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.

The voyage of Mimesis - some notes

It was our thought last week to stay with Erich Auerbach for one more session. Last time we talked about "Odysseus' Scar," the first chapter of Mimesis. Next time we plan to discuss Chapter 8, "Farinata and Cavalcante."

I intend to put a few notes here this week about Auerbach. He is a ferociously difficult reader to read. He will devote a page to describing the effects produced by a particular word - as he does in Farinata and Cavalcante, for example, with the word "allor," which basically in Italian means "then": 

The second change of scene is managed through the words "Allor surse," in line 52. It seems simpler and less remarkable than the first. What, after all, is more normal than to introduce a sudden new occurrence with the words, "Then it befel . . .? But if we ask ourselves where in pre-Dantean medieval vernacular literature we might find a comparable linguistic maneuver, interrupting the action in course by a dramatically incisive "then," we should, I think, have a long search before us. I for one know of none. Allora at the beginning of a sentence is naturally quite frequent in Italian literature before Dante. It occurs for instance in the stories of the Novellino but with much less force of meaning. Such sharp breaks are in keeping with neither the style nor the time-sense of pre-Dantean narrative, not even with those of the French epics, where ez vos or atant ez vos occurs in a similar though much weaker sense (for example, Roland 413). That even extremely dramatic turnings of the tide of action were handled with stiff circumstantiality may be observed for example in Villehardouin when he relates the intervention of the Doge of Venice at the storming of Constantinople. When his men hesitate to land, the aged and blind Doge orders them upon pain of death to set him ashore first, with the flag of Saint Mark. This the chronicler introduces with the words: or porrez oir estrange proece. Which is just as though Dante, instead of allora, had said, "And then something quite extraordinary happened." The Old French ez vos may serve to point the way as we try to find the correct Latin term for this abruptly intervening "then." For it is not tum or tunc; in many cases it is rather sed or iam. But the real equivalent, which gives the full force, is ecce, or still better et ecce. This is found less frequently in the elevated style than in Plautus, in Cicero's letters, in Apuleius, etc., and especially in the Vulgate. When Abraham takes the knife to sacrifice his son Isaac, we read: et ecce Angelus Domini de caelo clamavit, dicens: Abraham, Abraham. I think this linguistic maneuver, which effects so sharp an interruption, is too harsh to stem from the elevated style of classical Latin; but it corresponds perfectly with the elevated style of the Bible. And furthermore, Dante uses the Biblical et ecce verbatim on another occasion where a state of affairs is interrupted by a sudden, though not quite so dramatic, occurrence (Purg. XXI, 7: ed ecco, si come ne scrive Luca . . . ci apparve . . . after Luke xxiv, I3: et ecce duo ex illis . . .). I am not prepared to state as a certainty that Dante introduced the linguistic maneuver of this abruptly interrupting "then" into the elevated style and that it was a Biblical echo with him. But this much would seem to be certain: at the time Dante wrote, the dramatically arresting "then" was by no means as obvious and generally available as it is today; and he used it more radically than any other medieval writer before him.

But we must also consider the meaning and the sound of the word surse, which Dante uses in at least one other passage with telling effect to describe a sudden emergence (Purg. VI, 72-73: e l'ombra tutta in se romita / surse ver lui . . .). The allor surse of line 52, then, has hardly less weight than the words of Farinata which bring in the first interruption; this allor is one of those paratactic forms which establish a dynamic relationship between the members they connect. The conversation with Farinata is interrupted--once he has heard part of it, Cavalcante cannot wait for it to end, he simply loses his self-control. And the part he plays--his peering expression, his whining words, and his precipitate despair when he sinks back-forms a sharp contrast with Farinata's weighty calm when he resumes speaking after the third shift (11. 73 ff.).

Auerbach's ear, moulded by years of listening to the phrasing and rhythms of poets in several languages, is a Stradivarius, and he is its maestro. In Dante's use of what most would take for a simple, everyday word, he detects tonalities that deepen our appreciation of the dramatic power of this scene.

What makes talking about Auerbach difficult -- aside from the fact that few readers today have half a smidgen of his linguistic competence and cultural awareness -- is that these focused specific passages serve as multi-leveled specimens in an ongoing contemplative conversation that Auerbach is having with 2500 years of literary language, conceived, at times, as one giant developing thing. Not only is all of his reading brought to bear upon single passages, but multiple skeins of arguments branch out from them, often emerging as he moves from the particular -- the allor above -- to statements of a far more general nature.

He says this, for example, shortly after the above passage:

. . . if we start from his predecessors, Dante's language is a well-nigh incomprehensible miracle. There were great poets among them. But, compared with theirs, his style is so immeasurably richer in directness, vigor, and subtlety, he knows and uses such an immeasurably greater stock of forms, he expresses the most varied phenomena and subjects with such immeasurably superior assurance and firmness, that we come to the conclusion that this man used his language to discover the world anew.

This power, assurance and mastery of various forms then becomes a factor in why Dante's poetry can violate the classical canon of the separation of styles -- a feature which caused Goethe to speak of his "repulsive and often disgusting greatness" -- without departing from the gravitas of a unique sublimity. Take a descriptive statement of this kind:

Themes which cannot possibly be considered sublime in the antique sense turn out to be just that by virtue of his way of molding and ordering them.

It moves -- leaps -- to a far more general claim that seems to include aesthetic judgment, critical distinction, and the hyperbolic evocation of a poetic power that knows no bounds, and owes no fealty to any generic rule, ordering principle, or stylistic norm:

For nowhere could one find so clear an instance of the antagonism of the two traditions -- that of antiquity, with the principle of the separation of styles, and that of the Christian era, with its mingling of styles -- as in Dante's powerful temperament, which is conscious of both because its aspiration toward the tradition of antiquity does not imply for it the possibility of abandoning the other; nowhere does mingling of styles come so close to violation of all style.  (Italics mine).

In a very basic sense, Mimesis is a voyage that takes us from the basic syntax and diction of texts to moments that seem to be contemplating not one passage or poem, but a vast recollection of poems. 

With so much arising from particular close readings, it's more than ordinarily challenging to identify the key articulations of an overarching narrative. We certainly need to be asking: What story is Mimesis telling? Before leaping to facile conceptual formulations, though, careful readers might wish to pause and work through the details.

Paradiso 10: Mai da lei l'occhio non parte (3)

One is lost in conjecture as to the motive which impelled Dante, the admirer of Thomism, to place in the mouth of St. Thomas Aquinas the eulogy of Siger of Brabant, the apostle of Averroism. -- Catholic Encyclopedia.

After Dante returns from his momentary oblivion (mente unita), he and Beatrice see and hear 12 learned doctors of the Church, singing and turning around them.

It's a fair bet that anyone who's ever studied even a little of Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Peter the Lombard or Richard of St. Victor has not reflexively thought of them as dancing ladies. The audacity of the figure - one out of a profusion of tropes that serially proceed from one another in this scene - has been both admired and criticized.

Poi, sì cantando, quelli ardenti soli
 si fuor girati intorno a noi tre volte,
 come stelle vicine a' fermi poli, 

donne mi parver, non da ballo sciolte,
 ma che s'arrestin tacite, ascoltando
 fin che le nove note hanno ricolte.

As soon as singing thus those burning suns
  Had round about us whirled themselves three times,
  Like unto stars neighbouring the steadfast poles, 

Ladies they seemed, not from the dance released,
  But who stop short, in silence listening
  Till they have gathered the new melody.

Museo Archaeo Cagliari

Charles Singleton points to an Italian scholar's description of a ballata, a dance song:

He represents the customary manner of dancing to a
ballata, in which the lady who leads the song recites the
first stanza [the ripresa or ritornello], standing still;
when she has done this, the entire group of dancers moves in
a round dance, repeating the stanza, and when finished,
stops; then the lady of the song [i.e., who first began the
song], again standing still, sings the next stanza, which
ends rhyming with the first whereupon the group again does a round dance, singing again the stanza called ritornello.

Dante's dancers, let's bear in mind, are blazing suns. They are singing and circling, then they pause -- not released from the dance, but for a moment silent, suspending their motion; they listen, gather the nove note, the new notes, and begin again.

It might be a small point, but it seems to me the "ladies" of Dante's dance are not pausing to hear one of their own sing a known song. Rather, they all pause, in silence, listening, until they gather the new notes. These circling suns are giving themselves not to something they already know. They are silently attending to something new.

Is it too fanciful to see these dancers as listening to new notes of music, which then dictate the dance? In this way, they are replicating the pattern above, when Dante wrote several terzine about turning wheels, then paused, telling us to pause and attend to them, while he turned to listen to new words to write down in his role of scribe?

From guardando, the first word of the canto, on, the contemplative act -- looking at and listening to the Other, then noting (pensando dietro), writing, singing, dancing what is heard -- has been a unifying motif of canto 10. The poet tells us to vagheggiar ne l'arte - to contemplate with love the art, the turning heavens:

tanto che mai da lei l'occhio non parte.

The Maker's "eye" never parts from his Creation; later, Thomas Aquinas will say that one who listens well delights to see every good in the false world:

Per vedere ogne ben dentro vi gode
 l'anima santa che 'l mondo fallace
 fa manifesto a chi di lei ben ode.  

By seeing every good therein exults
The sainted soul, which the fallacious world
Makes manifest to him who listeneth well; (10.124-26)

To find such good, to hear something genuinely new, one has to attend with care to what is there and stop listening to oneself (Paradiso 10 a manifesto of close reading?). How does this motif, binding everyone from God to the poet to the lettor, play out with the dancers?

Aquinas introduces a considerable variety of authors who were also readers -- an historian, a mystic interpreter, a natural scientist, logicians, allegorists, philosophers, and even Siger de Brabant, whose rigorous Averroism put him at odds with his contemporary theologians, including Aquinas.

Aquinas begins his list with his "brother and master" Albertus, but even before Albertus we hear of Dominic, the shepherd whose flock contained the lambs called Thomas and Albertus. The strong sense of an obedient community and the bonds of a worthy teacher-student pair begin the list, which then broadens into a more diverse group spread across centuries and different lands, ending with Siger, whose contentious Averroism got him condemned by the Inquisitor of France.

Once again, Dante's staging provokes palpable surprise. The author of the "Siger" article in the Catholic Encyclopedia can't for the life of him understand what would prompt Dante to include an Averroist among these ardent suns. But perhaps there's a clue in that very article:

Siger was the adversary of Albertus Magnus and of St. Thomas Aquinas, "contra praecipuos viros Albertum et Thomam". His principal work (De anima intellectiva) called forth St. Thomas's treatise on the unity of the intellect (De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas). Siger in fact supported all the beliefs of the Averroist philosophy — the monism of the human intellect; one intellectual spirit for all men, separate from the body, is temporarily united with each human organism to accomplish the process of thought.

For sober theologians, the inclusion of Siger comes dangerously close to an endorsement of heretical thought. The author fully anticipates their surprise. But here in the canto of the Sun, we have diverse minds in motion, singing to each other harmonies that surpass their light:

più dolci in voce che in vista lucenti (10.66)

Something other than the intellect as source of declarative statements of truths is at work here. Consider this delicious irony: One of the salient points of Siger's thought was the unity of intellect. His assertion that we all share one immortal mind is a key reason others, including Aquinas, attacked him. The doctors of the Church, as learned as they were, spoke truth as they saw it, and apparently were least able to unite intellectually when it came to the question of intellectual unity.

Then there are the remarkable closing words of Aquinas's speech, again apropos of Siger:

"silogizzò invidïosi veri.”

"did syllogize invidious truths"  (10.138)

Dante, Beatrice, Siger and other Sapienti

Several translators and commentators (but not Longfellow or Sinclair) render this as "enviable truths." This sounds conciliatory, but makes no sense. If Siger's truths were enviable, what were those of Thomas or Boethius? We might say instead that his truths themselves were invidious -- not the thinker, but the thoughts. Siger is acknowledged as one whose truths wrought disharmony, dissonance within the Schoolmen and throughout the Church intelligentsia.

If so, this might help us see what is truly uniting Paradiso 10: not whether someone is narrowly, pedantically correct in what he states as truth, but rather whether the truth is offered in the contemplative spirit, and how, in that spirit, differences -- twists, inflections, conflicts from one point of view to another -- are generative of new, fertilizing insights. The temperate torque (torta) of the heavens is replicated in the turnings of the mind, arguing and doubting in the quest for truth whose depths exceed its furthest reach. Yes, the folle volo of Ulysses resonates here, but instead of heroic folly, lambs that grow fat as they quest.

The final simile transforms the music of the 12 turning sapienti into the inner workings of a clock. pushing and pulling, counting the hours, and awakening the Bride of God:

Indi, come orologio che ne chiami
ne l'ora che la sposa di Dio surge
a mattinar lo sposo perché l'ami,

che l'una parte e l'altra tira e urge,
tin tin sonando con sì dolce nota,
che 'l ben disposto spirto d'amor turge; 

così vid'ïo la gloriosa rota
 muoversi e render voce a voce in tempra
 e in dolcezza ch'esser non pò nota
se non colà dove gioir s'insempra.

Then, as a horologe that calleth us
What time the Bride of God is rising up
With matins to her Spouse that he may love her,

Wherein one part the other draws and urges,
Ting! ting! resounding with so sweet a note,
That swells with love the spirit well disposed,

 Thus I beheld the glorious wheel move round,
  And render voice to voice, in modulation
  And sweetness that can not be comprehended,
Excepting there where joy is made eternal.   (Par. 10. 139-148)

The concatenation of music, mechanical action, time and lovemaking is the final surprise of the canto, and it returns us to the moment when we readers first were told to raise our eyes to the wheeling stars. There we saw not just the oblique angle of the ecliptic, but considered the virtue it imparts, rendering Earth fecund. In the X of the wheeling heavens lies the call and response of the sources of life -- water, light, heat, song, love, both human and divine, joy -- then foretasted, now right on time.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Tolstoy said it well

In reading Dante, one ought to know one is grappling with this:

"For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite"

A few notes . . . (part 3)

This is the third in a series of posts about the opening movement of Dante's Paradiso. 

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3     Part 4     Part 5

If the faces in the Moon in Paradiso 3 turn out to be "really there," as opposed to being mere images or reflections, that reassuring sense of a determinate position in space gets turned on its head in canto 4, when Beatrice explains how Piccarda and the others whom Dante has just encountered are always actually in the Empyrean:

ma tutti fanno bello il primo giro,
e differentemente han dolce vita
per sentir più e men l'etterno spiro.

But all make beautiful the primal circle,
And have sweet life in different degrees,
By feeling more or less the eternal breath. (Par. 4. 34-36)

The literal ground Dante and the others stand "in" - the moon, falls away. Beatrice's words scramble the concept of presence. Instead of the polarity of presence/absence, we are invited to entertain another medium or mode, which Beatrice will call "condescension."

Ungrounding 

Before we get to that, I'd like to try, however tentatively, to trace a recurrent gesture in Paradiso:

• In canto 1, the poet makes sure we understand that the text we are reading (or listening to) is but a shadow of a shadow of an experience, an experience he no longer can recall.

• Something to cling to arrives in canto 2. Beatrice makes sure Dante understands that moon spots are not simply to be understood as variations in material density. Indeed she offers a replicable, empirical scientific experiment using mirrors to help demonstrate that a simple material principle will not explain the rich diversity of all that is.* Empirical knowledge and logical reasoning here are held up as authoritative ways for human beings to speculate about things they cannot directly experience.

• That apparent gain in epistemic stability is challenged in canto 3, when Dante, now in the Moon, finds the very notion of "ground" has become problematic. The labile medium of the Moon makes it hard to tell how he, others, and the Moon occupy the same space. The faces that are suddenly before him seem reflections, appearing as if reflected on shallow water, and later disappear into seeming watery depths. The medium has no fondo, no ground -- one moment it seems shallow, the next moment profound. But it is not a reflective surface. Beatrice assures the pilgrim that Piccarda, Costanza and the others are vere sustanze.

• The assurance of vere sustanze is further complicated when Dante learns in canto 4 that Piccarda and all souls in Paradiso are always actually in the Empyrean. It's not that Piccarda could be speaking to him either from a few feet away or from a point infinitely beyond all distance. Entangled, both are true at once: the vere sustanze are "here" and "there." The structure of Paradiso is really not a structure as we normally think of it, something resting on a foundation that rests on terra firma situated in space. Here, like the earth under Amphiaraus at Thebes, ground falls away. We're shading into the Uncanny, and certain elements in cantos 3 and 4 evoke its frisson.

Oscillating

If one were to attempt to characterize more concisely a pattern in these opening cantos, a figure in the carpet, it is perhaps something like this:

• Canto 2: A gain in perceptual knowledge (illumination) is posited using negative proofs from the sensory realm.
• Canto 3: That illuminating gain is then complicated as sense perception is put in question, leaving us lacking in sense certainty, but confident at least of the underlying reality of substance.
• Canto 4: Substance is complicated, scrambled. It turns out that Paradiso is not a "place" subject to space and time. Rather, signs are being made

The effect is not unlike a recurring, self-effacing oscillation: Each time we think we've got a purchase on Paradise, there's a loss of certitude, a vanishing of grounds for judgement. For the visitor, it's not unlike being out to sea:

metter potete ben per l'alto sale

vostro navigio, servando mio solco

dinanzi a l'acqua che ritorna equale.

Well may you launch upon the deep salt-sea

Your vessel, keeping still my wake before you

Upon the water that grows smooth again. (Par. 2. 13-15)

The opening cantos have put the pilgrim and us on an epistemological roller-coaster, and the ride is not yet over. Like the wake that is the only trace of the poet's vessel, a trace soon erased, so the proper (object) of Paradiso keeps receding.

It's not that with each loss comes some compensatory gain, as if automatically. Rather, it's sink or swim: loss opens the way to the possibility of acceding to another kind of apprehension. It's up to you. As Beatrice says to Dante at one point, watch your step:

“Non ti maravigliar perch' io sorrida,"
mi disse,“appresso il tuo püeril coto,
poi sopra 'l vero ancor lo piè non fida,

ma te rivolve, come suole, a vòto:"  

"Marvel thou not," she said to me, "because I smile
at this thy puerile conceit,
Since on the truth it trusts not yet its foot,

But turns thee, as 'tis wont, on emptiness." (Par. 3. 25-28)

If the senses and substance -- the reliable earthly bases of Aristotle's understanding of Nature -- are not sure guides to the mansion of God, what is? The ground is more quicksand than terra firma.

The opening movement of Paradiso conducts us to a carefully orchestrated cognitive crisis. By the time we reach the account of condescending in canto 4, it is an open question whether, like poor Nebuchadnezzar, we can even begin to say what we are experiencing, let alone penetrate to what it means. We might even have a spasm of sympathy for the king's murderous frustration with his "magicians, enchanters, sorcerers and astrologers." Lunacy impends.

The stakes for the poet, the poem, and its readers, have never been higher.

*For a parallel contemporary account of popular astronomy, see Ethan Siegal, Beyond the Galaxy. Chapter 1 here is free. 

To be continued . . . 

A few notes . . . part 2

This is the second in a series of posts about the opening of the Paradiso. 

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3     Part 4     Part 5

The somewhat detailed look into Paradiso 2 in the most recent post served to interrupt the effort to trace a pattern begun a few days earlier, but it was quite helpful. How so should become clear if we go slightly ahead.

Let's look again that scene in Paradiso 3 where Dante says he made an error opposite to that of Narcissus, thinking the faces appearing to him in the moon were specchiati sembianti - mirrored semblances. Turning around to see the source of the images, he says, e nulla vidi - and I saw nothing.

The error here is not simply the opposite of that of the boy who fell in love with his own image; it is also the exact reversal of what happens in at sunrise in Purgatorio 2: Dante, expecting to see Virgil's shadow next to his own, and seeing nothing, turns to where Virgil should be, and in fact still is. Virgil reproves him for mistrusting -- he doesn't cast a shadow because he is one. 

Io mi volsi dallato con paura
d'essere abbandonato, quand' io vidi
solo dinanzi a me la terra oscura; 

e 'l mio conforto: “Perché pur diffidi?”
a dir mi cominciò tutto rivolto;
“non credi tu me teco e ch'io ti guidi?

Unto one side I turned me, with the fear
Of being left alone, when I beheld
Only in front of me the ground obscured. 

"Why dost thou still mistrust?" my Comforter
Began to say to me turned wholly round;
"Dost thou not think me with thee, and that I guide thee?

These scenes in the third canto of each canticle set up mini-paradigms that resonate with the nature of each world the pilgrim is experiencing. For Dante in Purgatorio, it is a matter of trust -- submitting to an authority that is not immediately visible but which, from past experience, one knows to be reliable. (This is also why the Muses in Purgatorio are led by Calliope -- they are on a mission to rhetorically demolish false guides.)

Here in Paradiso 3, the mode is no longer the shadowy realm of expectation, belief, or trust, but of increasingly brilliant surprise. The seemingly mirrored semblances are not images or shadows, but in fact the very beings they appear to be.* The substance of things hoped for is given before it can be hoped for, and this is "revealed" as becomes clear in the nothingness (nulla) the poet turns to see.

This surprise reversal has the structure of hysteron proteron, as used by the poet in the image of the arrow that strikes the target in canto 2:

e forse in tanto in quanto un quadrel posa
e vola e da la noce si dischiava,

And in such space perchance as strikes a bolt
And flies, and from the notch unlocks itself

This figure that reverses cause and effect, completion and beginning, is the challenging narrative trope of Paradiso -- "challenging" because it violates the sequential order of ordinary quest narrative. It also reverses the prefigurative mode in which the Christian Middle Ages read the Bible. The Old Testament was read, as in the superb title of a book on Milton, as "shadowy types" that prefigured the truth (logos) of the New Testament. Once revealed, the Word obviated quest.

If one looks at the three cantos 3 from the perspective of poetics, we can add to the order of the three canticles we began once before:

Inf: hope forever lost                                    -- the letter: "abandon all hope"
Purg: hope actively propelling one ahead       -- shadowy types: guide to truth
Par.: hope substantiated                                -- truth

One could go on ticking off attributes of each canticle that fall into something of this order, but the last thing I want is to overschematize the Commedia. The poem complicates itself as it goes along, and that's more interesting.

How does canto 2 help with the effort to discern a pattern? Consider what we found: When Dante the pilgrim enters the moon, he bogs down his journey by asking Beatrice about the man in the moon, a fabled figure dreamed of by men who can't see him face to face.

But even as Dante is asking Beatrice about this shadowy type, he is himself a man in the moon incarnate. In Par. 3.43-45, the poet explicitly relates the co-joined human and moon to the Incarnation, which will be self evident when we finally get to see it.

Lì si vedrà ciò che tenem per fede,
non dimostrato, ma fia per sé noto
a guisa del ver primo che l'uom crede.

There will be seen what we receive by faith,
Not demonstrated, but self-evident
In guise of the first truth that man believes.

The "spirit" of this scene, its wit, playfully gives us a lunatical misdirection of a quester who asks about distant spots and signs when he in fact is the very thing (a sort of loony λόγος) about which he is asking. This bewilderment tickles, and Beatrice's smile conveys full awareness of what fools these mortals be. Within this frame, laughter can be relaxed and even medicinal -- to see one's own error, even among the wise, will now and again occasion a cathartic spasm of self-debunking laughter.

While the poem is registering esprit on several comedic levels, it never loses sight of the reader, whom it warned about venturing too far out to sea. Dante's bark (legno) is heading for the deepest waters, and those who fail to see their own folly are most at risk of becoming the drowned man the poet of Inferno 1 nearly was.

*This point will be looked at in more detail when we discuss canto 4 in the continuation.

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

Part 1     Part 3     Part 4   

to be continued . . .

The torque of Pride

When Dante crosses the threshold into Purgatory proper and hears the door swing shut, he speaks of the one thing that could never be excused - looking back:

Poi fummo dentro al soglio de la porta
che 'l mal amor de l'anime disusa,
perché fa parer dritta la via torta,

sonando la senti' esser richiusa;
e s'io avesse li occhi vòlti ad essa,
qual fora stata al fallo degna scusa? 

When we had crossed the threshold of the door
Which the perverted love of souls disuses,
Because it makes the crooked way seem straight, 

Re-echoing I heard it closed again;
And if I had turned back mine eyes upon it,
What for my failing had been fit excuse?   (Purg. 10.1-6)

No possible excuse for someone who has been advised not to look back, no matter how strong the temptation. Dante, the new Orpheus, passes the threshold safely and successfully. This is only one of several thresholds, however - instead of assuring the safe return of his Eurydice to mortal life, obeying the order to not look back gives Dante hope of seeing his Beatrice at some future moment, when he is fit to experience her transhumanized form.

One way of understanding a constitutive difference between the canticles, then, could be one's relation to hope:

Inferno:       hope forever lost.
Purgatorio:  hope actively propelling one ahead
Paradiso:     hope substantiated

This small scheme will be subject, of course, to our reading of the Paradiso, which is about to begin. I want to bring up one other thing about the Purgatorio as we get to that new threshold, and it's contained in the snippet quoted above.

che 'l mal amor de l'anime disusa, 

perché fa parer dritta la via torta,

 the threshold (soglia) . . .

that souls' bad love disuses
because it makes the crooked path seem straight.

Entering the terrace of Pride, the poet lays down an apparent law of the human condition: when we desire wrongly, that causes us to see as direct what is in fact crooked, or indirect.

The narrator here posits a turning, or torque, of the soul by which what it sees, and how it sees - cognition - is skewed by what (and how) it wants. Where Plato's soul just needed to be turned around and ascend to see the Good in order to want it, this offers a more Augustinian view. One cannot see straight until one's love (will) has turned toward the Good. The will is what is bound, imprisoned, and the terraces of penitence are about liberating it from its false and deviant loves.

The complex path of discipline, edification, and challenge that the pilgrim goes through before Virgil can "crown and mitre" him as a freely willing self over himself should be kept in view as one enters Paradise.

It's a path with its own complications. I'll just briefly point to one. In the same canto (10) of Purgatorio, before they encounter the Proud souls bearing their pedestals, Dante and Virgil see three narratives depicted on the terrace wall, famously described as visibile parlare: The three tales are the Annunciation, the story of Uzzah and David and Michal, and the tale of Trajan and the widow.

Contemporary commentators including Robert Hollander and Nicola Fosca have noted some complications of the tales -- for example, that the angel's appearing to Mary, which bears the hope of salvation to everyone born after Christ, carries a sense of doom to Virgil, the poet of the 4th Eclogue, whose prophecy of a savior to be born did not save him from Limbo.

Hollander also wonders whether the Proud souls, crushed under the weight of their stones, can even see these storied walls - are the walls inclined so one can see from a very low angle, he and others ask.

Another point that seems relevant is that the first sin, the one upon which all other sins feed, requires those carrying their pedestals to read from their low and oblique angle, over and over again, three tales that, in a very real sense, defy easy understanding. One might quite easily see an image of the Annunciation, but does that mean that one in fact understands it? What would "understanding" mean here?

And if the Annunciation is problematic, the tale of Uzzah poses its own difficulties. Here's a guy leading the oxen that are bearing the Ark of the covenant, and the Ark totters, seeming about to fall. He reaches out his hand - one can easily presume it's an automatic reflex - and is struck dead for presuming to do something he was not tasked to do. Is this readily comprehensible? Or must one go round the mountain several thousand times before it begins to make sense? This is of course about the automatonic nature of our drives, desires, and thoughts - these things we are persuaded we simply control.

The tale of Trajan also runs counter to common sense (as does, of course, the spectacle of David) and all military protocol.

If we gloss over these tales (as I'm doing here), it could be at our peril. If we presume we have read them aright, we might be submitting our qualifications for spending a good amount of time on this very terrace.

Why point this up with emphasis? Let's remember that these works, Dante avers, are produced by an Artist that surpasses Polycletus and Nature itself - making the question of distinguishing real from fake, fact from fiction, a real, not a rhetorical, question. And let's remember that the basic element of Pride is in fact to think something is straight that is not. The torque of Pride and the torque of simplistic reading are not, in this canto, unrelated. In a very real sense, Dante has engaged the full web of rhetoric, the textual deviousness of tropes, mimesis, figuration and narration, in his analysis of Pride. To sin is to be trapped in trope. The presumption of reading -- in the sense of some unmeditated, direct apprehension of a text -- puts one fairly far along the path of error.

One can hope that the challenges of Paradise, however daunting, leave us less prone to tie ourselves in knots.

Reading as Viniculture: Purgatorio 4

Purgatorio 4 begins with an assertion about the nature of the soul based upon esperïenza vera; namely, that the soul is a single entity comprising parts, and when one part is concentrated upon one thing, another part is not free to do another thing independently. The experience in this case came from Dante's being so involved with Manfred that three hours passed without the poet's noting it.

As always, the text puts it to us to ask: What is this doing here? The task of reading stems from grappling with such questions, far more than from annotating references with learned footnotes. Each canto of this poem requires us to ask why certain seemingly disparate passages are juxtaposed. We should ask what these have to do with one another, and see whether we might find unity where before there seemed only a series of unrelated pieces. Unity of soul would seem at least to invite us to inquire into unity of text.

On a smaller scale, we encounter this very phenomenon in the passage that immediately follows the meditation upon the nature of the soul:

Maggiore aperta molte volte impruna
con una forcatella di sue spine
l'uom de la villa quando l'uva imbruna, 

che non era la calla onde salìne
lo duca mio, e io appresso, soli,

A greater opening ofttimes hedges up
  With but a little forkful of his thorns
  The villager, what time the grape imbrowns, 

Than was the passage-way through which ascended
  Only my Leader and myself behind him,

Robert Hollander calls this a "pseudo-simile" because it is not formally ordered with words such as "just as" . . . "so." By leaving out the comparative terms, one can argue that the passage puts into greater relief the juxtaposition of the farmer and God. If we then ask whether there is some larger relevance to the juxtaposition of architectural design of this hidden threshold of Purgatorio with the farmer plugging his hedge, it offers at least the prospect of reading the terms:

hedge :: solid rock
hole    :: nearly invisible fissure in rock
farmer :: God

The farmer is keeping out whichever thieves or creatures might steal his uva embrowning on the vine. To complete the comparison: so God has designed Purgatorio to be defended against anyone attempting to enter without divine authorization. The way in is not just hard to see, but very difficult to climb, as the next few lines make clear, as the poet struggles to keep up with Virgil, and asks somewhat pathetically how high the entire mountain is. 

What we've not yet involved in the comparison is the grape. This uom de la villa has a vineyard, where grapes are ripening before they are harvested, and transformed into wine.  

uva :: souls

With this, the rich figure of Purgatory as vineyard comes into view. Just as grapes growing in the wild might not survive predation, and certainly will not of their own doing turn into good wine, so the souls entering Purgatory have not the wherewithal to transform themselves. The work of purgation, as will be seen in the spiraling terraces from Pride to Lust, will be the labor of transformation from grape to wine. 

The fine thing Dante is doing here is inviting us to put this together for ourselves, using simple things we know from nature. As we do so, we participate in producing the poetry of the poem. To read is then to collaborate with the poet, or at least with the poem, to press it to yield its potency. (Reflecting on "wine" in the New Testament of course brings added "aroma.")

So the interrelation of the terms of the implicit comparison brings us a suggestive sense of what Purgatory might be: less charnel house or penitentiary, perhaps, than a protected spot of cultivation -- ripening, maturing, readying -- in preparation for a transformation to come. By interrelating, close reading turns into a sort of viniculture, with heady results. 

And, just as there is no wine without grapes, there can be no intellect without the vegetative and emotive parts of the soul. Seemingly disparate elements are parts of a greater whole. The initial tercets of canto 4 now seem quite relevant to the figure of wine making

The canto of course has further elements, including an overly elaborate dialogue on the track of the sun, and the delightful encounter with Belacqua. To read Dante is to pursue him.

Open road: Purgatorio 3 on reading

Corpo, the word for "body," appears four times in Purgatorio 3 -- more than in any other canto of the canticle, commentators note. (The word appears nine times in Paradiso 2.) The first half of this canto, with its play of light and shadow, has to do with sensory intelligence -- what later came to be called aesthetics, often elaborated in relation to our experience and judgment of perceptible form -- e.g., art and beauty.

At sunrise, Dante sees that he doesn't see Virgil's shadow, and leaps from that to the fear that Virgil has left him alone. This produces an ironic effect: Not seeing the figura of Virgil causes Dante to not see that Virgil is in fact right next to him, which Dante easily could have seen had he not been fixated on the level of figura.

On the narrative level, this can be seen as a cautionary tale about the differences between a sign and that which the sign stands for. If we remain just with the sign, as Casella's listeners did --

Noi eravam tutti fissi e attenti

                 a le sue note;  
(2.118-19)

we face the possibility of never turning toward that which the sign stands for -- its meaning, or referent.

The introduction of aesthetics brings in its solar train a concern with signs, and thus with language and reading. The Purgatorio is making a "note" that has to do with reading, including the reading of the Purgatorio.

There's a sharp contrast here, in fact, with the mode we found in canto 3 of the Inferno. There we read the identical eternal text that Dante and Virgil encountered. The mouth of hell promised nothing -- to enter is to abandon hope -- it's a gate of no promise, no futurity, no meaning beyond its own self-referencing enunciation.

No such writing stands at the entrance to Purgatory; the only song we hear is soon disrupted. It's worth thinking about the writing that does appear further up the mountain: penitential "P's" are inscribed on Dante's forehead only to be erased, one at a time, as he spirals up the terraces. Here, even writing is not fixed.

Prof. John Freccero, who viewed Dante as profoundly in debt to St. Augustine, long ago noted that within the Augustinian view of reality, there is the human being, who is love; the only question is whether that love is directed toward self, or toward the other, on the way toward the Ultimate Other. If one loves fine dining, for example, this love stops at the meal, which ends up back in the self -- a form of self-idolatry. Love that is not idolatry doesn't fix upon every sign, every desire, every beautiful thing, but moves through all things seeking that in which all live, and move, and have their being. Such love by nature rises to its true home, as Beatrice will explain in the Paradiso.

Here at the base of Purgatorio, in the thick of his own shadow, the pilgrim receives a lesson in signs and reading. And Virgil, after composing himself, speaks in a most Augustinian way:

He's mad who hopes our intellect

can rapidly run that infinite way

kept by one Substance in three Persons.

Matto è chi spera che nostra ragione

possa trascorrer la infinita via

che tiene una sustanza in tre persone.  
(3.34-36)

The pathos here, as Virgil reflects upon the disiar . . . sanza frutto -- the "fruitless longing" of the greatest minds of antiquity -- is justly famous. As readers we now might want to ask how this concern with body, with signs, with reading and aesthetics relates to the unexpected appearance of Manfred and the tale he tells.

The motion of love: Francesca II

It's tempting to read the Inferno with a sort of "I told you so" persona. The structure lends itself, since the damned have a finality to their tales that has the imprimatur of divine judgement. And we have a pretty good indication, by virtue of location and contrapasso, what the Deity thought of each category of sin.

Dante the pilgrim is not quite so clear, however. In canto 5, his first encounter with the lost, he weeps, he pities, he faints. He is confused (smarrito). Are we? We readers might not wish to ignore the complications inherent in this canto, given its treatment of reading.

The pilgrim seems very troubled at the vision of the great literary (and one historical) lovers, and even more so after encountering Francesca. It's one thing to feel confusion about love in general, seeing Paris, Helen, and Cleopatra driven down the wind; it's another thing to encounter a woman who quotes your love poetry to you in support of her allegation that Love led to her death and damnation.

"Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende,
     prese costui de la bella persona
     che mi fu tolta; e ’l modo ancor m’offende.
Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,
     mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,
     che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona.
Amor condusse noi ad una morte.
     Caina attende chi a vita ci spense."

"Love, which quickly kindles in noble hearts,        100
     Seized him for that fair body which from me
     Was torn—what grief the manner still imparts!
Love, which makes each loved one pay love’s fee,
     So seized me with the beauty of my friend
     That yet it does not leave me, as you see.
Love led us both to one death in the end.
     Caïna waits for him who quenched our lives above.”*

Francesca's address is remarkable not only because it cites the tenets of Courtly Love and echoes the ancient sense of Eros as the god whose power even other gods cannot control. It also echoes Dante's own imagination of Love from Vita Nova, making it personal as well as universal:

Amore e ‘l cor gentil sono una cosa
Love and the gentle heart are one thing

Francesca mostly sounds like the stilnovisti - the poets whose sweet new style garnered fame and literary honors for Guido Guinizelli, whom Dante will meet in Purgatorio 26, and Dante himself, among others. She sounds like them because she's not only nearly quoting them verbatim, she is also pontificating. She sounds like an expert, one who knows what Love is.

Where does that knowledge come from? It would either be from experience, or from books. Francesca, like Mme Bovary, may have read about love; what did she understand?

Collaborative Commentary: Cyropaideia

This is entirely unrelated to Dante, but quite related to our mode of reading him. The first online collaborative commentary on a classical text is here, and it's quite wonderful.

Here's a link to the Cyropaideia - be sure to explore "Content" and "Comments" - this is a fine effort to read with others - not unlike Classics in Sarasota!"

The figure of reading in the Inferno

It would be a sign of something about our attention to close reading if we did not at least acknowledge how the Inferno early on foregrounds the act of reading.

There is, of course, the gate of hell in Canto 3: a gaping mouth whose inscription we meet and read precisely as Dante and Virgil do. The gate states that it is the first text, marking the moment that mutability, temporality and death entered Creation:

Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
     Se non etterne, ed io etterna duro.

A further irony (also noted here) is built into this threshold for those condemned to cross it: For them, time and change, development and movement toward salvation, now come to an end -- the damned are fixed, frozen for all time in the contrapassi of their perdition. The gate is a grave marker; for lost souls, it's the terminus ad quem of the temporal order of which it also was the initial instance, thanks to the villainy of the original lost soul.

Reading is also implicit in the structure of the Inferno from the beginning.

Palace of Minos

Here's Minos in book 6 of the Aeneid:

Nor far from these,
The throng of dead by unjust judgment slain.
Not without judge or law these realms abide:
Wise Minos there the urn of justice moves,
And holds assembly of the silent shades,
Hearing the stories of their lives and deeds.

hos iuxta falso damnati crimine mortis. 430
Nec vero hae sine sorte datae, sine iudice, sedes:
quaesitor Minos urnam movet; ille silentum
conciliumque vocat vitasque et crimina discit.

Here's Minos in canto 5 of the Inferno:

There horrid Minos makes a snarling sound,
Examines the offenders that come in,
Then dooms and sends them as his tail is wound.
I mean, the soul of evil origin,
Approaching him, confesses all its past;
And that discerner of the grades of sin
Determines where in Hell it should be classed,
Then wraps his tail around himself to show
How many circles down he wants it cast.

Minos by Dore

When Dante the pilgrim encounters Virgil in canto 1, he meets a classical author whom he has read. That Virgil comes to him at all is an interesting result of Dante's having friends, including Beatrice, in high places. But to make the guide to the Christian afterlife a Roman pagan poet -- one whose text is both a model of classical epic and a work whose many pagan errors undergo heavy editorial correction in the Commedia -- is to construct a narrative that both is about reading Classical works and about critical discernment of their virtues and their errors.

In the Commedia, Virgil is both the literal Roman poet of history and literature, and the figure of Dante's reading of that poet's works. True to the archaic notion of allegory -- alienum eloquium -- the Roman poet is his literal text even as that text undergoes revision by something alien to it: a reading rooted in the authority of the Scriptural Word has caused that text to bear another, allegorical dimension.

Dante exhibits admiration for Virgil even as the Roman poet's text is radically transformed by Dante's own text, as the two Minoses make clear. The commanding power of ancient classical texts -- their auctoritas -- is essential to Christian education for Dante: it is the peak of human attainment sans Revelation. But Virgil and all classical works are also errant texts, which need a third eye, as it were, to gloss their purported truth with the truth revealed in Scripture.

From the beginning, then, Dante's dark wood is even more obscure than it seemed. The selva oscura of canto 1 returns in Canto 4 as the selva . . .di spiriti spessi -- a wood thick with the noble spirits of Limbo, including Virgil. These spirits are wise and useful, yet remain a selva in which one can lose oneself.

Dante makes the act of reading both explicitly and implicitly central to his poem. This is dramatized even more in Canto 5, where reading a romance leads lovers astray. Reading has consequences. We'll look at Francesca's scene in another post.

Reading Biagio's Troy

As we think about Dante as harbinger of a return to or rebirth of Classical education, consider that one hundred years later, painters like the Florentine artist featured here were depicting scenes from the Iliad in ways that reflect certain medieval characteristics.

Writer Anna Judson notes a few wonderful aspects of these works by Biagio d'Antonio (her post is part of a fun series of Museum Favorites). First, they offer contemporaneity - the dress, the style of armor, the architecture, all are 15th century Italy.

Then, Judson notes that far from being realistic representations of Troy, Biago has selected numerous famous buildings and monuments found in several cities in Italy, including the Tower of Pisa, and grouped them to compose "Troy":

The Death of Hektor

Similarly the painter depicts a sequence of events, rather than a single moment. For example, says Judson:

The Wooden Horse panel similarly depicts not just the Trojans bringing in the horse, but also the Greek army’s attack, and the kindling of the fire that will burn the city – but here the events are shown not sequentially but simultaneously, interwoven with each other, so that cause and effect, the Trojans’ celebration and destruction, become inseparable.

While this insouciance with respect to place and time might violate our sense of "realism,"  it should remind us that, as Judson says, these works fall outside the realm of strict visual mimesis. They are meant to be read. Bringing the tale of Troy into the world of his own day, offering a succession of scenes that we need to compose in order to understand the image - these are useful reminders that a depiction of Troy is, first of all, a depiction of a text by Homer, and next, is itself a text requiring us to attend to the painting as a grouping of signs that have permission to diverge substantially from Homer. It's our task to order them that they might yield a richer sense.

We will want to remember this as we look at Dante's classical figures and how he employs the image of reading.

Punishing irony: Virgil's witness in Inferno 4

In Canto 4 of the Inferno, Dante turns to Virgil and asks him a veiled (coperto) question:

“Now tell me, master, tell me this alone,”
I said to him, wishing to be assured
Of that faith by which all doubt is overthrown,
“Have any gone from here and then secured
Salvation, by their own or Another’s fee?”*

Virgil replies:

And he, who understood my covert word,
Said, “This condition was still new to me
When I beheld a Mighty One appear,
Who was crowned with a sign of victory.
He took our first begetter’s shade from here,
With Abel, Noah, and Moses, who did show
The laws to man and how to hold them dear;
King David and Abraham of long ago;
Israel with his father and his seed,
And Rachel, for whose sake he labored so;
And many more, and made them blest indeed.
And I would have you know I can attest
That, before these, no human souls were freed.”*

This exchange is of interest for several reasons. For one, it's the witness of a lost soul to the harrowing of hell and liberation of a select few. Virgil, who had died about 50 years earlier than this event, attests first-hand to the act of a "Mighty One."

ci vidi venire un possente

The event became one of the articles of the Christian creed, but Virgil recounts it  in the words of an honorable Roman. Un possente is a generic term for anyone of power, and, while accurate as far as it goes, it is blank with regard to the unique identity of the Mighty One: the martyred Son of the God of Abraham, fresh from his trial and crucifixion.

Virgil speaks of what he sees. His natural light of human reason can and does report and support the faith Dante and all Christians practice, flowing from Scripture. What Virgil "sees" is veiled to him - the facts are reported, but their full and unique implications are not.

What we as readers find here is something I think Dante the poet does throughout his Comedìa-- a poetic enactment of the profound discontinuity between the light of reason, art and science on one hand, and revelation via the Book, on the other.

In a sense, what the moment does is reproduce Dante's reading of Virgil. In the moment that Virgil voices and demonstrates his authority as teacher, guide, prophet, poet and witness, we find a blindness, a falling short -- the irony of an inescapable ignorance. It is a punishing irony, consigning him to hopeless finality in a half-lit suspense of endless desire, and more ironic because in its helplessness (vis a vis Virgil), it helps Dante overcome doubt.

Dante dramatizes the reality that obtains in a world where human genius, nobility of spirit and incorrigible honor just are not enough. For Virgil and the rest of those in Limbo, what the mind and sense and soul can see, and what the imagination or inspiration can intimate, is merely the outward appearance of a unique event whose full import -- the breaking not of rocks alone, but of the rule of death -- remains "coperto." Another word for that might be "illegible."

We'll want to be on the lookout for further examples of this mode of poetic acting out in the Comedìa. With Revelation comes a shattering literacy.

*From an unpublished translation of the Inferno by Peter D'Epiro.

ἀκτὴ: Some edges in the Philoctetes

Ὀδυσσεύς

ἀκτὴ μὲν ἥδε τῆς περιρρύτου χθονὸς 

Λήμνου, βροτοῖς ἄστιπτος οὐδ᾽ οἰκουμένη, 

ἔνθ᾽, ὦ κρατίστου πατρὸς Ἑλλήνων τραφεὶς 

Ἀχιλλέως παῖ Νεοπτόλεμε, τὸν Μηλιᾶ 

5

Ποίαντος υἱὸν ἐξέθηκ᾽ ἐγώ ποτε, 

ταχθεὶς τόδ᾽ ἔρδειν τῶν ἀνασσόντων ὕπο, 

νόσῳ καταστάζοντα διαβόρῳ πόδα: 

The opening lines of the Philoctetes. Here's Jebb's translation:

Odysseus
This is the headland of sea-washed Lemnos, land untrodden by men and desolate. It was here, child bred of the man who was the noblest of the Greeks, Neoptolemus son of Achilles, that I exposed long ago the native of Malis, Poeas' son, on the express command of the two chieftains to do so, because his foot was all running with a gnawing disease.

The first word of a work of Sophocles often is worth attending to. Here it's ἀκτὴ:

ἀκτή (A), ἡ,

A. headland, foreland, promontory, 

2. generally, tract of land running out into the sea, 

II. generally, edge,

The word takes on meaning from the text it opens. This is not the time for a full exploration, but a few elements might be worth thinking about:

From the vantage point of a sailor or a drowning man, a headland or promontory is the prospect of salvation. 

From the perspective of a stranded Crusoe figure, the point where land runs out to the sea is the limit of one's motion -- the isolating (isola = island) wall or threshold of one's world.

The ἀκτή  can be the hoped-for, salvational terra firma, or a limiting wall of despair, depending on whether one is drowning at sea or attempting to escape a deserted (οὐδ᾽ οἰκουμένη) island. That is to say, the edge cuts both ways - it's liminal.

We are at the edge of the text. Odysseus is speaking, introducing Neoptolemus and us to the scene. He begins with ἀκτή and moves through a concise statement of how he, Odysseus, isolated Philoctetes here under the orders of the Atreidai, before he ends at Philoctetes' dripping (καταστάζοντα) foot. Another edge, suppurating flesh and liquid mixed - a shedding wound upon which the serpent-bitten man cannot stand, move, or rest.

In a play that is deeply about separation, about a vast interwoven story of two nations and the isolated individual who yet is necessary to the resolution of their conflict, the question of edges, borders, limits is basic. Consider the moments in the play in which edges appear to disappear. One example might be the central choral ode in which the singers, taking part in Odysseus's plot to trick Philoctetes, are moved by the subject of their song -- the wounded man's plight. Another might be the moment Philoctetes set fire to Heracles' funeral pyre -- where the hero's suffering body, consumed in fire, ceased to suffer and, the tales tell, began another journey. 

From its first word, the Philoctetes is grappling with edges -- encountering the nature of their limits, discovering that they can be suspended, crossed, transcended. Sophocles gives us much to attend to.