#canto 11

YO

I just noticed smh

Apparently outis hasn't embarked on the oddessey yet

According to this line frm udjat outis, it seems she's fresh frm the trojan war ( the smoke war ) and she's enlisted the LC to help her get back home

Now this can mean one of 2 things

Outis enlisted our help to take over Ithaca, I CORP ??

With the slaying of the suitors of Penelope

Possibly the higher ups of I corp then

Or Ithaca isn't I corp and is some treacherous place in the outskirts

Which imo is a pretty far out theory so I corp holds more credence

But this does change quite a lot of things tho so either her soldiers who all survived the smoke war according to the original myth, were killed by Poseidon ( some sort of a god of the city, which is why she said she knew what she was doing in canto 5 )

And also this means according to the myth the gods of the city have forced her to go along with the LC

As they dropped him of in Circe's island in the original myth

Which brings up interesting parallels as to who is circe in this case, would it be Dante? Vergillius ? Or maybe one of the sinners ?

And also Circe's island was touted as a pseudo paradise, which in comparison to the horrors of the smoke war the bus wld seem like it innit

Canto 11, Paradiso - Lovers?

Okay, throughout the Comedy the basic logic of amorous relationships provides a framework for understanding any number of things: ethics, the motion of the universe, God… you know, nothing much important.  Only occasionally has Dante used this logic to describe an actual erotic relationship, real lovers.  So, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, when we stumble upon the following:

Ma perch’ io non proceda troppo chiuso, / Francesco e Povertà per questi amanti / prendi oramai nel mio parlar diffuso. / La lor concordia e i lor lieti sembianti, / amore e maraviglia e dolce sguardo / facieno esser cagion di pensier santi; / tanto che ‘l venerabile Bernardo / si scalzò prima, e dietro a tanta pace / corse e, correndo, li parve esser tardo.

But because I proceed too darkly, / Francis and Poverty for these lovers / take you now in the various things I say. / Their concord and their happy semblances / love and wonder and sweet looks / made the cause of holy thinking; / such that the venerable Bernard / first bared his feet, and after such peace / ran and, so running, to him seemed slow.

Beatrice begins with the makings of an allegory, in which a young man, against his father’s wishes, falls in love with a “lady,” and loves her with the ardor of, you know, someone who wants to shag many bones.  What Beatrice begins with is something like the masterplot one might encounter in Romeo and Juliet or The Fantasticks, a mere wire frame of a story onto which later, in post production, artistically oriented (and poorly paid) nerds will apply layers of highlights and shaders so as to give the appearance of any number of the greatest hits of Chretien de Troyes.  The point of the wire frame love affair is to set us up to expect something that all too often has been lost in the poem as a result of its persistent revision: romance, that tried and true institution of two people doing poetry and thereby doing each other.

But Beatrice quickly loses patience for the subterfuge, in part, because there is little reason to persist in allegorical ruses in Paradise, for here everything is more or less exactly what it seems, even if that “what it is” happens to be beyond comprehension.  What we have here is one of those unfortunate tropes of Western literature, the personification and feminization of an abstract concept, just so that “she” can become the object of yet another insufferable patriarchal rationale.  It gets worse, of course, because of how this fits into St. Francis’s history, and how his life is not just his own but also how the Franciscan order came to be.

Quando a colui ch’a tanto ben sortillo / piacque di trarlo suso a la mercede / ch’el meritò nel suo farsi pusillo, / a’ frati suoi, sì com’ a giuste rede, / raccomandò la donna sua più cara, / e comandò che l’amassero a fede; / e del suo grembo l’anima preclara / mover si volle, tornando al suo regno, / e al suo corpo non volle altra bara.

When the one who chose for him such good / it pleased to draw him up to the reward / that he merited in debasing himself, / to his brothers, as to rightful heirs, / he commended his lady most dear, / and commanded that they love her in faith; / and from her lap the illustrious soul / willed itself to move, turning to its own realm, / and for its body would no other coffin.

Kinky.  I get the sense that maybe, just maybe, Beatrice has taken her own metaphor a little too far, unless she really means to suggest that it’s perfectly okay for Francis to pimp out Poverty to his brother monks, once he’s given up the ghost.  She really takes this to the extreme, what with the dying in the lap and all, which, in case you’re not all that familiar with premodern euphemisms for bone-shagging, means sexy time.  The debasement of Francis and his fellow men of the cloister is rendered analogous to the way in which the courtly lover debases himself before his lady.  Now, it’s worth noting that courtly love was not necessarily understood to be carnal, and there is a sense in which the lover remains detached from the object of his love.  However, having at least some sense of human nature, I think it no small leap to assert that this whole game of appearance and service is tinged with desires for good old fashioned hanky panky.

Of course, there is an alternative way of understanding this.  The adoration of Poverty as donna evokes the adoration of the Blessed Virgin (a.k.a. Mary, a.k.a. Full of Grace) as Madonna, and so just as Mary the Mother of God mediates our relationship to her son (and thus to the godhead), so too does poverty mediate our relationship to… well… I dunno, but it’s worth speculating for a bit.

e quanto le sue pecore remote / e vagabunde più da esso vanno, / più tornano a l’ovil di latte vòte.

and the farther his sheep, remote / and more vagabond, go from him, / the more they return to the fold empty of milk.

Beatrice makes use of the rather tired metaphor of lost sheep, but I think it may provide a clue as to what Poverty is meant to mediate.  Recall that love and its logic have generally been a way of expressing the basic desire of all souls for God.  The mediation that Poverty provides, then, is to strip away all those alternative objects for our basic erotic drive, so that it can only be directed toward that which it was always intended.  The metaphor may have found its way into kinky town, but that fact alone matters little, if, as Heaven is wont, human desire simply is what it is, as it was always meant to be, and the promiscuity of the monks for their lady simply becomes the generosity of the One Love for all His creation and the entirety of creation’s love for Him.

In that sense, then, the metaphor is not out of line at all.  God is a holy whore.