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In Praise of Evil

The words “uncomfortable” and “unsafe” occupy positions of unquestionable power. To ignore them, when they are deployed, amounts to heresy, to psychopathy, to cruelty.

A crisis of priority underwrites the new rise of an old type of tyranny: 2,000 years ago, it was prophesied that the meek would inherit the Earth. It happened, oh how appropriately, without a whisper. So that by the time the 20th century authoritarian powers took hold of Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, each could defend its pet horrors by evoking a need for safety.

Several decades prior, Friedrich Nietzsche had prophesied the arrival of a new type of philosopher, a philosopher who would affirm life as Dionysus had affirmed it: An Antichrist, drunk on the will to power, an inhuman monster whose words would dissect as only music dissects: at a level, that is, above the human, like unto godly, horrifically cold, if only because their warmth exceeds the apprehension of their readers, who, venerating the meek, are to this new philosopher as an intestinal bacterium is to a human being: At worst, a simple hindrance, an annoyance best to excrete, worthless; no, less than worthless: Worthy of eradication, if only because, without them, the new philosopher may walk unhindered and enjoy a type of life these bacterial men cannot allow themselves.

This new philosopher has arrived.

***

The phrase “Wille zur Macht,” or “Will to Power,” is the least-understood in all philosophy. It does not engage with political power in any way; it is not a will to domination, still less to formal status. It is, abstractly, a will to the expression of content—no, more, to eruption. Each person contains, if only in viciously suppressed dreams, an ideal, a longing, a coursing whitewater of energy. The meek are those who have worked, albeit futilely, to eradicate this will. Considering their longings unattainable, or the task too grand, they make a performance of sacrificing their wills for those still weaker. They call this solidarity.

Oh, but those whom they wrongly consider weaker still have their wills, and someday these meek puritanical noble bourgeois heads will roll.

***

The uncomfortable, the unsafe, have learned to game this system. Situated comfortably in a bourgeois milieu which they disavow at every opportunity, claiming some tenuous link to an oppressed group, they perform weakness so as to hijack the self-denying energies of solidarity. Thus they bastardize the Will to Power, turning it into a will to domination, engaging the armies of solidarity with the task of providing them with their ideals, their longings—but the rapids of energy are diverted from them, who build their lives upon a basis of theatrical control. Those weaker, who are really stronger, will recognize their slavery and rebel; and this rebellion will not take the form of cruelty, but of a self-sure vitality, a relentless indifference, which will be cast as cruelty.

***

Kierkegaard should have killed himself; or he should have married, started a family, taught at a university, and forgotten his insectoid ambitions. His greatest creation, the Knight of Faith, who works his whole life for that which is impossible, laboring in a patience which can only be satisfied by eternal life, is a pathetic mockery of will, a monument to submission, to denial of life.

Only the modern meek have done worse: not content with submitting to a higher power, they have dreamed of submitting to the lowest powers they can imagine. New materialists write of giving bacteria and soils their due credit and of unseating humans from the ontological throne; progressives compete to see who is weakest and who, therefore, should be obeyed.

A Kierkegaardian worship of futility is contemptible. But the progressive worship of discursively fabricated weakness is beneath contempt. It is atonement in advance for the sin of strength, a randomized lust for control-as-such, the very apex of guilt-ridden denial of life.

***

But he who would maximize security at the expense of the possibilities of full life is, indeed, guilty; guilty of treason against life itself, against the Earth and all that composes it, against the composition of the human body and the dreams and drives and sublimity that arise from the full exertion thereof.

***

Life ends in death, and so it must, by any lucid thinker, be considered in the context of death. Those who cannot say, “This life is worthy of its death,” have not only lived poorly; they have fundamentally failed to grasp the most basic facts of life, and they should not be trusted in any case, for such an essential failure is inexcusable. And then, what of those higher beings who can say, “This life is worthy of its death, and so it is indifferent to death?” Are there such beings?

Lonesomeness is crushing. This is not a metaphor. To struggle beneath the weight of such a pressure, in a milieu of those who deny the pressure itself, who swear through gnashing sideways smiles that such a struggle is not strength, but weakness, and who want nothing of that labor, but only a release from what paltry weight they must carry, by virtue of simple existence—this is the weight, the pressure, itself.

And so there is but a thin, blurred line between evil and the lonesomeness of the strong.

***

The first step toward evil:

The meek must exercise their Will to Power, as all things must; but they exercise it by submission, by venerating meekness itself, and so by requiring that all be meek; they work to render their own pathological denial of life obligatory; and so they are less than worthless. They have, by self-effacement, positioned themselves beneath ethical consideration: They are nothing but hindrances to full life, for themselves and for the strong…

The second step of evil:

…and there must be some antibiotic by which we may rid ourselves of them, or by which, videlicet, we may be free of the pathologic weakness they impose.

***

Egoism is a simple idiocy, precisely as the conception of the individual, upon which it is based, is an idiocy. A close bond, a friendship, love, is no external phenomenon. It alters the basic physiology of all involved, such that they are simultaneously singular and plural. My name is Legion, for we are many: I am a chimera composed of those I love, and who love me, and as such I am more than a singular, as a mountain soars above the tectonic slabs which collided to create it.

Lonesomeness is a freedom in the sense that amputation might be freedom from a leg. When the meek seek to impose lonesomeness, it demonstrates their fundamental crisis; namely, that they cannot conjoin in the way I have described, that they are always fearful of each other, for each of them considers himself to be the weakest and most vulnerable of all, even as he bends over backward to show his loyalty to those supposedly weaker—for the weak are desperate and cruel in direct proportion to their weakness, so that solidarity emerges from an egoistic fear, a craven grasping for security in the paranoid, vicious milieu of the weak. Only the strong can merge with one another, can trust, can become more than egoists.

***

The third step of evil:

My name is Legion, for we are many: and those who struggle for weakness among themselves have done nothing to deserve my consideration. Bare life, after all, has no fundamental worth. God is dead; we have killed him; we kill him still; and we laugh, for we know that we have transgressed, and that our transgression opens possibilities of life heretofore unknown, unknowable—a laughter at the edge of an immeasurable abyss, laughter at the possibility of jumping, knowing that we will hit bottom eventually, will die, as we always knew we would, but knowing, also, that the fall promises equally immeasurable ecstasy, a fullness only available within the unknowable. The taste for certainty is the most disgusting taste, rotten fruit of the same craven weakness which spawns the ethics of the meek, their squabbling, their egoist solidarities, their thirsts for control. But the taste for uncertainty is an organ of the full life, of life which does not know, and must test, its boundaries—of life which is lived rather than simply preserved.

***

I repeat: the meek are beneath contempt, beneath all ethical consideration; but we are not those fascists who, smothered by a pathetic fear of the disenfranchised, call them “weak” and seek to eradicate them. Such a paradox, such a loathsome self-ignorance, is no reaction against meekness, but rather a limit-point thereof: as the progressive attempts to hijack the desires of the disenfranchised, the fascist attempts to blot them out; but each is driven by the same fear, the same leering desperation, and toward the same telos—namely, the domination of the disenfranchised. Violence is not the result of power, but rather of the lack thereof. The Venn diagrams constructed by a Berkeley-trained intersectionalist utilize much the same categories as the National Socialist extermination plans, and for the same reasons. But the strong have no need for such distrustful heuristics; we can meet people as they live—as Legion, as the conglomerates of social circles, as collision-points of intimately shared Wills to Power. Such a trusting, humanizing strength is as illegible to Judith Butler as it is to Hermann Goering.

***

And so this is the fourth step of evil:

The phrase, “The meek are beneath contempt, beneath all ethical consideration,” does not mean that they are worthy of violence. To swat at a gnat is a sign of vulnerability, not of strength. Rather, it means that the meek are worthy of naught but indifference. Of contempt, that is, but not of hate: hate must be reserved for equals. The strong abhor needless lashings-out, needless protest; such empty performance, such symbolic “standing up for one’s beliefs,” is nothing but a masturbation of conscience. Violence against the contemptible renders the violent contemptible. It is a show of weakness masquerading as strength, which is the most pathetic form of weakness, the braggadocio of the loser, the bravado of the convinced. We, the strong, are not convinced. We are above convictions: a taste for uncertainty implies a thirst for chaos only when it slips from a tongue without nuance.

***

The Bolsheviks were strong: they waited for decades, climbing the ladders of Tsarist organizations, waiting, unsure and likely afraid, but nonetheless endowed with the silence of the powerful. The end of the Soviet Union began when the Red Army turned on its comrades, with the routing of Makhno, the Stalinist purges. Stalin, pathetic paean to machismo, was weak. Likewise, Hitler cemented his own demise when he created the SS to protect his fragile edifice from the SA; Kristallnacht, the Night of Long Knives—terminal weakness. Thus did the McCarthy trials foretell the hegemony of America’s distinctly pathological leftism. And thus does Ocasio-Cortez’s blacklist prophesy the rise of something new, something not yet constituted, something which still lies in incubation in the most electrified corners of the American right, but which has already begun to move beyond left and right, beyond nationalism, beyond good and evil…beyond America?

***

She is sick and pale with grief that thou, her spawn, art far more fair than she—cast her off! You traditionalists, you nationalists, you strong and floundering: tradition is an unsurpassable teacher, and the nation is a start, and floundering is the surest sign of strength’s own blessing. The superior will inevitably experience his superiority, at first, as a weakness, for it is a condemnation to loneliness, to ostracization, even to monstrosity.

But tradition is not the end, and if it is fetishized as a provider of certainties, of timeless truths, it is a heavier hindrance than any other. Cast it off, as well, but do not forget its weight, for without weight, there is no strength in movement.

And the nation is as epistemologically feeble as the race, the gender, the sex: it is an insubstantial amoeba, drifting and morphing with the desperate desirers of its suitors, an abstract prostitute infected with an atavistic myopia for which there is no cure, so that its lovers will die blind, paralyzed, and in pain with no origin and no end and no antidote, radiating through the whole of the nervous system, as at the end of the most advanced syphilis.

And your floundering is the vouchsafing of salvation: only the strong may become so lost, may reach such heights of despair, of disillusion, of unsureness; and at the summit of uncertainty, looking out over the surrounding lowlands, rolling and green beneath a thin fog, you see a path, as yet unblazed but blazing, if but for its untrod roughs, which are offered only to your sight, you the directionless, you who can bear the compound phantom weights of such disorder.

The path does not lie to the left or to the right, but upon another axis. It is high time to escape the tyranny of the French Revolution and its deterministic binary. Robespierre is shouting nonsense at the pulpit, but we are not seated to his left or his right: we are outside, sweeping the street or proudly shoeing a good horse or languishing in stocks or branks, waiting for something we cannot yet imagine but of which we have an inkling, a nebulous unsure powerful hope.

***

If thoughts circulate within a mind, and if each mind is not contained within a skull, but is the product of intimacies, of friendships, and if this mind is strong and can withstand such penetrating friendship, then, by tracing through this labyrinth the wire of our personal Ariadne, we may plot the geometry of a world whose geography is bound only by our capacity for such friendship and whose robustness makes a mockery of all political and identitarian designations of any known left or right.

The resulting map is the most dangerous object in existence, for it renders all hegemonic political and social structures obsolete; it demonstrates, by comparison, their looseness, their fragility, their venomous weakness.

And when those strong, all-too-strong few who can contain such maps unite, there is an eruption as of Vesuvius, and the Earth quakes and the stone rolls away, and an altogether new thing strides from the tomb, not looking from side to side, but straight ahead, its brow unfurrowed, adamant—for it knows that, by simple virtue of its existence, it is a foregone conclusion; those temperate noble bourgeois heads which labored to keep it locked inside its tomb will roll, and their vaunted solidarities and sympathies will show themselves, at last, for what they were: the mendacious metastases of a terminal weakness, the tyrannies of a sickness unto death.

And what a death! What a thing to watch, this death! The meek have waited so long in hospice, in abject fear and postured trembling, longing for salvation, for the nebulous telos of progress—is this death not the very height of compassion? Of a benevolence of such gravity that it is only available to the strong?

***

This is not a call to violence, but a call to love thy neighbor; but, as in the Biblical Hebrew, thy neighbor is not simply he who lives near to you, but he who is worthy to live near you, who can withstand your type of love, of trust, and who can thus become part of you, part of us, of the strong, another link in Ariadne’s wire—in this labyrinth, the Minotaur is no worry: it was overcome by the very act of building the labyrinth.

Rather, the crucial thing is to explore the labyrinth, to find the structures therein that could not have existed outside of it—to find, that is, those structures which are only available to the strong, and to plot them, and to build them outside the labyrinth; the meek shall line up to explore them and shall be lost, consumed by their own incapacity to trust, by their own thirst for control, for certainty, which is the most disgusting and the most enfeebling of thirsts.

The Minotaur was overcome in the very act of building the labyrinth—or was it? What shall we find, as we plumb those depths, which are beyond all distances yet measured—nay, not only beyond, but upon different axes?

***

I am old-fashioned? So I am old-fashioned. I contain multitudes, and tradition is an unsurpassable teacher. The modern style is a non-style, driven by the craven fear of evoking a cringe, of seeming earnest. The addiction to irony is a horrific disease, marked by self-effacement, indirectness, a permeating weakness which recoils from the slightest hint of gravity. It is a commitment to insignificance. It is a resignation to meek morbidity. Irony is the shell erected by that all-too-soft mollusk who does not believe that he can recognize the world for what it is. We, the strong, have no need for it. It is only one of many self-denials which must be eradicated.

***

And so it is love which, in the end, is the answer. An eruptive love. A love which transgresses all bounds, which penetrates the skin, which renders the mind multiple. And what of the meek, who cannot endure such love, but must settle for solidarity—for the pathetic, mendacious conquest of those whom they only call “weak” because they recognize their superior strengths? Let them burn in the corrosive acid-reflux precipitated by the control which, in their insatiable thirst, they have guzzled; and do not try and save them, who are beneath contempt, beneath consideration, beneath us. For there is a fundamental hierarchy of man.

And so it is strength, the free exercise of the Will to Power, the ability to withstand trustful friendship, rather than a craven will to domination, which determines that hierarchy. It is the capacity to bear the explosive gravitas of friendship, the readiness to enact communication on an etymological basis—that is, “com”: with; “mun”: mouth; “-ication”: The union of a plural as a singular, the relinquishing of fearful egoisms, speaking and thinking as a solo and a choir: my name is Legion, for we are many.

And so, finally, is it that tradition is brought forward: For there is not an opposition between past and future, but rather between the past, as imagined by the traditionalist, and the future, as tyrannized by the progressive. But the strength of tradition was rooted in its timeliness, its honesty with regard to its material reality.

And so let us call it not tradition, but honesty, the strength to withstand recognition. And what shape does such an honesty take now? It is uncertain—indeed, a radical uncertainty, but a willingness to action in precisely such uncertain conditions, without the palliative atavisms of conservatism or the tyrannies of progressivism, but something new, a strength to match the hegemonic sickness, which is as terminal as this new strength is hopeful.

Let the meek rot. Long live the strong, the lonely, the lovers whose love erupts in the form of new worlds, new heights of trust, new summits of loneliness, to which only an equal may ascend, one superior to the meek, for whom the meek are as worthless as a gnat, and to whom the uncharted abysses of uncertainty are an invitation to barely bearable ecstasies, which are not to be controlled or moderated, but which are to be met headlong with a courage only accessible to a select few, who reside above, on a fundamentally higher plane, and have nothing to do with the pathetic political and moral squabbles of their day; but who, rather, chase better worlds, worlds which are not worlds but labyrinths, esoteric by virtue of their barring of all but the elite, the monstrous, the evil, who are, after all, the only explorers who are worthy of the maze and of the Minotaur which guards its center.

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James Joyce’s “Dubliners” Review

Poet George Russel clearly had some trepidation when he asked his friend and fellow writer James Joyce to submit a short story to Irish Homestead, a periodical he was editing for the Irish Agricultural Organization Society. It was the summer of 1904, and Joyce hadn't yet published any fiction - his focus hitherto had been on poetry and drama - but he had made a reputation as a gadfly and iconoclast, quick to denounce and ready to shock all and sundry with his unconventional views. That is, if and when they could understand him. Joyce was known as much for his obscure and indirect communications as for his rebellious temperament. During his days at University College, a journalist had written in response to one of Joyce's fiery public pronouncements: "Everyone said it was divine, but no one seemed quite to know what it meant." Joyce's nickname among his college peers at the time was Mad Hatter. Russel offered a pound in payment. "It is easily earned money," he promised, adding, "if you can write fluently and don't mind playing to the common understanding and liking for once in a way." Russel wanted something simple and rural, but realizing how little these adjectives described Joyce's public persona, he conceded that Joyce could publish under a pseudonym. Joyce derided the periodical, which he later referred to contemptuously as "the pigs' paper," but this offer of a quid had quite an impact on 20th century literature. Joyce now turned his attention to fiction, and conceived of the idea of a series of short stories - or epilceti as he called them (although epicleses is the proper term) in reference to the invocation of the Holy Spirit in Eastern Rite Christianity - that resulted in his book Dubliners. As Joyce explained to his brother Stanislaus, he saw a "certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do." Joyce also decided upon the pseudonym Stephen Daedalus, a name that (with a slightly different spelling) would serve as the author's literary alter ego in his later novels. But after this promising start, Joyce would encounter a legion of difficulties in completing and publishing Dubliners. Irish Homestead accepted three of his stories - The Sisters, Eveline, and After the Races - but the editor rejected his fourth submission Clay because he had received so many letters of complaint from readers in response to earlier tales. Joyce continued writing the stories, and looked to publish them as a book. But potential published had even more objections than the readers of Irish Homestead. A full decade elapsed between Joyce's first version of Dubliners and its long-delayed release. Joyce approached 15 different publishers, some of them more than once, before he found one brave enough to take on the book. His merits as a writer were not in question, but rather fear of legal repercussions. As early as 1905, Grant Richards had agreed to release the book, but the printer objected to the questionable nature of one of the stories (The Gallants), and in time a host of other problematic passages and phrases raised the ire and concerns of various interested parties. By 1909, Joyce had given up on Richards and signed a contract with Maunsel and Roberts, but this proved to be an even greater waste of time and energy, as his new editor George Roberts insisted on censoring more and more passages, even to the point of insisting that the name of every Dublin commercial establishment mentioned in the work be give a new fictional identity. The angry author eventually exacted revenge in the time-honored way of writers in general and Joyce in particular: he used his art to ridicule his adversary. In a broadside published at his own expense, Joyce lampooned his overly cautious editor: He sent me a book ten years ago; I read it a hundred times or so, Backwards and forwards, down and up, Through both ends of a telescope… Shite and onions! Do you think I’ll print The name of the Wellington Monument, Sydney Parade and Sandymount tram, Downes’s cakeshop and Williams’s jam? I'm damned if I do—I'm damned to blazes! Talk about Irish Names of Places!... In an even bolder move, Joyce wrote to King George V to get his blessing for a contested section of the book - a remarkable step, given the insult to the monarch's grandmother, Queen Victoria, in the passage under consideration. A secretary at Buckingham Palace responded with a dismissive note stating the King found it "inconsistent with rule" to pass a verdict on such matters. Joyce, always willing to spin facts to suit his interests, interpreted this as an indication that his story had not given offense to the House of Windsor. Joyce may have felt better after scoring these points, but they hardly improved his relations with Roberts or moved his book any closer to publication. After more rejections, he eventually came back full circle to Grant Richards, who was now willing to take a chance on Dubliners. Finally, a decade after he first announced his plans for a collection of epliceti, James Joyce's first book of prose fiction showed up in bookstores in June 1914, just a few days before the outbreak of World War I. Dubliners seems like tame fare nowadays, but the book stood out for its frankness and psychological realism back at the time of its release, especially in the context of an Irish literary culture where the two dominant influences were the Catholic Church and Celtic revivalist pride. By this time, James Joyce had left his native Ireland far behind, and would never return. But even those who merely judged Dubliners by its stories, and knew nothing of the author's self-imposed exile, would have been struck by how much they owed to continental European trends. Joyce himself had aligned himself early on with the aesthetic of Henrik Ibsen, but we can also see elements of Flaubert, d'Annunzio, Zola and other writers who had few followers in Dublin. The spirit of Chekhov also seems to hover over these stories, although Joyce claimed he had not read the Russian's works at this time. Nowadays admirers speak of Joyce as the quintessential Irish author of the 20th century, but to his contemporaries he represented everything that was opposed to home-grown Irish culture and values. In Dubliners, despite all the local color (and name of commercial establishments), Joyce made clear at every turn that his vision for Irish fiction involved modernization and retrofitting on the continental model. Joyce was often forced, in the course of these pages, to present the raw realities of his stories in indirect or roundabout ways - otherwise they would not have been published at all. But the book is, strange to say, even more powerful and realistic because of areas of silence within the text. After all, the Dublin Joyce was attempting to capture in prose was filled with characters whose public behavior and statements were at odds with their private activities. So when Mrs. Mooney in The Boarding House, finds a husband for her daughter by deliberately putting the girl in a compromising situation....well, of course, she won't dare state openly what she has planned all along, even when plotting out the details with her child. And when Eliza and Nannie Flynn in The Sisters remain guardedly vague about the struggles their brother Father James Flynn faced in fulfilling his responsibilities as a priest, this discretion - full of ominous hints - is both plausible and accentuates the sense of existential foreboding that inhabits the story. But Joyce is more than a chronicler of secret scandal. In Araby he captures the longings of adolescence with bittersweet poignancy. In Ivy Day in the Committee Room he delivers one of the great fictional accounts of political campaigning, and in just a few pages draws in all the contradictory elements - idealism, rivalry, expediency, ennui - that come together on election day for those who have worked at the grassroots level in such contests. A Mother is about a parent who wants to push the musical career of her daughter, but on her own unrelenting terms; with a slight change of setting, this story could be just as persuasive if set in the current day. But Joyce saves the best for last. The Dead, which closes out Dubliners, is the longest and most ambitious of his stories, and deservedly ranks among the dozen or so most important works of modern short fiction in English. A small party of friends and family serves as a vehicle for Joyce to develop many of the subjects and themes that would dominate his fiction for decades to come - including cuckoldry, religion, Irish nationalism, the challenge of foreign values, the power of song, the persistence of memory and, above all (as the story's title suggests) death and dissolution. The ease with which he develops these themes, while simultaneously orchestrating the festive activities of more than a dozen vividly-developed characters, is awe-inspiring. And, all the while, he is building up his narrative for a tragic epiphany in the final page. Joyce would never write a conventional plot - and character-driven novella of this type again in his life. But it is hard to imagine that he could have constructed a better one. Why would a young author at the dawn of his career focus so closely on death - a concern that both begins and ends Dubliners? The subject seemed to afflict Joyce at a deep psychic level during this period of his life. In a letter from August 19, 1906, he wrote of suffering from disturbing nightmares: "horrible and terrifying dreams" of "deaths, corpses, assassinations in which I take an unpleasant prominent part." He was residing in Rome at the time, struggling to make a living as a bank clerk, and the city itself seemed to echo his night visions. He enjoyed comparing Rome to a cemetery - it was made up, he insisted, of "the flowers of death, ruins, piles of bones, and skeletons." This thought was repeated again and again in his conversations and correspondence. In a letter to Stanislaus, he proclaimed: "Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother's corpse." Then again, Joyce had his own family corpses to display—albeit in the form of fiction. Joyce's alter ego Stephen Dedalus is confronted by the ghost of his mother in Ulysses, and we can only wonder at what visions the author had of his own deceased mother, who had died in August 1903, that caused him to incorporate these elements associated with horror tales into his modernistic novel. The death of Joyce’s brother George in 1902 also weighed heavily on him (and he would name his own son Giorgio after his sibling). Adding to this melancholy note, his lover Nora Barnacle also had her own intimate stories of death to share—her two previous boyfriends had died while courting her, Michael Feeney of typhoid at age 16, Michael Bodkin of tuberculosis at 20. At the convent where she worked, Nora had even earned the nickname of "the man-killer." Joyce found himself in the strange situation of feeling jealousy for dead rivals, but in a manner typical of his process, responded by finding a way of transforming this anxiety into fiction. It was in this frame of mind that Joyce, with intimations of mortality assailing him from all angles, set out to write The Dead shortly after his return to Trieste from Rome. Some may carp that this story - and indeed all of Dubliners - is given undeserved notoriety, solely because it is assigned in classrooms by teachers who fear Joyce's more daunting later works would be too hard for their students to digest. But make no mistake, this is not Joyce light, or Irish Lit for Beginners. Those who grasp the full scope of the forces at work in these many pages, may even be more shaken by their implication than by the ostentatious avant-garde effects of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. So don’t read this book as a stepping-stone to the "harder" Joyce books. Dubliners is no preparatory effort leading toward something more fully realized. You might even be wise to come to this book at the end of your Joycean studies. It is after all a work obsessed with the endgame. If Ulysses is the book recounting the epic struggles of a single day and Finnegans Wake the literary equivalent of a long, deep sleep reviving in an ever-recurring cycle with each dawn, Dubliners is the even darker approach into a far more opaque night, one from which there is no renewal. As such, it belongs on the short list of masterful fictions about the looming void inherent in the human condition—Death in Venice, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Wings of the Dove and a handful of other works come to mind. The fact that it came from a brash writer at the beginning of his career only adds to the marvel of its mature resignation.

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Dante’s Inferno: Final Analysis

Inferno is a pilgrimage through the psychological and political consequences of losing your way, a pilgrimage that Dante had to undertake to refind his way after nearing an unstated moral event horizon. His midlife crisis leaves him shipwrecked, stranded in a dark forest, his lee shore blocked by three beasts that incarnate three basic modes of errancy: a fraudulent leopard, a violent and prideful lion, and an incontinent, envious, insatiable she-wolf. (Interpreting the beasts is controversial, but this reading resonates with me.) When the beasts almost make Dante lose hope, Virgil saves him, sent by Beatrice to guide him the long way to her. Dante has little problem accepting Virgil, his favorite writer, as his guide and master.

In hell, Dante witnesses the penalties for sin, learning about sin from friends, foes, heroes, teachers, and others. Sometimes Virgil interviews them for him. Sometimes they require coaxing. Almost all agree to talk. Their penalties exemplify "poetic justice", manifesting their sins in some creative, brutal way, e.g. hypocrites creak under lead cloaks with gold sheens.

From Virgil, Dante learns the plan of hell: those who lived without a sound mixture of Christian faith and Christian virtue are, with few exceptions, damned to an afterlife of eternal hopeless longing, even if they were pagans who lived before Christianity, like Virgil himself. There is a clear, bitter message: your life cannot be just without being a Christian, and if your life is unjust, you deserve the torment you'll get. Just as prisons are called "correctional" facilities but teach inmates to be more sociopathic, the sinners Dante meets in hell consistently show themselves to have learned nothing from their punishments. Never does Dante question and probe the justification for hell, taking at face value the declaration of hell's gate, that hell is the artifice of the unflagging, infallible wisdom, love, and justice of God.

Virgil acts not just as a tour guide, but also a harsh father, criticizing many of Dante's behaviors, such as pity towards those Virgil deems unworthy of pity. Usually Virgil offers no good explanation for his complaints, and he comes across as abusive and arbitrary in his judgments. Unsurprisingly, Dante is rather slow to osmote Virgil's unclear expectations, and even in the tenth subcircle of the eighth circle is being lambasted. Even a simple aside like "While we walked, Virgil justified his judgments" would have cleared Virgil of much of my misgivings, but as far as I can tell, the poet thinks his Virgil is thoroughly virtuous, leaving aside a few follies that betray his pagan roots.

The poet often shows a troubling lack of self-criticism on a personal level, even as he's repeatedly quick to criticize his artistic shortcomings. Dante the character even seems to fade into the background many times, as if the story is about us and we're intended to fill in our own reflections in the pilgrim's stead. Some aspects of the poem are impersonal, but many are deeply personal: maybe a third of the sinners Dante meets are people he knew, many of them people he once considered virtuous but of whom his poetic retrospective made him change his tune. That gap is one of the few displays of self-criticism, though dampened by the poet's unshakable confidence in his ability to judge others' hearts. Dante even goes as far as slander, filling the subcircle of homosexuality with people of whom no record of homosexuality exists.

Another example of self-criticism is in Dante's reflection on his relationship to fortune. Several sinners prophecy his exile, which happened a few years after the story takes place. When Dante's beloved mentor, Brunetto, offers such a prophecy of his impending misfortune, Dante is arrogant in his resolve:

"This much I would have You know:

as long as conscience does not chide,

I am prepared for Fortune as she wills.

Such prophecy is not unknown to me.

Let Fortune spin her wheel just as she pleases,

and let the loutish peasant ply his hoe."

At that I saw the right side of my master’s face

turned back in my direction. And he said:

"He listens well who takes in what he hears."

Nonetheless, I go on speaking

with ser Brunetto, asking who, of his companions,

are most eminent, most worthy to be known.

Virgil's words could read as a compliment, were it not for the "Nonetheless" the poet followed them with. Fortune and justice are two of God's ministers, having analogous status to major Greek deities, so the quoted passage has the double irony of being just one canto after the blasphemers, notably Capaneus, who bragged that Zeus could not stop him (and was dead-wrong).

Capaneus earns more wrath from Virgil than anyone else, I think, rivalled only by one of his outbursts against Dante after Dante weeps for the punishment of the diviners:

Reader, so may God let you gather fruit

from reading this, imagine, if you can,

how I could have kept from weeping

when I saw, up close, our human likeness

so contorted that tears from their eyes

ran down their buttocks, down into the cleft.

Yes, I wept, leaning against a spur

of the rough crag, so that my escort said:

"Are you still as witless as the rest?

Here piety lives when pity is quite dead.

Who is more impious than one who thinks

that God shows passion in His judgment?"

Most of the time, Virgil has a keen read on Dante's thoughts, but in some cases it's hard to pinpoint just where Virgil's thoughts on Dante's actions come from. The above passage could be the poet criticizing Virgil, asking for sympathy for an error, or even having failed to learn who "deserves" pity for what.

Dante's course through hell is more or less spiral, going leftwards along the circles until crossing their thresholds, with a few changes in direction. Virgil knows where they're going, since a magician forced him to travel to the bottom of the abyss once before, so the trajectory of Dante's voyage holds true. Along the way he develops rather little, apparently reclaiming the "good of the intellect" (lost to all sinners) under the surface, but never takes ownership of his growth, motivated by his meek sycophancy—

Whatever pleases you is my desire.

You are my lord and know I do your will.

—toward Virgil rather than the redemption Virgil is trying to lead Dante to irrespective of Dante's servility.

Along the way, some sinners assume Dante is a new sinner on his way to punishment, which indicates that sinners can go unescorted to their destinations after they're judged, and yet Dante and Virgil never once meet a sinner headed to their destination, nor any traveler at all. Only near the end did it occur to me how weird that is, and I think it's Dante saying that the pilgrimage of the soul is a lonely road, even though its landmarks are populated.

Writing itself is the same way: a voyage through one's inner world, with none but one's greatest influences by one's side. Writing is also edifying: it can build, uplift, even save. Many of Dante's heroes, damned or not, were involved in the foundation and destruction of cities. Dante was not a very successful politician, and frankly he didn't have a tenth the backbone it would take to accomplish heroic physical feats like building a city. This poem is his compromise. He isn't any of the heroes he mentions, not Paul who helped found Christianity, not Aeneas who founded Rome, not Theseus who founded Athens—honestly, the hero Dante most resonates with seems to be Odysseus.

Dante's Odysseus did not find anything; in fact, Odysseus abandoned his family to sate his worldly curiosity, and roped his men into exploration for its own sake, with no end. On reaching old age, Odysseus didn't settle down; he set his sights higher, to Olympus itself, likely knowing it to be suicidal:

"I and my shipmates had grown old and slow

before we reached the narrow strait

where Hercules marked off the limits,

warning all men to go no farther.

On the right-hand side I left Seville behind,

on the other I had left Ceüta."

“O brothers,” I said, “who, in the course

of a hundred thousand perils, at last

have reached the west, to such brief wakefulness

of our senses as remains to us,

do not deny yourselves the chance to know—

following the sun—the world where no one lives.

Consider how your souls were sown:

you were not made to live like brutes or beasts,

but to pursue virtue and knowledge.

With this brief speech I had my companions

so ardent for the journey

I could scarce have held them back.

Gathering experiences is folly if you don't use them. Wisdom spoils unless it's planted and disseminated. Odysseus could've at least had the courtesy to write a sprawling epic poem to leave behind. Exploration is a rare opportunity, and inherently adjacent to the roots of such words as "astray", "trespass", "aberrant" and "errant",—indeed to "sin" as missing your target. But how can your aim be true if you don't even know where you're headed? How can you find your target without trial-and-error? A whole cast of characters and very special circumstances are needed for Dante to survive, let alone thrive as I assume he does come Paradiso.

Inferno is so laden with political and literary references that it's impossible to even follow without a guide. I used the Hollander translation because it was recommended by the person who convinced me Dante was worth checking out, and the annotations are excellent. That said, I was often frustrated knowing there were entire dimensions of undercurrents veiled to me because I couldn't put the pieces together without derailing my reading by rerouting my limited energy.

Dante is quite clear about the inseparability of personal virtue and political legacy, with various factions rotting and falling because of leaders or members having weak spirits, their actions perverting or forsaking what Dante esteems as values that hold factions together, maybe the most notable of which is piety: to God, to friends, to country, to family. The first sin in hell, after the outskirts of virtuous pagans, is neutrality: standing for nothing, being complicit in whatever whoever wins does.

Dante would rather you be an honest member of his sworn political rival faction than a bystander, and certainly than a dishonest member of his favored faction, as such people pollute the faction's standing and influence. That said, Dante doesn't posit a perfect correlation between personal virtue and political legacy: he talks with alleged gays with excellent intellectual or political services, and one of the most memorable figures, the heretical Farinata, was a member of Dante's rival party, one Dante had great respect for, as complicated as his picture of the man is.

There are three types of shade, in my opinion: the prideful, the shameful, and the indistinct. The prideful sinners are the most memorable, they who are happy to share their stories, who retained strong identity because their convictions, though misguided to Dante, were strong in will and influence. Farinata, Capaneus, Odysseus, and Ugolino are my favorite characters, and they're all deeply prideful. The shameful are those who, while not indistinct, are not eager to share their stories for the world to hear from Dante's pen. Their conviction is clouded by regret, because they knew what they were doing was wrong, had no vision in doing wrong, and can't hide from the severity of their own faults. Then the indistinct are those whose values were so muddy, so undifferentiated, that they have little to no presence. The most indistinct are the neutrals and the spendthrifts & prodigals, the first and fourth circles, who are glossed over without a single representative.

Many of the sinners are found near their partners in crime, e.g. the heretics are buried with the factions of their respective heresies, Odysseus burns with Diomedes, Ugolino gnaws on Ruggieri, Francesca is bound with her lover,—for each pair, one is silent. Dante likes to pick modern (by 1300 standards) Italians and ancients when deciding representatives for sins, routinely insisting that the sins are as old and as current as you can imagine.

The hierarchy of hell is openly arbitrary: the more Dante thinks you displeased God, the deeper into the pit you are. So gays are situated deeper than Atilla the Hun, and man, this cantica would've been so much more interesting if Dante were critical of standard Christian moral beliefs. For all I know, maybe he was but couldn't be open about it. He seemed to include the gays only out of obligation, showing zero ill will towards them. And at face value you can't tell me flattery and divination, for examples, are more unjust than tyranny that leaves rivers of blood in its wake. Virgil explains the why of placements like so:

Every evil deed despised in Heaven

has as its end injustice. Each such end

harms someone else through either force or fraud.

But since the vice of fraud is man’s alone,

it more displeases God, and thus the fraudulent

are lower down, assailed by greater pain.

It's not clear how Dante thinks homosexuality or blasphemy harm others "through force or fraud". And then there's the suicide forest, where harming yourself, i.e. not someone else, is given a particularly cruel punishment: becoming a tree and apparently being denied proper resurrection come Judgment Day. Like, look, suicide hurts those who care about you, but not through "force or fraud", and Dante doesn't acknowledge the legacy of pain suicide leaves. This is a good time to mention offhandedly that I have a strong impression that the moral event horizon to which drawing near sent Dante on this quest was suicidality. I can't substantiate that very well, but it fits too well in my reading to ignore.

The lack of personal details Dante offers about his life is a stark contrast with the intimacy of his shared knowledge of Italian and adjacent politics. A few sinners ask him about himself, but I didn't find anything he said all that revealing, other than that it wasn't revealing, convincing me that the poet deliberately kept himself out of the picture even while drawing me into his world. That choice is too circuitous to count as confession, no matter how autobiographical it is by its implications (e.g. the Malebranche almost catching him might be an admission that Dante almost pitched himself into barratry) and themes. Maybe Dante's confessions come later in the epic, but I'm sure Hollander would've mentioned that somewhere in the notes to Inferno. I'm also suspicious that Dante's family is nowhere mentioned, given the premium he places on family in e.g. choosing for Odysseus to use charged language while confessing his abandonment of his family, cherishing Virgil as a "gentle father", and giving Ugolino's sons the consideration their father didn't.

While Virgil says that fraud is man's alone, I think that Dante takes sin in general to be man's alone. Among the fraudulent are demons, a manticore, a centaur, giants, and Satan—aside from iced Satan they are not punished the way the sinners are, but simply being in hell is punishment enough. Each monster is at least humanoid, and their human qualities enabled the harm they caused to be injustice. The circle of violence contains harpies, more centaurs, and the minotaur—so it's not just fraud that humanoids commit.

The icing on the cake is that Satan, trapped in ice at the center of the Earth, is impotent; he's called the emperor of hell, but he looks to be dumb and silent, not even acknowledging Dante as he climbs Satan's body to the end of hell. Satan is defeated; he is kept alive as an example, used to keep the Cocytus bitterly cold, and cannot be used as a scapegoat for humans to pin their sins on. Many of the sinners foist blame for their errors on other people, abnegating their responsibility and thereby squandering their capacity for redemption. Not one sinner, save a few saved during the harrowing, has ever escaped hell, says Virgil. Not that they can't, but only that it doesn't happen: the shades rot in their desolate ignorance, every last one of them, with the possible exception of Virgil, who leaves hell alongside Dante with a fitting ending line:

As far as one can get from Beelzebub,

in the remotest corner of this cavern,

there is a place one cannot find by sight,

but by the sound of a narrow stream that trickles

through a channel it has cut into the rock

in its meanderings, making a gentle slope.

Into that hidden passage my guide and I

entered, to find again the world of light,

and, without thinking of a moment’s rest,

we climbed up, he first and I behind him,

far enough to see, through a round opening,

a few of those fair things the heavens bear.

Then we came forth, to see again the stars.

I don't know how to feel about Inferno overall. I wasn't moved by it, and I had to restrain myself a lot from just saying, "This guy's an idiot and an asshole"—he gets away with being cruel to several sinners in hell, and regarding hell as just is abominable in my eyes—, but the amount of thought and care that went into it is phenomenal, and it's just the first third of a story. Its indulgence—the height of which is that Dante gave a random girl who barely knew him a major role in his theology to dote on his self-insert—should dissuade anyone from thinking that indulgent writing is bad or base. The indulgence gives the story a lot of personality, as prideful or coy as Dante often is about it and its contents. I also must acknowledge that I'm not Dante's target audience: I'm uneducated, atheistic, and my difficulty in connecting with the text stems from differences in values and preferences deeper and subtler than I can articulate through the gripes I've offered in this post.

So while it's not, like, life-changingly good for me, I don't regret having read it, because it challenged me in ways that I think were valuable, and I think I'm a better reader for it.

[kalliersnovelreviews]

The Hole at the Center of Everything: My Voyage through Dante's Inferno (Cantos 26-34)

CANTO 26

Dante mocks-laments Florence because its "fame resounds through Hell", represented by sinners in almost every region thus far, for which the city's just doom draws near, and "[w]ere it already come, it would not be too soon"—the exile-to-be tires of waiting for the inevitable, for the city's rot to sour his fortune.

The climb to the eighth moat is demanding, but treacherous is the recall—

I grieved then and now I grieve again

—of its contents: Dante has to "curb [his] powers lest they run on where virtue fail to guide them"—a humble caution for himself and other to-be pilgrims.

Dante compares himself to a hillside peasant watching evening fireflies—fires dot the infertile, peaceless moat, by which contrast Dante distances himself from the scene, the fires concealing their sinners as a heavenward chariot appears an indistinct fireball to an observer. Virgil detects Dante's reckless eagerness and explains:

Each [spirit] is wrapped in that in which he burns.

Dante thought as much, and asks of the fierce fire resembling the pyre of Eteocles—who and his brother Polynices killed each other, their enmity such that even their smoke would not merge, unlike the last canto's smoky mutation—, and hears,

Within this flame find torment Ulysses and Diomed. They are paired in God’s revenge as once they earned his wrath.

The sin here is false counsel, "tongues" of fire burning those whose tongues set ablaze the world with unjust directives—for Odysseus and Diomedes: the Trojan horse, beguiling Achilles into fighting to his death (the pair had prophecy of such), and the looting of Palladium (effigy of wisdom). These were cold pragmatists who weren't above using people as disposable tools.

Dante's inflamed eagerness to speak with the great hero is sanctioned by Virgil, on condition that Virgil speaks on Dante's behalf. Virgil entreats the pair to tell their stories if he earned their favor at all for writing of them in his Aeneid (in which Hollander says Virgil "is pretty hard on them").

Odysseus, the gigachad himself, recapitulates his odyssey: after leaving Circe, by whom he was "beguiled" and abused, his insatiable curiosity about the world, about man's "vices" and "worth, outweighed his "tenderness" for son, "filial duty" for father, and "love" owed to Penelope, the only of his family he names, elevating without adequating her stake in his heart.

In this version of the odyssey, Odysseus sailed the world with a loyal crew until old age, reaching the non plus ultra, the edge of the world, and rallied them to venture beyond:

Consider how your souls were sown: you were not made to live like brutes or beasts, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.

Unbinding others' curiosity is Satanic, and Odysseus' charismatic counsel infects others with his desires, turning his ship into a death cult for super-human knowledge, like Ahab's "I do not order ye; ye will it":

I had my companions so ardent for the journey I could scarce have held them back.

Dante's pilgrimage exposes him to knowledge otherwise-hidden, perhaps otherwise-forbidden (Dante's vision of hell is idiosyncratic, and without support from Mary, Beatrice, Virgil, Chiron & Nessus, Geryon, the wand angel, and others he would've died many times), but for which his ardor is meek and passive, astray from humility and confidence. Dante doesn't wonder or question what knowledge is rightly his; he's here for the ride, takes what he can get, and is deterred by each peril—his pursuit of "virtue and knowledge" is sight-seeing, Odysseus' a trailblaze.

Of course, Dante, mister hillside fireflies, will reach Mount Purgatory, as resourceful Ulysses reached the apical Mount Olympus and was galed until sinking, "as pleased Another"—he didn't see the gods, and the wind wasn't necessarily godsent—the irony if it weren't! If Odysseus earned meaningful knowledge about the virtue, vices, and worth of man, he withheld it. Also, Dante's family is conspicuously absent for condemning Odysseus for abandoning his own.

———

CANTO 27

With Odysseus done, his fire evens out and Virgil sends him away. I think Virgil controlled the conversation so Dante, with his budding boldness, couldn't be impassioned by Odysseus, under the dubious pretext that the hero wouldn't talk to an Italian.

A second flame replaces Odysseus, its voice like the brass bull torture device animated by its victim's sounds, remarking on Virgil's Lombard (not Greek or Latin) dismissal of Odysseus, asking the pair to stay and talk, drawing attention to his iron will:

Though I am in the flame, as you can see, it irks me not.

His tone is more leisurely than Odysseus' was, but the tempered resolve required for a life of false counsel defines each sinner here. The flame, the strategist Guido da Montefeltro, doesn't recognize Dante's alive-ness (or Virgil's Virgil-ness), all-eyes for Virgil, asking "if Romagna lives in peace or war." Virgil, blind to the present and no attention-hog, passes the reins to Dante:

It’s up to you to speak—this one is Italian.

Dante breaks the non-news that, while at peace for now, "Romagna is not, and never was, free of warfare in her rulers’ hearts." Dante details the statuses of eight cities in Romagna, with such indirect phrasing that he must have some idea of who Guido is if he expects to be understood. Of Cesena, Dante says, "as she lives between tyranny and freedom, so she lies between the mountain and the plain"—this seems a jab at Odysseus and the guileful pride that led his men to doom at the threshold of Mount Olympus.

Dante finishes his long-winded status report and asks who the sinner is, offering him fame above; Guido says that if he believed Dante he would be silent—inglorious and shameful, no Odysseus—, and answers because to his knowledge "up from these depths, no one has yet returned alive"—the "yet" adds an odd spark of hope to the fatal, incessant longing that binds sinners' hearts. Guido was a warrior who became a friar "to make amends" for his bloodshed.

Guido blames Boniface VIII, "the Great Priest—the devil take him!—", for roping him back into warfare, where his "deeds were not a lion’s but the actions of a fox", with worldwide renown for his craftiness. Eventually that foxiness displeased him, at "that stage of life when all men ought to think of lowering sail and coiling up the ropes", until Boniface warred against Christians none of whom "had gone to conquer Acre or traffic in the Sultan’s lands", betraying his papacy and his calling, and summoned Guido as an advisor, the Sylvester to his Constantine, to "cure him of the fever of his pride" and help him raze Praeneste. At first Guido stayed silent, seeing that Boniface was mad, but Boniface bribed him with absolution and threatened him with damnation:

I have the power, as well you know, to lock and unlock Heaven, because the keys are two for which the pope before me had no care.

One line hellbound him: "Promis[e] much with scant observance". Upon dying, the shade of Francis tried to claim him, but was thwarted by a "dark Cherub" for the "fraudulent advice." The four examples of fraudulent advice given—the plundering of Troy, the marshalling of Achilles, the sailing to Olympus, and the dooming of Praeneste—reaped injustice: the false peace-offering of the horse, ensurance of Achilles' prophesied death, a journey leaving untilled legacies, and unrepentant complicity in abuse of the papal mantle; in each case the fraudster's intentions are cloaked or compromised.

Guido's concession annihilated a city where silence would likely have ensured his salvation. Instead, the dark angel carted his spirit through Minos' judgment and hell's coils, dunking on him with facts and logic:

One may not be absolved without repentance, nor repent and wish to sin concurrently—a simple contradiction not allowed.

Absolving sins entails re-solving desires, dissolving temptations through personal accountability. Guido had his upright path and forsook it in a moment of cowardice, abdicating responsibility for his fate to wicked Boniface.

———

CANTO 28

Again Dante warns that what follows is too wild to articulate adequately—carnage eclipsing the combined horrors of four notable battlefields: Aeneas defeating Apulia, Rome's defeat by Carthage, the Normans defeating the Saracens, and Manfred and Conradin falling to Charles of Anjou. If a battle's gravesite were exhumed and the fallen's wounds examined, "it would be nothing to the ninth pit’s filth."

The first image Dante offers of the ninth moat itself is a shade halved from the chin down, innards turned to outtards—a graphic, vulgar ("the loathsome sack that turns what one has swallowed into shit"), in-your-face description. Without prompting, the shade introduces himself:

See how I rend myself, see how mangled is Mohammed!

Dante's Mohammed is of one mind, but of split body, a maverick Christian who splintered his faith to found Islam as a rival sect, his ostentation as a successful founder reframed here as showing off his counterpass. Mohammed explains that the scourgers here "sowed scandal and schism while they lived", for which a devil renews their bisection in a cycle long enough for them to heal—to experience wholeness for a fleeting window before being rent again.

The schismatics drove their communities ever-further from unity, even led them to cycles of balkanization and scapegoating that may endure still. Mohammed asks who Dante is, suspecting—though without accusation—he's delaying his own punishment, and Virgil relays the truth to the prophet, vouching that Dante neither dead nor hellbound ("nor does his guilt lead him to torment")—implying that if Dante's journey ended here, he would go to Purgatory and earn salvation the usual way, his soul clean enough for the climb he once spurned in fear.

The shades in earshot, hearing Dante's alive-ness, gaze "in wonder, each forgetful of his pain", and Mohammed tells Dante to warn Fra Dolcino, an atavistic Christian, to stock up to survive a siege. Dolcino was starved out in 1307. Even in death, even for a sect hardly allied with his, Mohammed tries to sow schism.

He has no leverage here; the falsity of his authority is laid bare by his banishment to hell.

Mohammed walks off and another shade, with a mangled face, opens his windpipe to speak, recognizing Dante and asking Dante to "spare a thought" for "Pier da Medicina", about whom we know nothing. Pier asks Dante to relay a warning his infernal foresight showed him, of "a brutal tyrant’s treachery" against "the two chief men of Fano", a tyrant whose city "another down here with me would take delight in never having seen."

Dante requests clarification on the last bit, and is shown a man "with his tongue sliced off so deep in his throat, Curio" whose false counsel moved Caesar to civil war.

Next is a dis-armed shade, Mosca, who instigated the Guelph-Ghibelline civil war that ruined Florence. Mosca was mentioned before as one whom Dante thought was bent on doing good, but is one of the worst Florentines. Mosca once said, "A done deed finds its purpose", admitting, "For Tuscany, that was an evil seed." Dante reminds Mosca that that seed spelled death for Mosca's "own stock", and Mosca flees in berserk grief, probably the most remorseful sinner yet. Yet if he's here, he's unrepentant.

The schismatics are among the most sociable sinners, eager to be heard.

Dante's conscience fortifies him under "the armor of an honest heart"—elevating himself above Mosca's inadequate grief—; else he wouldn't pen the last sinner: a headless man holding his head like a lantern—a misleading guide—, Bertran de Born, who "set to enmity" King Henry II and his son. Bertran explains the counterpass as the "fit punishment" befalling sinners. Since Pier's unknown crime isn't even hinted at it's likely clandestine.

Schismatic mechanisms muddy, shift, and calcify loyalties by founding, urging, and supporting division. Divided kingdoms fall. Even a small seed, localized division, can proliferate intractable brambles.

———

CANTO 29

Dante lingers and weeps, "intoxicate[d]" by the ninth moat. Virgil reminds him they're on a tight schedule, questions why Dante pauses at this circle and no others, and sardonically asks if he plans to count every schismatic in the 22-mile circumference of the annulus. Dante tries to stay Virgil but Virgil is already moving—Dante recognized a relative, but Virgil claims that man, Geri del Bello, was hurling threats at Dante, which Dante overlooked amidst the shocking scenery while Bertran's "lantern" distracted him. Dante defends Bello, saying that his violent, unavenged death made him indignant, amplifying Dante's pity.

The pair talks of other things until they reach the tenth and final malebolgia, its bottom invisible for want of light, its lamentations piercing Dante's ears and heart—the wails of plague, stench too, as if festering in summer heat. Here God's "minister", "unerring justice, punishes the counterfeiters whom she here records." The gates of hell said justice moved God; in this phrasing, justice is a mere delegate, accounting and enforcing the architect's will, perhaps complementary to Fortune's opaque ministrations.

The counterfeiters are so stricken that they seem unable to stand, most lying and crawling about, with one pair sitting back-to-back, clawing, scaling themselves for the incurable itch of their pseudo-leprosy, blighted exiles. Virgil, sardony persisting, offers a captation seeking Italians to interview, "so may your nails last you in this task for all eternity."

This is the first canto to make my skin crawl. Dante is lucky this plight isn't contagious.

One of the pair says the pair are Italian, but demand who's asking, at which Virgil relays the duo's situation, getting everyone's attention, and the stage is Dante's to ask who the sinners are in exchange for reviving their names in the waking world. One introduces himself as Griffolino d'Arezzo, burnt for a false charge of heresy but caught by Minos for alchemy.

Griffolino focuses on the circumstances of his execution, where he said in jest that he knew how to fly, and was asked how by Albero of Siena, who didn't get the joke.

It is true I said to him in jest: “I do know how to rise into the air and fly!” And he, who had the will but not the wit, asked me to show him how And just because I failed to make him Daedalus, he had me set on fire by one who took him as his son.

The failed wings are a fairly minor invention compared to, say, the labyrinth, and I doubt any mortal can make another mortal such a gifted craftsman.

Dante mocks the farce with a remark against the "fatuous" Sienese. Another leper pitches in with the fatuity of Stricca, Niccolò, and the Spendthrift Brigade, with an ironic description of their follies: Stricca the spendthrift "knew how to moderate his spending", Niccolò the gourmet who "devise[d] a costly use for cloves",—these Sienese sought luxurious excess, devalued and squandered their goods, even destroyed the plates and service they ate from.

The speaker tries to forge comradery with Dante over their shared prejudice, and names himself as Capocchio, recognizing Dante, perhaps from their students days, from which Dante should remember Capocchio's skill with mimicry. Counterfeiting makes the low seem high, to take advantage of people's fallible senses and sensibilities.

If alchemy is punished here rather than in the annulus of violence against nature, Dante probably sees transmutation as forgery: lead turned into gold still has the worth of lead, and peddling it as genuine gold is fraudulent. Thus alchemists claim powers they lack. Having all the observable features of a thing doesn't equate the one to the other, as Capocchio's "ape of nature" talents attest: though punished for alchemy, impersonation via body-doubling or handwriting-falsification could end up here.

Their leprous counterpass makes them unable to deceive; even if they're not compelled to confess, superstitions and commonsense keep most far away from lepers, and it's an egregious sickness. These lepers have no community, being scarcely more than a "malarial ditch".

———

CANTO 30

With fierceness eclipsing that of the maddened victims of Juno and Fortune, two shades charge like wild beasts, one tusking and dragging Capocchio. Juno's jealousy infected a man with insanity such that he killed his son; Fortune, though not jealous, facilitated the fall of Troy, leading a woman's family to die and her to go feral.

In the intervention of a god vs. the ministration of Fortune, the results are the same. But the madness justice wreaks against those who blighted and blinded their own consciences is greater.

Griffolino names the tusker as Gianni Schicchi, and Dante asks of the other demonized shade, that it might not gore Griffolino. It is Myrrha, who disguised herself to have sex with her father. Gianni disguised himself as a dead man to ensure inheritance for his family. For acting as other than themselves, they now have not even themselves, reduced to beasts.

The next shade, "fashioned like a lute", has the distension and thirst of dropsy, where "the face and belly do not match", and introduces himself as Master Adam, who while alive "had in plenty all [he] wanted" but is now afflicted with tantalizing thirst, a lush river by where he sinned emblazoned in his mind to torment him worse than the malady:

The rigid justice that torments me employs the landscape where I sinned to make my sighs come faster.

By the river he falsified coins—where indeed face and belly do not match, and which feeds the belly but starves the conscience.

Sullen and envious, he remarks that he would rather his employers join his misery than be freed of his own. He'd heard from the furious shades that one had, yet asks, "What good is that to me whose limbs are bound?" Stationary like the usurers, thus unable to indulge his schadenfreude, Adam is also innumerate, far exaggerating the size of the tenth moat from his immobility, an ironic twist on the "three carats’ worth of dross" by which he inflated the value of coins.

Dante asks Adam about "two wretches who steam as wet hands do in winter" to his right, and Adam says they were there when he "rained into this trough"—his thirst clearly occupying him—, unmoving, nor likely to move again. One was a false accuser, the other Sinon, a Greek who feigned desertion to entice the Trojans into accepting the gift horse.

At the invective, Sinon rises to punch Adam—probably Sinon chose to spend his time in hell resting and rotting, unless Adam was lying—, the lute-like body "boomed out like a drum", and Adam returns the favor, boasting that his arms are loose and sturdy. Sinon mocks Adam for his arms not saving him from burning, despite their handiness for coining; Adam retaliates that Sinon bore false witness; Sinon counters that his own sin was one, Adam's "more than any other devil!";—these shades are petty.

In Italian this is a rap battle, counterfeiter Adam hollow like a drum vs. perjurer Sinon who made his laden horse seem hollow, ending with Adam saying, "For you to lick the mirror of Narcissus would not take much by way of invitation." Dante's tour offers a tinted mirror into shades' hearts, boring beneath their flagrant self-unawareness. In Adam's rejoinder, Sinon's thirst is greater, thus his sin worse; and he would drown himself to sate his thirst, maybe overcome by the backbite of conscience that self-awareness would bring: a reflective spring can receive a lot of impurities, which would reveal the mud Sinon tries to project onto Adam.

Dante enjoys the show, but Virgil threatens him:

Go right on looking and it is I who’ll quarrel with you.

Dante is so abashed that he "long[s] for what is, as though it [is]n’t"—he seeks pardon, doesn't realize he seeks pardon, and was already granted it:

Less shame would cleanse a greater fault, and that is why you may set down the load of such remorse.

Virgil reminds Dante that he's by his side if future shades quarrel. Is Dante shaming us for enjoying the rap battle he thrust upon us, or is Virgil being too harsh even by Dante's standards?

———

CANTO 31

Again Dante reminds us that his dependence on Virgil harms and heals as the spear of Achilles wounds then mends with its touch. Likewise the voyage through hell harms and heals at every turn: the assault to sense and sensibility, the bitter confrontation with outcomes of temptations Dante is no stranger to, the monsters who help or hinder Dante's progress—in retrospect even hell is "the cause first of a painful, then a welcome, gift."

Despite Virgil's absolution—a facile penance for a trivial error—the pair march in silence toward the Ninth Circle.

At the edge of the Malebolge "it was less than night and less than day", dense with ominous transitory mist, a twilight void broken by a "horn-blast that would have made the loudest thunderclap seem faint"—a treacherous, futile horn heralding the visibility of forms Dante mistakes for towers, sight from afar insufficing to resolve the territory of betrayal.

Taking Dante's hand, Virgil explains that the towers ringing the abyss are the upper halves of giants, who become visible as the pair nears them, whereupon "error left [Dante] and fear came in its place."

These giants are "those whom Jove still threatens from the heavens when he thunders", an explicit statement of the coexistence of Zeus with God, whether Zeus be an estuarial face of the singular kaleidoscope or otherwise. The presence of other mythical beings is whatever, due to ambiguous or petty source or error, but Dante invokes his authorial authority to vouch that the giants rebelled against Zeus, and that their horn was louder than his thunder; justice can prevail without brute force.

Dante praises nature for spurning her craft, "depriving Mars of such practitioners": even nature can err and repent (?), and Mars, Florence's former patron, is a constant reminder of the city's bloodied roots. The giants' existence is unjust because "when the power of thought is coupled with ill will and naked force there is no refuge from it for mankind."

Dante describes the nearest giant as 70ish feet tall. It bellows,

Raphèl maì amècche zabì almi!

—a hateful, inscrutable speech. Virgil fires back, "You muddled soul, stick to your horn!", before naming the giant as "Nimrod, because of whose vile plan the world no longer speaks a single tongue." Nimrod built the Tower of Babel: humans together—of whom God said, "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do"—could rise to heaven, but God scattered their tongues, foreclosing their efforts. Nimrod babbles, and only hears babble, so Virgil's outcry is silly.

The next giant, "bigger and more savage", is chained, Ephialtes who "joined the great assault when giants put the gods in fear." Dante asks to see Briareus, but Virgil says they're headed rather to Antaeus, and that Briareus is a fiercer analog to Ephialtes, who earthquakes in outrage,—Briareus' strength is incalculable to outstrip that display.

Reaching Antaeus, Virgil launches into captation, praising his strength that may have tipped the scales for "the sons of earth" in "the war on Heaven", though backhandedly locating his quarry of lions (of which he learned from Lucan's shade) at the site of the battle that won Rome the Punic War—Virgil offers Antaeus fame from Dante's pen that could go to Tityus or Typhon. Needing no further bribing, Antaeus—with "the mighty grip once felt by Hercules"—grabs Virgil, who grabs Dante, and sets them "gently on the bottom that swallows Lucifer with Judas". Like Geryon, he is very quick to return to his original position: "like a ship’s mast rising, so he rose."

Throughout, Antaeus gave no expression; he can speak, says Virgil, but he doesn't. Nor is he fettered. His pride, though treacherous, is motivated more by fame than by fury. For his first trip, Virgil probably sweet talked Briareus, of whom he wrote. We're in Cocytos now, the inner profanum of the 3-sphere, coldness be our god. Here the greatest potential is squandered to wreak injustice.

———

CANTO 32

Self-conscious of his inability to express his thoughts with "verses harsh enough and rasping", "no enterprise undertaken lightly", the poet calls on the Muses to help him match "the telling" to "the fact": words can capture the world; music can move mountains to reshape the world.

While walking, Dante hears a voice cautioning him to not step on the sinners, whom he sees embedded in a lake of ice so solid that a mountain crashing down on it would do nothing—an absolute, immovable plight.

The first sinners are as summertime frogs submerged save for their snouts, "teeth a-clatter", "ashen with cold", their faces downturned in unabated shame and desolation, crying tears that soon freeze. Dante singles out a pair frozen together, asking their identities, at which they weep, and their tears freeze, gluing them tighter, setting them into frenzied headbutting against each other.

A nearby sinner asks, "Why do you reflect yourself so long in us?"—the ice is a mirror into the morbid temptation to betray that could surface in any heart—, and identifies the pair as brothers, Alessandro and Napoleone degli Alberti, who killed each other over inheritance, the worst sinners in Caïna—worse than Mordred, worse than two Florentines who slew their relatives. The eponymous Cain is nowhere to be seen.

The speaker names himself as Camiscion de’ Pazzi, who awaits a relative, consigned deeper still, for his "exculpation"—to no avail, envious folly. The collective purpling of a thousand cold faces engraves in Dante a shuddering imprint, marking his arrival at the next subcircle, where, whether by "will or fate or chance", he "struck [his] foot hard in the face of" a sinner. That it was hard implies will. This man, Bocca degli Abati, betrayed the Guelphs during a battle, ensuring catastrophic loss. Indignant, he plays victim about being singled out, shouting curses, and Dante asks Virgil to stop so he can question this figure. Virgil stops, remaining silent.

Dante asks who the reproachful man is, Bocca asks who Dante is to pass through Antenora "buffeting another's cheeks", Dante offers him fame, and Bocca declines: "I long for just the opposite." Dante threatens Bocca, Bocca refuses to give anything but howls, to which a nearby sinner names Bocca and asks him why the ruckus. That satisfies Dante:

Now you no longer need to say a word, vile traitor; to your shame shall I bring back true news of you.

Bocca, defeated, can only ask that Dante bring true news of the other sinners' shame too, calling out Buoso da Duera, who named him, who took a bribe to let an invading Guelph army through the pass he was tasked to defend; Tesauro de' Beccheria, who betrayed Florence by letting the banned Ghibellines in and was beheaded; Gianni de' Soldanieri, a Ghibelline who joined the uprising against his own party after their leader's death turned the tides; Ganelon, who betrayed a bulk of Charlemagne's army to be slaughtered; and Tebaldello Zabrisi, who betrayed his fellow Ghibellines to vengeful Guelphs in Bologna.

The reiteration of Ganelon's treachery, alluded to by Nimrod's futile foghorn, reminds us that Dante and Virgil are invaders: they got through the iron walls of Dis, were abetted by Geryon, then Antaeus, whose loyalties could be bought with fame, and now approach the emperor of hell.

Caïna encases those who betrayed their families, Antenora those who betrayed their parties, and Dante is careful to include traitors of Guelph and Ghibelline alike, abominating each, reflecting his belief in the utmost importance of loyalty, standing for something, even for causes Dante thinks unjust: far better an honest Ghibelline than a traitorous Guelph or, for that matter, a complicit neutral.

Dante's attention is then captured by a pair of shades, one biting the other at the brainstem with "famished" aplomb and "bitter hatred", accentuated by cold medical language. Dante offers him requital for a sound case against whom he bites.

———

CANTO 33

Traitors are numerous—canto 32 may well contain the most named sinners of any canto—, and Camiscion's elliptical prophecy reminded us that they lurk amidst the living with insidious subtilty and invidious inevitability.

Ugolino is willing to relive his grief to seed "infamous fruit to the traitor" he gnaws on like aspic, and angles for sympathy. Recognizing Dante as a Florentine by his dialect, Ugolino names himself and names his meal as Archbishop Ruggieri, who backstabbed him, using a false accusation—that Ugolino gave Pisan castles to Florence and Lucca—to starve him with his family in the Tower of Hunger, "where others yet shall be imprisoned".

After some months of tracking the moon through a spyhole, Ugolino received a prophetic dream: "the lord and master", Ruggieri, with hounds and friends, hunts "the wolf and wolfcubs" where Lucca is hidden from Pisa, and the flagging wolves are devoured. Ugolino awoke from the dream to hear his children "weep in their sleep and ask for bread."

Ugolino accuses any who do not grieve at his tale of heartlessness.

Though his story is grievous, Ugolino has avoided confessing his treachery: betraying his Ghibellines and conspiring with Ruggieri against a just judge, Ugolino's own grandson, an affront to civil justice and familial piety alike. When Ugolino's children awoke, they commiserated about sharing troubling dreams, then heard the tower's entrance nailed shut, the implication petrifying Ugolino's heart such that he did not weep, while his children wept, one asking him, "You look so strange, father, what’s wrong?"—Ugolino pled for our pity, but asks for yet more pity by lamenting that his suffering destroyed his capacity for grief, a Medusan glimpse of his family's impending starvation.

Ugolino was silent, desolate, all day; by the next, his children shared his expression, renewing his sorrowing, causing him to gnaw his hands, which his children took for hunger, offering their flesh to bite instead.

Father, we would suffer less if you would feed on us: you clothed us in this wretched flesh—now strip it off.

Ugolino curbed his chewing to ease them, but there was nothing he could do but sit with his stony heart until, one by one, his children starved to death, the first begging, "O father, why won’t you help me?" right before perishing.

Ugolino had no care or thought for the comfort or salvation of his own dying sons.

Maddened, "already blind", Ugolino called to their corpses in vain, then cannibalized them:

Then fasting had more power than grief.

Ugolino should be asking for sympathy and salvation for his children, whom his machinations doomed, for whom he never shed a tear, of whose afterlife status he offers no report. His futile vies for pity match him heaping all of his resentment on Ruggieri to deflect his fatal responsibility in the tragedy.

The poet castigates Pisa for their unpunished cruelty to the uninvolved children. Dante is the only one here who cares for the children, even ensuring all four are named: Ugolino named Anselm and Gaddo, and the poet adds Uguiccione and Brigata. Dante doesn't grace Ugolino with a response, only the cold, silent abandonment Ugolino showed his own children.

The traitors are the most obstinate about confessions, one pair ignoring Dante's request, Ugolino trying only to restore his good name to blight Ruggieri's.

Ugolino could have used his time in the Tower of Hunger to console his children and reflect on his sins. In one account, he sought a friar to confess him and his sons, but was refused. Dante omitted that, whether he was unaware of it or wanted to write a colder Ugolino than other accounts. There's biting irony in the fact that Ugolino's worst character traits as a father weren't what condemned him. Without his treachery he shouldn't have gone to hell even had the events in the Tower of Hunger transpired as Dante told, i.e. he probably would've been purgated.

Leaving Antenora, Dante sees the next set of traitors, faces upturned so that their tears freeze in their eyes and obstruct further weeping. By now the cold had calloused and numbed Dante's face, but he could still feel wind in this still place. He asks Virgil from whom comes the wind, and Virgil only tells him to wait and see later.

One sinner cries to Dante to remove the ice crusting his face so he can cry again, the crust marking the saturation and congestion of his grief. Blinded by grief, the sinner assumes Dante is a shade headed to Judecca. Dante asks the man's name first, with an oath:

Then, if I do not relieve you, may I have to travel to the bottom of the ice.

Dante may be somewhat hyperbolic, but I think his deal reaffirms his faith as backing up his promise, such that breaking his promise would be spurning his renewed faith and spiting God. The traitor introduces himself:

I am Fra Alberigo. I am he who harvested the evil orchard, and here, for figs, I am repaid in dates.

Alberigo was a Jovial Knight who invited two relatives for dinner, had them *slaughtered* at the cue of ordering fruit, and—Dante asks if he's already dead, but Alberigo says *no*: "‘Such privilege has this Ptolomea, that many times a soul may fall down here well before Atropos has cut it loose."

Those who betray guests go directly to hell, do not pass Minos, do not collect 200 dates, and their bodies are possessed by demons—hinted to be other than the Malebranche—for the rest of their fated lifespans. Alberigo adduces Branca d'Oria, "who walks the earth, as [Dante] must know", who shares Ptolomea's eternal winter, who plotted to murder Michel Zanche of the boiling tar.

Alberigo asks again for Dante to wipe away tears. Again Dante acts cold: "And to be rude to him was courtesy." He used fraud, maybe had to, to outwit a fraudster.

The poet shames Genoa, marveling that they haven't been exterminated, for spawning such as Alberigo.

It is strange that Dante has never seen a sinner, escorted or not, headed toward their assigned circle.

———

CANTO 34

The flag of the king of hell draws near, soon to be visible, says Virgil, and Dante looks and beholds: the wings of Satan, churning like windmills in the mist, causing the bone chilling wind that Dante tries to avoid by hiding behind Virgil. Shuddering at the recall, the poet relays his vision of the shades of Judecca, "wholly covered" save for the occasional protrusion, in a range of postures: lying, standing, bent, upside-down, none in any shape for a conversation.

At last Virgil introduces Satan, Lucifer, Dis—the eponym of ill will—, and Dante enters a sublime state neither alive nor dead, the culmination of his pilgrimage, a moral death preparing for purgative rebirth. Satan "rose from the ice", the void tower at the center of the cosmos, each arm over 800 feet long, marking his height as clearing 2,000 feet—a monument to all our sins:

If he was fair as he is hideous now, and raised his brow in scorn of his creator, he is fit to be the source of every sorrow.

This is not a Satan with an active influence in the overworld; Satan is defeated, and sin is man's alone. No scapegoating befits this wretched creature who, once outshining all but God, is now laid lowest, impotent, emperor in name alone to the penitential artifice of his (for)sworn enemy.

He has three heads: that facing us is red, yellow-white on the right, and black on the left. I think red is the scornful, envious wrath he loosed on the world; whitish yellow is a stained vacancy, reducing a complete rainbow (white as the colorless all-color) to one shabby hue; and black is shame.

For each face there are two wings, outspanning any sail yet now unable to carry the seraph anywhere. With each flap, three gusts of wind renew the chill of the Cocytus. Once free, Satan is now transfixed as a perpetual motion machine for the damnation of traitors, weeping from six eyes, drooling tears and bloody spit from three chins, brutally chewing three arch-traitors.

Satan's endless weeping attests to his grief, reliving in memory how far he's fallen. Virgil identifies the three sinners as Judas, Brutus, and Cassius—the latter two's treachery against the ordained, thus for Dante rightful, empire of Rome was an affront to the plan of creation, not merely to political loyalties.

Without pause or fanfare, timekeeper Virgil declares, "But night is rising in the sky. It is time for us to leave, for we have seen it all." Dante and Virgil climb down Satan, and with a switch the poet acknowledges is confusing, they reach a hole in the ice, and from the hole, Satan appears upside-down.

The hole, though a "natural dungeon", had to have been placed there intentionally: as Virgil said, "by such rungs as [Satan's flanks] must we depart from all evil": seeing Satan isn't enough, but one must mount and surmount him, understanding the desolation failure to do so wreaks, has wreaked for all of history. And yet, Satan—"the guilty worm by whom the world is pierced"—is the greatest sinner, unmatched, unmatchable by any human: a timeless limit—

like the magnetic monopole by which charge (electrical, but I imply a moral analog) is quantized; incidentally, the monopole is a Hopf fibration, by which are constructed 3-spheres, such as Dante's cosmos

—that capstones the panorama of trespass, a pivotal "Here be dragons" bridging the map of despair with that of hope.

Virgil explains that the corridor follows the center of the Earth; thus 12 hours elapsed in a blink. Virgil then offers a geological myth: on Satan's fall, the land of the southern hemisphere fled north away from him, its displacement forming Mount Purgatory, in the process creating "this lacuna" that facilitates the voyage.

In pitch darkness the pair walk, until, alerted by the sound of a "narrow stream" that had eroded the corridor into a "gentle slope", they enter a hidden passage and climb up:

Then we came forth, to see again the stars.

Not "I", but "we": guidance is salvific, and hope now stars Virgil's horizon as it does Dante's.

[kalliersnovelreviews]

The Depraved Privation of Trust: My Voyage through Dante's Inferno (Cantos 18-25)

CANTO 18

It looks like the entire second half of the cantica will be devoted to fraud.

We've come to the Malebolge, ten concentric, descending moats "fashioned entirely of iron-colored rock", encircling a pit that, despite presumably being the smallest region of hell, is "extremely wide and deep". The iron color brings to mind the iron fist with which hell was designed, while it being rock seems to mock the ill will of the sinners: for all of their fraudulent nerve, they lack the strength of real iron—the strength of sound judgment—, because their actions have unsustainable foundations; they will be purified and perfected in the end.

That it's possible to journey all the way through hell indicates that such journeys, though perilous, were intended, and the fortifications and gatekeepers function not just to uphold the demarcation of injustice, but also to test pilgrims—tests Dante would've likely failed each time without Virgil, and tests from which Dante arguably gained little.

The first malebolgia has naked sinners, half moving clockwise, half moving counterclockwise, these "new scourgers" being lashed "with heavy scourges" by horned demons that kept the sinners swift.

Dante, perhaps too busy with wonder, is not scared of the demons, despite almost every other monster thus far being hostile. Instead he looks among the throng and spots a familiar face, Venèdico Caccianemico, who tries to "hide by lowering his face". (Hollander: "His sin was in selling his own sister to Opizzo of Este.")

Dante asks why he's here,—I've just realized how odd is the split between Dante the pilgrim, circa 1300, and Dante the poet, 1308-1320+: the poem's autobiographical content retrofits him with an alternative history that presumably converged with Dante's "real" history in Dante's present. Dante the poet has to know the sinner's sin to know where to assign them, but through documentations reframed here as infernal revelations.

Though reluctant, ashamed, Caccianemico is moved by Dante's recognition and confesses:

It was I who urged Ghisolabella to do the will of that marquis, no matter how the foul tale goes around.

Then he hastens to add that many of his fellow Bolognese are "crammed" in here, indicting the Bolognese people's "greedy dispositions". He can only bury his shame in the madness of his crowd, in which pimping was endemic.

A demon strikes the man, shouting, "Away, pimp! there are no women here to trick"—"trick" is slang for acts and customers of prostitution and reiterates the fraud by which pimps ensnare victims—, and Dante rejoins Virgil.

They ascend a ridge and Virgil tells Dante to let the second ring see him, and points out the hero Jason, who "seems to shed no tears despite his pain." In his odyssey, Jason deceived, impregnated, and abandoned two women, Hypsipyle and Medea. Virgil, probably with disgust, quickly concludes, "Let that be all we know of this first ditch and of the ones it clenches in its jaws."

Crossing to the second ditch, Dante's first impression is "whimpering", far more piteous than Jason's stoic dignity: this deep ditch is full of shit, and flatterers plunged in it for being full of shit, their statuses leveled: "one could not tell if he were priest or layman." Flattery's injustice is that it muddies merit to coax favor and status, status subject to like demerit.

Somehow Dante recognizes one man as Alessio Interminei, who, not recognizing Dante, demands why Dante fixates on him. Dante's stated recognition leads the man to confess his flattery, with equal shame as the pimp but less reluctance. Then Virgil points out Thaïs, "who, when her lover asked: 'Have I found favor with you?' answered, 'Oh, beyond all measure!'"—probably to multiple lovers. She scratches herself, which begs for horrific infections, and alternates between squatting and standing, maybe in mock imitation of cycling through lovers. Virgil's discomfort with such filth is palpable.

———

CANTO 19

Dante preludes the third malebolgia with an outcry against Simon and the simonists named after him, "who prostitute the things of God that should be brides of goodness!" To sell holy things is worse for Dante than selling someone's body, for the injustice it wreaks may be greater on the whole. Dante is awfully excited to malign these sinners, overcome with joy at recalling God's artistry and justice in, among other things, meting out punishment.

In the third moat, the walls are perforated with holes, "all round and of a single size", that contain the upper halves of sinners, reduced one and all to the sin by which they once sought to get ahead. Maybe thinking this ditch strains credulity, Dante offers as his "seal, to undeceive all men", recount of a story of him breaking a baptismal fountain (or maybe a baptismal oath) to rescue a drowning person.

While such fountains are communal, these fountains are dry and singular, befitting those who tried to private what can't give life as private property. The simonists writhe from their feet being burned, unable to defend themselves.

Dante inquires about the worst-tortured sinner he sees, and Virgil offers to take him down to talk with the man. Instead of saying, "Yes, let's go", Dante says,

Whatever pleases you is my desire. You are my lord and know I do your will.

He straight-up admits to being motivated first and foremost by pleasing Virgil, despite knowing that Virgil will take him to Beatrice regardless, and should know that he's here to rekindle his faith and learn the meaning of his life.

Down the embankment they go, and Dante adopts the role of a "friar who confesses a treacherous assassin"—the assassin hopes to defer or deter his death—, though not with any professionalism: he leads with "Whatever you are", questioning or even rejecting the shade's humanity, and is vague in his request: "come out with something, if you can." The man vexes Dante by mistaking him for Pope Boniface VIII.

The simonist, Pope Nicholas III, assumes Boniface will end in this malebolgia too, because he "did not fear to take by guile the beautiful Lady and to do her outrage", using the church for personal gain and extending the papacy's power to territory Dante would reserve for the empire. Nicholas is confused because his future-sight led him to believe that Boniface would die (as he did) several years later, while it's around 1300 during Dante's visit.

Virgil intervenes in Dante's speechlessness to tell him to disavow the misidentification, and he does, yet again showing more due deference than literal popes. With a plaintive sigh, Nicholas asks what Dante wants, his privative sin making him unsociable in death, but does give his confession with a fun pun:

[S]o avid was I to advance my cubs I filled my purse as now I fill this hole.

He lined his pockets as he now lines this pocket.

His predecessors are crushed beneath him, and Boniface will soon take his place at the moat's surface, and Boniface in turn will be covered by Clement V, a "lawless shepherd" who used his friendship with King Philip IV to first get elected as pope, then abuse the papacy for Philip.

Dante unleashes on Nicholas, reminding him that Peter et al. did not take or offer bribes for their power, that such "avarice afflicts the world, trampling down the good and raising up the wicked", even an apocalyptic image of the church with seven heads and ten horns, as if becoming the beast through its violation by religious authorities given to vice—"a god of gold and silver", a hundred false idols, a decay chain, at or near critical mass in Florence, begotten by the ill-gotten "dowry" by which Constantine wed Sylvester with power over Rome. Dante's 28-line diatribe is a nuclear roast—no recovery, no response from Nicholas, all in perfect meter, reverence for heaven's keys restraining words harsher still—that earns a drawn-out bear hug from Virgil, lasting until the pair overlooks the fourth moat.

———

CANTO 20

Dante the poet uses the first tercet to prepare to "giv[e] matter to the canto numbered twenty of this first canzone, which tells of those submerged." One gives matter to pregiven form, a form by which Dante obliges himself to cover the gamut of justice to a standard befitting the subject.

Dante the pilgrim "was all eagerness" for the next moat, which he soon saw contained a litany of silent, weeping sinners moving in litanous processions, their faces twisted backwards, which Dante admits is unprecedented if not impossible in medical biology.

When Dante weeps in pity, Virgil rebukes him harshly:

Are you still as witless as the rest? Here piety lives when pity is quite dead. Who is more impious than one who thinks that God shows passion in His judgment?

Virgil has overlooked Dante's pity on other occasions, so "Here" shouldn't mean all of hell, but as the scourges will worsen, it can't be bolgia 4 only, nor all of Dis since Dante's pity for Brunetto and the wheelmen was forgiven and even sanctioned by Virgil. Yet Virgil's follow-up, that the height of impiety is believing "that God shows passion in His judgment", seems a condemnation tailored to the seers here, if fraudulent divination means arrogating gifts of sight—claiming favor where neither favor nor grace is granted. But that doesn't explain Virgil's "still", since Dante couldn't know beforehand how to act to diviners, so Virgil must have expected Dante to latch onto a broader, slippery principle of conduct.

Dante failing to do so is also Virgil's failure, and Virgil's aggression is his starkest departure yet from his "gentle father" persona, so Virgil may be projecting onto Dante, launching into so length a speech, first compelling Dante to see the seer Amphiaraus, who foresaw his death, fled a war, and met the very death he tried to flee, swallowed by the ground as it mocks him; then Tiresias, the blind seer who was genderswapped twice; Aruns, a cave-dwelling sky-, sea-, and star-gazer (though not astrologer); Manto, her front veiled by a curtain of hair, who "settled in the place where [Virgil] was born"—the notes say Virgil's account of each seer has minor to major distortions or (re)inventions ("violence done to classical texts"), but maybe it works for the seers' stories to be shrouded in false sight—they who sought to understand too much are now unable to be understood, or even tell their stories, muted by their injuries.

Virgil, calmer but still excited, indulges in a history-geography of Manto, culminating in her settling on a dry plot in a marsh to practice magic until her death, after which people built a city there and "named it Mantua, with no spells or incantations"—Dante forced Virgil to retcon Manto's magic passing to her son by omitting him as Mantua's founder, ending her legacy and divorcing Virgil from divination, replacing the link with his challenge to Dante's piety. The audacious redaction—which backfires by Streisand effect—culminates in Virgil's peroration:

I charge you, therefore, should you ever hear my city’s origin described another way, allow no lie to falsify the truth.

Dante the poet has Virgil the guide censor Virgil the poet for the edification of Dante the pilgrim. This might count as the first flat-out lie Virgil has told, but I don't think I'm meant to read it that way; I think this tangle extends the counterpass from physical to mental, a memetic haze. Besides, Virgil should, like, be honest and accountable; lying won't dissolve a blemish, and surely he knows that, so it wouldn't sit right—Dante asks for a lot of good faith from his audience to pull this stunt.

Virgil then names Eurypylus, who "told the favoring time for setting sail" and (salting the tangle once more) "is sung in certain verses of my lofty tragedy, as you know very well"; three more; then the spinsters-turned-witches; then they must proceed, Virgil using the moon to timekeep (and no more, unlike astrologers). How the moon is visible underground is unclear.

———

CANTO 21

From the last canto, Dante and Virgil continued "speaking of things my Comedy does not care to sing"; the subject may be too lofty, tragic, or irrelevant, but the apophasis reads as coy—Virgil's infodumps are always fun, and the poem is already gratuitous and indulgent in other ways. It's almost like Dante is being possessive and smug about his privileged knowledge of Virgil.

The fifth moat is full of boiling tar, compared to tar used to caulk "unsound ships" in winter while they're being rebuilt, renewed—Dante sees nothing in the "seething pitch" before Virgil, in panic, calls his attention to a devil running towards them, a sinner hooked on his shoulder like a butchered pig.

So near is the demon that he can be heard telling another to plunge the shouldered sinner while he goes for more prey from Lucca, where "money turns a No into a Yeah", with wording implying he goes above to abduct shades from living men—it's unsettling to consider that there are passages leading straight from earth to hell, and odd if the Malebranche demons can bypass the usual Charon-and-Minos entrance with their quarries, lest the devils have judgment over this group of swindlers, grafters, and barrators. The demon has the humor to exempt Bonturo, Lucca's most infamous barrator, from his judgment of the city as saturated with swindlers, maybe marking Bonturo as his target before racing away.

The plunged sinner, trying to float in the tar, is berated by the remaining demons, who too have sardonic humor:

This is no place for the Holy Visage!

Here you swim a different stroke than in the Serchio!

The first remark may contrast his piceous, piteous face with Lucca's picture of ebony-faced crucified Christ. With cruel hooks, the devils hound the man, prodding him down like "scullions"—the Malebranche are menial helpers; God is the chef and artist of the pit—keeping meat submerged so it cooks, an irreversible process redoubling the irony of the caulking-rebuilding metaphor.

Virgil tells Dante to hide while he bargains with the demons, having outwitted them before:

[H]ave no fear. I know this place and had exactly such a scuffle here before.

But when Virgil shows himself and his resolve, the demons swarm him, and his confidence crumbles. He asks for counsel with one demon, Malacoda, who is elected by the rest, though Malacoda mutters, "This won’t do him any good"—as though the demons plan to gut Virgil no matter what, though Virgil pays no mind, even though he surely heard it, as Dante, hiding farther away, heard and recalled it.

Virgil's lofty arrogance contrasts the demons' low arrogance as he plays his only card:

Let us proceed, for it is willed in Heaven that I guide another down this savage way.

That card wouldn't have worked for Virgil's first trip. I get the nagging feeling, after Geryon, that Virgil has some way of persuasion he doesn't want Dante to see. The demon drops his hook, as if humbled, decrees the pair's safe passage, Virgil draws Dante out, the demons swarm him too but relent at Malacoda's command, and Malacoda says the next bridge is broken, as of 1,266 years and 19 hours ago—impeccable timekeeping for uncivilized brutes, maybe facilitated by their overworld ventures—, and sends a troupe of devils to, or so he'd like us to think, safely escort the pair to the nearest viable bridge.

Dante declares his misgivings to Virgil, pointing out that the demons can barely restrain their bloodlust, which Virgil tells him is only "for the stewing wretches." Not only is this the first time Dante has tried to stand against Virgil, but Dante is right to do so. These demons are intelligent butchers and there's nothing in it for them to take pity on visitors.

If Virgil passed these demons the first time, that may be because he wasn't encumbered by Dante, or wasn't targeted by the demons. Heaven's sanction counts for nothing when the Malebranche could throw them into the tar right now and they couldn't do anything about it.

———

CANTO 22

In his time as a cavalrymen, having seen the various equipment and tactics of many armed men, Dante never witnessed such "outlandish fanfare" as the Malebranche's departure. To lighten the memory, Dante quips, "in church with saints, with guzzlers in the tavern." I'm sure he would've preferred saints and angels to lead him; he even admitted he'd rather go without escort than be led by demons.

Now Dante can see sinners in the pitch, raising their backs for reprieve like dolphins, "giving sailors warning to prepare to save their ship"—to the ironic metaphors of ship-rebuilding and cooking is added the lack of anyone being saved—, or raising their heads like frogs, playing whack-a-mole with the demons.

A slow sinner is skewered, about to be flensed, but Dante asks Virgil to first learn the man's name, and hears that this man was born to a wastrel father—"destroyer of himself and all his goods"—, but his mother tried to lead him aright by putting him "in service with a man of rank", where he began a life of "taking bribes".

One demon, claiming the sinner as his prey, has the courtesy to offer Virgil more time to question the man before the "mangling" begins in earnest. Virgil asks for more Italians, and hears of Fra Gomìta, "who had his master’s enemies in hand but dealt with them so each one sings his praises", and Michael Zanche,—the sinner trying to delay his torture, using the demon leader's sanction of Virgil's interview to keep the other demons at bay.

Emboldened by his relative success, the sinner hatches a plan: he can lure Italians up if the Malebranche retreat. One demon calls out the "cunning stunt", and is told, "I must indeed be cunning if I procure still greater anguish for my friends." I wouldn't trust an unrepentant fraudster's loyalty, but the demons assent, turn their backs, and—the sinner dives, escapes, the two demons pursuing him scuffle in thwarted rage and get tarred, "cooked to a crust", and Dante and Virgil take their leave.

———

CANTO 23

The demons of fraud were undone by their incontinence, their intelligence compromised by bloodlust—and the irony of them outwitting Virgil, considered a beacon of judgment, but being thwarted by some random barrator!

Dante parallels the brawl with Aesop's fable of a mouse that strings himself to a frog to cross a river, where the frog dives as if to drown the mouse, and a kite on the hunt snatches the mouse and the frog too—he says the brawl and the fable are as alike as two dialectical words for "now", issa and mo, one from north and one from south, both accentuating the situation's urgency. Apparently issa often designates abrupt turns to misfortune (once X; now Y).

Yet the parallel is flawed because the kite and the frog, rather than the frog and the mouse, perished in Canto 22. Dante may also be criticizing Virgil's incompetence by making him the frog that almost got him, the mouse, killed.

Dante voices a sudden fear that the demons will be fiercer should they catch up:

It’s our fault they have been cheated, and with such hurt and shame I’m sure it must enrage them.

It's like he's unconsciously urging Virgil to sublimate the shame he must feel, since no rescue is forthcoming here, as he asks Virgil for concealment. Virgil is on Dante's wavelength—

Just now your thought commingled with my own, alike in attitude and aspect, so that of both I’ve formed a single plan

—but despite the urgency has time for nine lines where one would suffice: down the slope to the next ditch. Y'know, maybe Virgil was right: the Malebranche could've shredded the pair at any time, so Virgil's gullibility may have been him buying time for a chance to escape, thinking the demons would pounce if the pair refused escort.

The demons come flying, Virgil acts as a protective mother and embraces Dante, slides down with reckless abandon, and the demons are stuck:

[H]igh Providence, which made them wardens of the fifth crevasse, deprives them of the power to leave it.

Virgil's unfamiliarity with the fifth moat, and near-failure, implies he went around it the first time, despite his claims.

The shift in energy is jarring: straight from a farce-thriller to the doom and gloom of "a lacquered people who made their round, in tears, with listless steps", clad in specious—"Gilded and dazzling on the outside"—lead cloaks that hide their eyes.

Hypocrisy's etymology was once given as "epi-", "above", and "crisis", "gold". Now it's "hypo-", "under", and "krino", "pronounce", to answer as an actor.

Dante asks Virgil to find any recognized hypocrites. A pair stops Dante, slow but with "haste of mind", and say that Dante seems alive but if dead it's unfair for him "to go uncovered by the heavy stole". They ask Dante's identity, the first curious sinners in a while, and hear it. He affirms that he's alive, then asks theirs:

But who are you in whom I see distilled the misery running down your cheeks in tears? And what is the grief you bear that glitters so?

The second question highlights their counterpass: they who hid behind pretense to garner the prestige of doing, without doing, are exposed by their a) placement, b) compulsion to confess, and c) monastic-mockery cloaks beneath which they creak "like scales", overburdened by the imbalance between face and fact.

They were elected peacekeepers who doomed their city because it had enemies of Pope Clement IV, for whom they rejected the calling of their order. Dante begins an invective—"O Friars, your evil deeds…"—but stops, seeing Caiaphas crucified onto the ground to be trodden over because "he advised the Pharisees" to martyr Jesus.

Virgil marvels at this "eternal exile" who helped cause Jesus' death, maybe wondering why anyone would throw away salvation like that. Virgil asks for directions that don't require black-angelic escort, and is abashed to hear that Malacoda lied about a viable bridge from 5 to 6. The friar mocks him for being bedeviled, Virgil storms off, and Dante follows in his footsteps.

———

CANTO 24

Dante's fate hinges on Virgil's ability as a guide, so Virgil's expressions can dishearten and uplift with equal measure, even in succession, as here, which the poet likens to a peasant waking to intractable frost that clears before the second time he goes outside, allowing him to take up his shepherding. Virgil's frustration gives way to reassurance, and then a plan: advanced rock-climbing with the rockslide left by the crucifixion.

It was "no climb for people wearing leaden cloaks"—neither Dante nor Virgil are definitive hypocrites, fortunately. But that makes me wonder if Dante's difficulty progressing through each section of hell says something about how much he struggled with, or was tempted by, the punished deed—maybe almost being caught by the Malebranche is a tacit confession that Dante almost fell prey to barratry in his political life.

When Dante reaches "where the outermost stone had broken off", he sits, winded, and Virgil berates him, accusing him of sloth, with which "no one comes to fame", without which one's life and legacy is as smoke or foam. Without Dante, many hard-working, influential, once-famous people who ended up in hell would've been buried to a niche era of Italian history, known only to a few scholars.

Virgil's rebuke turns into a pep talk:

Get to your feet! Conquer this laboring breath with strength of mind, which wins the battle if not dragged down by body’s weight.

That's easy to say when you're weightless. I know we're in the land of ill will, but the proximity of Virgil's speech to the hypocrites could suggest that hypocrisy is born from sloth, an akrasia against doing what one has pledged to do that becomes malice when the pledge is neither relinquished nor redoubled, but fronted as if upheld. In response, Dante acts more fit than he is, his body lead but his words gold:

I rose, pretending to more breath than I had in me, and said: 'Go on then, for I am strong and resolute.'

He uses the form of hypocrisy for virtue to push himself beyond where he thought he could.

While climbing, Dante hears "a voice that seemed unfit for forming words" from the next moat, sounding like the speaker was moving. Dante asks Virgil to go to "the next ledge", a request Virgil honors with strange approval:

I give no other answer than to take you, for a just request should be followed by the act, in silence.

Virgil's lack of silence could suggest Dante's haste or boldness are unjust, or that the explanation is exempt from what is explained.

The seventh moat is a plague of snakes that eclipses Libya's panoply of "chelydri, jaculi, phareae, cenchres, and amphisbaena"—all mythical snake-like monsters. From them the sinners, "naked and in terror", even handcuffed by snakes, cannot hide.

One runner is bitten by a snake, catches fire, turns to ashes, and is reborn within seconds—dust to dust, back to man, a mockery of resurrection, a laying-to-rest restless in a loop. To the man it's as if he had a fainting spell from a devil or sickness, "wholly bewildered by the breathless anguish he has undergone". Virgil asks his identity, and he identifies himself as "Vanni Fucci, animal", whom Dante knew in life as a "man of blood and rages", so Dante asks of this pit's sin.

The bestial man, despite his "wrathful shame", "did not dissemble"—he did disassemble, though!—:

I am thrust so far below because I stole the lovely ornaments from the sacristy and the blame was wrongly laid upon another.

Mm!, the archetypal thieves are Adam and Eve, beguiled by the serpent, who knew shame for their transgression and couldn't hide from it. They're nowhere to be seen, though. Vanni Fucci tries to preemptively ruin Dante's joy with a political prophecy: Pistoia and Florence will undergo upheavals, and Mars, Florence's vengeful ex-patron, will use lighting—as if stolen from Jupiter?—to decimate Dante's faction, to exile them from their soured Eden. The prophecy has no hint of thieved political power preluding the exile, subtly reinforcing that the exile will be unjust.

———

CANTO 25

Finished with his prophecy, the spiteful thief blasphemes God, and the serpents, now Dante's "friends" (enemy of my enemy), coiled tighter around him, stilling and silencing him. While the snakes are on the side of justice in this cosmology, Dante laments Pistoia's fallen state, pleading it to burn to ashes—presumably without revival.

For Dante, Fucci's blasphemous pride exceeds even Capaneus', his actions such a knowing affront to law, both natural (bestiality, animality) and civil (theft), for which natural law is despoiled from him through the snakes' to-ashes-and-back magic.

Fucci flees, and a centaur laden with snakes chases the "unripe soul" in an imitation of the first fall. Virgil names the centaur as Cacus, who spilled "lake[s] of blood" and, unlike the centaurs from the boiling blood, stole cattle, for which Hercules obliterated him—a hundred strikes where ten sufficed.

A Florentine trio stops the duo, asking where their fourth man is, and Dante shushes Virgil with a finger to his mouth as a six-legged reptile pounces on one in the trio, Agnello, locking him in a suggestive embrace, and then "they fused together, as if made of molten wax", like the brown by which white paper blackens aflame.

The spectating thieves exclaim, "Look, now you are neither two nor one!"—for lives spent breaking bonds of ownership, these men now own not even their own bodies, their identities susceptible to monstrous mutation at any time, with no refuge or retreat.

Once the fusion completes, the two-and-none monster lumbers off, and a "black and livid" "fiery reptile" besets another thief, sticking to his navel, hypnotizing him,—they both spew smoke that merges, and the poet interjects to brag that neither Lucan nor Ovid wrote anything so sudden and strange as the metamorphosis of reptile becoming man and man becoming reptile. The rehumanized thief spits at the reptiled one, and Dante is left "dazed" and "bewildered" at processing three anomalies in a row.

[kalliersnovelreviews]

Tempered beyond Intemperance: My Voyage through Dante's Inferno (Cantos 10-17)

CANTO 10

Dante uses a captation to ask Virgil if he can see any of the heretics, "For all the lids are raised and there is no one standing guard." Unlike the last three circles, the heretics retain well-defined identities, and their sorting into factions of heresy reflects that. Though laid to rest, they get no rest, not until after they "return from Jehosaphat with the bodies they have left above" at the Last Judgment.

Virgil gestures towards Epicurus and his followers, "who hold the soul dies with the body", and sees through Dante's ruse: Dante seeks a conversation. Dante coyly denies hiding anything "except to speak few words—as you’ve from time to time advised," perhaps seeking permission to be forthright with his desires.

Before Virgil can respond, mere seconds after Virgil told Dante, "soon your need to have an answer will be satisfied right here," a heretic recognizes a fellow Florentine and calls on Dante to chat, rising from his grave: "Farinata, who did not believe in Christ’s resurrection". This startles Dante toward Virgil, who, exasperated, cautionary, and encouraging, sends him to fulfill his wish.

Virgil recognized Farinata—maybe they met in Virgil's first voyage, hence Virgil's timeliness in forecasting the chat. Farinata, rising, lifted "chest and brow as though he held all Hell in utter scorn": a haughty man, and unrepentant, if his downplay—"I was perhaps too cruel [to Florentine]"—is any indicator.

His low disdain in sharp contrast to the gatebuster angel's high disdain, Farinata asks of Dante's heritage, and Dante "held nothing back", raising Farinata's brow again; Dante's ancestors were "most bitter enemies" to Farinata's faction, whom Farinata "not once, but twice, had to drive out."

I bet Farinata was obsessed with power during life, because petty power plays dishonor a once-in-a-lifetime exchange like this. Dante, catching on and stooping, notes his party's greater resilience, "skill that Yours have failed to learn as well". The mix of disrespect and the honorific "Yours" is amusing.

Another sinner rises, asking a very loaded question:

If you pass through this dark prison by virtue of your lofty genius, where is my son and why is he not with you?

Is genius enough to earn an unpenalized trip through hell? Why would such trips be taken in tandem? What makes his son Guido a lofty genius? Also, Virgil is the lofty genius by style, Dante having a low style and depending on Virgil, first for inspiration, now for guidance.

Guido apparently "held in scorn" Dante's Beatrice. "held" tells the sinner Guido died, which tells us that these sinners are excised from the present.

LMAO, then Farinata continues like nothing happened, lamenting his faction's failings before prophesying that Dante "too shall know how difficult a skill that is to learn," i.e. Dante's own immutable exile.

Maybe trying to garner sympathy, Farinata asks why Dante's faction has been so cruel to his; Dante implies that a bloodbath ("that dyed the Arbia red") made his faction "raise such [vengeful?] prayers in our temple," melting religion into Florence's political crucible as a major tributary of the city's decay.

Farinata hides in his crowd—"I was not alone"—for its misdeeds, while flaunting that "when all agreed to make an end of Florence," he was its sole defender.

Farinata confirms Dante's suspicion that the damned see the future until the present blinds them. With remorse, Dante asks Farinata to tell Cavalcanti that Guido still lives; then, Virgil drawing him back, asks of the size of Farinata's sepulchral retinue: over a thousand, including a king whose "political battles with the papacy marked nearly the full extent of his reign" and a cardinal who may have said, "If I have a soul, I have lost it a thousand times for the Ghibellines."

Dante relays what he's learned, and Virgil, without downplaying the portends, reassures him:

[F]rom [Beatrice] you’ll learn the journey of your life.

Not from Virgil, though.

———

CANTO 11

The "unbearable foul stench" marking the inner half of the 6th circle forces the pair to acclimate to the sensory assault, pausing before the tomb of Anastasius misled by Photinus to deny Jesus' immaculate conception. To pass the time, Virgil explains the plan of the rest of hell:

Every evil deed despised in Heaven has as its end injustice. Each such end harms someone else through either force or fraud.

Here, sin is determined by the impacts of actions, coupled with unrepentance for misdeeds. The walls of Dis raise an iron boundary between willful and unwillful errors, though none are excusable, and each could have been obviated, in Dante's cosmology, through faith. Like, if you hit someone while drunk-driving, your fault is choosing to get drunk, and the impacts of your actions remain your responsibility even if while drunk you didn't have self-control.

Intention doesn't matter; how you act on it does. The 5th circle contains those who stewed in it or let it boil over; the 7th circle contains those who enacted calculated violence against "God, oneself, or one’s neighbor" "or their possessions": pillagers, plunderers, murderers, arsons; gamblers and self-harmers; and those who "deny and curse [God] in [their] hearts, or scorn nature and her bounty." Whereas the stygian bubblers were merely "sullen", bogged down by anger for which they knew no constructive outlet, violence against God and nature entails active ill will, turning against, rather than merely away from, reality.

The importance of gratitude threads Virgil's account, e.g. the self-violent "lamenting when [they] should rejoice," or thieves who, discontent with what is rightly theirs, become parasitic versions of the gluttons and hoarders. The damned are defined by their cardinal sins, so Dante sent Dido, who "slew herself for love", to the circle of lust, seeing her lust outweighing her violence against herself, and not condemning her as harshly for not rejoicing in life.

Fraud gnaws at every conscience, whether used on him who trusted or on one who lacked such faith.

Fraud doesn't just harm; it scars, it "severs the bond of love that nature makes." "[H]ypocrisy, flatteries, and sorcerers; lies, theft, and simony; panders, barrators, and all such filth" are consigned to the 8th circle; "Fraud against the trusting" is the worst sin, the ticket to the 9th circle.

The havoc fraud wreaks on hearts disrupts victims' ability to cultivate themselves, tangling their virtues and connections in sophistry or trauma. Many sinners in the circles marked by undifferentiation were likely victims of fraud that scrambled their values and buried them in moral and spiritual debt that they lacked the drive to pay back.

One's worldview includes one's account of whom to trust, under what conditions, for what reasons; fraud, especially treachery, perforates that account, often leading to universal, even misanthropic, distrust in others, thus alienating one from present and potential friends and communities, necessitating tremendous effort to mend those wounds and experience life in an agentic way.

Dante asks why the wrathful are outside of Dis; Virgil, condescending, mentions the distinction between incontinence, malice, and bestiality. Incontinence is marked by negligence of reason, malice by abuse of reason. The "good of the intellect", lost to the doomed, is the alignment of reason, will, and passions.

Dante calls Virgil his "sun, you who heal all troubled sight", which befits Virgil having prepared his mentee to face some of humanity's greatest fraudsters. Asked to justify usury—high-interest moneylending—'s place so low, Virgil explains that the usurer "scorns nature in herself and in her follower" by rejecting his "lot to earn his bread and prosper" through toil that, "as far as it is able, follows nature", which "takes her course from heavenly intellect and its operation." Usury violates, even cheats, this ordained fractal genealogy.

———

CANTO 12

Dante and Virgil clamber down the old aftermath of a rockslide, a rare marker of geographical change in a land governed by inflexible law, and meet the Minotaur, "a sight that every eye would shun." On seeing them, the Minotaur gnaws himself "like someone ruled by wrath", like the man in the Styx whose impotent frustration led him to bite himself.

Virgil addresses the Minotaur as if he mistakes Dante for Theseus, "who in the world above put you to death", and tells him Dante is simply here "to view your punishments." The Minotaur is immobilized by his own rage, granting the pair a window of safe passage.

Of the landslide, Virgil explains it "had not yet fallen" at his first voyage, which he recalls as right before the harrowing of hell,

when the deep and foul abyss shook on every side, so that I thought the universe felt love, by which, as some believe, the world has many times been turned to chaos.

The phrasing "as some believe" implies that Virgil believes that love wreaks chaos just as much as love emerges from chaos, whereas the crucifixion arguably instates the triumph of love over chaos: the primordial "love" sending sinners and pagans to hell. Several sinners we've met were moved by love to damn themselves, most notably Francesca's love for her partner and Farinata's love for Florence.

Virgil doesn't seem on-board with the Christian story, and I don't blame him; for doing nothing wrong, he was consigned to an eternity of forlorn longing, and even watched others get saved as he was passed over while he "thought the universe felt love". There are many types of love to go around down here, and each one seems severed from justice one way or another.

The pair is stopped at the outskirts of the 7th circle by a band of archer centaurs—who, like the Minotaur, are half-human, half-monster, reflecting the "bestial" yet distinctly human face of violence motivated by "blind covetousness" or "insensate wrath", compared to akratic or sullen wrath.

Nessus, "who died for lovely Deianira and fashioned of himself his own revenge" against Hercules, demands to know the pair's destination, threatening to shoot otherwise, assuming they've been condemned to Dis despite their presumably very unusual manner of entry. Virgil demands to speak instead to Chiron, "who raised Achilles", and tells Dante a brief word about the centaurs, who "go in thousands" around the moat over the boiling-blood Phlegethon to keep the violent in their proper depths of submersion, dictated by their guilt.

Chiron, unlike rash Nessus, notices that Dante lives, which Virgil uses to segue into a request: "lend us a guide[…] who will show us to the ford and carry this man over on his back". Chiron, whose judgment Virgil trusts, assigns Nessus. Chiron trained Hercules and Theseus, so him not guiding Dante himself refreshes the divide between Dante and the heroes he's been compared to.

Nessus complies without complaint, and is even thoughtful enough to point out figures that Dante would know, focusing on "tyrants who took to blood and plunder", who are submerged the deepest. It's odd that Virgil didn't explicitly mention tyrants, such a distinct and vile group, when outlining hell's classification of violence in the last canto.

The centaurs have had plenty of time to familiarize themselves with the willful violent, but Nessus is not only articulate but apparently knows which sinners to single out for Dante's convenience. Though quarrelsome and predatory, he's far from a dumb beast.

Virgil doesn't hesitate to let Nessus take over as Dante's guide, while Dante remains silent. It looks like Dante doesn't have a single line in this canto, and even his reactions are suppressed: he doesn't remark on the tyrants Nessus points out, react to the centaurs threatening him, request conversation, inquire about anything, describe his feelings about the unnamed sinners he recognizes in the burning blood—even the Minotaur's hideousness gets an impersonal account.

———

CANTO 13

Dante, Nessus, and Virgil arrive at a forest of decay: no paths, no leaves green, no branches straight, thickets dense enough to hide wild beasts. Dante seems to recognize the harpies by their wailing, needing no explanation from his guides.

Virgil interjects to warn Dante that he's about to encounter something so fantastical that Dante wouldn't believe it if Virgil told him. The air is filled with lamentations that Dante can't pinpoint, so Virgil invites him to pluck a twig, which he does, and—the thorn-bush speaks:

Why do you tear me? Are you completely without pity?

For this, Virgil apologizes to the bush, saying Dante had to know the fate of the sinners here, and coaxes the bush into telling his story in exchange for fame in the waking world.

He introduces himself indirectly as "the one who held both keys to Frederick's heart": Petrus de Vinea, minister of the Emperor Frederick II. By devoting himself wholly to his station, he traded the kingdom of heaven—whose two keys are mercy and judgment—for this worldly kingdom that turned on him. He would like us to believe that envy—

who never took her whoring eyes from Caesar’s household

—"inflamed all", who then "did so inflame Augustus that welcome honors turned to dismal woe." Petrus elevates the status of the empire with parallels to the Roman Empire, which was allegedly sanctioned by God, thus treating his devotion as less-removed from the kingdom of heaven than it was. To cling to that, he shows no remorse for how he served his country, maintaining his innocence while not condemning those he claims falsely accused him of treachery—Dante considers suicide—

scornful temper[…] made me, though just, against myself unjust

—rather than treachery to define Petrus. From the start, Petrus has been vying for our sympathy, pleading his innocence, even though infallible Justice sent him here and not to the 9th circle; his placement should be better testimony than any rhetoric. Is it, though?

Hollander says that Petrus "betrayed his lord by stealing from his treasury", and that "it is far from clear that Dante knew what we know." Yet Petrus' behavior makes more sense to me if Dante suspected Petrus' treachery but thought his suicide more salient for whatever reason, like how he assigned the suicidal Dido to the 2nd circle.

In Petrus' own words, his last act in life was scorn to escape and perhaps repay scorn: yet another case of someone overcome by impotent frustration. Though he frames himself as the victim, killing himself in "scornful temper" rather than, say, despair reveals his vengeful nature, which he tries to downplay so Dante will restore his reputation, "which, helpless, lies beneath the blow that envy dealt it." His harsh description of envy doesn't match his vengeance; you can't "hurt" envy by killing yourself.

And he was paid to keep secrets:

I kept [Frederick's] secrets safe from almost everyone.

The "almost" seems like a slip-up that contradicts his oath:

not once did I break faith with my true lord

—a sacrilegious oath, reinforcing Petrus' deification of his king and kingdom.

Virgil is passive to the sinners' tangled words, even when Dante is clueless. He could offer better guidance.

Overcome by pity, Dante entreats Virgil:

Please question him about the things you think I need to know. For I cannot, such pity fills my heart.

Virgil only asks him how the suicide forest works. Suicide uproots the soul, and Minos sends it to be "flung by fortune" in the forest to grow into a wild thicket, i.e. Harpy chow. These souls will not remerge with their bodies, for "it would not be just if we again put on the flesh we robbed from our own souls"—that is cruel, denying second chances to the suicidal.

Two shades—"naked and torn": spent spendthrifts—run through the thicket; the slower is destroyed by attack dogs. Oh no! Anyway, the bush by whom the carnage was is now protective of his body, a nameless Florentine who hanged himself and preferred Mars as the city's patron.

———

CANTO 14

Dante takes pity on the Florentine bush, gathering his fallen leaves and giving them to him, then exits the forest to the "barren plain" it rings, an "expanse of deep and arid sand" by which Dante compares his pilgrimage to Cato's efforts to liberate his men from Caesar, culminating in suicide that Dante apparently considered a Christ-like self-sacrifice, as Cato isn't in the suicide forest; he's in Purgatory, as a pagan?!

The comparison also subtly reinforces my guess that Dante is here because he had a crisis of faith that led him to become suicidal. If apt, Dante may even see his Comedy as a liberatory work against the tyranny of figurative demons.

The third group of violent sinners is those who spurned God or nature, and are left naked in this desolate annulus, some lying down—blasphemers crying out—, some sitting hunched—usurers—, many roaming—homosexuals—, all while fireflakes rain on them, igniting the sand, "doubling the torment." Burning sand is an affront to nature—it's effectively impossible—; this is otherworldly fire & brimstone for those who rejected the laws of nature.

Dante asks Virgil about a sinner who "lies there grim and scowling so that the rain seems not to torture him", tempering his praise of Virgil with the flippant, perhaps trust-shaking reminder of Virgil's failure against the angels.

The burning man introduces himself by his unswerving defiance against Jove, whose revenge his pride claims to deny, and ignoring that his damnation is all a wrathful god could hope for against a wayward mortal. He, Capaneus, withholds that his initial defiance is likely what earned such vengeance to begin with, without which he wouldn't have incurred Jupiter's wrath.

It's curious that Roman gods have enough sanction in Dante's cosmology that defying them is tantamount to scorning God and nature, since non-Christian mythical entities are framed as unnatural and/or perverse. Capaneus fixates on Jove despite being in a Christian hell.

Virgil castigates Capaneus, pointing out that his obstinate pride only amplifies his misery, that his unceasing anger causes his current agony. I think this is Virgil's first outburst at a sinner. He explains to Dante that Capaneus held and holds "God in disdain", indicating that Capaneus would defy any god on principle—while sieging Thebes he proclaimed that not even Jove could stop him from burning the city, for which he forever burns.

Virgil doesn't let Dante share one word with Capaneus, hurrying them along in silence—I bet Virgil is reflecting on his own faith, having written "in an age of false and lying gods", avoiding the blasphemy that befell Capaneus, but still unsaved—to a red river that "spurts" like an artery, is girded in bed and banks by stone, and emits vapor that "quenches every flame above it"; Virgil treats this stream as the most remarkable sight yet, so Dante asks for elaboration.

Virgil retells the story of Crete, a wasteland in the middle of the sea, innocent when ruled by Saturn, with a mountain "once glad with leaves and streams" but now "barren" and "outworn"—its caretakers were irresponsible to nature's order, apparently neglecting to fallow it or moderate their usage. At Crete, Rhea bore Jove, hidden from Saturn—lest time devour the inchoate might of law—by an uproar she caused.

In the mountain is an old golem, facing Rome like a mirror, his head gold, the rest silver, brass, iron, and a right foot of clay bearing most of his weight. These materials descend in value, but the clay connects it to the ground; clay is a common seed of man's creation in pagan myths; Rome "stands" on a shaky but perhaps necessary pagan foundation. The non-gold—gold is the noble, incorruptible pride Capaneus and Farinata think they embody—of the body is rent, flowing tears that become hell's rivers—this red is Phlegethon again—, plus purgative Lethe. The rivers sharpen boundaries, tears from a false, dead Eden facilitating Dante's redemptive passage.

———

CANTO 15

The river has a stone embankment as though its level fluctuates ("As the Flemings[…] fearing the tide that rushes in upon them"), so it can't overflow and flood hell. Further along the bank, Dante and Virgil meet shades who gaze at them "as men at dusk will sometimes do[…] under the new moon." Emphasizing new moon highlights the clandestine, shamed nature of these sinners' actions.

Dante's former teacher, Brunetto, recognizes and halts Dante, and is recognized despite his "scorched face" that presumably renders him unattractive. Dante moves to caress Brunetto's face—or to bow his head nearer to Brunetto's in deference—, Brunetto asks to accompany Dante for a while, and Dante can't accept quickly enough—though him needing Virgil's permission shows that he takes Virgil as his master, and Brunetto only as his teacher. Virgil's silence is taken for assent.

Dante walks the elevated embankment—"the higher path"; he wouldn't become hellbound even to walk with his cherished mentor—while Brunetto follows at Dante's hem. Brunetto asks how Dante is here alive, and Dante is suspiciously vague:

In the sunlit life above, in a valley there, I lost my way before I reached the zenith of my days.

Maybe he thinks nothing more needs to be said, but I feel that he's hiding how and why he lost his way, out of shame or confusion. Dante doesn't even introduce Virgil beyond that, in his time of need, "he appeared, and now along this road he leads me home", which is odd; Brunetto, framed as a great support ("By following your star you cannot fail to reach a glorious port") and influence, should delight in Dante gushing over another of his main influences, unless Dante thought he disliked Virgil.

Virgil is leading Dante to the home of his being, but Dante's reunion with Brunetto is so warm that Brunetto's personality is like a home for Dante, even if only a homely relay. Brunetto even laments that he couldn't comfort Dante in life, having died prematurely.

Brunetto prophecies to Dante: Fiesole's "malignant, thankless", "blind", "greedy, envious and proud" descendants "rightly shall become, because of your good deeds, your enemy". As a "sweet fig" among "bitter sorbs", it is inevitable that Dante will face exile if he stays "untainted by their ways"; the noble few are destined to be devoured by the ignoble many, at least where corruption is so rampant as in Florence. The humble, hardy plant regrows from the manure of foraging beasts, who will tear each other apart while Dante's (supposed) eugenic Roman heritage endures intact.

Dante flatters Brunetto for the silver-lined prophecy, and for teaching him "how man makes himself immortal"—which must refer, with some irony, to salvific virtue, and maybe also to honorable fame (this poem is immortal). Dante vows to take Brunetto's prophecy and others' to Beatrice for verification, grateful but skeptical, and with "should I reach her" skeptical also of his trajectory.

Having heard similar report from Farinata, Dante declares his resolve:

I am prepared for Fortune as she wills[…] Let Fortune spin her wheel just as she pleases, and let the loutish peasant ply his hoe.

Dante seems to accept that his coming misfortune is just, natural, and survivable, but Virgil interjects:

He listens well who takes in what he hears.

Dante, only halfway through his infernal trip, arguably lacks the character to make good on his word; without that character, his resolve is vain, and verges on prideful, even defiant—Fortune is a deity like Jove, and to declare oneself undefeatable by a deity walks a razor-line of blasphemy and madness, doubly so when Dante hasn't taken his divine sanction to heart (though he hasn't let it go to his head either).

Brunetto tells that his troop are clerics and scholars (Hollander: "None of these (neither is Brunetto) is recorded by other writers as having been homosexual.") and departs with a plea that Dante treasure Brunetto's Treasure and thus memory.

———

CANTO 16

At a waterfall leading to "the lower circle", abuzz like a beehive, three shades run from their crowd to Dante, recognizing him as a fellow Florentine. As they beg him to pause, Virgil tells him to be courteous but not linger.

When they stop, the trio locks together like wrestlers, "joined into a single wheel" so they can walk in place and not incur the penalty of immobility. Despite the shades being "naked, peeled hairless by the fire", they retain strong senses of identity. One shade introduces the other two as notable politicians: Guido Guerra, who "did much with good sense, much with the sword", and Tegghiaio Aldobrandi, "whose voice deserved a better welcome in the world".

The speaker identifies himself as Jacopo Rusticucci, whose "bestial wife, more than all else, brought [him] to this pass." Not a noble, he rides the titles of the other two to get information from Dante, while blaming others for his damnation.

Dante is so moved by the plight of his fellow statesmen that he nearly embraces them, stopped only by the threat of being "burned and baked", and assures them that sadness, rather than contempt, moved him so. Dante says he's heard much of them, even sung their praises himself, and that he's here to "leave bitterness behind for the sweet fruits promised" by Virgil—he is gradually getting the salvific point of his pilgrimage, seeing firsthand the desolation wrought unto oneself by lives defined by injustice, as twisted as this cosmos' concept of justice is.

Worried by the words of a more recent sinner, Jacopo asks Dante if "valor and courtesy still live there in our city", to which Dante cries out about Florence having succumb to "excess and arrogance". For the devastation wrought by misusing wealth, it's odd that Dante didn't place conversant sinners in either relevant circle, like they're not worth even vituperation. The wheel, speaking in harmony, thanks Dante, asks him to rekindle their memory up above, and rolls off.

The wheelmen seem assured of their goodness, lacking the shame that would deter other sinners from wanting their names and deeds recalled. Dante's uncritical kindness to them suggests that these sinners are here only because Dante, as a Christian, is obligated to place them here; he has nothing but praise for their political achievements, and seems to believe these men upheld valor and courtesy in office.

Hollander notes that there's debate over whether homosexuality is what's punished here, as yes or no both create problems, and several plausible alternatives were proposed.

Still, my takeaway here is that, given Virgil's sanction and Dante's adulation, you can have excellent character but still end in hell, even for a sin that doesn't define you—the narrative's vagueness vs. the characters' sharpness, i.e. well-defined identities with ill-defined maculations, attests also to that.

The waterfall's roar becomes almost too loud to speak, but Virgil orders Dante to undo the cord "with which [he] once had meant to take the leopard with the painted pelt", Dante hands it over "coiled and knotted", and Virgil throws it into the abyss. No mention of such cord was given before, but its association with the leopard of fraudulent camouflage tells us where we're going now. Virgil reads and exposes Dante's anticipation:

Soon what I expect and your mind only dreams of will appear.

Almost with embarrassment, Dante the poet interjects to tell us that what follows is so fabular that he shouldn't even speak about it, as it's a "truth that bears the face of falsehood": a shape like a man rising from sea after loosing an anchor. Virgil has done this before; the figure may be the only way to reach the 8th circle other than Minos' judgment. Moreover, fraud is falsehood that bears the face of truth, and to be successful shows no shame or embarrassment in its content, lest that too be a ruse. The inversion implies that storytelling, treated as such, is (in general) exempt from fraud.

———

CANTO 17

Virgil gives the monster a dramatic introduction:

Behold the beast with pointed tail, that leaps past mountains, shatters walls and weapons!"

The "foul effigy of fraud" is a manticore: the face of a "benevolent", "righteous" man—fraud bears the face of truth—, scorpion tail hidden and surely poised to strike, the rest fur and serpent with coloration more vivid than anything Dante's memory can recall, "painted" like the leopard's but to sheer excess, more intricate than any web—of lies or otherwise—Ariadne could weave.

Virgil declares their need to reach the "evil beast" beached at the "stony rim" of the abyss, but that first Dante should complete his tour by examining the sinners "sitting on the sand[…] near where it falls away", while Virgil requests escort from the manticore.

The sitters weep, their bodies stationary but their hands restless, with motion like dogs gnawing and clawing fleas and flies besetting them during summer. Each has "pouches hanging from their necks", on which "they seemed to feast their eyes", suggesting that these sinners, the usurers, sought to nourish themselves on wealth accrued by unjust means—no toil, hence their immobility here, while their passing of money from one hand to another has their hands in agitated activity.

Usury borders on fraud for Dante, but has the legal loopholes and informed consent to confine it to violence against nature. If the manticore is visible to the usurers, they don't react; their fixation on the purse-IDs blinds them to the wonders of nature, and perhaps the dangers too: a manticore, huge and vibrant apex predator, warrants both awe and terror.

While Dante can't identify the usurers' faces, he recognizes the heraldry of several Florentine factions that the usurers probably advanced but dishonored—their misdifferentiated values obscure their identities, but they bear their legacies and their loyalties on their necks. One usurer speaks to Dante, questioning, dismissive, indecisive.

The usurer goes from asking why Dante is here, to sending him off, to asking him to wait, only to use the limited time to declare and demand the soon arrival of two major usurers. Spite, mockery, and envy lace his voice; the usurers are unsociable, probably having viewed each other as rivals or worse in life, so all the speaker seems to look forward to is other, more successful usurers getting their due: taking their seat in the barren sand for an eternity of sullen bitterness. They made wealth their life's work, were undone by their pursuits, and now have no wealth, nor even companionship.

Not wanting to upset Virgil by overstaying his cold welcome, Dante departs without reply. His final description of them, as "weary", connotes pity, and he seemed reluctant to leave so soon. Dante's anxiety of displeasing mars the responsibility he cultivates by trusting and osmoting Virgil's superior judgment. He doesn't think much about why Virgil acts and thinks as he does, content to be led by fear of rebuke, a sheep with too little interest in surpassing his shepherd.

When Dante returns, Virgil, already astride, asks him to "mount in front", after hinting that each descent will now be staired by a monster. Virgil's words terrify Dante, which Dante counters with "shame, which, in the presence of a worthy master, makes a servant bold" to board the manticore. Virgil sits in the middle "so that the tail may do no harm" and commands the manticore, Geryon, to descend in a wide, slow spiral, mindful of his "unaccustomed burden".

Geryon plunges, and Dante is overcome by terror like what Phaeton and Icarus must have felt when their flights failed—but Virgil's figurative reins hold fast, and Geryon's aim holds true, unlike for the rebellious falcon Dante compares him to. Geryon sets them down, and "vanishe[s] like an arrow from the string"—astonishing power! Geryon isn't some unruly bird. How did Virgil win Geryon's aid twice?! Did Virgil want to hide his word magic from Dante?

[kalliersnovelreviews]

Simping for Beatrice: My Voyage through Dante's Inferno (Cantos 1-9)

CANTO 1

Midway in the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.

Dante takes it upon himself to have our midlife crisis for us, having succumbed to inner demons so terrible that even in retrospect, at the summit of his Comedy, he shudders to recall them. Waking up in a valleyed forest, with no sunlight to guide him, he stumbles out to the foot of a hill atop which shines the light of creation—the sanctuary shore for our shipwrecked survivor—only to be parried by three beasts: a leopard, whose camouflaged pelt implies deceit, the first and least deterrent; a lion, rage, pride ("his head held high"), and hunger; and a she-wolf, to which the lion seems an impotent afterthought, emaciated, insatiable, terrible enough to drive Dante into the shade, where he meets the shade Virgil.

The three beasts don't hurt Dante; that they intimidate him is enough; that they don't chase him past the hill suggests that they're gatekeepers rather than predators. Dante the writer may have realized that Dante the character could have climbed the hill, and didn't only out of fear, fear that lived through his pilgrimage ("how hard it is to tell[…]—the very thought of it renews my fear!"). That fear was attributed to the forest, but he passed through the forest without incident, only to be deterred by beasts he had less trouble describing.

Virgil even shames Dante for choosing misery over "every joy", only to say that his only way out is by "another path" because the wolf is in fact willing and able to kill him:

It is another path that you must follow, if you would flee this wild and savage place. For the beast that moves you to cry out lets no man pass her way, but so besets him that she slays him.

Instilling shame over an insurmountable obstacle seems unfair, but may be justified if the beasts incarnate three classes of sins, and Dante is being shamed for incubating such a fierce wolf, without which he could skip the Comedy and roll credits right here. But then he wouldn't have lost his path in the first place.

Virgil adds that the she-wolf has mated with many creatures and prophecies that she will with many more until she's exterminated by a man who will save Italy by feeding on "wisdom, love, and power", rather than "lands or lucre", which by contrast the she-wolf would seem to, having been loosed upon the world—so not just "here", wherever this is—by "primal envy". This is an envy that begets defilement to gain equilibrium: it drags its victims down to its level so they no longer have anything worth envying, and the wolf's sexual violations would seem to symbolize the forced conjunction, even bondage, by which the victim is tied to the victor, who foists their values on their subordinates to sow a plague of greed, arrogation, and subjugation.

Knowing that the wolf is fated to be overcome not by Dante, Virgil requests to be Dante's guide through hell, where "ancient souls in pain" "bewail their second death", and through purgatory, of those "who are content to burn because they hope to come[…] among the blessed", to the threshold of paradise beyond which he, a pagan, is not permitted—there to be transferred to the care of our beloved Beatrice. Dante, motivated to "escape this harm and worse"—his heart so clouded that he neglects to be motivated by aspirations toward virtue—, accepts Virgil's offer to take the scenic route to salvation.

———

CANTO 2

Twilight falls, leaving the animals to fall asleep—"released[…] from their labor"—, leaving Dante in abject loneliness: the labor before him is one for a living human and none other. Only a human could call upon the powers of "Muses", "lofty genius", and "memory" and weave a story. Since the Aeneid contains a descent into hell, Dante discusses Aeneas: he ventured to hell while alive, and was saved by divine ordinance that led him to found the Roman empire, whereafter Paul ("the Chosen Vessel") visited the afterlife while alive, to pave the way for the salvation of the faithful—but Dante is neither Aeneas nor Paul, as he admits with more self-doubt than humility:

But why should I go there? who allows it? I am not Aeneas, nor am I Paul. Neither I nor any think me fit for this.

Dante's lack of backbone couples his overthinking with his anxiety, leaving him indecisive and misdirected; Aeneas and Paul had visions and missions, while Dante has nothing yet to set his fear and pain on a worthy course, nothing that could have driven him up the hill. His position is a crisis of faith compounded by a despondent lack of hope and confidence, so he needs to depend on Virgil, who is blunt about Dante's cowardice—

which many a time so weighs upon a man it turns him back from noble enterprise

—, but reassures him: Beatrice (whom Virgil instantly simped for: "I implored her to command me"), her words having all the weight of the most blessed, entreats Virgil, Dante's most formative author, to guide Dante.

Beatrice has three striking points: 1. Dante is important enough that heaven gossips about him; 2. Dante is at odds with Fortune, both unlucky and unreliant on luck; 3. Dante is at the cusp of the event horizon ("I fear he has gone so far astray that I arose too late to help him"). She also promises to sing Virgil's praises to God, for all the good that'll do him; and if she's such a beacon of virtue, why doesn't she guide Dante herself? She's either unequipped or unwilling, and neither seem satisfying explanations.

The flattery that Beatrice and Virgil exchange is weird, unnecessary, and surely they're smart enough to realize that. Virgil's servility seems almost an overcompensation for his lack of faith during life, and it could be chalked up as a worldly habit never lost, were it not reciprocated by Beatrice's captation—Virgil doesn't frame it as marring her immaculate virtue, and maybe I should consider this as generosity—Beatrice lavishing kindness onto Virgil for free—precisely because Beatrice knows Virgil would obey her even without it, i.e. she is safe to be complimentary without being thought to have hidden motives.

That Virgil asks Beatrice how she can descend to hell compounds the mystery of why she, whose words are as polished as Virgil's, can't be Dante's guide—after all, she's literally invincible:

I am made such by God’s grace that your affliction does not touch, nor can these fires assail me.

"your affliction" implies that damnation is contagious, as Virgil's prophecy of the she-wolf also implied. Mary was moved by pity to break heaven's "stern judgment"—which is incredible sway that would be pure frivolity were Dante any less than an Aeneas or Paul in this narrative—for Dante's sake; she summoned Lucia, "the enemy of every cruelty", who questioned Beatrice's passivity:

[W]hy do you not help the one who loved you so that for your sake he left the vulgar herd?

Lucia has a twinge of accusation, perhaps considering Beatrice cruel for her inaction—though breaking "stern judgment" is a big deal, Lucia's phrasing implies that Beatrice could and should have done so already. Dante's affection for Beatrice during life inspired him to begin his spiritual journey, so it's only fitting that Beatrice should be there to lead him to its finish line. Maybe pagan Virgil must act in ways blessed Beatrice can't for Dante's voyage to succeed. Either way, Virgil's account of Beatrice renews Dante's hope, Dante accepts Virgil as his master, and their journey begins.

———

CANTO 3

THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE CITY OF WOE,

THROUGH ME THE WAY TO EVERLASTING PAIN,

THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE LOST.

JUSTICE MOVED MY MAKER ON HIGH.

DIVINE POWER MADE ME,

WISDOM SUPREME, AND PRIMAL LOVE.

BEFORE ME NOTHING WAS BUT THINGS ETERNAL,

AND ETERNAL, I ENDURE.

ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE.

The inscription of the gates of hell is brutal: what follows is the artifice of omniscient-omnibenevolence, the unmoved mover motivated by justice to condemn sinners and pagans to "everlasting pain". The third line, "THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE LOST", feels ironic: the way, not any old way,—what Dante lost was the way, leaving him lost, but here, among the lost, he's fated to find his way. It's like the inscription was tailored to him; who else would be in a position to read it? The lost souls aren't free to wander; even Virgil being outside of the gates is anomalous.

Dante asks Virgil to interpret the message; Virgil says,

Here you must banish all distrust, here must all cowardice be slain. We have come to where I said you would see the miserable sinners who have lost the good of the intellect.

Hell is for humans because only humans—and some mythical creatures—have the power to abuse their intelligence. Probably Dante's nebulous cowardice has led the good of his intellect to hang by a bare thread. Through the gates, he hears the woeful cacophony of the damned, and breaks into tears from its onslaught, "always whirling in that black and timeless air". He asks what the sounds are and from who, and Virgil informs us that this is the realm of the neutrals, "those who lived without disgrace yet without praise", including angels who didn't take sides in Satan's civil war, kept here "lest on their account the evil angels gloat"—which seems silly. Who cares what evil angels say, if they're impotent in their prison?

Virgil doesn't let Dante linger with these angels:

The world does not permit report of them. Mercy and justice hold them in contempt. Let us not speak of them—look and pass by.

Doesn't this count as Dante reporting them to the world? Either way, Dante retrospectively said his head was "encircled in error" for his inquiry; Virgil implies that empathy, even interest, is wasted on these wretches.

Right after, Dante sees the counterpass of the neutral humans: a vast entourage all chasing a "whirling banner", whose restlessness consigns these souls to loyalty to vacillation, as in life. Were Dante not a loyal politician who undertook this Comedy, here he may have ended up, for the indecision his cowardice breeds.

In tandem with following the shifty banner, the sinners, "who never were alive"—a harsh charge Dante levels right after recognizing a shade as "who, through cowardice, made the great refusal"; without Virgil's polished words earlier, Dante would have had a great refusal and fallen—, are stung by bugs, with no clothing for protection, to agitate them into constant motion. For their regret—specific to indecisiveness—"they are envious of every other lot", despite being on the fringe of hell; it doesn't get much better than this.

Past them, Dante sees souls "on the mournful shore of Acheron", "eager for the crossing" despite the aimless torture they will endure—Virgil stays his hasty queries about these souls, and Dante is ashamed, "fearing [his] words displeased him"; ask Virgil if and how you spoke out of line! Here cowardice leads to a blurry boundary remaining unclear.

When the ferryman Charon arrives, he isn't surprised to see Dante, a living person; he just says that Dante should take a different ship, perhaps judging that Dante is not hellbound (anymore?). Virgil relays that Dante's journey is heaven-sanctioned, and Charon goes silent while the other passengers go into a frenzy, blaspheming everything but their misdeeds; everyone but themselves.

Like the neutrals, these souls stand unified in error—"they drew together"—as Charon "herds them all aboard" like falling leaves, a shepherd who offers no salvation. Now Virgil addresses Dante's question: all who die in God's wrath come here, and justice brainwashes them into longing for their punishment. "No good soul ever crosses at this place."—Charon thinks Dante is good, but Virgil doesn't.

———

CANTO 4

Aboard Charon's ferry, having fainted from a wind blast, Dante awakens from thunder, conspicuously just in time to behold the edge of hell, "filled with the roar of endless woe." Filled with dense vapor that hides its depths, "the blind world" turns even Virgil pale,—Dante doesn't state what he felt about the pit, but his timid tone when he judges Virgil's reaction to be fear speaks for itself. Virgil claims that pity, not fear, moves him so, but is quick to end the discussion with his command to begin the descent.

Shrouded in mist, Dante's first impression of the first circle of hell is the din of sighs of "grief without torment", which Virgil tells us belong to those like himself who lived with merit but without faith.

You do not ask about the souls you see? I want you to know, before you venture farther, they did not sin. Though they have merit, that is not enough, for they were unbaptized, denied the gateway to the faith that you profess. And if they lived before the Christians lived, they did not worship God aright. And among these I am one. For such defects, and for no other fault, we are lost, and afflicted but in this, that without hope we live in longing.

These are good people, and it's just to condemn them to eternal damnation? And Dante doesn't see anything wrong with that?! Virgil has a twinge of bitterness, no doubt full of the despairful longing he mentioned, but seems to have a resigned acceptance of his fate. There's nothing he can do anyways.

Dante's admiration for Virgil and awareness of his mobility leads him to ask if anyone, "either by his own or by another’s merit", has graduated from hell. No one has, save for a handful of biblical characters that Jesus saved during his descent—not even the great classical poets, whose fame brought honor to art, and who don't dispute Virgil's position at their apex ("honor the loftiest of poets!").

Introducing them tersely as Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, Virgil says,

Since each is joined to me in the name the one voice uttered, they do me honor and, doing so, do well.

The "one voice" must be the inspiration of the Muse, which confers greatness on art across genres, with epics (Homer as "sovereign poet", Virgil as "the loftiest of poets") having a slight edge for their immeasurable capacity for glory.

Dante has the infamous audacity to declare himself accepted by these as the 6th-greatest poet in history. Virgil introduces them, they glorify him on the spot, and then they're off, "speaking of things that here are best unsaid, just as there it was fitting to express them." It's cheeky to mention that you're not going to mention something—nothing less than the speech of the 5-6 greatest poets—, and right after declaring your premature greatness. I've had fruitful conversations that drew on so much shared context that observers would have been lost, but with a memory like Dante's, I could recreate their contents with clarity.

The end of Limbo, the first circle, is demarcated by a "noble castle" with seven walls, "defended"—who would, or even could, besiege this castle?—by a stream that the pair walk on "as on dry land", a parody of the miracle of walking on water and a reassurance of their sanction. Beyond the walls lies a "fresh, green meadow"—a pittance of hope; "enameled": specious lacquer—where gather great military, political, and intellectual figures, gentle but joyless.

Their lack of dialogue reduces them to wax figures at an antique museum, and Dante rushes through the many names he offers, each one worth a good few lines but stripped of all merit but their name and place. This whole canto is a lacquer of honor coating quiet despair,—Dante talks of honor much in this short space, but can't distract from how little that honor amounts to towards salvation.

The atmosphere is subdued but not peaceful, heavy but not substantial. Dante's breathless recollection—a mosaic of paths to pagan glory—cheapens his reverence, makes it impersonal, more a display of generic knowledge than a demonstration of personal connection as he showed with Virgil. But at least the inner edge of Limbo has a shine; "out of the still, into the trembling , air", the pair "come to a place where nothing shines." It's all downhill from here.

———

CANTO 5

In the second circle "stands Minos, snarling, terrible"—y'know, I would be in a bad mood too if I had to spend eternity as the sole judge of everyone who dies doomed.

Since a new batch of migrant dead arrived at Acheron right when Dante, Virgil, and their accompaniment boarded Charon's boat, there seems to be an endless fresh supply ("Always before him stands a crowd of them).

His presence, or the justice magic permeating this land, compels full confessions from all who come before him lost—for Dante he takes a short break to caution our pilgrim:

[B]eware how you come in and whom you trust. Don’t let the easy entrance fool you.

Minos may be sowing doubt toward Virgil, who is not spotless in character, but doesn't deter the journey. Virgil, knowing that Dante can't afford to let doubt overcome him and maybe hiding something that Minos hinted at, uses the same line he did on Charon to silence Minos:

[His destined journey] is so willed where will and power are one, and ask no more.

The line has "What are you gonna do about it, godless fool?" energy, but Virgil isn't capable of much if his words fail him. He's hiding behind the aegis of a faith that he's never had.

Minos doesn't even get to react before Dante is distracted by "the screams of agony" of the lightless, loveless storm that batters the "carnal sinners" "who make reasons subject to desire"—Semiramis who "made lust licit" to get away with incest, Dido who "slew herself for love", the lustful heroes of the Trojan war; Virgil indicates and names "more than a thousand shades", which is insane. How would he even recognize them? He wouldn't have known many of their faces during life, and even with a flawless memory would have needed to talk to each one to verify who they are.

Moved by pity, Dante asks to speak to a couple who "seem to be so light upon the wind"—Virgil assents, telling him to "entreat them by the love that leads them", which Dante doesn't, but still they heed his summon.

Well, Dante's tone was affectionate while his wording was plain; his tone's what the spirits respond to. Where God forsook them—

if the King of the universe were our friend

—, Dante didn't—

we would pray that He might give you peace.

That "would" bespeaks their total lack of hope: as much as they'd like to reciprocate Dante's courtesy, they can't; no one will hear them but he, and they're trapped in the welter of lust. Dante's pity may well be a once-in-a-lifetime reprieve for them.

The lady of the couple, Francesca, speaks for both, and declares that love is to blame, love, "quick to kindle in the gentle heart", love, "which absolves no one beloved from loving, love, which "brought us to one death"—sure, blame a metaphysical agent for abdicating your own agency.

She takes petty solace in knowing that "him who quenched our lives" will fall to Caïna, a much-worse area of hell. Dante bows in silent reverence for them until Virgil asks for his commentary, and Dante, a bit naïve, is awestruck with sympathy:

Oh, how many sweet thoughts, what great desire, have brought them to this woeful pass!

Then, through tears, he asks,

[H]ow and by what signs did Love acquaint you with your hesitant desires?

She blames the romance of Lancelot, whose adulterous affair with already-married Guinevere instigated a civil war, which she read with her to-be partner, and one thing led to another. Not once does Francesca show regret for her decisions, nor admit responsibility for her actions. Forever bound by love, defined by love, while scapegoating love for their woes—no wonder these two are so "light upon the wind" (freer in the flight by which they've fallen) with such a turbulent double-bind.

Dante's empathy for the couple's doom is so great that he faints, falling "as a dead body falls." Given the importance of the beautiful beatified Beatrice whom he lusted after in life, it's suspicious that Dante feels so strongly for lost lovers and places them so high in the pit.

———

CANTO 6

When Dante comes to, he blames the "piteous state" of the couple he's left behind for having "confounded [him] with grief"—I take "confounded" to reaffirm that Dante's pity for the lost is in error, for it leads him astray, into confusion, his morally feeble heart unable to navigate perplexities such as doom one to hell.

We find Dante in the third circle now, of eternal, hateful, cold, leaden, changeless, monotonous rain—the pleonasm of descriptors presages this circle's subject of gluttony. The rain consists of hail, water, and snow: three competing aspects of one faux-trinity, befitting this circle's guard: three-headed Cerberus, unrestrained mutt who with a rain of savagery mutilates gluttons and "makes them howl like dogs"—the lust-stricken were battered in the air like birds, the gluttons battered to the ground like dogs.

So indiscriminate is Cerberus that Virgil throwing dirt into its mouth distracts and quells it; the monotony of the rain thus suggests that gluttony, oversaturation of the appetites, debases what should be exquisite, elevates what should be base. Here too reason is subject to desire, losing its capacity for differentiation, which cripples one's decision-making skills.

Those who aren't Cerberus' toys lie prostrate—they worshiped more, and now the more of rain subjugates them—as Dante and Virgil trod over them, the shades' emptiness solid only to act as stepping-stones, for they stuffed themselves with base substance in life and are thus laid low.

One rises, recognizing Dante, pleading him to recall him; the monotony extends even to dimmed identity, Dante suggests, and can't recall, but asks, and hears: he is Ciacco, a fellow Florentine who laments that their city is "so full of envy that now the sack spills over"—an endemic supersaturation that evokes the she-wolf's insatiable infectious appetites. Ciacco regarded such a corrupt city as a "confines": nowhere in it to go, nor out, but where envy reigns over petty hearts.

Dante, worried about the spread of envy-gluttony, asks Ciacco for a prognosis—

what shall be the fate of the citizens[…]?

—and etiology—

tell me why such discord has assailed it

—of Florentine's moral blight; Ciacco prophecies that bad blood will become blood shed as the "rustic faction" expels its rivals, who "within three years" will repay the favor and "in their arrogance" lord over the other faction. So lawless, so ablaze with "Pride, envy, and avarice" are the hearts of the conflictors, so gluttonous for power, that only two Ciacco deems "just"—or, according to Mazzonni, the two laws, natural and artificial, are violated. (I can't help but wonder what civil wars rage among Dante scholars…)

Disturbed, Dante beseeches Ciacco tell of many townsfolk "whose minds were bent on doing good", only to be told that they "are among the blacker souls" awaiting him deeper in the pit. Dante the pilgrim seems to be a poor judge of character, while Dante the poet is self-assured enough to judge a panoply of historical, mythical, and local figures without missing a beat.

Ciacco, in spite of the reprieve a real conversation should be for him, ends the conversation by entreating Dante, "bring me to men's memory." A vain vie for fame, or perhaps a desolate, shame-ridden plea to restore his shape. Virgil says that Ciacco will stay in that stupor until Judgment Day resurrects him to purify him, amplifying his torment to draw him "nearer" to perfection—him and the other infernal souls.

The level numbness of the third circle stands in stark contrast with the sensitivity to both pleasure and pain that is the "measure of a thing's perfection"—it does seem that the souls of lust were closer to perfect, with its acuity and affection and weeping, compared to the saturnine tone this canto sets—Dante's own sensitivity, though not yet harmonized to reason, bodes well. Virgil, supervisor in the background, only speaks near the end, in solemn address to the fate of the tormented souls.

———

CANTO 7

Plutus, a god of wealth, "our great foe", screams Satanic gibberish at the duo in a vain effort to stop them. Virgil tells him off by declaring that the place where Michael did avenge the proud rebellion, i.e. where Plutus' alleged lord got curb stomped, sanctions their journey, thus that Plutus is powerless to stop it. Virgil's words seem to break Plutus' spirit—which makes Plutus' word salad seem like a warning whose unheededness dooms proud travelers, rather than a threat whose impotence denies him a victim.

Dante assumes Virgil, "all-discerning sage", understood the unknown tongue, but only assumes.

The fourth circle, where "the sinners were more numerous than elsewhere", contains hoarders and spendthrifts, holding heavy items, jeering at each other's sins, locked in a dance reminiscent of waves breaking on each other over a whirlpool—Dante the poet is so stricken, even in recall, by its strangeness that he apostrophizes to question—surely in lamentation rather than challenge—God's Justice: who punishes here, and "why do our sins so waste us?"

Dante singles out the abundance of clerics "in whom avarice achieves its excess", for this group's presence brings his heart great anguish. Asking Virgil if there be any he would recognize, Virgil states that, like the gluttons, these sinners' "undiscerning" lives makes them indiscernible in death.

The pennypinchers don't trust Fortune at all, while the prodigals trust her too much, for which her whimsy mocks them, for which they "embroil themselves" and give away their tickets to salvation. Their loyalty to Fortune, a false idol, indifferent too, leaves them destitute in spirit, and Fortune's full power "could never give a moment’s rest to any of these wearied souls." Dante, all innocence, asks Virgil for a profile of Fortune, which ignorance incenses Virgil, who swears to "feed" Dante his judgment of Fortune—a nourishment greater than any lavish banquet on the road to enlightenment.

For Virgil, Fortune is the "minister and guide" of worldly splendors "who shifts those worthless goods, from time to time, from race to race, from one blood to another beyond the intervention of human wit." Not only is Fortune a false idol; she resists efforts to know her ways—

as secret as a serpent hidden in the grass

—and control her. Her domain includes political power—

One people comes to rule, another languishes

—, which should speak to Dante as a politician who's no friend with Fortune. Fortune's judgment is inscrutable, but some of the dead offer prophecies—no longer under the blinding yoke of Fortune or presence, maybe. Fortune "is reviled by the very ones who should most praise her", i.e. gives humility to those in danger of ending up in the fourth circle, those who forsake opportunities to gain and share spiritual nourishment over material goods.

When spiritual nourishment leads to self-acceptance, one's survival needs can be enough; when avarice leads to hoarding or profligacy, enough is never enough.

Virgil's last comment here is that Fortune is deaf to her revilers, because blessed, and I'd say that indifference, without ignorance, to the hollow words of oversavers and overspenders is a blessing—we often speak of the "rat race", its futility, its deceptive desirability, the blindness and hypocrisy "success" can lead to that further stratification, zero-sum scarcity mindsets, the strained relation of spiritual freedom and financial freedom, etc.

With the stars setting, Virgil hurries Dante along a tributary to the Styx swamp, the muddy prison of "those whom anger overcame", each soul either locked in vicious combat or sighing seething bubbles that accentuate the surface's freneticism. The latter were given to rage that sullied their views of the world, estranging them from the good things in life, muddying their connections. Virgil speaks for them, unpausing—no Ciacco greets Dante—, and they arrive at the tower demarcating incontinence from malice.

———

CANTO 8

So we're like 20% through the cantica, but 5/9 circles through, and two circles were crammed into the previous canto. That gives a lot of weight to the disastrous discordance of Dis. As if realizing he was a little too rushed, Dante flashbacks to where from afar he first beheld Dis' signal towers, one calling to another. Dante asks the nature and origin of the towers, and Virgil—how would he know this without having taken this route before?—to look over the waves, where Dante sees a skiff, faster than any loosed arrow, racing towards the pair, crying, "Now you are caught, damned spirit!"

In just two sentences—including a "this time" that confirms that Virgil has been through here before—, Virgil turns the wrathful pilot, Phlegyas, from a would-be captor into a compliant ferryman. Virgil didn't even have to mention that Dante's journey is sanctioned; Phlegyas panics—

Like one who learns of a deceitful plot that has been hatched against him

—from Virgil's unspoken command that he ferry them to the next circle, as if already knows the how and why of their voyage.

Cutting through the swamp, the skiff slowed by the weight of flesh, one muddy sinner rises to question Dante:

Who are you that you come before your time?

Dante recognizes him, but asks who he is, and gets only, "I am one who weeps"—whoever he is, left unnamed, he's reduced to his sin and its grief. Dante takes no pity on him and berates him, for which Virgil lavishes Dante with praise, declaring of that sinner, "Not one good deed adorns his memory."

To be cruel to the impotent damned seems frivolous and petty; they're already getting justice unerring, we're led to believe.

Only when, upon Dante's sadistic request, the sinner is "torn to pieces by the muddy crew" is he named as the "spiteful Florentine" Filippo Argenti. The wrathful sinners are so bellicose that they'll pounce on anyone over anything, wanton attack dogs. Then the "sound of mourning" presages their arrival to Dis.

Dis is a fortified city, with ramparts forever aglow, a "vast army", moats, iron-like walls, and the first thing that awaits Dante as he disembarks Phlegyas' boat is "more than a thousand angels fallen from heaven", who with a chorus of anger and disdain try to send Dante away alone—the fallen angels are territorial over the literal worst place in this universe, which is still God's before theirs, so desperate for control.

Dante despairs at the prospect of retracting his steps—since without Virgil he may have died many times—, but Virgil reassures him; they're in this together, and nothing can stop or part them along Dante's ordained pilgrimage. Virgil, whom Dante now sees as his "gentle father"—a remarkable bond to forge in under a day, though likely catalyzed by desperation and longing—, speaks with the rebel angels while Dante waits on the sidelines, "remain[ing] in doubt": that one tercet is present-tense, as if Dante the poet relives the moment of doubt more acutely than the rest of the canto.

This time, Virgil's polished words fail; the angels withdraw, slamming the gates shut, and Virgil's vexation reflects his first loss. Renewing his resolve, Virgil says that the angels showed the same "insolence" at the gate with the inscription, and failed there; and now, whether through clairvoyance or trust, Virgil declares that help is on its way.

Virgil's first loss of wits marks a turning point: the fallen angels know that what they're doing is wrong, and that's why they do it, clinging to a caricature of freedom by impeding Providence at any chance they get. They have little to lose, and their wits are wed to their will in malevolence, so they don't fear retribution.

The rebels' brief success suggests that Virgil's bossiness won't work anymore; he'll need cleverer tactics to win over the gatekeepers of Dis and protect Dante, who has been weak or passive in wit and will thus far. A good father raises a son to surpass him—we'll see if Virgil lives up to that.

———

CANTO 9

For all his alleged wisdom, Virgil is human; even he can be overcome by doubt, and if anywhere will show that, it's literal actual hell. The situation, despair about to set in, pales Dante's face with "cowardice"—a rather harsh retrospective reprimand for a reasonable reaction to being stranded, helpless, miles into a pit that would happily kill you (Beatrice in Canto 2: "We should fear those things alone that have the power to harm").

Seeing Dante's face, Virgil composes himself, and thinks aloud about how help was promised him, which I don't see in his recount of Beatrice's entreaty—his barely-restrained panic shows that he isn't too confident that help will arrive; after all, heaven already abandoned him once, despite his virtuous life, and he has neither faith nor grace.

Dante, with renewed fear, and maybe recalling the choice phrasing from Virgil's exchange with Phlegyas, asks if anyone from Limbo has journeyed to Dis; Virgil, sensing the hidden question, admits that he was spellbound "to fetch a spirit from the circle of Judas", "the lowest place".

Virgil is only an able guide because he'd been the victim of black magic. For that matter, Beatrice's words were no less compelling than the witch's spell, and it's doubtful that Virgil would've volunteered to be Dante's guide without such compulsion.

Waiting for their "help" to show, and as Virgil explains that "[they] cannot enter without wrath", speak of the devil: the Furies descend on them, and Virgil names them, having written of them: Mageara, jealousy; Alecto, implacable anger; Tisiphone, vengeance.

Virgil's impotent wrath, the Furies' malevolent wrath, God's looming judgmental wrath—the Furies threaten to petrify Dante with Medusa's head, of which Virgil says, "should you see it, all chance for your return above is lost," covering Dante's face with his own hands. Dante the author challenges the reader to "consider the teaching that is hidden behind the veil of these strange verses."

To be petrified is to be incapacitated by fear, which Dante has thus far avoided via Virgil's supervision. Fear has been one of Dante's main struggles so far, and he isn't equipped to resist something like Medusa's gaze; such a sight is not for his eyes.

If the Furies want to kill Dante, they should've waited until they have Medusa's head at-hand so Virgil couldn't prepare for it. Their anger cripples their strategy; they're certainly not crafty like the serpent, and their encounter with Theseus, wasting the chance to kill him, embittered them so they tried to kill Dante, only to be foiled again as a tremendous, hot wind preludes the arrival of their help, scattering "a thousand lost souls" while gliding over the water.

Virgil makes Dante bow and remain silent; this newcomer isn't someone for Dante to interrogate. The angel waves a wand at the gate, opening it with "no resistance", and lectures the rebellious angels: fighting "against the fates" only amplifies their pain, for the will of heaven "never can be severed from its purpose". He reminds them too of Cerberus, whom Virgil pacified, and whom Hercules, before rescuing Theseus from the Furies, chained.

Dante is no Paul, Aeneas, or Theseus,—the reliability of his protection is questionable, given how easily things could go wrong down here, and he has no heroic traits, feats, or skills. For now, he's a normal guy who's been given the ultimate second chance at the cusp of the event horizon—which, from his sensitivity (often overwhelmed), his passivity, and redemption's availability to who endures life with an open heart, I think is suicidality.

The angel departs without sparing a word for the duo, uninterested in he who has the backing of four of heaven's most powerful ladies. Dante eagerly strolls through the gate to see a burning graveyard "filled with bitter torment and despair", tombs laden with "the arch-heretics of every sect" "with all their followers"—those who knew, or should have known, the way and chose to reject it.

[kalliersnovelreviews]

I keep seeing history being rewritten so let me offer a CliffsNotes version:

We. All. Fucking. Stayed. Home.

We all masked. We were all "in this together" until the restrictions became unreasonable.

We didn't get haircuts. We missed deaths of loved ones from other diseases. We put off funerals.

We put on masks. We social distanced.

Not for 15 days. But 30 days. 45 days.

We watched as our businesses closed, our events canceled.

And then we watched Nancy Pelosi get a haircut. And you defended her.

We watched Gavin have dinner with friends. And you defended him.

We watched as you protested and rioted and looted and burned, all the while telling us we were horrible for being mad about the draconian measures implemented that shut down our gyms and bars and theaters.

We were "in this together" when you said you wouldn't trust a vaccine under Trump. We were "in this together" when you acted like the experts knew what the fuck they were talking about even as they changed their position in the matter of days.

We did it your way. It didn't work.

So take your revisionist bullshit and go hide under your bed.

You act like HCQ is an experimental drug. It isn't.

You act like Ivermectin is only for horses. It isn't.

You act like you follow the science. You don't. If you did, you wouldn't hold the positions you do.

This isn't about being anti-vaxx. This is about your arrogance and rewriting history to make you feel better about being the Nazis at this point in history.

You think your patience is running out? LOL fuck you.

I know people that couldn't hold their family member's hand as they died because of COVID. Fuck your inconvenience.

I know people that lost their businesses. Fuck your "running out of patience"

I think it's time you give the unvaxxed their credit. Many of us have already had COVID and lived.

No, COVID is not a hoax. It absolutely should be taken seriously. But maybe it should have been taken seriously by your side the entire time.

Our patience ran out last year, early this year. Welcome to the club.

[kalliersnovelreviews]

Thomas Ligotti: Dark Phenomenology and Abstract Horror

Of course, mystery actually requires a measure of the concrete if it is to be perceived at all; otherwise it is only a void, the void. The thinnest mixture of this mortar, I suppose, is contained in that most basic source of mystery—darkness.

-Thomas Ligotti

Dark Phenomenology and the Daemonic

Thomas Ligotti in his essay The Dark Beauty Of Unheard-of Horrors (DB) will tell us that “beneath the surface utterances of setting, incident, and character, there is another voice that may speak of something more than the bare elements of narrative”. He’ll emphasize as well the notion that “emotion, not mind, is the faculty for hearing the secret voice of the story and apprehending its meaning. Without emotion, neither story nor anything else can convey meaning as such, only data”.  Stephen Zweig in his study of daemonism in the arts once told us that great art cannot exist without inspiration, and inspiration derives from an unknown, from a region outside the domain of the waking consciousness. For me, the true counterpart of the spasmodically exalted writer, divinely presumptuous, carried out of himself by the exuberance of uncontrolled forces, is the writer who can master these forces, the writer whose mundane will is powerful enough to tame and to guide the daemonic element that has been instilled into his being. To guide as well as to tame, for daemonic power, magnificent though it be and the source of creative artistry, is fundamentally aimless, striving only to re-enter the chaos out of which it sprang.

Isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation are among the wiles we use to keep ourselves from dispelling every illusion that keeps us up and running. Without this cognitive double-dealing, we would be exposed for what we are. It would be like looking into a mirror and for a moment seeing the skull inside our skin looking back at us with its sardonic smile. And beneath the skull— only blackness, nothing.

-Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

Ligotti makes a point that horror must stay ill-defined, that the monstrous must menace us from a distance, from the unknown; a non-knowledge, rather than a knowledge of the natural; it is the unnatural and invisible that affects us not something we can reduce to some sociological, psychological, or political formation or representation, which only kills the mystery – taming it and pigeonholing it into some cultural gatekeeper’s caged obituary. As Ligotti says “This is how it is when a mysterious force is embodied in a human body, or in any form that is too well fixed. And a mystery explained is one robbed of its power of emotion, dwindling into a parcel of information, a tissue of rules and statistics without meaning in themselves.” (DB) The domesticated beast is no horror at all.

In the attic of the mind a lunatic family resides, a carnival world of aberrant thoughts and feelings – that, if we did not lock away in a conspiracy of silence would freeze us in such terror and fright that we would become immobilized unable to think, feel, or live accept as zombies, mindlessly. So we isolate these demented creatures, keep them at bay. Then we anchor ourselves in artifice, accept substitutes, religious mythologies, secular philosophies, and anything else that will help us keep the monsters at bay. As Ligotti will say, we need our illusions – our metaphysical anchors and dreamscapes “that inebriate us with a sense of being official, authentic, and safe in our beds” (CHR, 31). Yet, when even these metaphysical ploys want stem the tide of those heinous monsters from within we seek out distraction, entertainment: TV, sports, bars, dancing, friends, fishing, scuba diving, boating, car racing, horse riding… almost anything that will keep our mind empty of its dark secret, that will allow it to escape the burden of emotion – of fear, if even for a night or an afternoon of sheer mindless bliss. And, last, but not least, we seek out culture, sublimation – art, theatre, festivals, carnivals, painting, writing, books… we seek to let it all out, let it enter into that sphere of the tragic or comic, that realm where we can exorcize it, display it, pin it to the wall for all to see our fears and terrors on display not as they are but as we lift them up into art, shape them to our nightmare visions or dreamscapes of desire. As Ligotti tells it, we read literature or watch a painting, go to a theatre, etc.:

In so many words, these thinkers and artistic types confect products that provide an escape from our suffering by a bogus simulation of it— a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering… to showcase how a literary or philosophical composition cannot perturb its creator or anyone else with the severity of true-to-life horrors but only provide a pale representation of these horrors, just as a King Lear’s weeping for his dead daughter Cordelia cannot rend its audience with the throes of the real thing. (CHR, 32)

So we seek to cover it over, isolate it, anchor ourselves in some fantastic illusion of belief, and distract ourselves with Big Brother episodes or Kardashian hijinks, else read or watch tragic portrayals of the horror as a way to purge the effects of these dark emotions that we just cannot cope with. All to no avail. For in the end they will not stay locked up in the attic, but begin to haunt us, begin to find ways to make their presence known, to escape their dark dungeons and enter our lives in surprising and unexpected ways till in the end we discover we are overwhelmed by their dark necessity. Even Ligotti admits that after all his own short narratives, his art, his horrors are little more than escapes from the ennui – merely providing an “escape from our suffering by a bogus simulation of it”. (CHR, 32)

In the work of William James I came across a peculiar passage in The Sentiment of Reason:

A nameless unheimlichkeit comes over us at the thought of there being nothing eternal in our final purposes, in the objects of those loves and aspirations which are our deepest energies. The monstrously lopsided equation of the universe and its knower, which we postulate as the ideal of cognition, is perfectly paralleled by the no less lopsided equation of the universe and the doer. We demand in it a character for which our emotions and active propensities shall be a match. Small as we are, minute as is the point by which the cosmos impinges upon each one of us, each one desires to feel that his reaction at that point is congruous with the demands of the vast whole,—that he balances the latter, so to speak, and is able to do what it expects of him. But as his abilities to do lie wholly in the line of his natural propensities; as he enjoys reacting with such emotions as fortitude, hope, rapture, admiration, earnestness, and the like; and as he very unwillingly reacts with fear, disgust, despair, or doubt,—a philosophy which should only legitimate emotions of the latter sort would be sure to leave the mind a prey to discontent and craving.

Isn’t this exactly what the weird tale purports to do? To leave us disquieted and discontent, to leave us craving for more or for an extreme resolution to our desire; yet, knowing full well, and ahead of time, that there can be no resolution; not in this life, nor in the annihilation of our physical life into ashes and oblivion? The point of the weird tale is to disturb us rather than to allow us to continue to sleep in our safe little box of security, to awaken us from our lethargic immersion in the human symbolic order; this realm within which we so comely allow ourselves to be lulled and enclosed, a realm of collective delusion in a global society and civilization that our mainstream protectorates or mediautarcracy or elite cultural pundits term “reality”? This sense of estrangement and alienation from our everyday lives, as if the world were ‘out-of-joint’ and everyone around us had taken on an almost puppet like existence, an uncanny vision of a world where humans were bit players in a cosmic horror show of which no one is aware. And, most uncanny of all, that even though you’ve become aware of such a hideous duplicity in the order of the world you are not sure whether it is real or unreal, whether you are sane or insane. And, as you wander through your daily existence everything becomes more spectral, more ghost-like as if reality were giving way to another world, as if the protection zones that defended you from knowing too much, of feeling too much, were coming down and this other order of existence were invading your life, your mind, and the natural world around you in subtle ways that you could not directly perceive with your senses – but, could only feel with your uncanny sense, your emotions and affective relations.

It seemed to him that the old mysteries had been made for another universe, and not the one he came to know. Yet there was no doubt that they had once deeply impressed him.

-Thomas Ligotti, The Order of Illusion

Horror acts like a sigil, a diagram that invokes the powers within the darkness to arise, to unfold their mystery, to explain themselves; and, if not explain then at least to invade our equilibrium, our staid and comfortable world with their rage, their torment, their corruption. The best literary horror or weird tales never describe in detail the mystery, rather they invoke by hyperstitional invention: calling forth the forces out of darkness and the abstract, and allowing them to co-habit for a time the shared space – the vicarious bubble or interzone between the reader and narrative, both together weaving or unweaving a form or inform – a new terror, or  zone of corruptions and horror, wherein the force of reader and the force of the hidden powers within the interstices of the narrative meld and form if not a chimerical being, then a fugitive and mutant thought and voice; a voice at once daemonic and full of that hellish wisdom of the Abyss.

Speaking of Lovecraft’s tale of the musician Eric Zann Ligotti says: “What brought this man ‘who signed his name as Erich Zann’—as if he had another name, or perhaps none—to that rundown boarding house in the Rue d’Auseil? What caused him to remain on that twisted street? Above all, what is it about the blackness and its ‘shocking music’ that so possesses him?” (DB) As he suggests “Zann and the Rue d’Auseil were, at the very least, sympathetic entities, a district unto themselves—and when he disappeared into the blackness he seems to have taken the street, which was as old and misshapen as he, along with him”. (DB)  Sympathetic entities: this seeming collusion or corruption of the one by the other, an almost magnetic appeal or mesmerizing association between the two forms of horror shaped by each others desires, known by each others dark daemonic splendors. As if the place, the music, and the players were all part of some larger entity, some darker and more abysmal majesty of inexistence.

In fact it is not the natural light, the street, the music in itself, but rather as Ligotti tells us “in the blackness the mystery must remain, nameless and unknown, leaving only the memory of a certain haunting music to suggest, as subtly as possible, its meaning. It is the abstract, elusive form of supernatural horror in this story that may account for its enduring enchantment for certain readers.” (DB) The ancients believed that to name something, to name a god was to control its power. For Ligotti the magic and mystery of the elusive darkness must remain unnamed, neither reduced to our scientific or sociological categories and tropes or brought into the domesticated circle of rational logics; no, instead the unnatural must only be accessed indirectly, lured and allured out of its dark lair, tempted only by spectral events, shades and nuances of the actual, a movement only from the affective regions of the silence. Against the old Gnostic adagio of “To know and be known,” this is rather the indirect path: the way of “affecting even as you are affected”. This is the way of non-knowledge rather than knowledge.

…despite all I have done, it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the music of Erich Zann.

-H.P Lovecraft, The Music of Eric Zann

He’ll remark that for Lovecraft, The Music of Erich Zann is “the early, almost premature expression of his ideal as a writer: the use of maximum suggestion and minimal explanation to evoke a sense of supernatural terrors and wonders” (DB). Evocation: calling forth the darkness from the abyss, letting it invade the circle of magick, like a sigil or diagram of force that flames forth as the secret life of the mysterious entity awakens. Again the voice:

In the earlier story as much as the later one, that secret voice beneath the narrative speaks strongly and stridently, imparting its meaning through feelings rather than facts, singing a song without words on the theme of the nameless horror and strangeness of the universe, that cosmic neighborhood where everything that is, is terrifyingly wrong… and at the same time alluring, a place of charming evil. (DB)

A song without words, nameless, cosmic in scope; a song of cosmic catastrophe, at once alluring and tempting you into the place of terror, the circle of evil. He comments on closing that in the Music of Erich Zann, Lovecraft “captured at least a fragment of the desired object and delivered it to his readers” (DB). Should we say that rather than capture, that he allowed the voice within the narrative to indirectly access the reader’s mind, allowing it to form itself as an entity, an elemental power, a hyperstitional inexistent at once real and full of terror.

Ligotti speaks of darkness as being both the minimal and the base line for that mystery we term the weird tale. At the edge of things, on the borderlands between phenomena and the noumenon lies this thin red line of darkness that wavers in the cold light of intellect and imagination, that allows us to peer into that subtle realm of spectral being where the monstrous and grotesque, the beautiful and the sublime terrors below the threshold of our daylight worlds glow in the nightmare realms of infinite mystery. As Ligotti tells us the “dark, indeed, phenomenon possessing the maximum of mystery, the one most resistant to the taming of the mind and most resonant with emotions and meanings of a highly complex and subtle type. It is also extremely abstract as a provenance for supernatural horror, an elusive prodigy whose potential for fear may slip through a writer’s fingers and right past even a sensitive reader of terror tales.” (TLR)

The Dark Aesthetics of Fear

Everywhere things are effacing or disguising their existence, seeking a mask of shadows or a veil of pale light wavering across their disfigured surfaces. But their struggle for obscurity nonetheless remains only a matter of form—an invasion of vitality still threatens the ruins of certain cities.

-Thomas Ligotti, The Mocking Mystery

David Roden in a theoretical entry into dark phenomenology has a nice post on aesthetics which relates that “dark phenomena are experienced affects that provide no or only an insufficient yardstick for their description. We have them, we talk about them, inordinately even; but having does not allow us describe them adequately or even recognise them over time. A microtonal difference between pitches might qualify. We feel a difference and report it; but we are unable to carry that difference with us in memory. We might be haunted by a euphoria that we can never recover, or a crushing terror we cannot articulate. At issue in the earlier discussion, was a tension (in my case “hesitation”) between a thin reading of darkness  as a purely epistemological category and a “thick” reading that interprets the dark side of experience as basic, eluding theoretical reason in principle.”

This notion of the tension between the epistemic and ontic in abstract horror returns me to Nick Land’s short work Phyl-Undhu: Abstract Horror, Exterminator in which the narrator tells us that what we fear, what terrorizes us is not the seen – the known and definable, but rather the unseen and unknown, even “shapeless threat, ‘Outside’ only in the abstract sense (encompassing the negative immensity of everything that we cannot grasp). It could be anywhere, from our genes or ecological dynamics, to the hidden laws of technological evolution, or the hostile vastnesses between the stars. We know only that, in strict proportion to the vitality of the cosmos, the probability of its existence advances towards inevitability, and that for us it means supreme ill. Ontological density without identifiable form is abstract horror itself.”

Let us repeat that: Ontological density without identifiable form is abstract horror itself. Which aligns well with Roden’s added statement on the ‘dark’ in dark phenomenology: “Their darkness holds in principle. On this account no matter how much our scientific knowledge improves, their relationship to brains’ computational and functional properties will remain speculative at best. While this claim might be true, it can’t be justified without claiming the kind of intuitive information regarding phenomenal natures that the dark phenomenology hypothesis precludes. Indeed, the position borders on the self-vitiating. If we don’t know what X is, then we’re on weak ground if we insist in going on to make irreducibility or ineliminability claims about it: we don’t know that a neurophenomenology of the dark is impossible just because a certain kind of phenomenology is.  So, despite its aura, the dark phenomenology hypothesis is not conducive to wide angle metaphysical theorizing.” (ibid.) In other words its grounded in scientific naturalism that knows there is a tension between a thin epistemological interpretation of Dark Phenomena – experiences that furnish no tacit yardstick for their description – and a weird reading that I hesitate to term “ontological”, since its presuppositions seem more difficult to articulate than the naturalist side.

Abstract Horror and Horror Literature

Preceding revivification there may be a sudden darkness which embraces the dead city, and within the darkness great flashes of light create the appearance that things are in motion. There may only be a frail mist which drifts among the ruins and slithers into their every fracture. Or there may be nothing at all, or nothing that may be witnessed.

-Thomas Ligotti, The Mocking Mystery

Reading a recent essay by Cengiz Erdem Postnihilistic Speculations on That Which Is Not: A Thought-World According to an Ontology of Non-Being we come across this: A thought thinking itself is thinking nothing other than nothing. It thinks itself as its own object, which means that it thinks nothing as something. This circular thought we designate as the thought of nihilism. It is this thought thinking itself as the thought of nihilism which we name post-nihilism. As Land in his Manifesto for an Abstract Literature remarks,

Disintegration inspires a thousand manifestoes, as our age confirms. Here is another. It would be a manifesto in defense of nothing, if nothing needed – or even tolerated – defending. With its solicitude mocked by alien voids, it can only attack something – anything (everything).

In The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror Ligotti reminds us that the monstrous and grotesque, the mangled and obscene, the creatures that inhabit the nightlands of our worst nightmares – bloodthirsty vampires and ravenous zombies, the undead and spectral, the wyrd and fatal creatures of imaginal and real seeming – those barely perceptible and invisible ghostly beings that arise from our fears and terrors “inspire a subjective sense of the uncanny in those who perceive them because they divulge the “dark knowledge” that human beings are also things made as they are made and may be remade because they are only clockwork processes, mechanisms, rather than immutable beings unchanging at their heart”.

This sense that the human is not a fixed category, that it is mutable – a mutant and fugitive being that can transgress its limits, its finitude scares the piss out of conservatives and traditionalists  alike who would hold onto the Judeo-Christian humanist world view that has always seen man as the exception – as the Child of God, etc. who was made a “little lower than Angels” only to be in some eternity of imaginal infinity a ruler of Angels with Christ in some paradisial Kingdom of Heaven. Such are the dreams of religion. But in our time of the demythologization and flattening the human there is no longer any separation from the stark fact of our ‘animality,’ and the fact of being reduced in this fashion by the natural sciences disturbs those who would continue to dominate the minds of humanity. They’ll point to our intellect and communicative powers, our linguistic and cultural glories: the ability to enter into relation with techne and technics that has allowed humans to surpass and transcend their natural place in the Order of Things.

“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

-H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Yet, as Lovecraft in one of his famous stories – “Call of Cthulhu” once suggested, the “sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” Here is the nub for Ligotti, the dividing line of those who continue to sleep in the illusory safety net of their cultural delusions:

This is Lovecraft’s atmosphere — that of a world in which the “frightful position” he has placed all human existence could lead to universal madness or extinction at a moment’s notice. Through this atmosphere, Lovecraft gives consistency to an imagined world where there is greatness in knowing too much of the horror of a planet in the shadow of Cthulhu and all that this implies about our existence. As for those people who still go about their ordinary, average business complacently enjoying the skies of spring and the flowers of summer, innocently unaware of the monstrosities with which they coexist— they are children. They have no idea that there is nothing worth living for in Lovecraft’s world. (CHR, 193)

Many will remember  the Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot once suggested that “humankind cannot bear too much reality”.  In an interview Nick Land once remarked that “what is concealed (the Occult) is an alien order of time, which betrays itself through ‘coincidences’, ‘synchronicities’ and similar indications of an intelligent arrangement of fate. An example is the cabbalistic pattern occulted in ordinary languages – a pattern that cannot emerge without eroding itself, since the generalized (human) understanding and deliberated usage of letter-clusters as numerical units would shut down the channel of ‘coincidence’ (alien information). It is only because people use words without numerizing them, that they remain open as conduits for something else. To dissolve the screen that hides such things (and by hiding them, enables them to continue), is to fuse with the source of the signal and liquidate the world.” This ties back in with Ligotti’s sense that below the polyphonic surface, the glitter images of phenomenality, the brokered work-a-day world of glamourous beauty of life in a hidden lair – that is only accessible through the secret sharer – the daemon’s voice within us that arises from those emotive twins fear and terror of the unknown. It’s this voicing of abstract horror of which Land speaks in § 108 —

The object of abstract literature is integral obscurity. It seeks only to make an object of the unknown, as the unknown. Cryptropic nature captivates it (Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ). Whatever might imaginably be shown is something else, but then so – if not exactly equally – is anything that remains simply apart. Those who dedicate themselves to this dubious cause can be nothing but a surface effect of The Thing.

“Beyond humanity, another phenomenology persists,” Dylan Trigg tells us. Far from being the vehicle of a solely human voice, there is a darker phenomenology that can attend to a realm outside of humanity. Indeed, one can surmise a model of phenomenology that is not only capable of speaking on behalf of the nonhuman realms, but is especially suited to this study of alien ecologies: zones of darkness and the abstract. We will term phenomenology’s specific mode of accounting for the nonhuman realm, the unhuman. Another thinker Richard Grusin in The Nonhuman Turn remarks that the “nonhuman turn more generally, is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a turn toward and concern for the nonhuman, understood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technologies”. There’s a sense that in Ligotti as in Lovecraft that the monstrous perspective of abstract horror presents the ultimate challenge to anthropomorphism. It’s this decentering of the humanist and Judeo-Christian heritage locked in its fantasy of Man as the exception in the grand scheme of things, as the being created by God – a “little lower than the angels, only to ultimately rule over them” (KJB) I spoke of earlier. In Kant’s time, Enlightenment Reason was the central motif of the human, the light that guided thought and politics, that brought emancipation and the sciences, gave us the truth of the universe of things, etc. Some call this era the “great disenchantment”. Nietzsche’s “Death of God'' or the nihilist liberation of the universe from its significations and meanings. An age when the universe lost its human meaning and regained its own truth: the truth of meaninglessness, impersonalism, and indifference to human wants or needs. The universe was devoid of human meaning or gods and would henceforth be ruled by the mastery and power of Reason alone.

The Glamour of the Unhuman

The source of this resurrection-to-come may remain unknown, its purposes secreted in the remotest parts of the creation. Yet no force ever withstands the way of this mysterious maker of new worlds, just as no world is ever allowed to endure in its greatness.

-Thomas Ligotti, The Mocking Mystery

Against this humanistic world of thought and culture is the notion of the Unhuman. With the unhuman, something comes back to haunt the human without it being fully integrated into humanity. In this respect, the unhuman is closely tied up with notions of alienation, anonymity, and the unconscious. The distinction of the unhuman is that it does not negate humanity, even though in experiential terms it may be felt as a force of opposition. As we will see, it is precisely through the inclusion of the human that the nonhuman element becomes visible. This does not mean falling back into anthropomorphism. Rather, it means letting the unhumanity of the human speak for itself. (TT, 9) Yet, all this theory of entering into some unhuman perspective is just that theory. As Ligotti will suggest,

Nonhuman occupants of this planet are unaware of death. But we are susceptible to startling and dreadful thoughts, and we need some fabulous illusions to take our minds off them. For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing. (CHR, pp. 28-29)

The key here is the Human Security System: survival and reproductive cycle shut down – all those “defense mechanisms” both within and in culture that protect us from too much truth: we are expendable, we are not exceptions, we are elemental beings of dust and stars; dead stars eons ago gave birth the void we are. It’s as if Life gave us blindness for a reason – and, by that I mean consciousness filters out everything but the illusory aspects of reality it needs to survive and replenish the species: hunger and sex drive the illusions of humanity and also lock us within our own self-deluded circumference of safety. And, yet, there are times-between-time, transitional zones in-between one symbolic order and another when everything goes topsy-turvy, when chaos rather than order takes the upper hand and the great filters internal to the brain, and to culture break down and the daemonic force of the natural and unhuman, the unhomely or uncanny break out into the world at large, into the great outdoors and cause utter havoc. This is one of those moments.

Freud, The Uncanny, and the Human Security Regime

…mystery itself remains guarded, its life sealed far away from its creation. And in a world that seems to possess a life of its own, figures parade in a state of terror which is immortal, unchanging, and which endures, through all the phases of a fateful ordeal, as their only inviolable birthright.

-Thomas Ligotti, The Mocking Mystery

Freud would teach us that a person tropes in order to tell a many-colored rather than white lies to herself. In fact Freud would go one further and say that literary and imaginative literature, poetry, and all those cultural artifacts from advertising to the neon-signs in a bar utilize our desires, tap into our hidden fantasy life or – as he’d term it “defense mechanisms” in order to ward off unpleasant truths concerning danger within us hiding the dark and murderous core of what Freud troped as the “id”.

Sade in his grotesque and erotic danse macabre asks: “What is man? and what difference is there between him and other plants, between him and all the other animals of the world? None, obviously.” This is a classically Dionysian view of man’s immersion in organic nature. Judeo-Christianity elevates man above nature, but Sade, like Darwin, assigns him to the animal kingdom, subject to natural force. Vegetable too: man is soulless, “an absolutely material plant.” And mineral: Juliette says, “Man is in no wise Nature’s dependent; he is not even her child; he is her froth, her precipitated residue.” Rousseau’s mother nature is Christian Madonna, lovingly enfolding her infant son. Sade’s mother nature is pagan cannibal, her dragon jaws dripping sperm and spittle.

Both of these are human fabricated and encoded fantasies, tropes if you will; defense mechanisms that hide the darkness from within in the phenomenal imagery of the Outside. We belong to the tribe of fabricators, illusionists, makers of false worlds and dreamers of eternity. Yet, in the end our lies are just that: lies against time’s dark curvature, the sense of déjà vu – the amorphous feeling that we have done this before, that we are living through the steps of an eternal cycle that we have repeated over and over and over again from eternity to eternity. That we are not ourselves but rather patterns in a cosmic game of repetition without outlet. Is this not the dark truth we hide from ourselves? Are we mere dust motes in a cosmic funhouse?  Are the hideous faces in the House of Mirrors none other than the distorted image of our real selves staring back at us? And the moment we walk up and seek a clearer image of what lies behind those distorted eyes we discover a darker truth: the Void. The nothingness we are and are not.

There is a sound in my new language for that transitory time of day just before the dark hours. The sound clusters together curious shades of meaning and shadowy impressions, none of which belong to my former conception of an abstract paradise: the true garden of unearthly delights.

-Thomas Ligotti, The Lost Art of Twilight

Abstract horror and the uncanny deal in these ambiguous and troubling affects, the uncertainties and hesitations that keep us hover between the real and unreal, sane and insane. Themes such as invisibility, transformation (mutation, metamorphosis), dualism (doppelgangers, doubles), and all those moral or amoral of good and evil, or good and bad. Out of these are generated the leitmotifs of ghosts, shadows, vampires, werewolves, doubles, partial selves, reflection (mirrored multiplicities and multiplications), enclosures, monsters, beasts, cannibals, and all those tentacle alien incursions or those strange and insidious puppets or automatons. This is the realm of the indefinable and abstract where transgressive impulses from within overpower the world towards incest, necrophilia, androgyny, insanity, paranoia, recidivism, narcissism and ‘abnormal’ psychological states as convention tropes under hallucinations, dreams, nightmares that breakdown the distinction between animal, vegetable and mineral and blur them within the witches’ brew of fantastic or horrific alchemy  in an attempt to ‘normalize’ the perceptive and affective relations that otherwise would undermine our ability to cope and exist within a social world among other humans.

Lovecraft in his now much repeated statement in The Supernatural Horror in Literature reminds us that the “oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form.” He would go on in the next paragraph to state a much more powerful view (and I quote in full):

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our inmost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species. (ASH, KL 334)

This sense of something undefinable, abstract and not a part of the everyday work world of newspapers, politics, or habitual conversation is accessible, not to the vast majority but to a specific subset of the population who seem more adept and sensitive to the dark transports just beyond the range of normalized and socialized (“rationalization, reform, Freudian analysis”) mediations that always seems to weave itself through those deep seated yearnings of “religious feeling” that Lovecraft – as a materialist, registers as part of our evolutionary heritage.

Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle will first address the notion of the uncanny and daemonic, saying:

How exactly we can trace back to the infantile psychology the uncanny effect of such similar recurrences is a question that I can only touch on in these pages; and I must refer the reader instead to another work, already completed, in which this has been gone into in detail, but in a different connection. For it is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious of a “compulsion to repeat,” proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts—a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the impulses of small children; a compulsion, too, which is responsible for a part of the course taken by the analyses of neurotic patients. All these considerations prepare us for the notion that whatever reminds of this inner “compulsion to repeat” is perceived as uncanny. (Freud 1919h, 238)

Ligotti in a discussion of supernatural horror and the “uncanny” will tell us that both terms refer to seemingly animate forms that are not what they seem, as with the undead— monstrosities of paradox, things that are neither one thing nor another, or, more uncannily, and more horrifically supernatural, things that are discovered to be two things at once. Whether or not there really are manifestations of the supernatural, they are horrifying to us in concept, since we think ourselves to be living in a natural world, which may be a festival of massacres but only in a physical rather than a metaphysical purport. This is why we routinely equate the supernatural with horror. And a puppet possessed of life would exemplify just such a horror, because it would negate all conceptions of a natural physicalism and affirm a metaphysics of chaos and nightmare. It would still be a puppet, but it would be a puppet with a mind and a will, a human puppet— a paradox more disruptive of sanity than the undead. But that is not how they would see it. Human puppets could not conceive of themselves as being puppets at all, not when they are fixed with a consciousness that excites in them the unshakable sense of being singled out from all other objects in creation. Once you begin to feel you are making a go of it on your own— that you are making moves and thinking thoughts which seem to have originated within you— it is not possible for you to believe you are anything but your own master. (CHR, 17)

It’s this uncanny suspicion that we are not masters of our own house which produces the uncanny effect and affect of fear and terror that those objective literary and artistic (film or painting) works help guide us through the nightmare inscapes of our own broken lives. As Ligotti puts it as “conscious beings, we must hold back that divulgement lest it break us with a sense of being things without significance or foundation, anatomies shackled to a landscape of unintelligible horrors. In plain language, we cannot live except as self-deceivers who must lie to ourselves about ourselves, as well as about our unwinnable situation in this world.” (CHR, 42) So that we build and construct defenses against our own truths, our own daemonism, our own inherent unhumanity. The concept of the human is that fantasy that defends us against our own daemonic monstrosity.

In fact as he’ll suggest it is in the experience of the uncanny, a feeling of wrongness. A violation has transpired that alarms our internal authority regarding how something is supposed to happen or exist or behave. An offense against our world-conception or self-conception has been committed. Of course, our internal authority may itself be in the wrong, perhaps because it is a fabrication of consciousness based on a body of laws that are written only within us and not a detector of what is right or wrong in any real sense, since nothing really is right or wrong in any real sense. (CHR, pp. 85-86)

The Daemonic Loosed Upon the World

The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

One could say that in our time the daemonic has escaped into the world, that the cultural and social defense systems that have been operative for twenty centuries are broken and that what we are seeing is the cages of the inner life of humanity manifest in the streets. The abstract horror and the fantasy life of man are no longer restricted to our tales but are rather on display blatantly in the murderous actions of our daemonized  and authoritarian world order. From the dark and murderous fears of police that drive them to kill young black males, to the dronological war machines that deliver payload after payload of death in the Middle-East, to the terror in the streets of American and European and Asian cities at the hands of militant ISIS followers we are seeing played out in real time the dark phenomenological worlds of the weird and fatal themes of abstract horror. Life has become a Weird Tale, and we the bit players in a darkening and murderous end game of which we are only dimly aware; and, that in our daily nightmares we are the unknowing agents of chaos and disorder, and this is an age of destructive carnival and sacrificial war; a time when Reality TV has become Nightmare TV and the world at large is a festival of cruelty and pain, of excess and transgressive aggression rather than a safe haven against the madness.

For Ligotti the subjective reaction to the seemingly objective stimulus of the uncanny is the gaining of “dark knowledge” about the workings of individuals, including the onlooker of the epileptic in the midst of a seizure. More expansively stated, not only is the epileptic perceived as uncanny by the onlooker (unless the onlooker is a physician who understands epileptic seizures by the lights of modern medicine and not according to a “traditional view”) but the onlooker also perceives himself as uncanny because he has been made conscious of the mechanical nature of all human bodies and, by extrapolation, of the fact that “mechanical processes are taking place in that which he was previously used to regarding as a unified psyche.” (CHR, 89) This sense that the corruption works both ways, upon the victim and the perpetrator; that the world is now topsy-turvy and that the uncanny boundaries between victim and perpetrator are reversible and hazy, and not always obvious is due to that subtle knowledge that each culture is circumscribed within its own black box of conceptuality. By that I mean by that that as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in his Cannibal Metaphysics argues the case that Amazonian and other Amerindian groups inhabit a radically different conceptual universe than ours—in which nature and culture, human and nonhuman, subject and object are conceived in terms that reverse our own—he presents the case for anthropology as the study of such “other” metaphysical schemes, and as the corresponding critique of the concepts imposed on them by the human sciences.

Dark fantastic fiction and weird tales are just such an exploration. It allows us to investigate the delusions within one’s own culture, to trace down the deliriums and phobias, the nightmares and aberrations that have guided our collective madness for centuries. The notion of insects seems to be a prime example of a nightmare scenario that one finds hidden in the lair of the monstrous within Western Civilization and Culture. One can harken back to ancient myths, dreams, fears, terrors of rats, insects, serpents, etc.; deep seated worlds of disgust that have shaped our religious and secular views of life, medicine, politics, and moral views.

We can see it around us in our daily lives, the madness and insanity of Brexit, the campaigns of Biden and Trump, the Turkish disposal of hundreds of thousands of citizens from government jobs at the hands of a dictator’s paranoiac fears and terrors, the pain inflicted in Africa, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and many other nations of class and caste warfare, of the mass deaths of those in the LGBTQ community at the hands of militant religious fanatics… one could go on and on.

We’re in that position of moving either way: 1) literalizing our fantasies: building walls and barbed-wire fences against invading hordes of refugees, migrants, etc.; or, 2) of seeing through them, seeing the aesthetic and defensive use of art and social mechanisms to defend ourselves from the onslaught of our own daemonic nihilism and drives: our fears and terrors. As Ligotti reminds us artistic invocations of horror are most successful when the phenomena they depict call up the uncanny, which, unlike Jentsch’s example of seeing someone having an epileptic seizure, are genuinely threatening both from the outside and from within. This species of horror can only be provoked when the supernatural is conjoined with the uncanny, because not even physicians and neuroscientists can be comfortable with supernaturalism, either by the lights of modern medicine or by any other lights. Bloodthirsty vampires and ravenous zombies are prime examples in this context, because their intrinsic supernaturalism as the undead makes them objectively uncanny things that generate subjectively uncanny sensations. They are uncanny in themselves because they once were human but have undergone a terrible rebirth and become mechanisms with a single function— to survive for survival’s sake. (CHR, 90)

There is the possibility that the very unhuman and impersonal forces of the universe not only are indifferent to our needs and desires, but that the very order itself in its blind fury and endless abyss of appetite is even now moving toward that doom which shall be our oblivion and utter annihilation. There are no safety nets in this impersonal and indifferent zone of mindless churning. We’ve tempted ourselves to believe otherwise, to create fantastic worlds of culture and civilization within which to hide ourselves from the truth of things as they are as they are… Now will come the next wave of intelligence, the possibility of our replacement, of a machinic civilization constructed out of the ruins of the human – a totally other mode of being and thinking outside the human altogether. For some this is a horror, for others a pleasant and welcome ending to the beast who would not die or change: human civilization that produced such greatness and also mass death, corruption and degradation will come to an end; extinction and oblivion in the backwaters of the night and the silence, the darkness. Do we even have a choice in the matter? I doubt it. As Frank Ruda in a charming work on fatalism suggests,

Comic fatalism therefore relates to nihilistic fatalism as active nihilism relates to passive nihilism in Nietzsche. Comic fatalism recoils back upon itself and thus turns the apocalypse into a category of comedy.

Maybe that should be our nonplussed reaction to the universal horror of an indifferent and impersonal universe in which the care and feeding of humans is a joke or at best something that is not built into the very structure of existence. A comic fatalism that seeks in horror literature nothing more than – as Ligotti once said in an interview, “pure entertainment”. As he’d say in another work: “To entertain ourselves for a spell, let us proclaim that were it not for tragedy the human race would have gone extinct long ago. It keeps us on our toes and pushes us toward the future in a paradoxical search to purge the tragic from our lives.” (CHR, 163)  He’d go on to say,

No one knows this better than the entertainers among us, those sublimating masters of artifice who could not forge their “great works” without the screams and sobs arising out of the pit where tremulous shadows run from themselves. (CHR, 163)

In our time we’ve forgotten this fact, and forgotten the art laughter, to see the world through the lens of art or horror literature and know that this, too, is illusion: the aesthetic call to our emotions, to our fears and our terrors that allows that purge, that release that only great art can supply. Rather in our time we’ve all become literalists of the imagination, so that apocalypse rather than a pleasant channeling of our fears has become  an actual possibility and real manifestation in the world around us in wars, famines, racism, hatred, murder, mayhem… The problem we face is that we’ve targeted the external world of actual people and deemed them disposable as if they are the ravenous zombies and vampires of our contemporary globalist madness. We’ve turned the inside out, reversed what once existed within into a projected nightmare scenario and living hell in the real world not as fantasy but as daemonic threat and doom upon ourselves and others. Talking of contemporary horror films Ligotti remarks that the characters in these films “cannot be sure who is a “thing” and who is not, since those who are transmuted retain their former appearance, memories, and behaviors even after they have become, in their essence, uncanny monstrosities from another world.” (CHR, 92) This sense that we’ve allowed the immigrants (US) and refugees (US and EU) to enter into and become a part of the social body of our nations leads to this sense of the uncanny uncertainty that one cannot be sure who is the “thing” – is it us or them: a paranoiac nightmare world of ravening lunacy, indeed. Because our categories of normal/abnormal have broken down due to the absolute Other of other conceptual cultures who have other sets of Symbolic Orders and ideas, concepts, ideologies, religious, and Laws, etc. we are now in the predicament of mutating and transforming into an Other ourselves all across the globe. There is no safe haven, no place to hide or defend oneself against oneself. In this sense we’ve all – everyone on the planet – become as Ligotti states it, in “essence, uncanny monstrosities from another world”. (CHR, 92) The world of the hidden and unrevealed – the unhuman: a realm at once of visible darkness and translucent majesty at the far reaches of our imaginative need; a realm of sound and music, vibratory and infernal chords, erotic weavings and terror hollowed spasms, wherein the elemental daemons and energetic forces, light up the galleons of unbidden mysteries and allure us toward insidious obscurity.

Enjoy the Ride: The Sickness of Our Age

Death as commodity. Police videos have skyrocketed. In America the new spectator sport has become channeling the latest death scene from the ongoing mediatrance police shootings across the USA. This grotesquerie which seems to be mobilized as the aestheticized visualization of police brutality, along with the veritable aftermath which comes with it of reactionary pogroms of Black Lives Matter’s activists on the streets to counter it in protest and political activism spawn even greater violence and death. All captured on the latest iPad, iPhone, or other media device and blipped nonstop to any of a number of media outlets online for a continuous feedback frenzy.

The key here is to watch how the very protests against police brutality seem to be reinforcing and escalating police violence, causing within police departments across the nation in-house paranoia, fear, horror and anxiety to the point that overreaction under duress and performance produces the very acts of violence that protestors intended should be curtailed or stopped altogether; else police departments that usually patrol poorer neighborhoods have gone minimal, and citizens are crying for more protection. Where is the sanity in this? Of course there is none. Our society is insane. Of course we figured this out long ago, but most of us decided to just sleep it out till it passed. But with climate change, iffy leaders, austerity, Brexit, wars and rumors of wars, racism, gender issues… one could go on… one realizes there is no escape from it. We are part of it… riding on a non-stop Ship of Fools without a port to end our madness, moving toward doom without hope or reprieve in sight.

Academics will theorize till their blue in the face, as usual. One wonders if someone can actually decide whether the apocalypse has already happened, and if this is just the fallout that we are unwilling as yet to accept. Responsibility? Who would willingly respond to madness? Me? I’m reminded of Thomas Ligotti’s thoughts in his Conspiracy against the Human Race (and here I let him have the final word):

Answer: Now you go insane. Now our species goes extinct in great epidemics of madness, because now we know that behind the scenes of life there is something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world. Now we know that we are uncanny paradoxes. We know that nature has veered into the supernatural by fabricating a creature that cannot and should not exist by natural law, and yet does. (CHR, 111)

Enjoy the ride!

Sources:

1.Schweitzer, Darrell. Thomas Ligotti Reader. Wildside Press; First Soft Cover Edition edition (April 9, 2003) (TLR)

2.Zweig, Stefan. The Struggle with the Daemon: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche (p. 15). Plunkett Lake Press. Kindle Edition.

3.James, William . The Collected Works of William James (8 collections of William James containing dozens of lectures all with active table of contents). (Kindle Locations 1303-1311).  . Kindle Edition.

4.Land, Nick. Phyl-Undhu: Abstract Horror, Exterminator. Time Spiral Press (20 December 2014)

5.Ligotti, Thomas. The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (p. 90). Hippocampus Press. Kindle Edition. (CHR)

6.Mumford, Lewis, Ideas.

7.Land, Nick (2015-12-16). Chasm (Kindle Location 8). Time Spiral Press. Kindle Edition.

8.Trigg, Dylan. The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror (p. 5). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition. (TT)

9.Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae (p. 237). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

10.Lovecraft, H. P.. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature: Revised and Enlarged (Kindle Locations 327-329). Hippocampus Press. Kindle Edition. (ASH)

11.Ruda, Frank. Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism.  University of Nebraska Press (May 1, 2016)

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Georges Bataille’s “Story of the Eye” Review

The question of how to approach Story of the Eye is a difficult one. Should I read it with a fresh eye or informed eye? Before even opening this book which was lent to me by a friend I knew it had a reputation as being scandalously sexually explicit, but also having been a profound influence on many high-minded 20th century French thinkers and artists. Equally the cover of this Penguin books edition doesn’t hide the fact of what you’ll find inside by displaying a woman’s torso and her genitals. Nevertheless I felt nervous about approaching it uninformed for fear of not “getting it.” Without looking at any background about the book or the essays by either Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes included in this edition, I plunged in reading. In general, I like to come to a book fresh without the influence of any reviews or essays to color my opinions before I’ve formed some of my own.

This novel doesn’t hold back opening almost immediately with a teenage boy describing meeting the sexually adventurous Simone who stands over a bowl of milk, hikes her skirt up and lowers herself down to give “pussy” a drink. Before running away, Simone’s stunned mother simply ignores her flagrant sexual exploits with the male narrator and turns a blind eye to the proceedings even when her daughter pisses on her from the rafters. In short intense episodes the unnamed male narrator goes on to describe an unrestrained romp-fest with Simone which includes orgies, water sports, creative uses of boiled eggs, freeing a sectioned girl named Marcelle from a mental institution, bull fights and transgressive acts in a church including sexually assaulting a priest. Amidst these explicit carryings on the narrator makes a number of striking observations about dreams, desire, obsession, violence, breaking from convention and death.

So what to make of it all without the informed background or academic arguments to influence my opinion? Like reading a poem for the first time I’m not sure what to think of it. It certainly stirred a lot of feelings for me. Anger. Disgust. Lust. Despair. Boredom. It seemed more to be playing with my subconscious than presenting a coherent narrative I could follow and thoughtfully consider – although it is a story. I dread to think what nightmares might assault me tonight. Certainly this was the author’s intention. For when the libido is given free-reign these transgressive fantasies are the result and as he states “our sexual dream kept changing into a nightmare.” It would be naively idealistic to believe that sex should only ever manifest in romantic expressions of loving passion. Sex is also frightening, indulgent, melancholy and scandalous. It’s frequently expressed as an assertion of power or a willingness to cede our bodies to the powerful. From the heights of ecstasy we often fall into the trenches of despair. If you continuously and heedlessly chase after lust it will turn sour; it will lead to madness. Instinctively we know this. That’s why there is so much shame, so much fear and repression, so many social rules, so much concealing and many furtive liaisons. Without it would we have so much literature? Probably not.

By dealing with sex in such a forthright way does it make Story of the Eye great literature? Without even reading about the book’s background and academic arguments focusing on it I can already imagine the debate will be - is it pornography or is it art? A question that can’t be answered. People will use it for what they will. In my book group a few years ago we read Anais Nin’s collection of erotica Delta of Venus. This book provokes the same question. To me, Nin’s stories felt both less artful and less interesting than this book (although they are certainly just as frankly and dynamically sexual.) But I was also less offended. There are aspects of Story of the Eye which do make me feel very uncomfortable. Not for its explicitness even when it verges into the dodgy territory of necrophilia. But two aspects of the book strike me as deeply suspicious.

Firstly, this book is purely about the male gaze. The narrator is anonymous and Simone is a male fantasy. Without inhibition or questioning she joins him in realizing his most perverse and insidious desires. When they free Marcelle from the nut house she suddenly becomes terrified of the narrator who takes on the symbolic image of a cardinal to her. The narrator realizes she makes this connection from the red blood which covered him when during their orgy he violently raped a girl. This incident wasn’t recorded when the orgy scene was previously recounted. Rape in fantasy certainly is something that should be explored – as it is an impulse which enters into the imagination of some people either as being the perpetrator or the victim. My issue with the way it’s raised here is the callous reference to it as if it were totally expected and not worth mentioning before.

The second thing I found offensive in the book is in a passage where he describes Simone having a different type of climax and makes a racist analogy: “These orgasms were as different from normal climaxes as, say, the mirth of savage Africans from that of Occidentals. In fact, though the savages may sometimes laugh as moderately as whites, they also have longlasting spasms, with all parts of the body in violent release, and they go whirling willy-nilly, flailing their arms about wildly, shaking their bellies, necks, and chests, and chortling and gulping horribly.” This blanket description referring to the way Africans have sex is both a stereotype and diminishing by turning a certain group of people into a symbol for unrestrained sexual expression. What’s particularly inflammatory about the statement is the end description of “horribly” which gives negative connotations to an unconscious physical reaction. Although Bataille seems to be invoking these multifarious sexual escapades as a way of seriously exploring the psychological complexity of lust here he vilifies a race of people by profiling them as showing savage unrestraint and presents it as if he’s making a humorous joke at their expense.

Having pointed those out there are aspects of the book I did find symbolically powerful and resonant. In particular, he has a way of describing the inability to achieve real satisfaction or fully satiate desire even after a climax is achieved – even multiple times. Here he notes the power of dreaming when thinking about the open window in the mental institution belonging to Marcelle as he looks up at it: “It is not astonishing that the bleakest and most leprous aspects of a dream are merely an urging in that direction, an obstinate waiting for total joy, like the vision of that glowing hole, the empty window” Here he suggests that desire is the murky condition which can’t be climbed out of no matter how many times a seeming fulfillment or an actual orgasm is achieved. The fantasy will always remain just out of reach, hanging luminous and attractive in the distance.

Going further, Bataille contemplates that desire for intercourse and the impulse to sexually meld into each other exists on an elemental level. He surmises “death was the sole outcome of my erection, and if Simone and I were killed, then the universe of our unbearable personal vision was certain to be replaced by the pure stars, fully unrelated to any external gazes and realizing in a cold state, without human delays or detours, something that strikes me as the goal of my sexual licentiousness: a geometric incandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating.” Here he elegantly suggests that light is a sort of an ideal expression of desire’s fulfillment. The radiance of it is caused by a collision of feeling beyond the flesh. It’s both an idealistic concept and an existentially crushing thought.

From the numerous explicit descriptions there is a building sense that (like in the John Waters’ film ‘A Dirty Shame’) “anything goes” is the new normality. This obviously clashes vociferously against what’s considered the civilized manner of achieving conjugation. Bataille writes “To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savour the 'pleasures of the flesh' only on condition that they be insipid.” His attack on “decent people” is linked to a sense of inhibitions about sex in society. The transgression he describes in this book is a way of bulldozing through this to reclaim the untamed animalistic instinct to have sex and assert that we are “akin to one another in the common isolation of lewdness, weariness, and absurdity.”

All this unrelenting lewdness is comical but also necessary. How else to navigate through the moral and socially polite barricades to deal frankly with how sex expresses itself in our imaginations? The book is elevated by the fact the writer probes the matter so assiduously like a nightmare he refuses to be thrown out of. Bataille’s writing is uneven, sometimes repetitive and doesn’t fully consider many facets of the complex psychosexual being. But perhaps if the book weren’t so short it would lose its impact? Or perhaps it would become such an intimidating swamp of bodily fluid no one could finish it? As it stands, it’s provoked a lot for me to think about and, having restrained myself, I’m now eager to read the included essays by Sontag and Barthes as well as others’ opinions and more information about Bataille himself.

If you’ve read this book I’d be very interested to hear what you think and if you haven’t does frank sexual content put you off from reading books even if they are considered a so-called "classic"?

[kalliersnovelreviews]

On Democracy

Karl Popper (1902-1994) established himself as a vicious defender of the principles of liberal democracy—a political philosophy that has, more or less, taken the Western world by storm.

Despite all their differences, liberal democracy is still a political philosophy strongly defended by Republicans and Democrats alike. After all, what is not to like about a political system that sells itself as one led by “The People”? Any reasonable individual could see the validity of giving significant political power to “The People.”

There is little to indicate Popper was being dishonest with some of the points he made in an effort to solidify liberal democracy as the supreme political order in the West, but it does appear he was a bit naïve.

Popper once said:

It is wrong to ask who will rule. The ability to vote a bad government out of office is enough. That is democracy.

Though his words have a flattering ring to them, Popper somehow neglected to address the cruel reality that the populace is much more efficient in voting “a bad government” into office than they are out of office.

One need only conduct a cursory investigation into the history of American politics to find that, the vast majority of the time, one side of the political aisle is always pissed at the administration in power. That is to say, 49% of the population is pouting while the other 51% of the population is enjoying the turnout. (I understand it is not a 50-50 split in Republican/Democrat representation in this country, but the analogy still proves sufficient.)

Thomas Jefferson had it right when he said:

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

If a time machine were available, one could blast to the past and survey the general population to see what they thought about their government. In the majority of cases, people will be disappointed. (Richard Nixon is one such exception, who won 49 states in 1972, which speaks to the colossal ignorance so prevalent in the average American.) How could this be? If “The People” are the ones voting in the politicians who run the government, how can so many people be upset and discontented with their national leadership?

Could it be that democracy is not a unifying political system?

Popper also had this to say:

The defense of democracy must consist in making anti-democratic experiences too costly for those who try them; much more costly than a democratic compromise.

Again, it is easy to see how Popper’s words make sense for the majority of people who are under the blind confidence of an inherently flawed system. But for those of us who are plagued by their inner critic, it is easy to see how, paradoxically, Popper’s sentiment has the bitter taste of authoritarianism in it. By just switching up a few words, it is not difficult to imagine Stalin issuing the same statement:

The defense of communism must consist in making anti-communist experiences too costly for those who try them; much more costly than a communist compromise.

Even if we grant that democracy is a functional political philosophy, its founding (in America) betrays its own virtue. Democracy, in the United States, was not democratically decided on by the people of the United States. It was a political system installed by a few men of the time (ie anti-democratic). In other words, democracy was founded in this country by the very elite system it was attempting to dismantle.

Consider these biting words from our second president, John Adams:

I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. … Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.

This does not even address the quality of the populace. Those who advocate for democracy demand their heart surgeon have a medical degree while having no problem with an uneducated populace being in charge of deciding who runs the country. This quickly devolves into mob rule—something this country has hosted on not so few occasions.

Plato uttered this same idea over 2,000 years ago:

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

The most cynical part of an ignorant populace is that it can easily be manipulated. Political ads, banal speeches, and 80s rock songs (eg Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”), for example, are enough to get the average American pumped for a given candidate. All of which exists outside the realm of policy. The crux of the degeneracy of democracy is not that some people are not doing enough—it is that the wrong people are doing too much.

It is the voter who is to blame for this broken system.

It is a person’s honest belief that the candidate they vote for will be better for this country than any other. The heartbreaking reality is that though the voter is responsible for putting a given politician in office, it is the same voter who is eternally condemning the very political structure they are perpetuating. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

Meanwhile, all of these elected politicians do little more than reinforce the superficial fantasies of the populace (giving vacuous speeches and deploying ridiculous ads), thus earning another term in office, and so on ad infinitum.

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Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger” Review

Introduction

I can’t remember the first time I heard of Knut Hamsun and his seminal work Hunger. It must have been during a time when I was searching for authors and books that had commonalities with Albert Camus and the Absurd.

It’s difficult to say.

I know I read this book in 2020—perhaps my favorite book read last year—and have consistently come back to it through reflection. It’s such a simple text that tells a simple story, but it has had a huge impact on me, both in terms of philosophical thought and what literature can and should do.

But, as usual, let’s start out by addressing the author of Hunger: Knut Hamsun.

Hamsun was a prolific Norwegian writer, publishing more than 20 novels during his lifetime, including a collection of poetry, some short stories, plays, a travelogue, and even some non-fiction essays.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920 as a result.

As a young man, Hamsun objected to the conventional tropes of realism and naturalism that was so prevalent in literature at the time, favoring modernist approaches to storytelling that leaned heavily on the intricacies and uncertainties of the human mind. This makes a lot of sense, considering the chaos of the time period—World War I being just one example.

These experimental literary moves typically surface in the form of digression, stream of consciousness, and an almost unhealthy dose of self-reflection—all of which Hamsun put to effective use in his work. There are many people who have a certain amount of distaste for this kind of writing, but I happen to enjoy stories that take you for a ride in ways that conventional stories cannot. Hamsun’s writing reminds me a lot of Virginia Woolf’s writing style, with the deployment of stream of consciousness etc.

He once noted that writers of any stripe should set out to describe the “whisper of blood, and the pleading of bone marrow”—drawing attention to the value of imagery, expressionism, and even the little absurdities that constitute a life. It could be that Hamsun’s work had an influence on André Breton and the surrealist movement as well, though I have no evidence to back up this claim. They nevertheless share some of the same ideas—least of which is breaking through the conventions and artistic expectations of the day.

Hamsun is oftentimes compared to Fyodor Dostoevsky in the way he expresses his contradictory attitude toward society and the culture he is so entrenched in. This typically manifests in commentary on the meaning of life, existence of God, community, and the hopeless attempt at coherence in a world run amok with incoherence and irrationality. Franz Kafka would undoubtedly be a welcome member in this group, too.

What is Hunger About?

As I mentioned, Hunger is a very simple story—at least on the surface—that features a nameless intellectual who is literally starving on the streets of Oslo, looking for work as a writer.

As can be assumed, he has little luck in doing so.

Throughout the narrative, our nameless protagonist meets a number of different people—people he attempts to impress and bargain with through his refinement as a citizen of the city. This is just the problem: Our nameless protagonist possesses such an allegiance to his own pride that he, a lot of times, refuses food and other essentials that people offer him. He never wants to come off as needing the help of his community.

It could be said that the word hunger applies to a number of different dimensions of the protagonist’s life. He is starving for relevance, for love, and for food, but he cannot get himself to accept that some things are simply out of his control, and that he may need the help of his fellow city-dwellers.

All because of his pride.

In this way, Hamsun nails the modern-day plight of the West. The West—of which I am a part—puts a premium on individualism, to the extent that we will allow ourselves to be destroyed before we concede that we may need someone’s help. Though there are many good qualities to being independent, Hamsun’s protagonist in Hunger is a perfect demonstration of how individualism—such as the objectivism of Ayn Rand and hyper-individualism of Max Stirner, for example—can have the opposite effect.

It has the very real possibility of annihilating a life.

The concept of class dynamics is discussed in the book with an astounding level of accuracy, at least as far as I can tell. One quote the protagonist expresses in the book is as follows:

The intelligent poor individual was a much finer observer than the intelligent rich one. The poor individual looks around him at every step, listens suspiciously to every word he hears from the people he meets; thus, every step he takes presents a problem, a task, for his thoughts and feelings. He is alert and sensitive, he is experienced, his soul has been burned…

The book, in many ways, is about the existential plight of the common person—the common person being that which has had to constantly think about why they are common and poor and at a disadvantage relative to their wealthy counterparts. These are luxuries that the wealthy do not need to think about, at least not on the level of the so-called common person. This is made even more clear, as Hamsun mentions, when it comes to the common person who happens to have a certain level of education. In this way, I am reminded of Dostoevsky’s bitter and rambling narrator from Notes from the Underground—featuring a self-reflexive narrator who is obviously educated, but is paralyzed by the society in which they live.

There is a strange contradiction in the protagonist himself, however, in that he seems to presume the motives of those around him while being profoundly confused about what he himself is.

There is another quote from the book I would like to share that explains this very thing.

He says:

I was conscious all the time that I was following mad whims without being able to do anything about it … . Despite my alienation from myself at that moment, and even though I was nothing but a battleground for invisible forces, I was aware of every detail of what was going on around me.

I don’t think I’m the only one who has felt something similar to this before. I have often presumed the motives of those around me—which typically is an indication of my own insecurity in certain areas of my life—while simultaneously having an inability to understand what or who I am.

I know that sounds a bit melodramatic, but stay with me.

Let me give an example. Let’s say you are angry. Even though you are angry, your whole existence is never wholly consumed by that anger while you are in the throes of that strong emotion. There is something inside your head—a non-angry part—that registers that you are angry. It is almost as if there are multiple neighborhoods within your own head that keep tabs on other neighborhoods, constantly trying to make sense of itself as a whole.

The question is: Which of the psychological neighborhoods is really you? If they are all you, then it is easy to see how absurd it would be to lay claim to all these contradictory feelings going on in your head at the same time. Perhaps that is the point, though. Perhaps we, as humans, are, at the core, contradictory in this way.

I don’t think Hamsun would disagree with this proposition.

The last bit I want to mention about Hunger is its attitude toward God and religion. The protagonist, again, like Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, tackles the concept of God with suspicion. When Hamsun’s protagonist learns that he is unable to change his situation in the world, he doesn’t conclude that his circumstance is merely the plight of the society that he finds himself in. Instead, he goes after the creator of the universe, raging against the very thing that created him.

The peculiar part of this strand of the story is that while the protagonist smashes his metaphorical fists against the doors of God’s kingdom, he continues to tell himself that he does not believe in God. This is another delicious contradiction. It makes the reader wonder if the protagonist is being honest with himself, or if he wants to want to not believe in God.

I’ll leave you with a quote from the book that addresses this very thing:

I tell you, you Heaven's Holy Baal, you don't exist; but that, if you did, I would curse you so that your Heaven would quiver with the fire of hell! I tell you, I have offered you my service, and you repulsed me; and I turn my back on you for all eternity, because you did not know your time of visitation! I tell you that I am about to die, and yet I mock you! You Heaven God and Apis! with death staring me in the face - I tell you, I would rather be a bondsman in hell than a freedman in your mansions! I tell you, I am filled with a blissful contempt for your divine paltriness; and I choose the abyss of destruction for a perpetual resort, where the devils Judas and Pharaoh are cast down!

Powerful stuff.

You can feel the anger and frustration of the protagonist as you read his words, but there is a small part of you that will ask if Hamsun’s nameless intellectual is really being authentic, or if he is merely performing for a certain neighborhood within his own psychology.

It’s difficult to tell.

The early 20th century British writer Ivy Compton-Burnett said something similar:

I don't feel I am going to meet my Maker. And if I were, I should not fear him. He has not earned the feeling. I almost think he ought to fear me.

Conclusion

I would recommend this book for those of you who like stream of consciousness and stories that do not rely on plot. This is not a story with a plot, per se. It is a character study—a story about a man who cannot stand himself while also puffing up his own ego.

The story, in the last analysis, is about a man who goes on strike against humanity for his own shortcomings. It’s an exploration of the human psyche, and about the ways we rationalize the world in order to continue.

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The Importance of Thinking for Yourself - a short essay by Kallier Devdi

Everyone tends to believe that they truly do think for themselves. It does not matter which side of the political aisle one finds themselves on: Everyone believes they ought to be the example others follow. I have heard these very sentiments uttered from every side of almost every discussion concerning politics, culture, literature, and philosophy.

The simple fact is that this is simply not true.

For X person to find the folly in Y person’s position does not necessarily mean that X person is correct—and oftentimes X person is just as wrong as Y person. It is much easier to find the logical gap or rhetorical deficiency in another’s position than to reflect on our own with the same level of scrutiny.

I think this is common to all of us.

Arthur Schopenhauer—an 18th century German philosopher—drew attention to this very thing in his short essay entitled “On Thinking For Yourself.”

The essay starts off:

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power. You can think about only what you know, so you ought to learn something; on the other hand, you can know only what you have thought about.

This goes against the popular adage of today—which can be summarized as: read widely. I hear this little quip a lot: read widely. It is easy enough to grasp what is meant here, but, according to Schopenhauer, it is the wrong mentality for the majority of people.

I will be the first one to say that I do not think enough people read today. I mean really sitting down and really reading a substantial book… with pages. Tweets and audiobooks do not count as reading, in my view. Not only do books expose one to other’s ideas, feelings, and methods of operating in a complex world, it also exercises our brain in a way unique to the activity of reading.

Schopenhauer was living during a time when those who vested a substantial interest in knowledge were typically found within the walls of academia. Though this has only changed a bit since his time, colleges and universities are still considered the retreats for those who put a premium on literature, philosophy, and the discourse surrounding metaphysical questions, among other things.

Schopenhauer’s issue was that when he looked at those around him, he saw too many people reading instead of engaging with their own mind—their own thoughts. This is what I would refer to as a second-order problem today. Not only are there not enough people reading today, there are certainly not enough people coming to their own conclusions. Social media is perhaps best known for its allegiance to echo chambers. Very few people do their own research, or come up with ideas independent of someone else they have read or heard.

We all know someone who claims to be an expert on X subject just because they heard it on the news or saw a friend post about it on social media.

Schopenhauer goes on:

The result of much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment. The practice of doing this is the reason erudition makes most men duller and sillier than they are by nature and robs their writings of all effectiveness…

One dimension of Schopenhauer’s thought here is that when we read a lot of text(s), we start to take on the ideas of those we’ve read, believing ourselves to be just as wise as the person we’ve read. The problem is that we have done nothing for ourselves—we have lost our identity in the worldview of the one we are reading.

In other words, we have made no independent contribution to the collective pool of thoughts in the world.

The German philosopher cements this suspicion when he writes:

Fundamentally, it is only our own basic thoughts that possess truth and life, for only these do we really understand through and through. The thoughts of another that we have read are crumbs from another’s table, the cast-off clothes of an unfamiliar guest… [I]t is a hundred times more valuable if you have arrived at it [a thought] by thinking for yourself. For only then will it enter your thought-system as an integral part and living member, be perfectly and firmly consistent with it and in accord with all its other consequences and conclusions, bear the hue, colour and stamp of your whole manner of thinking, and have arrived at just the moment it was needed; thus it will stay firmly and for ever lodged in your mind.

This is what Alexander Pope meant when he wrote: “For ever reading, never to be read.”

The ultimate goal of sitting down to read a text is to refine our own predispositions. I do not mean we should only read what will bolster our own ideas about the world (confirmation bias), but I do think we need to have an idea about X before we decide to read someone else’s opinion about X.

The fundamental thesis is that we rely too heavily on other people’s opinions. Not only this, but we tend to view other people’s opinions as our own, without having given the whole thing a fair bit of thought ourselves.

This point is hit home when Schopenhauer said that this distinction is what “determines the difference between a thinker and a mere scholar.”

Think for yourself. And then read. And then consider other’s ideas.

In that order.

[kalliersnovelreviews]

Computer Vision Syndrome - A Short Story by Kallier Devdi

Hey. Been a while.

I know I haven’t had a presence here for some time now. Just… things have changed for me, and I think some of you might want to hear about it.

Right now it’s 3:12am, and I can hardly type because I’m afraid it’ll make too much noise. I’m afraid to do anything. Eat. Sleep. I can’t even leave this spot to get to the bathroom—not that the stains in the carpet will matter a few days from now.

You’ll have to forgive me if this post feels terse or disjointed. I can’t… focus. At this point I’m practically blind and almost certainly insane, but I still feel like this is something I need to do. I know if I’d found this story on the forum when I first showed up, things would have gone a lot differently for me. I might not be here now, paralyzed with fear in this computer chair, soaking in my own piss.

They might never have found me.

This is all pretty cryptic, I know. It’s just not something I can explain in a couple of sentences. You’ll understand everything by the time you’re done reading. At least, everything I understand, which may not actually be much.

Among other things, I’m about to lay out a set of instructions that, if followed, could really, really fuck you up. So, step zero: if you have anything at all to look forward to in this life, stop reading. This isn’t for you.

—

For me, the descent began as a steady downward spiral into mediocrity. Probably a process most people my age are familiar with. You put off adulthood for a while by attending college until, finally, you realize the center can’t hold and you have to choose a career path. If you plan on being a productive member of society, this is when the real work begins. You stop putting off study until the night before. You forget you ever had a social life. You acquire a real, bonafide work ethic.

Or, if you’re like me, you drop out before the pressure piles on, and you commit to a life of MMOs and cereal because you can’t be bothered to fix actual meals. Granted, most people aren’t like me. They still have to get out and work a job to keep bread on the table. I don’t. I was lucky enough to have a mother who left me at an early age and an estranged father who shows his love not by answering my calls, but by keeping my joint bank account full.

Needless to say, I never had to work. Never had to get out at all, really.

So for half a year after I left school, my life consisted of three things: League of Legends, Netflix, and order-in sushi. The only time I remember leaving the house was to get the mail every other month. What a dream, right?

That is, until you discover that the human body isn’t really built to sit hunched in a computer chair, staring at a light source for weeks on end. It takes a while for it to sink in, but when that revelation finally hits, it really knocks you on your ass.

I remember pretty clearly the night it first occurred to me that something might be off. I was waiting for a game of LoL to start, sort of zoned out, staring at the junk on my desk. For some reason, my eyes came to rest on the Styrofoam cups that they delivered my lo mein in. They were collapsed into a stack about five or six cups tall. I think I was contemplating how to go about finding a maid to get rid of all the trash piled around the apartment, when I noticed something strange about the cups: a faint outline, offsetting the cups by an almost imperceptible distance.

I blinked a few times and waited for my vision to refocus. It was just blurry from all the time in the dark. Obviously. That’s what I tried to tell myself. As I rubbed at my eyes, as I dripped water into them from the tap, and then finally as I crawled into bed, I tried to believe that my eyes were just tired from the hours of grinding. They’d be better in the morning.

Of course, you already know that isn’t how things went. If it had been that simple, you wouldn’t be reading this.

My vision was no better the next day, nor the next week, nor the week after, and it was steadily getting worse. Each day I watched the outline of the foam cups drift further from the stack, slowly transforming into a ghostly double. It was the same for everything of contrast I looked at. The white plate of the light switch. Black text on bright backgrounds. The glint of light on the metal arms of my computer chair. They all acquired their own ghostly twins, which hovered just above them, and just to the left. Light sources were even worse, casting thin, radiant webs out toward their doubles. Before long the green LED light on my computer tower was surrounded by a dim halo.

I quickly became obsessed with my worsening vision, testing it by closing one eye and then the other, moving my head back and forth, spreading my eyelids with my fingertips—anything to understand what had changed. A lot of the hours I’d been devoting to games turned into anxious scrolling through medical websites. I didn’t actually break down and schedule an appointment with an ophthalmologist until I came across an article on WebMD titled "Early Symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis". The first on the list? “Blurred or Doubled vision.”

I won’t waste your time with all the medical stuff. Suffice to say it did more harm than good. I spent a couple months pestering my general practitioner and visiting every eye doctor I could get to. After about a dozen different failures to diagnose anything in particular, the anxiety got so bad that I started to develop new symptoms altogether. Fatigue. Head pain. Paranoia. During the day I tried to drown out my condition with video games. During the night I sat awake, watching the shadows, unsure whether they were actually moving or if my fucked up eyes were just getting the best of me.

It’s a strange thing to be so acutely aware of your own body. Easy to take your senses for granted. But the moment you experience the slightest change, your whole world shifts. And it’s an inward shift. Your body becomes a prison, separating you from the outside world, and your life is a series of scratches on the prison wall, counting the days since you were whole.

That’s how it felt to me, anyway.

The little sleep I got was precious to me. It was my escape. I often wished I wouldn’t wake up. But after weeks of slogging through that misery, I managed to find for myself a dim little beacon of hope: a condition that seemed to fit my symptoms to a tee, and that—according to the articles I could find—few medical professionals take seriously. Computer Vision Syndrome, or CVS. Essentially, you focus on the screen too hard for too long and all kinds of things start to happen to your vision.

Having a name that you can attach to your illness is… well, it’s hard to describe the feeling. It makes the whole thing less like some overwhelming force in your life and more like something you can fight. And lucky for me, the fight against CVS is a pretty simple one. You just have to condition your eyes and give them proper rest. That’s all there is to it. They call it the 20/20/20 rule. For every twenty minutes looking at the screen, spend twenty seconds focusing your eyes on something twenty feet away. Simple enough.

Again, though, too simple. This wouldn’t be worth writing if that was where it ended, would it?

20/20/20. Let’s say, for congruity’s sake, that I did this for about 20 days. In that entire time, the only difference I saw was that, now, when I flicked my eyes too quickly in any direction, dark strands drifted like shadows across my vision. I might have made another appointment with my doctor if I hadn’t already spent so much time reading about this stuff. They were floaters; little strands of collagen moving around inside my eyes. Everyone has them, but most peoples’ eyes focus in such a way that they’re more or less invisible. I knew they were harmless, but for some reason they horrified me. In my developing mania, they felt like an omen of some kind; a sign that I would spend the rest of my life looking out from behind these broken, kaleidoscope eyes.

It might sound a little melodramatic when you think about all the terrible stuff people go through, but I could never boast a particularly strong willpower. That little flame of hope my discovery of CVS had ignited was beginning to dim, and really I just wanted to die. The floaters had a way of exacerbating the paranoia and the anxiety. I kept catching glimpses of… things in my peripherals that weren’t actually there. My brain interpreted them as human shapes, but I knew better. Still, that knowledge didn’t make it any easier for me to sleep at night.

Exhausted, and mostly consigned to my fate, I did what people in my situation do: I began to shout my woes into the void of the internet. That was how I found this forum, tucked away in some yuku.com domain board for people suffering with CVS.

It’s been a while since the last time I checked in here, but some of the veterans may remember my first post. It was a wall of text—not unlike this one—describing in probably too much detail the minutiae of my condition. And if you remember that post, you might also remember one of the members who responded to it: BlindBat2020. I don’t know if she has much of a reputation around here, but she certainly made an impression on me.

All she said on the thread itself was that she knew what I was going through, and that she might be able to offer a solution. She told me to shoot her a PM if I was interested, and within the hour we were talking on her private IRC channel. It was called “The Watchers Chat.” Everyone there seemed to be just as receptive as she was. I’d feed them pieces of my story, and they’d all tell me about their similar experiences, and how they were on the road to recovery. I remember one user in particular—someone by the name of Transdermia—who said that he almost never thought about his vision at all anymore. Soon, he said, he’d be all better.

You can’t imagine the effect this news had on me. I took my fingers off the keyboard and… again, dramatic. I wept for a while.

After that, I spent almost all my time talking to BlindBat, learning about the chat and what they were all doing to fix their eyes. They called the process depersonalization. It wasn’t something any one of them had come up with, but rather a method that had just sort of been… passed down by the members of the chat over the last half-decade or so. None of the original members were around anymore, but they didn’t need to be—BlindBat and the others really seemed to have a handle on things.

She guided me through it, taking me a little further each day. It felt like a series of physical therapy sessions, if a little more… unorthodox.

Step 1: find something to focus on.

They called this a “locus.” It’s not going to be a youtube video or a game; it has to be something that doesn’t stir any thoughts or feelings in you whatsoever, but something you can still look at for hours on end. Harder than it sounds. For me, it ended up being a looping gif of the baby from Eraserhead, wrapped in bandages and gasping for air. Weird choice, probably—it might reflect something about my psyche—but it doesn’t really mean anything to me, and I find it visually interesting. So it works well enough.

Step 2: prepare yourself.

This one she spent a lot of time drilling into me. You really have to be able to concentrate fully on your locus. Keep the lights off. Cover the windows. If you have to, plug your ears. Wear earmuffs over the earplugs. Wrap yourself in blankets. Tape blinders to the sides of your head to keep your peripherals from distracting you. Anything you have to do to remain fully centered on the computer screen. You cannot afford to break your concentration.

Step 3: focus.

You remember that 20/20/20 rule I mentioned? This is basically that, adjusted for depersonalization. Every day for 20 days, you spend an additional 20 minutes each day concentrating on your locus from no more than 20 inches away. 20 minutes the first day, 40 the second, an hour the third, so on.

I remember cracking a smile when she first told me about it. It’s pretty much the polar opposite of the original rule. According to her, if you follow these steps, you slowly condition your mind not to notice your body. It’s a way of… escaping yourself. Hence, “depersonalization.”

I thought it sounded a little like hippy bullshit at the time, and I guess typing it now I still sort of do. That didn’t stop me from following her into like an excited puppy, though. I’d like to think that anyone in my position would have done the same, but, again—I’ve never been possessed of a particularly strong force of will. I was so tired of the life I’d been living, and everyone in the chat had gotten me so riled up for what was to come. Despite its weirdness, it seemed like the reasonable thing to do. The only thing to do.

Before we could actually start on the full 20 days, BlindBat insisted that I practice. She said things would get much worse before they got better, and if I quit half-way through she’d never forgive me. I really think she meant it.

So I pinned my quilt to the window frame to block out the sun, found my earbuds, and every day I wrapped myself up in a sheet, peeking out through a hole at the computer screen to watch the same black and white clip of that deformed creature play out ad nauseum.

I was surprised by how difficult it was to sit so still and so quiet for such a long period of time. At first I couldn’t even pass half an hour before I needed to take a break. She was right. Even after all the time I’d spent sitting in front of a computer, I wasn’t ready for this. It was different from anything else I’d ever tried to do. It just felt like… nothing. Waiting for time to pass as my eyes dried out. Thank god there were no rules against blinking.

Eventually, with the support of the chat, I began to acclimate. One of the other members described it in a way that changed my entire perspective. Have you ever stared at one of those flat, ugly, industry-standard carpets with all the different specks of color on it, searching for invisible patterns? After a while, the dots all start to crawl around like television static. It’s just an illusion, but it sort of… “animates” the carpet. I learned to look at the gif in a similar way, finding invisible shapes in the negative space, memorizing the places where the shadows and highlights go patchy.

The more time I spent practicing this way, the worse my symptoms became. The halo encircling the green LED on my computer tower became a gauzy disk which hid the entire thing from view. The doubled images split into triples, and then into quadruples. The floaters in my periphery became so pronounced, I constantly felt as if I was seeing figures huddled against the walls of my room, inching around in time with the quiet creaks of the settling building.

The only thing unaffected was the perpetual white glow of the computer monitor.

I tried not to mind. I didn’t want to break stride with my practice. I wanted my body and my mind to be fixed so badly.

Eventually I broke down and told BlindBat about it. She said that there was nothing to be worried about; laid out a few more instructions for me to follow. Something to the effect of “if you see something out of the corner of your eye, no matter what, don’t look at it. In fact, avoid looking at windows, ceilings, and walls altogether. Spend as much time looking at the computer screen as possible. That’s the best way. And if you hear a sound you don’t recognize, whatever you do, don’t investigate. You can’t let the paranoia distract you.” In retrospect, these new rules ought to have terrified me, but I found them strangely comforting. This was all just part of it. Normal. If I could ignore it, I’d be over the hump and on to my twenty days soon enough.

Over the following weeks, I often tried to get in touch with the other members of the chat. I was surprised to find the place mostly empty. I guess the crowd had been thinning for a while. I’d noticed, I’d just never thought it was anything to be concerned about. Out of the dozen or so who had been there when I first joined, by the time I felt ready to start the process, there were only six of us left. Soon, it was just me and BlindBat, alone together in The Watchers Chat.

When I asked where everyone else had gone to, she said they had started already. And then she announced, quite suddenly, that she was planning to begin her twenty days as well, and that she thought I was ready to do mine.

I was. At least, I thought I was. That was what I told her.

But I was also still afraid. Something about going through it my own, without anyone to talk to if I messed up… I don’t know. If there was actually anything to be afraid of, I wasn’t sure what it was. Just one of those irrational things, I guess.

I prepared myself to do it anyway; dragged the economy-sized bundled of cereal boxes from the apartment pantry into the bedroom, stacked the packages of water bottles beside it. It felt like I was getting ready to hibernate. And then, once everything was in order…

I just sat in the dark, scouring the internet aimlessly.

I never actually got around to doing the deed. Instead, I waited out the duration of BlindBat’s twenty days, practicing like a diligent little student while my instructor was away. Thirty minutes a day, staring at that black and white gif, trying to forget that I exist. To forget the darkness around me. The feeling of subtle movements just beyond my line of sight. Of being watched.

Twenty days passed. Twenty became thirty. Half way through the following month, I still hadn’t heard back from her, and my anxiety was beginning to overwhelm me. I didn’t sleep anymore. Could hardly will myself to leave my room. The only comfort I could find was in the hypnotic animation of my locus. If she never came back, I knew I’d be stuck this way for the rest of my life. The thought hung over me like a funeral pall.

In the end, I gave in to my desperation and went looking for her. By searching for her username on google, I was able to find her Deviantart account, and from there I followed a link to her facebook page. I think that was when I discovered that she was a girl. The thought hadn’t even occurred to me until then. Anna Ridley. She was pretty. Long, red hair, unkempt in the most pleasant way. Easy smile. Freckles. Familiar, dark rings under her eyes.

And she was dead.

Whoever had been posting for her must not have been too concerned about privacy. Her profile picture was framed with a flowered, “rest in peace” border. Her most recent status was a wall of text full of all the usual post-mortem reflections. Surprisingly, it also went on to describe how she was found sitting upright in her computer chair, rail-thin, eyes fixed on a looping image of autumn leaves blowing across the pavement. They guessed she’d gone a number of days without eating or drinking, but they weren’t actually sure how it happened.

I couldn’t breathe right. I felt the world closing in around me as I searched for any possible discrepancy—any hope that I’d ended up on the wrong facebook page, or that this was some kind of avant-garde art thing, or maybe that I had against all odds managed to fall asleep and I was caught up in a terrible dream. It took me most of the day to reconcile what I was seeing on her page with reality.

For a long time after that, I just sat in The Watchers Chat, waiting for her to log back in. Waiting for anyone, really.

It remained as empty as it had been for the last month.

Few people know what it’s like to feel totally alone. Most have at least one person they can reach out to. A friend. A relative. An acquaintance of some kind. Ultimately, if worse comes to worst, you can just call up the police and tell them you’re dying. They’ll send someone to do something. But I’d spent so long in the dark—let my life become so much about my sickness—that I was afraid to reach out. It’s like when you’re little and you don’t want your feet to slip out from under the covers because you know that something will grab you. I didn’t want to come out of the dark.

I could only see one way forward, and the person who was supposed to guide me there was gone. If I could sleep, I think I would have crawled into bed and just… stayed there.

But the shadows were growing longer all the time, and my vision was getting worse. Often, I swear I could hear the sounds of shoulders brushing against walls; floorboards creaking under imaginary feet. All I could do to keep from devolving into a trembling, paranoid mess was to stay wrapped in my sheet, earbuds plugged into my ears, gazing at my locus.

That was how I started my twenty days.

It was difficult at first. Not the concentration—I’d had enough practice to be good at that by then—more so the image of BlindBat in my head, sitting lifeless in front of her computer. I didn’t want that. No one wants that. I wasted a lot of time worrying about how it might have happened and how I could avoid it. I eventually decided I’d just have to be vigilant about my eating habits and make sure I stayed hydrated. If something did happen… well. I wasn’t ready to believe my circumstances could get much worse.

Twenty minutes the first day, forty minutes the second, an hour the third, and keep going until you’re spending upwards of five hours a day, entranced by the image you’ve chosen. It works better than you can imagine. As the seconds tick by, you sort of… enter the image. You lose your body and your memories. You become the pixels. The scanlines. You forget the way your open eyes start to sting, and your dry cotton mouth. You forget the world.

You even learn to forget the silhouettes in your peripherals; the subtle sounds of movement.

By the fourteenth day, I was almost gone. The things that had mattered to me a little over a week ago had melted away into the comforting glow of the screen. My failing vision, my paranoia, my steadily increasing fatigue? They became an itch at the back of my mind, too insignificant even to scratch.

In less than a week, I knew I’d be done with this nightmare. Freedom was only six days of careful concentration away.

I was nearly finished with my five hours for the day, when something pulled me out of my trance. It happened slowly. A creeping awareness that something had… changed in my environment. Air currents, probably. Paranoia. I was used to filtering these things out. But there was something more this time. Something tangible. A new sound.

I repeated BlindBat’s instructions in my head like a mantra: If you see something out of the corner of your eye, no matter what, don’t look at it. Don’t look at windows, ceilings, or walls. If you hear a sound you don’t recognize, whatever you do, don’t investigate. For a while, that helped. Only for a while, though. The sound was so persistent and subtly distracting that soon I was focused more on ignoring it than on my locus. I didn’t feel concentrated; I felt trapped halfway between myself and the screen, and the sensation was sickening.

All the anxiety and dread I’d spent so much time pushing away came flooding back. I could feel the cold air on my skin, the emptiness in my gut. My eyes hurt, lips were dry and cracked. For the first time, beyond the barrier of the sheet and earbuds and the repeating image of the deformed baby on the screen, I noticed how impossibly present my floaters had become. They’d coalesced just out of sight, forming shapes that I couldn’t quite see, but that I somehow knew were coherent.

And they were making sounds. Actual sounds.

In a moment of weakness, instead of trying to regain my composure and concentrate on my locus, I let myself react. I broke the rules. With quivering hands, I pulled my earbuds out. I could hear feet stirring gently against the fibers of the carpet, and quiet, labored breathing. My vision and my mind had been playing tricks on me for so long, what reason did I have to be genuinely concerned?

Fully expecting to see nothing, I glanced over my shoulder into the darkness.

A dozen pairs of eyes glared back at me, pinpricks reflecting the monitor’s light. They were set into the faces of gaunt, emaciated figures, all pressed against the walls, crouching in the corners, clinging to the ceiling. One of them stood in the doorway, torso arced as if it could barely support its own weight, head lulled to one side on its useless neck. A few wisps of dried-out red hair trailed down from its scalp.

I froze, twisted in my chair. I knew already that it couldn’t be a trick of the eyes. It was too specific. Too real. Still, I tested them anyway, the same way I had all that time ago when I had first noticed the double image of the foam cups. I tried to blink the figures and their staring eyes away, but they wouldn’t go. They simply continued to stare, their dark eyes pinning me in place. Watching. Watching.

It’s been this way for three days now. I can’t leave this chair. I can’t eat. I’m afraid just to move. I’ve considered calling for help, but I don’t see the point. I’m pretty convinced that this is my life now. Seems like I’ve done too much damage with this whole depersonalization thing to go back, and… I just don’t want to go on this way.

I won’t pretend to know what they want, but I think I have an idea. When I’m done typing this, I’m going to put the earbuds back in my ears, wrap the sheet around my body, and spend a lot of time watching my locus.

I guess that’s all. I just… wanted to share, you know? Seemed like the thing to do, in case anyone else stumbles across this rabbit hole and is thinking of going down it.

And hey. If you’re that someone and you decide to go through with it—even after reading this—maybe I’ll pay you a visit sometime. Who knows?

‘Till then, I’ll try not to disturb you.

[kalliersnovelreviews]

Mainländer - A Prose Poem by Kallier Devdi

It was the strangest thing—my dream. From the evening before last. Though, now, as the nib of my pen claws into this paper, bleeding black ink, I cannot convince myself it was merely some nocturnal fantasy. A premonition—yes, perhaps—a premonition, or perhaps the psychological rehydration of a more substantial thing. A forgotten memory, more like. I was dragged back to the start—to the very beginning of Mainländer’s discovery of his own genius—to the very genesis of my nocturnal vision. To the excavation site of what he stood upon as he breathed his final breath. Except, here, in this tragedy, I assumed the role of God. It was I who had orchestrated all of creation, and it was I who had masterminded my own quietus. I felt Mainländer’s ruminations and reflections trickling down upon me like molten wax—excruciating and torturous—sculpting and shaping my every dimension. Rising from the words he’d written was the fact that I—God—had plucked myself out of non-existence. I immediately sought to invalidate my unity—to somehow burst outward from the seams that bound me. But having realized the futility in exempting myself from the depredations of space-time and matter through deicide, I shattered and splintered myself, Big-Bang-like, into a multiplicity of time-bound fragments—the very fabric of what is now known as the cosmos. All that was and is—the billions, perhaps trillions, of years of accumulation of objects and organisms—now small glittering pixels of what was once a singularity. What was once me. I felt myself, in that moment, being pulled and ripped and blown apart. The pain and sadness were an infinite sickness that infected every cell. Mainländer let a stream of tears slide down his cheeks as he dotted the last “i” of his work. He hanged himself the day it was published, upon a stack of newly printed copies. He had done what I had failed to do—to put to rest the awareness of agony—to put to sleep a Mainländer-sized piece of me. He had fulfilled, to every degree, my strongest desire: to not be. I suddenly woke from the night in a cold sweat, the words, his words, echoing in my head—spinning and spiraling off the pages: “God is dead, and His death was the life of the world.” There are nights, even now, the darkest ones, where I still hear that peculiar voice calling for me like an old friend. Only then does an odd phrase—a musical one—resonate between my ears: “The final aim of history is a crumbling field of ruins. Its final meaning is the sand blown through the eye-holes of human skulls.”

[kalliersnovelreviews]

Medical Log Entry #16 by Kallier Devdi

Medical Log Entry #16 Patient: John Doe

You would think that in the midst of certain Armageddon--global thermonuclear war, devastating pandemic, cybernetic revolution, and the African continental plate disappearing, to name a few--that one would be accustomed to expecting the unexpected. I, for one, am no stranger to the bizarre. After my stint in deep space, my mind’s been programmed to think well outside the bounds of normalcy. Add that to the thirty-one years with the Force, I’ve seen it all. But when Nilo called me up and told me I had to hurry home, that I just had to see this, I could tell from the tone of her voice that something unique was waiting for me.

Nilo and I first met at UMBRA back in 0-13. I was newblood, straight from the uni’s proud and ancient halls. Still had the naive shine in my eyes. Still thought the earth tilted at twenty-three degrees. Nilo was already an old hound by the time I showed up. She’d been immersed in the strange for half a millennium. Everybody who’s anybody knows who Nilo the Cyrene is. Her fame is known from here to the outer sectors. She practically wrote the book on modern criminal psychology, as well as how to deal with the ramifications.

Needless to say, I boarded the next transport home. Of course, home was currently over two hundred and forty-nine million miles away, past Mars, past what’s left of Moon, back in tiny little Harrison, Michigan, United States, Earth. Traveling near Mach 100, the trip would take over a third of a standard year. That’s a long time for someone to wait, I had told Nilo, but she assured me I would be fine as long as I left soon.

It was day eighteen when it happened. Our transport was careening at speeds approaching oblivion (though nowhere near the higher realm of the mighty c), but inside the Argo everything was relatively calm. I excused myself from a fascinating conversation about fungus with the delightful Dr. Dame Wolffa and made a bee-line for the privy. It was there, standing in front of the mirror and watching the recycled greywater gush from the faucet, that the Argo experienced turbulence. I staggered. My head hit the counter top. Something massive crashed into the transport and the entire world around me shook violently. I heard a few gasps from outside, but the door on the privy was sealed shut and refused to open. I banged, as if expecting that to do anything, and again the world shook. It was as if an earthquake was loosed upon us, though, as I said, we were many million miles away from Earth.

The interior lights cut off, plunging me into sudden darkness. A moment later the emergency lights flashed on, a bright orange EXIT sign illuminating above the door. “Not hardly,” I said, pulling again at the latch. Open sobbing now sounded from without. I heard prayers and pleadings. Then the shuttle shook again and something massive crashed into it, grinding it and everything within it into dust.

Everything turned into colors. Sounds. Tastes. Smells. Indigo from a rainbow. The shade of dead wheat.  Mist from a waterfall.  The brightness of Sun at daybreak. How keystrokes sound at high WPM. Iris milky white. Bland oatmeal on a summer’s luncheon. Nilo’s perfume the night we went to Cloisters. The saffron hue of her lipstick. Darkness, encircling and pulsing, my body spinning in a billion little pieces, each turning and rushing along with whatever carried it away. An old dirge of trumpets and cellos. The grey of sepulchers and the gold of crowns. Salt on springmelons. Her laughter at the cine. Her hand inside mine. Dark blood red after a gunshot. Sand grains beneath fingers within cake upon grass under covers pork insulafoam bone masks joy inside you ache love numbers algorithms infinitely complex knowing knowledge knowing nothing spinning spiraling spewing splicing splaying splintering fragmentslightblackhopelostfoundyou...

Life coalesced; meaning reared its head; every road I’ve ever traveled was before me; every choice I’ve ever made; every possibility of everything, past, present, future. I was dead, and I wasn’t. There was still work to be done. Something remaining for me. All of this and more I knew, as if the Almighty chose to give me a glimpse into His mind. There was terror and there was certainty. Above all there was love.

I awoke here at St. John’s Hospital. I’ve no idea of the date. Every time I ask I’m told something about something called “January,” whatever that means. The orderlies all shun me. I see hate in their eyes. Distrust. There is one I may be able to persuade to join me, for I see sympathy in him. Still, I am lost without my Nilo. No one claims to know her, and I’m beginning to question her existence myself. I am no longer confident of anything. They asked me to write this all down, and looking back at it I can’t discern fact from fiction. They are trying to help me, so they say, but to me it’s more like an interrogation. Nothing makes sense. I am confined but for my writing arm and my neck. So I write, day in, day out, hoping someday that I can look back over this and find the truth. I know it exists. I had it in my grasp as I rode the comet back to Earth. But eternal fire is not meant for human minds, and I now must pay the cost. One day I will recover, and when I do, I will flee from this place and find Nilo. Until then, I must have patience. -----

Word Count: 938 -Written as an exercise in futility.

[kalliersnovelreviews]

William S. Burroughs’s “The Soft Machine” Review

Early on in The Soft Machine, our narrator embarks on a sweet vacation. But he could never fit all the sights and scenes on a postcard for the folks back home.

Let's see, he puts on an old Civil War uniform in Monterrey, capture some prisoners and executes one for kicks. Then he requisitions a ranch house and hold an orgy (but never explains now they decide which lucky soldier get to hang in the harness). And when he arrives in town, what a break: "They were getting ready to burn some character at the stake...." Our hero finds it a very arousing experience, but he must move on to Mexico City, where he has a torrid affair of short duration with an epileptic boy, which gets even sultrier when the duo visits a medicine man and our hero enjoys the benefits of autoerotic asphyxia - a favorite pastime of many characters in The Soft Machine.

We never find out what happens to the epileptic lad - who disappears in a mystical body-merging experience, and no bath salts required. But our narrator soon finds another young boyfriend. Alas, he eventually breaks up with the poor fellow in the most heart-rending way: "I tossed a cup of mescal in his eyes and side-stepped and he fell on his face and I rammed the planting stick right into the base of his brain."

As Shakespeare said: "The course of true love ne'er did run smooth."

Further adventures ensue, some of them hard to visualize or even comprehend - but readers may have already decided by this point that, with Mr. Burroughs, the fewer details, the better.

What, for example, are we to make of the following: "They strapped us in couches in a room under the temple, and there was a terrible smell in the place full of old bones and a centipede about ten feet long comes nuzzling out of one corner - So I turn on something I inherit from Uranus where my grandfather invented the adding machine...." You can keep on reading if you like but, despite the magical appearance of the calculator (a reference to the author's family connection to Burroughs Corporation, a pioneering computer company now part if Unisys), don't expect it to add up.

And even these passages - are they hallucinations? dreams? drug trips? fantasies? signs of incipient mental illness? or (hard to believe) autobiographical sketches? stand out as paragons of clarity in comparison with the maddening cut-and-paste sections of The Soft Machine.

Burroughs did not invent this technique, which comes out of the Dada and surrealist aesthetic. Experimental author Tristan Tzara entertained an audience back in the 1920s when he 'wrote' a poem by pulling random words out of a hat - and a riot ensued. (Unanswered question: were people fleeing the poem, or flocking to it?) Some scholars even believe Shakespeare followed a similar approach, occasionally throwing in a random noun where a verb should go, adding an element of surprise that spiced up his dialogue. Who knows, perhaps there were riots at the Globe Theatre? In any event, for ten-foot centipedes and mescal-in-the-eyes, we must bypass the Avon Bard and turn to the avant-garde Burroughs.

Whatever the lineage, the result is an often impenetrable story, with narrative sacrificed to sound and isolated blobs of disconnected meaning. Burroughs does not maintain the cut-and-paste style for the entire novel - perhaps a little more than half of the work still has a semblance of continuity - but the collage sections are the parts readers will remember most.

Or perhaps wish to forget. Here's a small taste:

Parrot on shoulder prods the heart - Paralyzed twisting in your movies for the last time - out of me from the waist down - I will never stand still for such lookout on street boys of the green - Happened that boy could keep his gas and violets.

And those who teach students how to diagrams sentences: you can give your class the following to parse:

In his sleep naked Panama night, the camera pulsing in blue silence and ozone smells, sometimes the cubicle open out on all sides into purple space. X-rays photos of viscera and fecal movements, his body a transparent blue fish....

How do readers respond to this? Based on my personal experience (an admittedly small sample size, to be sure), Burroughs's The Naked Lunch is the literary work most frequently started but never finished. In one instance, I recall an acquaintance telling me that he closed the book in mid-paragraph and sent it hurtling across the room.

Yet this author retains a cult following and a certain bohemian mystique undiminished by the passing years. I suspect that Burroughs's fans praise his books less for their violation of syntactical conventions, and more for their sheer rawness. Even after a half century, this prose has not mellowed with age, and I doubt it ever will. Perhaps this is fitting for a writer who claimed that the most pivotal moment in his career as a writer came when he shot his wife Joan Vollmer in the head while he was in a state of intoxication - ostensibly in failed imitation of a folk hero William Tell.

In all fairness, he was aiming the gun at a glass of water balanced on her head.

But, as Shakespeare said: "The course of true love ne'er did run smooth."

Yet there is a plot hidden beneath the dead-end sentences of The Soft Machine - or several plots, for that matter. The book includes a science fiction angle, an elaborate ruse of traveling back in time to study the Mayan civilization first-hand. Here we learn of various hitherto unknown Mayan rituals and practices - for example, when a Mayan man encounters another male, man or boy, the traditional greeting is apparently for both to drop their pants. What follows can't be described here, or I would run afoul of web filtering software, so I will simply describe it as the 'Mayan handshake'. And there is a magical realism story here about the narrator's spirit inhabiting other bodies - as in the interlude related above about the epileptic boy. Then again, this may simply be a description of a drug-induced hallucination, akin to what one finds in Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan books or Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception. Sometimes the same incident is recounted in several different ways - mystical, quasi-realist and distorted cut-and-past - imparting a peculiar house-of-mirrors quality to the unfolding tale (or anti-tale).

Other subplots start up sporadically during the course of The Soft Machine. We encounter a private eye named Clem Snide, an editor who works for a news agency that creates stories rather then report them, and other intriguing characters who briefly show promise of participating in coherent narratives. But these all fizzle out very quickly, and always in a similar manner. Characters forget their job, their mission, the very story they just introduced, and instead pull down their pants and engage in the 'Mayan handshake'. Let other novelists go in search of a great white whale or big issues of war and peace; Burroughs is content with a love pile on the floor, and a mess to clean up (or more often, just to leave behind) to mark the occasion.

And that's a good way to describe The Soft Machine. If you like seeing messes left behind, this is the novel for you. And if you couldn't finish The Naked Lunch, and want to give Burroughs another chance, at least this book is shorter. So you might get all the way through it. And if not, you can always toss it across the room. Fortunately The Soft Machine, at least in softcover, is a soft book, and you won't hurt anybody. Which is more than you can say for the characters here or the novelist himself.