The sin of synecdoche

A good deal of the story Beatrice tells in Paradiso 7 plays off of the question of direct versus indirect similarity, or proximity, or causality, of man to God. Before they sinned, Adam and Eve were good copies, or translations of God, she explains:

Goodness Divine, which from itself doth spurn
All envy, burning in itself so sparkles
That the eternal beauties it unfolds. 

Whate'er from this immediately (sanza mezzo) distils
Has afterwards no end, for ne'er removed
Is its impression when it sets its seal.

Whate'er from this immediately (sanza mezzo) rains down
Is wholly free, because it is not subject
Unto the influences of novel things.

The more conformed thereto, the more it pleases;
For the blest ardour that irradiates all things
In that most like itself is most vivacious. 

With all of these things has advantaged been
The human creature; and if one be wanting,
From his nobility he needs must fall.  

'Tis sin alone which doth disfranchise him,
And render him unlike the Good Supreme,
So that he little with its light is blanched,

And to his dignity no more returns,   (Par. 7.64-78)

Twice the passage uses the phrase sanza mezzo, i.e., without mediation, directly. It reappears a third time nearly at the end of Beatrice's speech:

But your own life immediately (sanza mezzo) inspires
Supreme Beneficence, and enamours it
So with herself, it evermore desires her.

The relation of immediacy made Adam and Eve similar to God in that they were free and immortal. But similarities can be deceiving.

God Envy

When the clever men of Greek mythology envied the Gods, they tried to steal their ambrosia, sleep with Hera, or defeat Death. They all ended up with signal eternal punishments in Hades.

With Adam, the fall is instantaneous: the moment the creature envied the Creator, he ceased to resemble that Being who, Beatrice says, doth spurn all envy. Enviously trying to assert his likeness, Adam proved his unlikeness; instead of a judicious translation of God, he produces a botched copy.

The similarity to God, it seems, veiled a vast difference -- a radical otherness. Instead of creating a perfect double of God, man discovers parody, and loses his standing, his dignified place in the universe. He goes into exile, a fallen creature in a fallen world. But unlike Tantalos or Sisyphus, he doesn't have to stay there.

Beatrice now tells of another translation, of divine Word into human flesh. It's not a simple story.

Ficca mo l'occhio, says Beatrice,

Ficca mo l'occhio per entro l'abisso
de l'etterno consiglio, quanto puoi
al mio parlar distrettamente fisso.

Fix now thine eye deep into the abyss
Of the eternal counsel, to my speech
As far as may be fastened steadfastly!

Man in his limitations had not power
To satisfy, not having power to sink
In his humility obeying then,

Far as he disobeying thought to rise;
And for this reason man has been from power
Of satisfying by himself excluded.

We need to be very attentive to Beatrice's words, her parlar, here.

Man's attempt to rise to the level of the Supreme made it quite clear that he had no concept of the Being whom he presumed to equal. The word "power," used three times, balefully intones the absence of any human power. Man doesn't even have the chops to lower himself to anything like the depth that would correspond to the absurd height to which he strove, in his follia, to rise. No amount of mere obedience will ever offset his egregious disobedience.

Yet the mistake the creature made is one we make all the time - the sin of synecdoche. Seeing that part of him was senza mezzo from God, he dreamt he had the power to become the whole - a total error of totalization. Man not only couldn't translate himself into the Divine; by presuming to try, he fell into an abyss deeper than any a human could create.

This abisso, Beatrice seems to say, is now to be found in her speaking. To listen to her is to see into that abyss, which in fact is where we always are.

Or where we would be, had God not found a way out. Man alone cannot excuse his transgression. God could forgive it - just cut him some slack - but that would not do justice to the dignity of the creature. And what Beatrice and Dante more than anything else are about in this canto is Justice, and God's other "way," mercy.

Therefore it God behoved in his own ways
Man to restore (riparar) unto his perfect (intera) life,
I say in one, or else in both of them. 

But since the action of the doer is
So much more grateful, as it more presents
The goodness of the heart from which it issues, 

Goodness Divine, that doth imprint the world,
Has been contented to proceed by each
And all its ways to lift you up again; 

Nor 'twixt the first day and the final night
Such high and such magnificent proceeding
By one or by the other was or shall be; 

For God more bounteous was himself to give
To make man able to uplift himself,
Than if he only of himself had pardoned;

And all the other modes were insufficient
For justice, were it not the Son of God
Himself had humbled to become incarnate. (Par. 7.103-120)

The doubleness of "such high and such magnificent proceeding" is truly a hall of reflecting mirrors (a mise en abyme, as the French say). 

God's problem is that his creature has to raise himself, even though man is clearly unable to do that without divine help. To merely act as God and grant a pardon would give the creature no part in his own rehabilitation. It would not accord any being worthy of recovery with the dignity of playing some role in that process.

God's solution: humble himself "to become incarnate." Translated into a man, the Verbo di Dio is humbled beyond measure -- even without the power to measure, one can see that this descent of God is at least equal to, and therefore a successful mirroring translation of, Adam's fatuous self-elevation of yore. 

At this point in Beatrice's story, we understand why Justinians's conversion from Monophysitism is deeply relevant, and we are now able to discern the subtle adequation of the balance of Justice. When the Word became flesh, it made Adam's abortive parody into something no longer absurd. Since God here is now double -- both God and a real man who teaches, is punished and killed -- He has, through sacrifice of Self, given the creature both the ownership of undergoing punishment and the dignity of playing a role in his own reparation. God doubles as man in order that man might accede to a dignity he lost when he tried to double as God. 

Are we satified?

Listening to Beatrice's parlar, we hear about the satisfaction of a debt, one that comes by surprise. A debtor satisfies his indebtedness thanks to his creditor's both assuming his debt and undergoing harsh pains to pay it off.  The question is, does this tale of satisfaction satisfy? If yes, then we're no longer in the abisso. 

If no, then why not? Is it that Adam's follia is here matched by the madness of God? The Greeks, who thought they knew gods, would probably think so. What god -- even the unknown one that Paul, on the Areopagus, said they acknowledged at Athens -- would contemplate such a thing? 

Paradiso 6 and 7 present a double account of history and of justice. From the Roman perspective of Justinian we gain insight into the workings of empire and its justification in the divinely orchestrated punishment and redemption of man. Beatrice's beatific vision takes us into the depths of that transaction. Either she persuades us to be satisfied with a surprising accounting -- an intricate juridical, ontological, and literally linguistic exchange that translates humanity into something more than a banished bad joke -- or, if we're not satisfied, leaves us at the brink of an abyss that could be nothing, or the lair of a mad god. We might not want to stare too long.

Doing Justice to the word: Paradiso 6-7

Paradiso 7 might present some interpretive difficulties, but there can be no argument that its opening tercet offers a song, sung by Justinian, that speaks in two tongues:

“Osanna, sanctus Deus sabaòth,
superillustrans claritate tua
felices ignes horum malacòth!”

Interestingly, it's common among translations of this canto to keep these lines as they appear in the original, rather than translate them. Translations are offered in footnotes - here's Grandgent's version:

"Hail, holy God of hosts, doubly illuminating with thy brightness the happy fires of these kingdoms."

As with many other poetic effects throughout the Commedia, a reader here has to work to bring out the sense, translating from two languages. We will want to ask why, at this point in the poem, Dante chooses to force us to become translators. What is it about translation that makes it relevant here?

Before getting to that, we might note that the first words of Justinian in Paradiso 6 speak of Constantine's transfer of the capital of the Roman empire to Constantinople -- a move that in Justinian's view went contro' al corso del ciel -- "against the course of the heavens."

The words speak of two different things: moving backwards, from West to East, reversing a course that tracks the actual sun in the sky as well as going against the the will of Heaven, which was interpreted to endorse a westward path of the Roman people from Troy to Italy.

Benvenuto da Imola, writing around 1380, offered this:

Justinianus narrat tempus sui imperii, conversionem et opera: et primo vult dicere quod romanum imperium jam steterat in Graecia ducentis annis et plus post translationem factam per Constantinum quando pervenit ad manus suas.

Justinian tells the story of his reign, conversion and deeds: and he first wishes to say that the Roman empire had already been located in Greece for more than 200 years after the transfer (translationem) made by Constantine when the empire came into his hands.

Benvenuto uses the term that was both proper and customary to describe what Constantine did. The noun form, translatio, derives from the verb transfero: "to carry over, carry across." However, it took on a broader meaning, as both the online etymological dictionary and Wiktionary note:

trānslātiō f ‎(genitive trānslātiōnis); third declension Translation, in the broadest sense: the process of transferring or carrying something over from one thing to another; in particular:

1. Translation of text from one language to another

1. A transfer from a literal to a figurative meaning; a metaphor (compare the Ancient Greek μεταφορά with the same senses)

The use of "translation" for the relocation of Constantine was common enough that Gibbon and other English writers spoke of "the translation" of Rome. And Justinian is clear from the outset that Constantine's act was a mistranslation -- "Rome" did not easily, or successfully, translate into Constantinople.

We have remarked before upon how the Commedia often does, through its poetics, something analogous to what it is saying, or an acting out of its thematic statement. Here the poem seems to be reinforcing through these cues the suggestion that, at this moment of the Paradiso's development, translation is deeply relevant. What Justinian does in canto 6 is to find the workings of Justice in history. But also in his own life, the decision to give coherence to Roman Law came after he abandoned Monophysitism, the belief that Jesus had a single nature that was either purely divine, or a synthesis of human and divine:

And ere unto the work I was attent,
One nature to exist in Christ, [una natura in Cristo esser] not more,
Believed, and with such faith was I contented.

This thread -- of duality, of two, not one -- marks the figure of Justinian, seen for the last time after his dual-lingual song:

Così, volgendosi a la nota sua,
fu viso a me cantare essa sustanza,
sopra la qual doppio lume s'addua;

In this wise, to his melody returning,
This substance, upon which a double light
Doubles itself, was seen by me to sing. . .   (Par. 7. 4-6)

Justinians's song is double, and sings of double illumination. At the same time, the two languages are musically harmonious, and fit the rhythmic and rhyming scheme of Dante's terza rima. As he said towards the end of his speech in Canto 6:

Diverse voci fanno dolci note;
così diversi scanni in nostra vita
rendon dolce armonia tra queste rote.

Voices diverse make up sweet melodies;
So in this life of ours the seats diverse
Render sweet harmony among these spheres  (Par. 6. 124-26)

Justinian says here that diverse voci (voices, but can also mean words, vows) and scanni (seats, positions, hierarchic statuses in the Empyrean) produce harmony in, of, and by the heavenly spheres (music as formal proportion is a subset of Justice). But to say as much is merely to allege. To clarify that just translation can in fact take place, is another thing. This performance occurs in canto 7 when Justinian incorporates two languages into the structure of a third, Dante's Italian terza rima:

“Osanna, sanctus Deus sabaòth,  

superillustrans claritate tua  

felices ignes horum malacòth!”

Note that in accomplishing this harmony, Justinians's song preserves the differences between Latin and Hebrew. The poem acts out, formally on the plane of language, what is at stake, theologically and politically, in the speech of Justinian in canto 6:

Theologically: Each tongue retains its integrity, like the two natures of Christ, yet they harmonize into a single intelligible poetic structure. 

Politically: The Hebrew words have to do with order, an order more militant than natural: sabaòth signifies "armies," and malacòth, "kingdoms" -- a vision of different and distinct kingdoms and powers, but under one God. 

Formally: The poetic accomplishment occurs in bringing Latin and Hebrew under the control of Dante's form -- his Italian syntax and the rhythm and rhyming structure of his terza rima. 

==

We might even suggest a historical analogue, as the Old Testament and Roman tongues are carried over into Italian as the inheritor of the two peoples chosen by God to bring about the central act of redemption.

And it is here that the entire burden of translation is brought to bear. When Justinian and his cohort vanish like velocissime faville, it is left to Beatrice to describe the descent of the Verbo di Dio:

fin ch'al Verbo di Dio discender piacque 

u' la natura, che dal suo fattore
s'era allungata, unì a sé in persona
con l'atto sol del suo etterno amore. 

Till to descend it pleased the Word of God

To where the nature, which from its own Maker
Estranged itself, he joined to him in person
By the sole act of his eternal love.   (Par. 7. 30-33)

The salvific act of history is a translation performed by the Word of God. The Trinity - Verbo/Fattore/Amore - is at work here in this atto, culminating not so accidentally with line 33. The duality of the man-God both is a carrying over of God into man and an opening of a way for man to cross back over to God. But as both Justinian and Beatrice strive to make clear, this elaborate transference not only must be just; it must do justice to be a true translation.

To see that this is the case, it execution must in turn be translated, i.e., read. Dante's doubt has to be dispelled through a clarity that sees how the sacrifice of Jesus was both just and unjust. Those executing him justly in his dual nature in turn had to be punished with the destruction of Jerusalem and the diaspora of the Jews. The Good News of the crucifixion, harrowing of Hell, and resurrection has a residue, an after-echo, that is bad news for the formerly Chosen People.

==

To translate is a sacrificial act of liberation. To break old bounds while yet preserving them; a disruption that frees so that something impossible, just now, can be, and can be spoken. The new, as in the New Adam, is the Old Adam carried over. A new tongue.

The sparks and fires of this scene should recall the tongues of flame of Pentecost. Fire descends, contrary to its nature, bringing with it a power of translation in which the Word becomes intelligible to all tongues.

The Commedia approaches this central redemptive act of human and divine history through the double lenses of Justice and Translation, at work in the dual kingdoms of Jerusalem and Rome. It is in the act of interpreting how Justice is rendered that the singular complexity claimed for the Redemption becomes intelligible. But how intelligible is it, as of yet?

Dante, Justinian, and Beatrice might feel that the destruction of Jerusalem, like the fall of Troy, was the necessary co-efficient of just human salvation. If some readers are left with an unsettling sense of something not quite square about this judgement, some frayed or still trembling loose end that occasions reiterated harrowing acts of injustice throughout human history, this would not come as a surprise. Doubt asserts itself. Further work is needed if one is to possibly get it right. To translate well, in the end, is to find le mot juste. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not there yet.

Opening Paradiso 1-6: A working hypothesis

Raffaello Sorbi: Piccarda taken from the convent

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

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

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

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

Horizontal view across all three canticles

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

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

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

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

Dynamic development within groups of cantos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Justinian: Mosaic at Ravenna

Rape: The predatory eagle of history

When one wants to indicate that something is right, fair, or fitting in modern Italian, one often uses the word giusto. If someone says something that is in accord with one's own views, you might say it with the same intonation as we would say "right" -- giusto!

Paradiso 6 is entirely the speech of Justinian,

Cesare fui e son Iustinïano

and, while it might not seem so at first glance, it is entirely concerned with the nature of justice.

It might not seem so because in some ways, it is a very one-sided canto. Justinian does all the talking, He compresses the history of Rome from the time of the Trojan War to the reign of Charlemagne into 62 lines, describing a zig-zag course of violence, rape and conquest that hardly intimates the presence or evolution of justice -- human or divine.

And he describes that history not as a chronicle of larger than life human actors whose intentions and actions dictate the course of events, but rather from the perspective of the Roman segno, the eagle that was the insignia of the legions of Rome. Segno of course can mean battle standard, but its root sense is "sign." From Justinian's perch on Mercury, viewing the eagle's course 745 years after his own death, what stands out from Roman world dominion is an alignment by virtue of which all the wars, conquests, rapes and subjugation enacted under the that sign made possible the justified, violent death of Jesus and the justified, violent destruction of the capital of Scripture.

Try telling this story to a disinterested bystander and see if she or he says "giusto!".  Nothing about this odd and seemingly squint-eyed view of the historic record seems just. If we don't find this asymmetry puzzling, we might be missing the neck-snapping vision of Justice at work here.

As Justinian tells his tale, beginning with the death of Pallas and marking key moments by citing predatory rapes (the Sabine women, Lucretia), the eagle emerges as the emblematic figure that winds through 1600 years of Roman power. Justinian calls it the uccel di Dio, the bird of God. If we regard its sordid history, the god in question seems more like Zeus, who carried off Ganymede --

- or the eagle said to be crafted by Hephaistos, at the bidding of his father, to devour Prometheus's liver:

When Julius Caesar is seen briefly in Inferno 4, he is described as having occhi grifagni -- a raptor's eyes. The eagle that subjugated the known world to the Imperium Romanum seems closer in spirit to Caesar than to the Holy Spirit.

The more we look at the astonishing abbreviation of Roman history in canto 6, the harder it is to justify any more beneficent view of the eagle or its accomplishments. Yet the one telling the tale is the emperor who devoted his reign to removing the troppo e'l vano from the body of Roman law, a vast undertaking that imposed order upon that corpus that became the template for human justice after the fall of Rome. If anyone understood something about justice, it's Justinian. It just doesn't fit.

If we wrestle with this a bit, there is one thing we can say about Justinian: he does justice to the complexity of justice in human history. Nothing is minimized or glossed over. If he'd given us a tale of noble rulers who never told a lie, whose greatness is a monument to themselves, in whose giant shadows we stand, or roost, like tourists, or pigeons, we'd sense the lie and likely turn away. Even Augustus, credited by all historians with achieving the Pax Romana, is not named -- he's simply the baiulo -- a porter bearing the segno.*

Dante's Justinian puts no lipstick on the pig; his history is a tale of sound and fury, error and compulsion, violence, vendetta and vengeance, following blindly in the wake of the eagle. It is the sign that moves history along -- those who follow it have no idea of the purpose, the sacred murder, toward which it moves.

Paradiso 7 will return to this enigma -- because Dante, like us, has doubt. The tale of Roman history provokes doubt just as did Beatrice's tale of the vows of Piccarda and Costanza in canto 5. As the pilgrim noted there, doubt, uncertainty, and the perception of things that do not fit spur the intellect to further understanding.

Paradiso 6 doesn't rest here - it tells the tale of Romeo, a figure that clearly has allegorical dimensions, pointing, at least, to the historical reality of Dante Alighieri. In this tale of a good and just man who is treated as if he were the opposite, a man who served his master well only to be rewarded with exile and penury, we may sense the heartbreak of the poet. Perhaps we should sense as well the heartbreak of another. One who made a very fine creature, called it Adam, to whom he gave all his creation. And watched as Adam fell into the insane turbulence of human history.

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm. 

       -- Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, IX.

*The root, bājŭlus, does not convey dignity, and extends to mean "day laborer." Also, interestingly:

A. A bearer at a funeral, Amm. 14, 7, 17; Sid. Ep. 3, 12; Aug. Ep. 19 ad Hier. 2; cf.: “vespillones dicti sunt bajuli,” Fulg. Expos. Serm. p. 558. —
B. A letter-carrier, Hier. Ep. 6 ad Julian. 1; Cod. Th. 2, 27, 1, § 2; cf.: “boni nuntii,” Vulg. 2 Reg. 18, 22.

Truth, desire and doubt in Par. 4

In Paradiso 4, Beatrice has just completed a subtle explication of will -- its elemental power, its potential to collude with violence. She clarifies how one who submits to coercion is nonetheless culpable by choosing not to escape from submission should the opportunity offer.

Dante is grateful, and, taking in her explanation, he finds another dubbio, a doubt that leads to another question.

He introduces it this way:

Io veggio ben che già mai non si sazia
nostro intelletto, se 'l ver non lo illustra
di fuor dal qual nessun vero si spazia.

Posasi in esso, come fera in lustra,
tosto che giunto l'ha; e giugner puollo:
se non, ciascun disio sarebbe frustra.

Nasce per quello, a guisa di rampollo,
a piè del vero il dubbio; ed è natura
ch'al sommo pinge noi di collo in collo.   

I see well that our intellect is never satisfied unless the truth enlighten it beyond which no truth can range.

In that it rests as soon as it gains it, like a beast in its lair; and it can gain it, else every desire were vain.

Doubt, therefore, like a shoot, springs from the root of the truth, and it is nature that urges us to the summit from height to height. (Sinclair trans. Par. 124-132)

Here the intellect reflects upon its own activity. The fact that intellect non si sazia - never satisfies itself -- assimilates the mind's effort to know the truth to desire, appetite, to a restless urge. The only thing that will bring the mind to rest is if it is illuminated by a truth outside of which no truth can range (si spazia).

The mind and truth here are in erotic tension -- the only thing that can satisfy the craving of the mind is a truth beyond which no truth can be found. Spaziarsi connotes wandering, playfully enlarging one's walk, one's passegiare, because it's enjoyable (see spassare).

Like sparziarsi, "di fuor dal qual" offers a spatial figure: outside of which no truth can range suggests there is a limit, although what is intended has no limit. Finite space is invoked to annihilate finite truth.

The blandness of the spatial figure is curious. To render a notion of the ultimate truth, the poet could have offered a riot of images relating to sublime totality, to the godhead, to the absolute in its infinite grandeur. Instead, we get a kind of limiting illumination, setting a border beyond which, simply, no truth can play. In the context of erotic play of mind and truth, to suggest that truth is that which limits the play of truth has two possibilities: either truth is so satisfying that it is like the ultimate beloved whose presence obliterates all others, or truth kills the play of difference, otherness, in its sober, self-contained precision.

The passage speaks of the truth about truth, but offers us a teasing ambiguity about its nature - is it sublimely beyond all bound (then how can it be distinguished from falsity?), or is its exacting correctness so binding as to end all speech? The first opens the door to the plenitude of the infinite; the second shuts it within cold tautology that brooks no argument -- the only thing one can say about the ultimate truth is that it is the ultimate truth: A = A.

A fine line: Is truth unending erotic bliss, or is it the All as baleful punctum?

Such balanced equivalence, or ambivalence, does not seem typical of this work. This is a poet who is never willing to leave something undecided -- especially something as urgent as the nature of ultimate truth. Of course it's the character Dante, not the author, who makes this articulation.

But this is the canto that began with a hungry man facing an undecidable choice between two perfectly equivalent objects of desire. There it was a simile employing a series of hypotheses; here, though, the pilgrim is describing to Beatrice, the source of truth, the plight of the intellect in the act of pursuing truth. What if truth is both infinite plenitude and aloof inarguability?

At this critical moment, on this blade's edge, the passage turns from the nature of truth to finding nature in our pursuit of it. One astute commentator is struck by the metaphors drawn from nature that now appear. Benvenuto da Imola, whose fine commentary was composed around 1375-80, thinks the figure of the intellect which can repose in the truth "like a beast in its lair" is especially fine:

come fera in lustra; et est optima metaphora: sicut enim fera diu vagatur et venatur per sylvam, et post omnes labores requiescit in antro; ita intellectus in mundo diu speculatur et contemplatur, et numquam quiescit nisi in ipso fine suo;

In this bold metaphor something that strikes a chord for Benvenuto that resonates back to the very start of the Commedia -- a beast wandering, hunting in a forest (sylvam) -- both the pilgrim and what he encountered in Inferno 1, louring images of his own intellect, lost, hungry, frustrated in the selva oscura. (Also resonating: Apollo, muse of the Paradiso, racing through the forest in hot pursuit of Daphne.)

The suggestion of savagery -- the beast can rest in its lair now because it's dined well upon the truth, or raped it -- hangs over this passage, which, unlike the beast, does not come to rest. Rather the pilgrim Dante asserts two things:

1. Intellect can join with the truth (giunto from giungere: "unite, couple with," noting that if it could not so conjoin, desire itself would be in vain), and,
2. At the moment the mind and truth join, new doubt springs up at its foot like a rampollo (seed, offshoot, or a natural spring of water).

The passage eludes being transfixed by the undecidable nature of truth by finding the truth of nature:

                                       . . . è natura
ch'al sommo pinge noi di collo in collo.   

As Benvenuto says, whatever else Nature is or does, it impels us (ad summam veritatem et felicitatem impellit nos). Our nature is to desire, desire spawns a quest until it kills what it desires; from that death spring new quests. We leap from peak to higher peak. This is the motion of a vibrant, active entity, a mind that is not spoon-fed, but freely hunts; a mind that's not reduced to abashed silence by knowledge, but is ever seeking. Doubt spurs us to conquer doubt.

Beatrice had said it is natural to rise and that we are part of nature. There is nothing especially noble about the quest for truth -- every flower turns toward the sun. Here Paradiso asserts its relevance and place in the quest of every human being, not just those gifted with divine revelation. We'll see this canticle proceed by leaps and bounds.

Labyrinth as trap or choice

A thoughtful post on classical and medieval uses of the labyrinth:

 Daedalus’ construction of a labyrinth is referred to by Virgil as an ‘inextricabilis error’ (Aen. 6.27) in the epic tale of the Aeneid. The poet recounts that the inventor fled Crete and went to Cumae, where he chiseled a drawing of his labyrinth on the temple doors that opened onto the passage into the underworld. Not long thereafter, Aeneas is warned that while it is easy to enter the underworld, it is much harder to find your way out. Daedalus’ creation of the Labyrinth was not without its problems. In his Metamorphoses (8.167-8), Ovid reminds us that the builder almost got lost in his own creation: “He, himself, was scarcely able to return to the threshold” (vixque ipse reverti ad limen potuit). Even the creator was not omniscient.

Sarah E. Bond's post ends with a provocative question about the difference between unicursal and multicursal labyrinths:

Tellingly, the multicursal labyrinths hinge on the choices of the individual, whereas the unicursal labyrinth hinges on the choices of the creator. It was not until the Renaissance of the 15th century that humanists began to depict non-symmetrical, chaotic, and more confused labyrinths. This was perhaps a direct reflection of new way of thinking about human agency and the divine.

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 . . . concluded (more or less)

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

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3    Part 4     Part 5

Paradiso 4 begins with three hypothetical exempla -- a man, a lamb, and a dog, each confronted with a need to choose one of two options. The needs are rooted in instincts -- hunger, self-protection, hunting -- but since the options offer no clue as to which is to be preferred, the ending in each case is death.

Why does Dante place this depiction of impasse, or undecidability, here? I can think of two reasons (both equally good, of course):

1. In cantos 1 to 3, Paradiso has followed a program that "ungrounds" the usual supports of intellect (as derived from the Greeks and scholastics). Perception, substance, and the modalities of space and time are not destroyed, but confidence in their use and verity is suspended. The pilgrim repeatedly has difficulty deciding whether what he is dealing with is here or there, or not here at all, or both here and there. Canto 4 will complicate that still further.

2. Taking a broader view, it can be seen that the pilgrim has developed from the soul lost in the selva oscura of Inferno 1 to the man who has been guided through Hell and Purgatory by one of the most learned classical minds, who releases him from his tutelage in Purgatorio 27 thus:

"Non aspettar mio dir più né mio cenno;
libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio,
e fallo fora non fare a suo senno:
per ch'io te sovra te corono e mitrio.”

"Expect no more or word or sign from me;
Free and upright and sound is thy free-will,
And error were it not to do its bidding;
Thee o'er thyself I therefore crown and mitre!"

Dante's schooling is not complete, but he has followed Virgil as far as one can via nature alone; his will is perfected. Having entered Purgatory as one who, Virgil tells Cato, liberta va cercando - "goes in search of liberty," Dante is now free to govern himself. 

It's this freedom that is found at an impasse at the opening of Paradiso 4:

Intra due cibi, distanti e moventi
d'un modo, prima si morria di fame,
che liber' omo l'un recasse ai denti;

Between two viands, equally removed
And tempting, a free man would die of hunger
Ere either he could bring unto his teeth.

The hungry man, poised exquisitely between equal feasts, cannot choose because he cannot tell which to prefer. His power to choose, though free, lacks traction -- dare we say because any methodologies of discernment have been subtracted from it.

Along with the loosening of the underprops of knowledge, there has been a concurrent concern in Paradiso 3 with will, illustrated in the stories of Piccarda and Costanza. What constitutes a vow, when is it effective, and what happens when one's intention to maintain a vow confronts a force that compels the one who wills to do other than she wills? The stories of the nuns, told in canto 3, are discussed and illuminated by Beatrice in canto 4.

St. Lawrence

Of course the predicament as described that the free man (and lamb and dog) is found in is not literally the case, but rather an analogy of the situation that Dante is actually confronting: two doubts assail him at once, making it impossible for him to speak, to ask Beatrice about one or the other:

da li miei dubbi d'un modo sospinto,

he is immobilized.

Both doubts involve reading. One has to do with whether the experience he's just had with souls in the Moon can be understood to support a literal reading of Plato's Timaeus. The other has to do with how to read the tales of those souls, Piccarda and Costanza -- to understand what they are saying about vows kept and broken. 

Beatrice's response to Dante says that to take the Timaeus literally, with its cyclical vision of souls determined by their planetary point of origin and return, would be a grave error -- indeed, it's the error that led to pagan polytheism, she avers. 

She contrasts such a literal reading of Plato with the statement that what Dante just experienced in canto 3 is a kind of sign. The souls appear and converse, but this is how Paradiso and Scripture fa segno -- make signs, which accommodate themselves to our limited faculties that depend upon the senses to arrive at knowledge.

So instead of being literal, the experience of the pilgrim is figural. Beatrice is unequivocal in setting up such a relation:

Souls in Paradiso : Pilgrim ::  Scripture : Human Reader*

Here the poem is making a meta-statement about its own reading.

This mode of "condescension" -- which, for example, attributes hands and feet to God and angels -- revises what the pilgrim has experienced -- both in canto 3 and throughout his voyage. Those angels he saw in Inferno 9 and throughout Purgatorio? We and the pilgrim "saw" them with human attributes, but now we learn that they were signs, i.e., figural accommodations to our limitations. We and the pilgrim have been experiencing allegory without being aware of it. 

If we thought we were on thin ice before, we are now in vertiginous territory. Looking back, we can no longer "see" those angels the same -- looking ahead, we are armed with the insight that all that we will experience will be other than what it truly is. If we were not told this, could we ever have discovered it for ourselves? Let's hold that question for now. The task of reading proceeds in this new "light."

This post is already longer than intended. A couple of quick observations relating this complex web of themes to certain poetic effects.

1. Intellect and Condescension. Condescension invites us to consider a mode of signification that is not rooted in nature. That is to say, when the power of the Lord is compared with mighty thunder, we are well within the tropes of the sensory, cognitive mirroring of the natural world. But when the Lord is given feet to walk in the Garden of Eden, or a mouth to speak with, there is no necessary natural link between the signifier (foot, mouth) and signified (Lord). From our perspective, as Beatrice says, such images are necessary to help our limited powers of apprehension; but from the perspective of what they "represent," they may be entirely arbitrary. We are faced with signs that neither depend on the senses nor can yield knowledge of what they signify by way of scientific experiment, logic, or any other mode of attention to their appearance. We are beyond mimesis leading to the question of how, given our limited intellects, such signs are to be read.

2. Will and Choice. In Canto 5, Beatrice will call the will's liberty the greatest gift (lo maggior don) that God made in creation. One can easily take the opening of canto 4 as an expression of crisis -- the will is paralyzed, the intellect is of no use, the hungry man dies. Following as it does from shocks to our abilities to be certain of what we know, it seems to put in question the very point of free will. For if it is impossible to decide what's better than what, our freedom comes to resemble that of the couch potato who has 500 channels, none of which offers discernible value -- meaningful difference -- over the others.

At root here is the nexus of knowledge and power, intellect and will. To have one without the other is to have nothing. One needs both power and a sense that can penetrate discerningly the intricacies of Nature, a mind that can accede to whatever lies beyond. 

Beatrice makes this all or nothingness clear with a play on words: 

li nostri voti, e vòti in alcun canto. (Purg. 3.67)

A vow (voto), if broken, is void (vòto). Humans act when performing promises, vows, which only exist so long as the will that made them is intact. We are in the realm that can perhaps benefit from an understanding of performative speech acts, in which meaning, being, and action may coincide.

If action without the guidance of intellect is chaos, and intellect itself is compromised by limits to our senses and understanding, and if signs no longer can be reliably interpreted to mean what they appear to be, the resulting paralysis might well lead to terminal frustration. As an aside, this can be linked with modern crises of faith, and post-modern gestures of futility. As we saw with Belacqua in Purgatorio 4 and now again with the "free man" who dies of hunger in Paradiso 4, Samuel Beckett's ghost is likely hiding under a nearby rock.

But in fact Paradiso 4 isn't riled by the sturm und drang issuing from these affronts to will and intellect. The pilgrim, so tied in knots by his dubbi as to be unable to speak, is resolved and restored to an energetic plenitude through the ministrations of Beatrice.

Nebuchadnezzar

This is not to say the tragic dimensions of this crisis of knowledge and will are absent -- they are there, embedded for example in the allusions to Nebuchadnezzar and Alcmaeon -- powerful kings, trapped by signs.

The tales of foretold events relate to the asymmetry of intellect and will. Nebuchadnezzar wishes to know what his portentous dream means, and puts his interpreters to the test. Amphiaraus wishes to control events in light of a future event -- his own death, and imposes his will upon his son:

• Nebuchadnezzar cannot understand his dream, but knows it portends something big about his future. In his frustration at being unable to decipher it, he demands that his soothsayers not merely interpret his dream, but first tell him what he dreamed, under pain of death if they fail -- an interpreter's nightmare if ever there was one.

• Alcmaeon's father, Amphiaraus, foresaw his own death at Thebes, and imposed his will upon his son Alcmaeon: the impious killing of Alcmaeon's mother, Eriphyle, as soon as Amphiaraus's foreseen end took place. 

These nightmares of  violent madness and vengeful matricide trace the tragic potential of the "free man's" predicament in Paradiso 4. Such extremes are certainly implicit, but in the manner of distant tales, or islands seen safely from a seaworthy ship. The poet of the Paradiso wants his readers to be mindful of the darker implications of the crisis of intellect and will, but those resonances do not dictate the tonality of the song. The semantic and tonal complexity at work here might be compared to the burgeoning polyphony of the 14th century.

Near the end of canto 4, the pilgrim is inebriated with the light of Beatrice's teaching.

"O amanza del primo amante, o diva,”
diss' io appresso, “il cui parlar m'inonda
e scalda sì, che più e più m'avviva,

"O love of the first lover, O divine,"
Said I forthwith, "whose speech inundates me
And warms me so, it more and more revives me,

The "free man" of the start (aka Buridan's ass) is now seen more as a cartoon than as a doomed, tragic king. We might not yet know why we are firmly in the comic mode, but, in this reviving warmth, we know we are.

*John Freccero formulated it this way in a lecture many years ago.

A translator's thoughts on making a new Iliad

Arline shared this interview with Caroline Alexander, whose new translation of the Iliad recently was released to high expectations, including her own:

“I know this sounds arrogant,” Ms. Alexander said, but she couldn’t imagine taking on the project “unless you believed you could do a better job.” She spent five years on her translation. Her goal is for her version to become the “translation of record.”

Alexander's discussion of her decisions in this translation are worth reading. Some have to do with diction (lexis):

I worked hard for restraint, and my mantra was “trust Homer, trust Homer.” I knew that if I could find the simple English word for his simple Greek, work for cadence—spoken cadence, not the cadence of “high” poetry—it would work.

Asked about a recent Hollywood treatment featuring Brad Pitt, she moves to another level of the work of the translator -- this not so much on the lexical level as on the level of thought (logos):

I didn’t watch the whole film. But I did see his first big kill in the opening 10 minutes. A stunning bit of stunt-work, very athletic and adroit, and totally un-Achillean. It implied that Achilles’ greatness as a warrior lay in his skill. Having just finished working on a documentary about tigers, I would venture that confronting Achilles would be more like coming face-to-face with a tiger than with a tricky swordsman.

This too is reading -- translating lived experience and that of the poem into a new vernacular of living images.

A sad note

We note with regret the passing of Cindy Bennett, whose good humor and ardent questions through many of our group's readings will be missed, even as we are grateful for the years we shared in her spirited presence. Her loss makes us mindful of others who brought so much to our sessions. We remember with admiration and regret Sue Sparagana, Jeannine Michael, and Cynthia Young, relentlessly questioning readers, all.

A few notes . . . (part 4 with minor changes)

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

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3    Part 4    Part 5

After Beatrice tells Dante in Paradiso 4 that Piccarda and all souls in Paradise "make beautiful the primal circle," that is, they are always with the Empyrean, she continues:

Qui si mostraro, non perché sortita
sia questa spera lor, ma per far segno
de la celestïal c'ha men salita.

They showed themselves here, not because allotted
This sphere has been to them, but to give sign
Of the celestial which is least exalted. (Par. 4. 37-39)

The reason the souls show themselves is to give a sign (far segno) and Beatrice likens this sign making to something Scripture does. It condescends.

Così parlar conviensi al vostro ingegno,
però che solo da sensato apprende
ciò che fa poscia d'intelletto degno.

Per questo la Scrittura condescende
a vostra facultate, e piedi e mano
attribuisce a Dio e altro intende;

To speak thus is fitted to your mind,
Since only through the sense it apprehendeth
What then it worthy makes of intellect. 

On this account the Scripture condescends
Unto your faculties, and feet and hands
To God attributes, and means something else;  (Par. 4. 40-46)

She goes on to say that the same holds true of how Scripture depicts the angels. The radical voiding -- not merely of orientation in space, but of space itself -- is linked to the figurative condescension of the language of Revelation, which conviensi al vostro ingegno, i.e., "thus fitted to your mind."

The mind -- that seat of faculties that brought the ancients to the godlike feat of systematically understanding the universe -- the pride of Plato, Aristotle, and all those in Limbo, is here brought down to the level of a severely compromised, blind actor, like Tobit -- noble, trying to do the right thing, but clueless that the guiding helping hand of Raphael is there, unasked for, within reach.

e Santa Chiesa con aspetto umano
Gabrïel e Michel vi rappresenta,
e l'altro che Tobia rifece sano.

And Holy Church under an aspect human
Gabriel and Michael represent to you,
And him who made Tobias whole again. (Par. 4. 46-48)

While a physical universe seems to appear in Paradiso, the actual model, Beatrice says, is that of a text. Space and time do not hold, presence is meaningless, anthropomorphism is a child's tale: Abandon all trope ye who enter here.

Tobias, Tobit and Raphael

Condescending to Marsyas

An attempt to sum up might go something like this: Paradiso is structured the way Scripture makes signs. Unlike similes, metaphors and other cognitive tropes that are rooted in the senses (using aesthetic properties and relations of likeness, difference, part/whole, contiguity, etc.), Scripture uses real things to "mean something else," and this altro may be beyond all imagining.

If Paradiso is structured like a text, what does this mean for us readers? Dante has already warned those seeking to follow in little boats to take care -- his boat will leave no track, though it is all the trace we have.

By the end of canto 4, the confident, scientific clarity of Beatrice's mirror experiment of canto 2 has been upended with the advent of a potentially limitless indeterminacy.

The usual faculties of the human intellect -- the tools and faculties of science -- are placed alongside another mode of signification unlike what we can safely say we know. A mode that gives hands and feet to all that is radically indeterminate and outside of earthbound space and time through a sign-making that, says Beatrice, condescends (condescende). 

Beatrice's empirical experiment might carry little weight as an example of antiquated science, but it has force in putting the claims and ambitions of intellect -- whether applied through experimental inquiry or logic -- into play. These claims are not negated, but reduced, compromised and complicated within a text that attempts to embrace and encompass both hard science and Scriptural revelation. Tensions in this and build, as the stakes mount up.

Flaying of Marsyas, Antonio de Bella

We might now relate this to Dante's choice of Marsyas as the name and figure both for the experience of Paradiso and for the song of that experience. To be drawn from the sheath of one's members is not just to leave behind an earthly husk: it is to have everything one has always used to see, hear, measure and know stripped away. After this, nothing will be what it seems, and when something seems to be what it seems, it's likely to be quite other. We very well might just be out of our senses.

Lewis Carroll had nothing on this.

To be continued . . .

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 . . .