così di quelle sempiterne rose
volgiensi circa noi le due ghirlande,
e sì l'estrema a l'intima rispuose.

And as are spanned athwart a tender cloud
Two rainbows parallel and like in colour,
When Juno to her handmaid gives command,

(The one without born of the one within,
Like to the speaking of that vagrant one
Whom love consumed as doth the sun the vapours,)

And make the people here, through covenant
God set with Noah, presageful of the world
That shall no more be covered with a flood,

In such wise of those sempiternal roses
The garlands twain encompassed us about,
And thus the outer to the inner answered. (Par. 12.10-21)

The question here is what is the relation of the first wheel to the second. Not in the sense of spatial arrangement this time, but as a matter of priority: what do firstness and secondness convey here -- is there in fact a primary wheel and a secondary one -- in which case, the bearing of the Biga might not in fact be quite balanced?

Warning: Some will consider this excursus anathema to jouissance du texte.

The simile begins by comparing the two wheels to two rainbows that originate in a command, an order given by Juno to her servant girl (ancella), sending Iris the messenger on a mission. In a tender cloud, two parallel and similarly colorful rainbows appear. Their parallelism makes them equal, yet the outer arc is born of the one within -- just as, and here begins a simile within the simile -- the speaking (a guisa del parlar) of "that wanderer" -- quella vaga (Echo) -- whom love consumed as vapors are consumed by the sun.

The mythological burden of the second simile is a surprise. The idea of one rainbow birthing another was a natural explanation provided by the science of Dante's time. Why bring in the myth of Narcissus -- one of the major myths from Ovid's book of changes -- to complicate that simple parent-child order of primacy?

Indeed, the myth of Echo is often read as a tale of secondariness: the origin of a voice from a love that is entirely fixated upon another - the other in turn being fixated by the love of his own image. While Echo wastes away, so does Narcissus, and in fact his love of his face, and her love of him, are in no way distinguishable -- in both cases, there is the utter fixation upon the face one loves. Narcissus's love is not more "primary" because he happened to fall in love with his own face -- indeed, he didn't know it was his own face until after he'd fallen in love with it.

Ovid's subtle tale makes clear that while Echo echoes the words of Narcissus, in speaking them her words take on new meanings. 

He runs from her, and running cries ‘Away with these encircling hands! May I die before what’s mine is yours. 

She answers, only ‘What’s mine is yours!’ (Metamorphoses 3)

The story plays on ordinary notions of firstness and secondness, and about how they can be reversed, putting in doubt any order of priority. 

Also, the mythological realm of Echo and Narcissus is not secondary to the natural scientific language of rainbows birthing rainbows. Let's remember that the first rainbow is there because it is Iris, Juno's messenger, whom Juno sent to be there. Myth preceded science in this simile. 

The first rainbow is a messenger speaking under command of the God. Unlike Echo she is not a vaga - a wandering being - because she is an ancella whose duty it is to convey the message of the God. In effect: Iris's speech is secondary, derived from the words of the Goddess whom she is echoing, while Echo's transformative echoes of Narcissus express the truth of her own primal love.

The structure is a procession of three similes: The wheels are like Iris, a rainbow which generates its own image in cloud and sun; this second rainbow is like the voice of Echo, born of self-consuming love, who vanishes like vapor consumed by the sun, and with it, the rainbows. What remains after this tale of self-generation and self-consumption is the voice, the invisible double that tells the tale.

If that were all, we would already have enough to at least make a case that the two wheels are in fact parallel, and that the apparent temporal priority of the inner rainbow is rendered less secure by its being likened to a tale in which firstness and secondness are reversed, or suspended. 

Except that's not all, because this entire little tale is contained in a parenthetical tercet between the rainbow ordered by Juno, and the third tercet's rainbow ordered by Noah's god. The rainbows are now "like" the rainbow that was given as a sign "to people here" that God would never again send a flood to destroy all life on Earth. (A big deal to someone like the poet, who nearly drowned in Inferno 1!)

With this new rainbow as permanent, unevaporable promise, the question of precedence is irrelevant. As promise, it stands outside of time and decay: it is an act, a signature that ratifies a covenant between Maker and man. The sign in the sky makes man presaga -- able to say before, to prophesy -- a future truth for all time. 

To prophesy is the opposite of the banal sense of an echo as a mere repetition of a prior sound. At this point, the question of primacy is undone. The inner circle might be the parent to the outer, as inner rainbow to encircling arc, but the outer has become a speech act that doesn't re-present something prior. Rather, it already "knows," or posits, something that has yet to be given the possibility of being known. Its speaking is its own primacy.

- Apology for this excursus -

An exercise such as this one rather laboriously unpacks what Dante's own unparalleled sense of story coiled within some allusions and similitudes, and might seem to go against the idea of reading as the pleasure of the text, the enjoyment one receives from simply "experiencing" the poet's language. And according to certain notions of "experience," that's true! But with a text like the Commedia, one enters a resonant work of imagination that is both telling a new story and engaged in active combat with the tales of prior potent texts. Dante read and loved Ovid, Virgil, Lucan, and the other poets named in Inferno 4, but in creating his tale of eternal life, he often evoked their works as grist for his own mill, his powerful reading of how they got it wrong. Poets aiming at truth are always, on some level, having dogfights. Like Dominicans.

Domini cani

The simile of the rainbows suggests that, just as in nature a parent precedes a child, so divine speech makes it possible to speak of a thing before the thing exists. Messengers of the gods share that knowing with mortals, and Dominic, whose embryonic mind was powerful enough to make his mother dream omens, appears to be one those messengers:

Ben parve messo e famigliar di Cristo: (12.73)

As such a messenger, Dominic was a torrential flood, destroying the arguments, the theological gardens of sundry heretical sects. But he remained true to the sign in the sky, and his flood was tempered:

Poi, con dottrina e con volere insieme,
con l'officio appostolico si mosse
quasi torrente ch'alta vena preme;

e ne li sterpi eretici percosse
l'impeto suo, più vivamente quivi
dove le resistenze eran più grosse.

Di lui si fecer poi diversi rivi
onde l'orto catolico si riga,
sì che i suoi arbuscelli stan più vivi.

 Then with the doctrine and the will together,
  With office apostolical he moved,
  Like torrent which some lofty vein out-presses; 

And in among the shoots heretical
  His impetus with greater fury smote,
  Wherever the resistance was the greatest. 

Of him were made thereafter divers runnels,
  Whereby the garden catholic is watered,
  So that more living its plantations stand.   (12.97-105)

The cantos of Dominic and Francis are balanced in detail. Each man gets 33 tercets of narrative of his life. The parts of their narratives balance each other in turn. If the passion of Francis knocked the sandals off his followers, Dominic nurtured his disciples and raised them in the light of deeply disciplined knowledge.

The construction of Dante's work is uncanny. Perhaps by chance, the central line of Dominic's canto is that defining description cited a moment ago:

Ben parve messo e famigliar di Cristo: (12.73)

The center of Francis's canto, perhaps by chance, evokes the ferocious constancy of Lady Poverty:

né valse esser costante né feroce (11.79)

In the interaction of these utterly dissimilar men (and their orders) -- a sort of nuclear fusion -- lie the potent love for and defense of the reinvigorated Bride.

The wheels balance and move as one. Perfectly. As two eyes move at a whim:

pur come li occhi ch'al piacer che i move
conviene insieme chiudere e levarsi;

(Even as the eyes, that, as volition moves them,
  Must needs together shut and lift themselves,)

A few notes on how the Paradiso begins

First in a series of posts about the opening movement of Dante's Paradiso. 

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3     Part 4     Part 5

The first tercet of the Paradiso puts into play three ways that la gloria manifests:

La gloria di colui che tutto move

per l'universo penetra, e risplende

in una parte più e meno altrove. 

These modes are in tension. One might think of gloria as light, but it is also power. It has three attributes: it moves all, it penetrates all that exists, and it shines back in some parts more, less in others.

It will take Dante the rest of the canticle to fully work out the implications of this tercet. A few notes:

As all authors must, Dante has to establish early on the sources of his authority and set out the scope of his argument. Paradiso offers the eyes and voice of Beatrice, and the inspiration of "Apollo." Canto 1 makes clear that the poet's experience is compromised severely: he can't actually remember more than a shadow of this voyage. Unlike the old Ulysses, not only will this new seafarer among the stars not have a simple tale to relate; he also can't be sure to what extent what he does relate represents what he experienced.

In Canto 2, Beatrice offers an experiment** to help Dante see that the variations in the visible universe cannot be explained by a simple materialist model with one differentiating principle, i.e., density.

The use of a replicable experiment along with the logic of her argument seems to provide some grounds for hope that mankind may possess some reliable knowledge of the heavens.

But this apparent clarity will be challenged in the first circle. In Canto 2.37-39, he finds himself in the moon -- somehow his body (corpo) and the Moon occupy the same point in space:

S'io era corpo, e qui non si concepe

com' una dimensione altra patio,

ch'esser convien se corpo in corpo repe,

If I was body, (and we here conceive not

How one dimension tolerates another,

Which needs must be if body enter body,)

And, if he can't quite understand his body's relationship to the moon, it gets more complicated.

In Canto 3 he meets Piccarda, one of several faces that appear in the moon's pearly . . . one can't quite say surface, since he and they are less "on" the moon than in it. The faces at first seem a kind of mirror image of Beatrice's mirror experiment from Canto 2. They seem reflections (3.10-15):

Quali per vetri trasparenti e tersi,
o ver per acque nitide e tranquille,
non sì profonde che i fondi sien persi, 

tornan d'i nostri visi le postille
debili sì, che perla in bianca fronte
non vien men forte a le nostre pupille;

Such as through polished and transparent glass,
Or waters crystalline and undisturbed,
But not so deep as that their bed be lost,

Come back again the outlines of our faces
So feeble, that a pearl on forehead white
Comes not less speedily unto our eyes;

But the faces turn out to be not reflections (risplende) but rather, like Dante, somehow have penetrated (penetra) the moon (3.16-24): 

tali vid' io più facce a parlar pronte;
per ch'io dentro a l'error contrario corsi
a quel ch'accese amor tra l'omo e 'l fonte.

Sùbito sì com' io di lor m'accorsi,
quelle stimando specchiati sembianti,
per veder di cui fosser, li occhi torsi;

e nulla vidi, e ritorsili avanti
dritti nel lume de la dolce guida,
che, sorridendo, ardea ne li occhi santi.

Such saw I many faces ready to speak,
So that I ran in error opposite
To that which kindled love 'twixt man and fountain.

As soon as I became aware of them,
Esteeming them as mirrored semblances,
To see of whom they were, mine eyes I turned, 

And nothing saw, and once more turned them forward
Direct into the light of my sweet guide,
Who, smiling, glowed in her holy eyes.

In a marvelous, delicate allusion (3.16-18), the poet tells us that his dis-covering that the images are not images - turning around to see the source of the reflections, he sees nothing (nulla)* - was an error the precise opposite of that which ignited Narcissus's love.

Can we see a pattern developing here? What do the scientific rigor of Beatrice's mirror experiment and the entire question of the man in the moon have to do with the pilgrim's profound corporeal and spatial disorientation in Canto 3, and with perhaps more fundamental indeterminacies opened up in Canto 4?

to be continued . . .

This is the fourth in a series of posts about the opening movement of Dante's Paradiso. Here are the other parts: 

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3     Part 4

===

*Note that the pilgrim's mistake in Paradiso 3 can productively be read in relation to a different mistake made by him in Purgatorio 3, which we examined in some detail here and here -- the moment when he doesn't see Virgil's shadow, and infers (falsely) that his guide has abandoned him.

**Thanks to Paul Johnston for sharing this representation of Beatrice's thought-experiment from Mark Musa's Paradise: Commentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004. p. 23.

Curious felicity in Heroides 16: Paris to Helen (I)

I, the son of Priam, send Ledaea that pure felicity

which only if imparted by your giving may be mine.

Hanc tibi Priamides mitto, Ledaea, salutem,

     Quae tribui sola te mihi dante potest.

The lovely opening of Heroides 16 sets a kind of conundrum centered on the act of giving and sending. We are as yet unawares of Paris's exact location -- and this is by design. Only gradually will it dawn on the reader that Paris is not writing from far off Troy, or some other distant land. Although he says "send," mitto, his epistle is in fact being conveyed from one room in Menelaos' palace to another. Paris is already "in the building," as we say, and the echo of Elvis might not be altogether misplaced.

Let's explore the oddity here a bit more. Paris says "I send felicity," (salutem: health, well being, welfare, prosperity...) but the very thing he sends to Helen can only come to him if she gives it to him. Mitto suggests distance, but dante ("giving") seems an act much closer to hand.  Yet the salutem in question -- which Paris does not have but can send -- only exists if both parties give and receive it to and from one another. This violates distance and time, as might be clearer in a paraphrase: I am sending you something I do not have, but I will have it for you if you give it to me.

In effect this is a condition of pure mutuality -- not as in sharing an ice cream cone, but more like a glance, or a kiss - neither can occur unless both parties simultaneously participate in it. This participation seems impossible if one is sending and therefore at a distance from the receiver. Only if both distance and time vanish in the act of giving can felicity occur. This is known as a specular, or mirror, relation, in which one can only see oneself seeing oneself in a mirror (speculum) if one's eyes reflect their mirror image, like Narcissus staring at his visage in the fateful pool.

That is to say, at the very beginning of his letter, Paris suspends polarities such as giving and receiving, distance and closeness, self and other, past and future. It might be worth noting, in this letter filled with allusions to prophecies, that prophetic speech suspends, and at times harshly dissolves, all that separates our usual compartmentalization of time. Seers see a future event in all its particular and imponderable uniqueness as if it were occurring now. We might return to this conjunction of beautiful people and hoary prophecy.

The entire letter elides temporal distinctions. First it seems Paris has not yet left Troy; then he's describing how his ships were built, and decorated; next thing he's getting a tour from Menelaos (even as he only has eyes for Helen), and a moment later he's winking at her at dinner and, from his lonely bed in the palace, writing to invite her company.

Another aspect of Paris's passion elides time just as his narration elides space:

My flames I brought with me; for I did not first find them here. They were the cause of my undertaking so long a voyage; They were the cause of my undertaking so long a voyage: for no threatening storm or wandering (error) drove us hither;

Attulimus flammas, non hic invenimus, illas.

     Hae mihi tam longae causa fuere viae,

Nam neque tristis hiemps neque nos huc appulit error; (27-29)

Paris's tale is the exact opposite of the sequence experienced by Aeneas (Heroides 7), who first wandered into Carthage (with divine nudging), then saw Dido, then felt passion for her.

Dido confesses in the Aeneid that the embers of her former love (for Sychaeus) are reignited as she gazed on and listened to Aeneas

adnosco veteris vestigia flammae

I recognize the vestiges of the ancient flame 

The reverse is true for Paris:

It is you that I seek, whom golden Venus pledged (pepigit) to my embraces; I desired you before you were known to me. I beheld your face with my soul before I saw you with my eyes, for fame was the first messenger of your beauty to wound me.

Te peto, quam pepigit lecto Venus aurea nostro;

     Te prius optavi, quam mihi nota fores. 

Ante tuos animo vidi quam lumine vultus;

     Prima tulit vulnus nuntia fama tui. (35-39)

It's one thing to see a beautiful face and fall in love; another to love someone first, and then to see what they look like. Paris is saying his experience of falling in love with Helen is a reversal of the usual order of cause and effect - which is precisely what's described by the rhetorical figure of prolepsis.

PROLEPSIS: the representation or assumption of a future act or development as if presently existing or accomplished. The representation of a thing as existing before it actually does or did so, as in he was a dead man when he entered.

First he loved her, then he saw her. Paris's love is proleptic, which, according to the above definitions, is not far from prophetic. No love was more steeped in prophecy that that of these two. To represent the future as present is to have a vision of that which is not yet. Unlike Dido, who re-cognizes love, Paris's love is fore-told, and in the telling, becomes real.

Which has everything to do with the question Paris poses right after his opening couplet:

Eloquar?

Shall I then speak? 

Paris first seemed to write from afar, but he's right next to us (and to Helen). He speaks of a passion that preceded empirical knowledge, reversing the Dido-Aeneas paradigm. But the question he asks -- that he must ask before he can say anything -- is whether to speak out -- e-loquar -- at all. In Ovid, speaking and loving, logos and eros, are so deeply intertwined as to be close to indistinguishable. Like Narcissus's eye in the speculum, fixed upon his returning gaze. We'll look at this more in another post.