The trajectory of furtive eros: Paradiso 27

Aside from an external preoccupation that's consumed a lot of my time recently, internal properties of the text have slowed our ascent to the higher reaches of Paradise. In the past six weeks, we've managed to eke through Paradiso 27 and have made it less than halfway through 28. It's the poet's fault.

The poem unfolds a series of thresholds bringing together so many textual skeins -- so many echoes, motifs, layers, metamorphoses and transitions -- that reading becomes excavation. Two weeks ago we read the opening of canto 28 -- the simile of the mirror and the doppiero. The other day we reread it, and found it new -- more richly complex than it had first seemed.

The notion of coming to the "end" of the Commedia is but a prospect, a hypothetical limit to which any reading is asymptotic. In a sense, the reading is the hunt, the caccia, for an elusive prey that was there before any reading came to be, and will always yield more than any single interpretation, however masterly and comprehensive. The totality of the text in relation to our reading might be proportioned as the originary luce e amore is to the pursuing creation striving to accede to it.

The notion of the hunt, the quest, with the desire to capture and possess the object of pursuit, runs throughout the text. In cantos 28 and 29 it will reach extraordinary scale. I want to note a few ways in which it's present in Paradiso 27.

This canto has to be one of the more astonishing ones simply in terms of sheer range of matter. Beginning with Dante facing the same four figures -- Peter, James, John and Adam -- we watch Peter grow red with anger at the degradation of his earthly succession. The entirety of heaven, which had seemed a moment before to smile, takes on the bloody hue. Beatrice's coloration clearly evokes Ovid's tale of naked Diana, surprised while bathing on Mt. Cithaeron, turning scarlet before the startled gaze of Actaeon (Metamorphoses 3). The goddess and Dante's guide turn . . .

the same colour which, through sun adverse,
  Painteth the clouds at evening or at morn,

Di quel color che per lo sole avverso
 nube dipigne da sera e da mane, (Par. 27: 28-29)

Peter continues fulminating that his keys and his own self have been degraded to mere figures on escutcheons and seals used by Boniface and others to wage war on the flock, or, as lies to be sold. That he who served as the very basis of the Church on Earth emits such blunt, unfettered rage and human frustration is itself striking, but Peter goes on, echoing Cacciaguida, to make sure the poet has his marching orders:

                                  "open thy mouth;
 What I conceal not, do not thou conceal."

                                      "apri la bocca,
 e non asconder quel ch'io non ascondo.” (65-66)

At this point, the entire host of heaven falls upward like snow in warp drive, and Beatrice directs Dante to take another look at Earth. The last time he'd done this, he had just arrived to the stars from Saturn (22: 133-154).

This new sight shows him the same threshing floor, aiuola, but from a different angle:

Since the first time that I had downward looked,
  I saw that I had moved through the whole arc
  Which the first climate makes from midst to end;

So that I saw the mad track of Ulysses
  Past Gades, and this side, well nigh the shore
  Whereon became Europa a sweet burden.

And of this threshing-floor the site to me
  Were more unveiled, but the sun was proceeding
  Under my feet, a sign and more removed.

Da l'ora ch'ïo avea guardato prima
 i' vidi mosso me per tutto l'arco
 che fa dal mezzo al fine il primo clima;

sì ch'io vedea di là da Gade il varco
 folle d'Ulisse, e di qua presso il lito
 nel qual si fece Europa dolce carco.

E più mi fora discoverto il sito
 di questa aiuola; ma 'l sol procedea
 sotto i mie' piedi un segno e più partito. (27:79-87)

The passage cries out to be compared with the earlier backward look, which took place right after he arrived in the stars. The planets with their pagan gods are gone. Now Dante sees two things: one is the eastern beginning and western edge of the European quest, from the moment of Europa's seduction to the mad pursuit of Ulysses. The other is his realization that the sun has traveled one quarter of its trip around the Earth since last he looked.

The bracketing of Dante's visit to the starry sphere by these two backward looks is pointed and calls for comment. The aiuola seemed closer in the first look, which retraced Dante's own voyage through the spheres of Paradise. The second spans the bounds of recorded history of the West, ending on a mad ship moving into the open sea, seeking it knows not what.

Why mark the origin of this wayward career with Europa? Of course she names the continent that is Dante's frame of reference. But perhaps there's a suggestive clue in Ovid's tale -- there usually is. The seduction of Agenor's daughter, the sister of Cadmus, begins like this:

Iamque deus posita fallacis imagine tauri
se confessus erat Dictaeaque rura tenebat,
cum pater ignarus Cadmo perquirere raptam
imperat et poenam, si non invenerit, addit   5
exilium, facto pius et sceleratus eodem.
Orbe pererrato (quis enim deprendere possit
furta Iovis?) profugus patriamque iramque parentis
vitat Agenorides Phoebique oracula supplex
consulit et, quae sit tellus habitanda, requirit.

(Meta. 3.19)

Now Jupiter had not revealed himself,
nor laid aside the semblance of a bull,
until they stood upon the plains of Crete.
But not aware of this, her father bade
her brother Cadmus search through all the world,
until he found his sister, and proclaimed
him doomed to exile if he found her not;—
thus was he good and wicked in one deed.
When he had vainly wandered over the earth
(for who can fathom the deceits of Jove?)
Cadmus, the son of King Agenor, shunned
his country and his father's mighty wrath.

The career of the West begins with furta, theft performed by the Lord of gods and men. Given the degree of calculated deception that went into the theft, translator Tony Klein's "deceits" is entirely justified. That humans cannot "fathom" the tricks of gods is a theme recurs throughout the Metamorphoses. The theft of Europa opens the story of the Minoan world of Crete and, through Agenor's order to his son, the world of Greece through the wanderings of Cadmus and founding of Thebes. The West was able track itself back to Phoenicia because writing, they say, was brought to Greece by Cadmus, who never did find his sister.

Cadmus, Harmonia and the Ismenian Dragon

Canto 27 interweaves motifs questing and hunting throughout, as well as the seductive snares of the gods. In addition to Europa carried off by Zeus and hunted by Cadmus, there is the horrific reversal that follows Diana's reddening -- Actaeon the hunter becomes the conscious prey his dogs tear apart.

In a moment, after the pilgrim turns back from regarding nearly the whole of Europe, the pilgrim will rise to the Primum Mobile. The sun has shifted one quadrant, or six hours, from his last look, so Dante's time in Gemini matches Adam's entire unfallen life in the garden. Adam lost Paradise shortly after noon, which happens to be the same time of day that Actaeon stopped his hunt, walked into the wood, and angered a naked divinity at a spring. It would not have been lost on Dante that Actaeon's tale repeats that of his ancestor, Cadmus, who, searching for Europa on the same Mt. Cithaeron, followed the heifer that led him to the spring where his men were attacked by the Ismenian dragon.

The enchanted world of the Metamorphoses where unassuming mortals are lured, seduced, transformed and destroyed by encounters with devious sacred beings stands behind Dante's text in meaningful juxtaposition. Dante has just finished speaking to Adam, who is fully conscious that his act of eating of the tree was a conscious choice:

Or, figliuol mio, non il gustar del legno
 fu per sé la cagion di tanto essilio,
 ma solamente il trapassar del segno. 

Now, son of mine, the tasting of the tree
  Not in itself was cause of so great exile,
  But solely the o'erstepping of the bounds. (Par. 26. 115-117)

When the pilgrim turns back from the aiuola to Beatrice, he is captured in a way Europa would have perfectly understood:

And if or Art or Nature has made bait
To catch the eyes and so possess the mind,
In human flesh or in its portraiture,

All joined together would appear as nought
To the divine delight which shone upon me
When to her smiling face I turned me round.

e se natura o arte fé pasture
da pigliare occhi, per aver la mente,
in carne umana o ne le sue pitture,

tutte adunate, parrebber nïente
ver' lo piacer divin che mi refulse,
quando mi volsi al suo viso ridente.  (27: 91-96)

All the beauty of all the lures the world holds are nothing to these eyes, this smile that charmed him so long before, and set him aflame.

The poet's own experience of Eros in the world is one way he knows that the ancients and their poets were on to something important. More important is that he show how different the result of the hook (amo) of Amor can be. It might be a power, a trap, but it isn't necessarily a doom.

The virtue that her look endowed me with
From the fair nest of Leda tore me forth,
And up into the swiftest heaven impelled me.

E la virtù che lo sguardo m'indulse,
del bel nido di Leda mi divelse
e nel ciel velocissimo m'impulse. (97-99)

The entire physical universe, which he is about to leave behind, is here summed as the bel nido di Leda. He is literally torn from it by the virtù gazing at him. The ancients knew that nest as the cradle of noble, beautiful, tragic demi-gods and mortals. On the same night Leda slept with her husband King Tyndareus, she was fertilized by a divine dissimulator. 

Some say Zeus impersonated a swan and took Leda; others say Venus pretended to be an Eagle pursuing Zeus in his fake swan persona; some say he pretended to fall into the lap of Leda (others say Nemesis) and swooned there in her protection until she fell asleep -- myths speak of divine beings, but have the waywardness of mortals. 

If canto 27 is haunted by tales of divine abductions and elaborate ruses and rapes, there is reason. The potent charms of Beatrice don't simply engage his devotion -- they uproot him from the beautiful nest because his actual origin is elsewhere. The verb describing this rooting, divellere, is quite strong -- it suggests a total tearing up, wounding, forcible dismemberment:

The word could describe what happened to Actaeon, or to Marsyas, or to Pentheus, another scion of Cadmus who at the end of Metamorphoses 3 is shredded by Bacchantes let by his mother. All these divine acts of destruction in Ovid occur within the nest of Leda. But the uprooting that happens to Dante here tears him out of that nest, beyond Gemini, beyond all location. As the new Actaeon, the new Ulysses, the new Icarus, the new Orpheus, the new Europa, the poet makes sure we know how much those tales of Eros meant to him, and to us.

We've not yet even mentioned the latter portion of canto 27. Its ambit is wide.

Sun dogs? Adam's reticence in Paradiso 26

. . . out of Norse mythology and archaic names (Danish: solhunde (sun dog), Norwegian: solhund (sun dog), Swedish: solvarg (sun wolf)), . . . constellations of two wolves hunting the Sun and the Moon, one after and one before, may be a possible origin for the term. Sun Dog

As soon as Adam begins to speak in Paradiso 26, he wields a very fancy, learned Greek term, twice: parhelion -- image, copy, equal -- of the sun:

Indi spirò: Sanz' essermi proferta da te,
la voglia tua discerno meglio
che tu qualunque cosa t'è più certa; 

perch' io la veggio nel verace speglio
che fa di sé pareglio a l'altre cose,
e nulla face lui di sé pareglio."

Then breathed: "Without thy uttering it to me,
Thine inclination better I discern
Than thou whatever thing is surest to thee; 

For I behold it in the truthful mirror,
That of Himself all things parhelion makes,
And none makes Him parhelion of itself.  (Par. 26: 103-108)

His claim to knowledge is exactly like that of Cacciaguida, Beatrice and others in Paradise - "I know your thoughts better than you do," because the interlocutor is looking directly into the mind of God - the mirror that cannot be mirrored.

Photo of an actual parhelion - or "sundog"

The use of parhelion -- such a showy word -- is arresting. First, it's Greek, and might remind us that Adam's doppelganger, Ulysses, would not even respond to someone who spoke to him in a tongue other than his own. The question of language is already in play before Adam addresses it in his answers to Dante's four questions.

There is nothing hackneyed in Dante's presentation of the first Man. No one else would have approached Adam in this way. First, the insistent recurrence of "firstness" - primaia - marks this passage as concerned with the question of what it means to be "number one" - how to us humans, it is simply unacceptable to be number two. At the root of Adams trapassar, there is this moment of negation - YOU are not number one, I AM. Milton runs endless variants upon Satan's negation, and Adam's.

Dante quietly raises the issue within an allusive passage that begins with the sun and parahelions. Whatever else one might make of this word here, two things are true - this is a hapax legomenon, except it isn't, because the rare word is used twice in two lines. Its eye-catching uniqueness is immediately undercut by the duplicity of its doubling repetition.

Dante is mimicking the sad lack of language -- the power of ontological origination does not lie within it or us. In the text of medieval astrology, the parhelion was equated with mock suns, also known as sun dogs. These mirrors of the sun were bright, but nothing in comparison with the real deal. We and our words are paltry doppelgangers, mockeries of a Maker whose variety infinitely exceeds our imagination.

If one asks where this deflation of duality occurs in Paradiso 26, the best reply might be, "once Adam opens his mouth -- everywhere." He's a dud. Far from the rhetorical power of Ulysses of Inferno 26, who with a very brief speech ignited an exhausted team to the ends of the Earth (devil take the hindmost), Adam sorts out the difference between gustar del legno and trapassar del segno, echoing his Greek descendant's decision to go beyond the segno of Hercules.

To trapassar il segno is to enter a world of conventional, un-Adamic language:

ché l'uso d'i mortali è come fronda
 in ramo, che sen va e altra vene.

Echoing our ineluctable mortality from the greatest poets -- Homer, Virgil, Horace -- links language not to Prometheus's stolen fire, but to the negation of it. To be human is not to be like Adam's words -- but to be true children of an ephemerality indistinguishable from them.

The shortcoming of the father of our species is as clear, and as powerful, as the structural ironies visited upon Francesca, Ugolino and other denizens of hell. Adam's transgression brought him the gift of counting. The proportions of Edenic bliss to earthly existence to time in Limbo are not only curiously precise, but tacitly comical. Mosquitoes live longer than Adam in Paradise. "Congratulations on toting that up -- you traded immortality for that?" Something of this grimaces over the scene.

In view of this, the reader needs ask: where is the recuperation of Adam? Where is the theology of the fortunate fall?

Here's one suggestion. With the number play in this canto, Adam is always clear about his, and language's, non-primacy. He might be an animal coverto, but he's hiding nothing.

"Nel monte che si leva più da l'onda,
 fu'io, con vita pura e disonesta,
 da la prim' ora a quella che seconda,
come 'l sol muta quadra, l'ora sesta.”

"Upon the mount that highest o'er the wave
  Rises was I, in life or pure or sinful,
  From the first hour to that which is the second,
As the sun changes quadrant, to the sixth."

Adam's loss of immortal bliss occurred shortly after the sixth hour of his Day 1, at the moment the second quadrant of the sun's journey begins. His exile occurs at the first hour of the second quadrant -- the one that followed  -- "seconda" -- the prim'ora of his bright nativity.

That this echoes the hour of the sun's journey in which the crucial Good Friday act of his (and Dante's) redemption began remains unspoken. Adam omits the inexplicable act of caritas that took him and us beyond the segno of mortality. The father of language has no words for that. One can charitably ask whether any Ulyssean encomium could more adequately convey the primal power of the Word than Adam's reticence.

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.

Preparing to go beyond the sun: Par. 13

As the cantos of the Sun come to an end with Paradiso 13-14, the density and richness of the text seem to grow exponentially. There is simply not enough time to get into the close detail that would do justice to canto 13. For now, a few observations that perhaps will help appreciate what seems to be a major transition that takes place between the clarity of the Sun and the distinctly indistinct realm of Mars that begins with canto 14.

First, as many note, the five cantos of the Sun have many instances of the x-shaped crossing (or ring structure) of chiasmus. One can only appreciate this patterning after completing all five cantos, of course. Indeed, one could say that appreciation of chiastic form, especially on the level of larger segments of text, always requires that the reader look back, and remember what has come before, in order to identify the pattern.

For example, the command to imagine, repeated thrice at the opening of canto 13, balances Thomas Aquinas's insistence on being attentive and holding things in memory at the end of canto 11, introduced by three "if"s:

Or, se le mie parole non son fioche,
se la tua audïenza è stata attenta,
se ciò ch'è detto a la mente revoche,

Now if my utterance be not indistinct,
If thine own hearing hath attentive been,
If thou recall to mind what I have said,  (11.133-35)

Thomas is talking about the pilgrim's understanding of his discourse, but the "if"s hold true for the reader as well -- turning the leaves of a book, the reader is taking in the words, which are like seeds. But the work of reading involves more than just taking in -- it involves remembering, reflecting, and attending to patterns to mill and bake and eat the bread of the angels.

So canto 13 beings with a fascinating passage too complex to explore here. But we can note that the reader is now invited to do more than remember; one is to imagine what the poet describes : 15 of the brightest stars from all over the night sky, plus the 7 of the Wain (the Big Dipper), plus two at the mouth of the horn (the Little Dipper) -- moving from a process of selection by brightness to a selection by form to a selection of part of a whole, anchored in the North Star -- all adding up to 24 stars.

The poet is giving the reader an exercise in pattern recognition, a kind of rebus or puzzle that makes us work across different kinds of patterns before reaching a totality of 24, which equals the number of teachers revolving in two wheels around the poet and Beatrice, as well as the number of lines it takes the poet to provide us with the opening movement of canto 13.

The passage of course is more complex -- once we shape the images we've been told to imagine -- we then must imagine those stars turning into two wheeling signs like a doubled crown of Ariadne:

aver fatto di sé due segni in cielo,
qual fece la figliuola di Minoi
allora che sentì di morte il gelo;

To have fashioned of themselves two signs in heaven,
Like unto that which Minos' daughter made,
The moment when she felt the frost of death;

Our envisioning of the key stars in charting the navigation of the seas -- signs used by Ulysses and all mariners -- is metamorphosed into new signs, like those of the girl who helped Theseus navigate his way into and out of the lethal Daedalian labyrinth of Crete.

And, after we've done all this at the poet's behest, we learn that our imagined vision relates to the reality Dante experienced the way the Chiana, a sluggish Tuscan stream, compares to the fastest celestial sphere, the Primum Mobile.

Chiana, we note, contains "chi," and the entire 24-line passage is a chiasmus that begins with the promise that our imagining will give us "who desire to well understand what the poet saw" something verisimilar to the reality, and ends with the deflating assurance that our mental image is about as close to the truth as night is to day.

The irony of making us work so hard for what is very small is undeniable. There's also death here, coming with a cold shock. One could (and should) explore the ramifications of a passage from navigational clues -- constellations -- to circling signs that are "like" the figure made in the sky by the daughter of Minos. Interwoven here are Ulysses and Theseus, two of the ancient questers who, by the light of their culture's wisdom, were successful.

Throughout the Commedia, the pilgrim/poet has been both like and unlike these heros (as well as Aeneas). Are we reminded here of how those questers in fact failed? We recall Ulysses' own tale (in Inf.26) of leaving behind the North Pole, and the vortex that consumed his ship. And Theseus, who owed his conquest of the Minotaur to the clues of Ariadne, left his guide behind, to be claimed by Dionysus, who constellated her crown at her death.

Here that single circle of stars is doubled, yet is still called a sign. It's a new sign, a double dancing "true constellation" that is not visible to sailors on Earth, but to questers who read and remember the visions and histories and allegories of the 24 teachers, grouped according to their leanings toward Francis and Dominic.

We return to the two wheels of the chariot/Church, also the two wheels of the Ark, but now they are likened to a doubled crown put in the sky by Dionysus.

This reference to the God of wine and ecstasy should, as Thomas A. says, be kept in mind. We're about to get a comprehensive lesson from Thomas about creation, which will treat in some detail the imperfections of "wax" that cause diversity and flaws in Nature. It turns out that form, here below the moon anyway, is always compromised, never without contingency and dross:

Se fosse a punto la cera dedutta
 e fosse il cielo in sua virtù supprema,
 la luce del suggel parrebbe tutta; 

ma la natura la dà sempre scema,
 similemente operando a l'artista
 ch'a l'abito de l'arte ha man che trema.

If in perfection tempered were the wax,
  And were the heaven in its supremest virtue,
  The brilliance of the seal would all appear;
But nature gives it evermore deficient,
  In the like manner working as the artist,
  Who has the skill of art and hand that trembles.  (13.73-78)

At this moment in the lesson of the Sun, Thomas acknowledges that Nature is inherently errant, like the hand of a master artist that trembles. (Hollander and others convincingly refer to Ovid's Daedalus building the wings that will enable him to escape from Crete, but at the cost of Icarus: "The father's hands trembled," (Metam. 8.211)). Greek genius always involves loss, just as the forms of Nature always involve dross. The limits of the visible, of image and form, are being driven home in canto 13.

The last lines of canto 13, suggesting the generous capacity even the wisest men have for error, chiastically reflect the opening of canto 11, the insensata cura of mortals and their vain syllogisms. As we leave the Sun, the limits of the Apollonian -- of realizable pattern and hence formal knowledge -- are being demarcated.

The question of how do we go on -- by what signs to navigate once we've crossed beyond the solar light of logic, history, science, philosophy and wisdom -- is taken up in canto 14.

Addressing Ulysses: The perfect contrapasso

Virgil in Inferno 26 tells Dante not to speak to Ulysses - he'll speak for him, because, he says, "They were Greeks, perhaps they'd disdain your words."

Words, language, are the substance of rhetoric -- the very sound of words plays a part in whether the one addressed deigns to respond. So too with spelling. Consider how differently you regard a message seeking your input, or your money, when the message itself lacks orthography, syntax, the basics of civilized discourse.

Virgil fears Dante's address would "lack address," in the secondary sense of adroitness of delivery, the manner of coming at someone:

1 dutiful and courteous attention especially in courtship —usually used in plural 

2 a: readiness and capability for dealing (as with a person or problem) skillfully and smoothly : adroitness 

b obsolete: a making ready; also : a state of preparedness

3 a: manner of bearing oneself  

b: manner of speaking or singing: delivery

Turning to the Greeks, the Roman poet employs a full-bore captatio benevolentiae -- working on his audience by alluding to his own alti versi, the lofty lines of his epic (lines that in fact do nothing to enhance Ulysses' reputation):

"If I deserved of you while I lived . . . if I deserved of you much or little when in the world I wrote the lofty lines, do not move on, but let the one of you tell where, being lost, he went to die."

The ploy works; Ulysses begins a speech that manages to contain a full life's quest within a few lines.

I want to look at the first thing he says, simply because in the large commentary devoted to this canto, these lines might receive short shrift. Ulysses begins:

When I parted from Circe, who held me more than a year near Gaeta before Aeneas so named it . . .

The parallel is clear: Ulysses was "held" -- the verb sottrarre can carry the suggestion of something taken fraudulently -- by Circe, the witch who turned his men into animals. Aeneas, coming to the same place, chooses to name it for his beloved wetnurse, and it bears that name today: Gaeta.

The contrast is between the wily Greek who, though escaping bestial enchantment, nonetheless is caught in the charms of Circe for "more than a year," and the Roman leader who, seeking a new land, names a beautiful portion of it for the nurse who nurtured him (and his son, some say), and who died at that point in their journey.

Throughout the Aeneid the Romans show themselves often nobler, more generous, and more rooted in the realm of the heart than the Greeks. In bestowing the humble nurse's name upon the isle of Circe, Aeneas moves toward the obliteration of the memory of Ulysses' experience there. Ulysses is being written out of epic memory on the Roman peninsula.

For Dante and his world, many of the names they use derive from the exploits, stories, the emperors and poets of Rome. The world was a palimpsest; one could dig down and find Greek predecessors, but they have been overwritten -- put into Italic form, or completely replaced by names that bring in indigenous Roman stories and achievements. Romans accepted the fact that they came after the brilliant world of Greece, but they push back, asserting different values and priorities. Allusively the point is made: Ulysses and the Greeks might have mapped out the world, explored it, given us knowledge, but the romance of the Roman people, their quest and glory, has remapped it with its own aura and meanings.

If Ulysses's language is usurped in this way, it points to another, larger eclipse further on in his journey. To know things is to name them, and Ulysses is rather meticulous in giving his auditors the names of places he and his men took in on their last voyage:

                            Spagna,  

fin nel Morrocco, e l'isola de' Sardi . . . 

. . . Sibilla . . .

 . . . Setta.

Passing the pillars of Heracles they sail five months into the blank oceanic void beyond. A mountain appears, and with it the storm that takes them under. Ulysses has no name for the mountain, of course (see previous post). He has no idea what it is, that it's made of earth that fled the body of Satan as he plummeted down and reamed out the core of the planet.* Ulysses lacks all sense of this, and, of course, he had no one to whom to tell his tale. So neither a name, nor a memory of the exploit, lives on -- other than in the Commedia. 

The world's most accomplished traveler, this former hero of the nostos, not only doesn't return, but also leaves no tale of his final destination, no trace. This silence, this aphasia, is the antithesis of kleos for the Greeks. Only a judicial imagination of genius could have produced what happens here: a contrapasso loaded with irony potent enough to punish Ulysses.

For the Greek teller of tales knows that this, his greatest exploit, was swallowed up with his drowning, and this will help us understand why Ulysses is Dante's uncannily nightmarish doppelganger. To have seen what he saw but cannot name or chart, and then to drown, puts his staggering final tale out of reach of knowledge, fame, earshot, of language itself. For this Homeric hero, no greater punishment is conceivable than to have been graced with achieving one incomparable feat, only to lie beneath the sea in eternal silence in the absolute certitude (he will never know otherwise) that no one will ever hear the greatest story he or his odyssey ever could have told. In this certitude, the hero encounters a judge who knew precisely how he deserved to be addressed.

*Lucifer, in falling, excavated the earth that creates the empty cone of hell, carved into the northern hemisphere; the displaced earth fled from Lucifer and then became Mount Purgatory, a cone of earth that rises up in the middle of the southern hemisphere.

Columbia University, Digital Dante.

Experiencing nothing: Ulysses in Inferno 26

[Note: this post has undergone several revisions - I hope it's now "finished."]

Our stimulating discussion of Inferno 26 today made it clearer to me than ever before how rich and enigmatic the canto of Ulysses is. I won't try to summarize the many fine points made by everyone, or the positions regarding whether to find damnable fault, and where, in the career of the Greek hero.

I just want to make a couple of place-holding points while fresh in mind. First, the canto is resonant with images of light, fire, sun, moon, and things large and small. More than just large or small, there is a strange almost quantum effect in which something that was small becomes quite huge, while never ceasing to be small. Scale is liquid, and ingegno, the Muse, must be restrained even as Dante is nearly overwhelmed in the presence of his classical double, the hero of many turns, whose rhetorical art was capable of putting in motion consequences beyond his control.

If nothing else, the presence of Ulysses -- both implicit and via explicit allusion --throughout all three canticles ought to make it clear that Athena's favorite is the predecessor and double of the pilgrim who is following Virgil through hell and purgatory. Take the alto passo where Ulysses meets his end. When we learn from this unique tale that Ulysses drowned within sight of the Mount of Purgatory, we might experience a certain uncanny frisson, remembering the pilgrim lost in the wood who looks back at the passo where he nearly drowned, and looks up at a mountain he cannot climb.

E come quei che con lena affannata,
    uscito fuor del pelago a la riva,
    si volge a l’acqua perigliosa e guata,
così l’animo mio, ch’ancor fuggiva,
    si volse a retro a rimirar lo passo
    che non lasciò già mai persona viva.

And just as someone who, with panting chest,
    Has made his way to shore from the deep sea
    Turns back to gaze at the deadly waters crossed,
So too my mind, continuing to flee,
    Turned back to look again upon that trail
    That never yet let living man go free.*

More allusions to Ulysses come later in the poem And the tale he tells, of seeking to experience the unknown, to know it, presents a paradox basic to the quest: what is there to know if there is still the striving for knowledge, but nothing left in the world to know?

Ulysses is in hell, says Virgil, because he used his arte and ingegno to cause certain events to occur. We have seen this illustrated in granular detail in our reading of the Philoctetes, but it's built in to the mythos of the great-grandson of Hermes. Unlike the horses that took Elijah to the highest, Ulysses fashioned a false horse and the lie that got it into Troy.

Ulysses troubled Dante, just as had the noble ancients of Limbo, and Dante gives him a staggering last hurrah. Profound recognition and admiration -- as well as unsettling fascination and longing -- accompany Dante's encounter with this figure. All the terror of canto 1 is there, at the end of canto 26:

Tre volte il fé girar con tutte l’acque;
    a la quarta levar la poppa in suso
    e la prora ire in giù, com’ altrui piacque,
infin che ’l mar fu sovra noi richiuso.

Ulysses might be damned to the eighth bolgia for his false light of counsel, but his grit is all too human. Which raises the question of how to read his ultimate contrapasso. One might be advised to tread carefully when attempting to read divine judgment.

What Virgil does not say is that Ulysses is damned for seeking to know the unknown. One way to see Dante's tale of Ulysses' final voyage is as a parody of grace. No other living mortal -- certainly no pagan -- ever laid eyes on the Mount of Purgatory. If the Deity wished to bar Ulysses from overreaching, a turbo could have sunk his little boat anywhere along its folle volo. "Altrui" didn't prevent it from reaching visual range of Purgatory.

This is a man who lacked knowledge of Revelation,  but almost stole it.

The summit of human striving goes no further -- Ulysses doesn't even make it to the soggy beach at the base of the mount. His double, Dante, will. Ulysses is graced with an extraordinary glimpse before he drowns. The pilgrim goes a different route, one that is in touch not only with classical wisdom but endowed with Revelation, and goes beyond Ulysses by a different way, not under his own steam.

No other human, not even Heracles, came close to what Ulysses experienced. The punishing irony: he has no idea what he experienced. He saw with the naked eye what could not be seen, what could not be part of experience or knowledge in the classical, horizontal sense: the upward spiraling ladder of Revelation may only be gratuitously given, never discovered, uncovered, inferred or deduced by any inquiry, math or logic. To see revealed truth without Revelation is tantamount to seeing nothing at all.

*Translation courtesy of Peter D'Epiro.

The textual intimacy of Penelope

Ovid begins his book of love letters with Penelope, writing to her husband whose fate is unknown. As she explains, she heard much of the tale of Troy from her son, Telemachus, who got it from Nestor. She got some information from Menalaos as well. Ovid, then, is grounding his poem in Homer -- the news of the war that is the Iliad, and fragments of the fate of Ulysses after Troy fell, which set the scene in the early books of the Odyssey.

So Penelope's letter is full of references to the two epics, and we could do worse than refresh our memory of some of the key characters and scenes that she mentions, as here:

And he told of Rhesus and Dolon dead by your sword,
so that one was betrayed by sleep, the other by guile.
It was brave, oh you, who are more and more forgetful of your own,
to enter the Thracian camp, with night’s deception,
and kill so many men, with the help of one!
Then you were truly cautious, and thinking first of me!
My heart shook all the time, with fear, while my dear hero
was depicted, riding through the army on Ismarus’s horses.

Dolon

The tale of Rhesus and Dolon (known as the Doloneia) takes place in book 10 of the Iliad, and concerns a night raid that Diomedes and Odysseus carry out. They capture and interrogate Dolon, a  Trojan spy (dressed as a wolf), then use his information to kill Rhesus, a rich king newly arrived to the war. It's a terrific episode of guile, Odyssean quick wittedness, and double-dealing. Apart from its value in the epic, we might think about why Penelope includes it in her letter.

Penelope also mentions minor characters, like Tlepolemos, a son of Herakles who dies at the hands of Sarpedon, and Antilochus, the youngest son of Nestor, whose best known feat, dying to save his father's life, isn't in the Iliad, but is remembered in Pindar's 6th Pythian:

Long ago, too, powerful Antilochus showed that he had this way of thinking; [30] he died for his father's sake, by awaiting the man-slaying commander of the Ethiopians, Memnon. For the horse kept Nestor's chariot from moving, since it had been wounded by Paris' arrows; and Memnon was aiming his strong spear. [35] The old man of Messene, his mind reeling, shouted to his son; the cry he hurled did not fall to the ground; his god-like son stayed on the spot and paid for his father's rescue with his own life, [40] and because he accomplished this tremendous deed he seemed to the younger men to be the greatest man of his time in excellence towards his parents.

It seems that Penelope was acquainted with the fates of characters even Homer doesn't include in his narrative!

Also, Penelope's letter is not celebrating the heroic life, as Pindar does in his Odes. If anything, as she weaves her web alone, far from the action, she speaks as the end term, the destination, of Ulysses. She is what was there before he left to help take Helen back, and she'll be there to hear the stories upon his return. But is she simply an auditor, waiting for the heroic song to arrive?