#canto 18

Canto 18, Paradiso - With Bread Not Swords

Già si godeva solo del suo verbo / quello specchio beato, e io gustava / lo mio, temprando col dolce l’acerbo

Already enjoying itself with its own words / that blessed mirror, and I was tasting / mine, tempering with sweet the bitter

Now that we have passed the halfway point, the principle of mirroring seems to have shifted slightly.  If the argument I made with the previous canto, that mirroring echos the repetition principle seen in the Purgatorio, is correct, then the idea of a mirror reflecting its own words or thoughts seems to represent a shift, wherein “reflection” takes on the sense of meditation or contemplation with which we typically use it.  To reflect, then, is not to mirror some other, but to mirror yourself.  To reflect is to see yourself again and to temper your initial impressions with time and consideration.

Io mi rivolsi a l’amoroso suono / del mio conforto; e qual io allor vidi / ne li occhi santi amor, qui l’abbandono: / non perch’ io pur del mio parlar diffidi, / ma per la mente che non può ridire / sovra sé tanto, s’altri non la guidi.

I turned myself back at the beloved sound / of my comfort; and what I then saw / in the holy eyes, love, which I leave behind: / not merely because I suspect my speech, / but because of the mind that cannot repeat / upon itself so much, if another not guide it.

The pilgrim/poet doesn’t want to tell you how hot his lady friend is, because reasons–not that he suspects his ability to say it, but because the mind is a cherry twizzler double pack that’s really hard to open unless you get someone else to do it.  What?

After Cacciaguida has passed on to only caring about his own opinions again, we finally get a sense of what is going on in the fifth sphere and who is there and where are the snack cakes, etc.  Warriors, fighting men for God and other things godly, populate the fifth sphere and, like all good armies, put on the most awesome Latin laser light show this side of the moon.  We see Charlemagne and Joshua and Judah Maccabee and your brother Ted who was in the Second Crusade reserves for a few years just out of college.  Cacciaguida is there, as he mentioned all the way back at the end of canto 15, because he fought with Emperor Conrad in the Crusades and [failed miserably] to free the Holy Land from the [perfectly reasonable, because they actually lived there,] influence of the Turks.

This is another thing old people do: praise the valiant efforts of the “heroes,” regardless of whether their heroism was terribly well thought out or for a noble purpose.  This isn’t likely to win me any friends, but sometimes the reflexive desire to thank or praise someone for serving in the armed forces comes at the expense of a complete unwillingness to examine what those armed forces are doing (and where!) or why anyone would choose to be complicit in it, since, after all, we Americans have an all volunteer military.  I realize people join up for any number of good, bad, or neutral reasons, but SUPPORT THA TROOOOOPS!!!1 rarely abides anything like calm, careful reflection on the nature of how nations express power in the world.

O milizia del ciel cu’ io contemplo, / adora per color che sono in terra / tutti svïati dietro al malo essemplo! / Già si solea con le spade far guerra; / ma or si fa togliendo or qui or quivi / lo pan che ‘l pïo Padre a nessun serra.

O militia of Heaven whom I contemplate, / pray for those who are on earth / all distracted after the bad example! / Back then they were accustomed to make war with swords; / but now make it by taking away, now here now there, / the bread that the pious Father deprives no one.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dante, the class warrior!

There is something honest, at least, about armed warfare.  Political differences come to a head, assholes rile up jingoism among the people on soapboxes and various Sunday morning chat shows, and everyone lines up on either side of a field to re-enact the first stupidity humanity perpetrated upon itself.  There is, at least, a long tradition of honor in battle, the glory of standing on the front lines at great personal risk, and demanding for yourself the best of the spoils, be they slaves or tripods.  War by other means is the politics of deprivation, to watch someone starve or die in the cold rather than go back on an absolute principle you adopted just the other day.  Even the suitors eating Odysseus out of house and home had to feed a beggar.

You could take “the bread the pious Father deprives no one” in any of several ways.  It could be the sacrament of communion administered by the Holy Father, i.e. his Pope-ship, the deprivation of which, through excommunication, was one of the weapons in the arsenal of the armies of the Papal States.  It could also be the bread of life, the manna the big G himself provided for the Hebrews wandering in the wilderness, a reminder that the other dutiful father, the Heavenly Father, would never leave his people in the lurch, especially in their hour of most desperate need.  However, then, as today, it is not all that uncommon to find the loudly religious denying their fellow human beings that which Christ never would.  In case you’ve forgotten, I seem to recall a picnic where everyone forgot to bring their sack lunches, so Jesus “redistributed” someone’s fishes and loaves into fish sandwiches for all.

So, when the warriors of the fifth sphere form the imperative diligite iustitiam, “love justice,” justice is not merely that which is dealt with the sword or the business end of a rifle but with compassion and consideration for the weakness that could afflict any one of us.  Dante’s exile and the wheel of Fortune, both of these are reminders of how unstable our lives are and of the ethical imperative seen throughout the poem, to guide one another to the good, especially when all hope appears to be lost, or, in the words of the liturgy, to be “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”

Canto 18, Inferno - Evil Pockets

Thankfully, as we arrive in the eighth circle on the back of the truthy fraud Geryon, I seem to have gotten over my momentary brain fart.  If you’re only familiar with Malebolge from Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, I find it necessary, briefly, to note that it is not a creature or person but a place.  I say this as someone who had to be disabused of this notion himself as an undergraduate.

Luogo è in inferno detto Malebolge, / tutto di pietra di color ferrigno, / come la cerchia che dintorno il volge.

A place there is in Hell called Malebolge, / entirely of stone the color of iron, / as is the wall that surrounds the circle.

The popular image of Hell as a fiery red place yields as we readers descend deeper to something much colder, both in temperature and in hue, for the worst sins in Dante’s moral universe are not sins of passion, which we seem to have left behind in the seventh circle with its rain of fire, but of indifference and cruelty.  The worst sins are those that lack any passion at all.

It occurs to me that there are two aspects of the poem that, so far, I have almost completely ignored: the structure of the Inferno and Dante’s copious similes.

Quale, dove per guardia de le mura / più e più fossi cingon li castelli, / la parte dove con rende figura, / tale imagine quivi facean quelli; / e come a tai fortezze da’ lor sogli / a la ripa di fuor son ponticelli, / così da imo de la roccia scogli / movien che ricidien li argini e ‘ fossi / infino al pozzo che i tronca e raccogli.

Just as, where to guard the walls / again and again ditches encircle the castles, / the part where those lie forms a figure, / so here these [ditches] form an image; / and as such fortresses have from their thresholds / bridges that cross to the outer shore, / so too from the edge to the innermost rock / they extend, so that they cross the banks and ditches / unto the well that cuts off and joins them.

I like this image of the eighth circle as a series of moats guarding a rampart at the center, which, in this case, would be the even deeper pit that leads down to the ninth and final circle.  Cocytus, then, is a kind of inverted fortress, and the fraudulent damned serve as the “water” that fills the moats that “protect” the lowest circle from the passions that rage above, for the worst of the worst are completely dispossessed of the love/fire that in the circles above is simply a misappropriation of that divine Love that animates the universe.  These are the true motherfuckers.  And this fact is worth keeping in mind, because the Malebolge or “evil pockets” take up more than a third of this canticle.  Though it is only the eighth circle, clearly Dante considers fraud to be significant, if he is willing to devote so much space in his poem to teasing out fine distinctions within the broad category of deceit.

The most telling part of the elaborate simile above is its final phrase, “that cuts off and joins them” (che i tronca e raccogli), for it provides, to my mind, the most concise and necessary description of what the structure of Hell means and not just what it looks like.  The circles, though connected, are cut off from each other, both physically/spatially as well as morally/psychologically.  The worst sinners are those who have sinned in such a way as to willingly and maliciously cut themselves off from others, be it through deceit or treachery.  The damned of the damned are completely insular in their thinking, looking out only for themselves and generally at the expense of others.  So too, their part of Hell is completely cut off from the rest, even as it is joined with it.  In fact, they are so completely cut off that even the ten different types of fraud are separated from each other and kept in their respective ditches by the horned demons that whip and beat them.

The “pockets” (bolge), then, are “evil/vile” (male), because they defy the basic necessity of life as presented in the poem, even if cryptically, not to go it alone.  Moreover, the “separate but joined” condition of the damned is also completely different from that of the saved, be they in Purgatory or Heaven.  Both these places, the mountain and the spheres, are divided, to be sure, into respective zones, but they are not cut off from each other, the mountain of Purgatory because it is a spiral path with distinct gates and the spheres of Heaven because they are crystalline, so you can see its entirety from anywhere within it.  What this simile makes clear is how the structure of the afterworld itself is allegorical, that it too has a meaning.

Nel fondo erano ignudi i peccatori

Along the bottom were naked sinners

Dante has mentioned several times that the denizens of Hell are naked, and I assume this isn’t just to be kinky but to point out how, in death, they are exposed.  Their physical nakedness here is reflective of a spiritual/moral nakedness that in life they adopted by virtue of their behavior toward themselves and toward others.  You could read this religiously, of course, to say that nakedness is indicative of a kind of abandon, that if you live your life assuming you don’t need God and all His petty rules, then, in death, this is precisely what you will get, left to the whims of forces that want nothing for you but ill.  However, if you assume, as I do, that your consciousness will rot along with your corpse and become food for the trees and grasses, there is still a meaningful way to read this, made all the more crucial by the madness of absolute individualism in which we nowadays seem to find ourselves.

There is a saying that if you live by the sword, you will die by the sword, and the point of this is say that if violence is your way of life, you are statistically more likely to come to a violent end.  Similarly, if you live the life of a lone wolf, you are likely to die alone, and though your corpse may be beautiful, no one will remember where it is buried or care why it rots.