From the Narrow Desert: Dante

Showing posts with label Dante. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Her prophets are light

I read light as a noun at first, until I saw it was followed by “and treacherous persons” (Zephaniah 3:4). I love little tricks like that, even, or perhaps especially, when they are serendipities of translation.

The light leads you home, but the light lead you astray.

Don’t be blinded by the light.

To be light is to be insufficiently affected by “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” It is caused by — or causes — or is indistinguishable from — a lack of inner substance.

Easy to confuse lightness with spirituality. The wind bloweth where it listeth, yes, but only the heavier planets can hold onto an atmosphere.

Sunday, October 29, 2023

In which I read the news

I was motorcycling down a fairly empty road when an old piece of newspaper blew across my path. The sentence "That's for you" appeared in the center of my skull (not as a voice, but with the clarity typical of telepathic communications), so I turned my bike around, found the paper, and took some photos of it.

When I got home, I realized that I had somehow neglected to photograph one part of it, so I immediately went back out there, tracked down the paper (which had blown some distance down the road in the intervening time) and rectified the omission. I guess that's sort of obsessive-compulsive behavior, but it felt urgent.

The news was about six months old.

I had begun the day by thinking about "anniversary syncs," and the most impressive of these to date has been the one about the many-eyed whale. On April 27, 2014, I posted about a dream in which I saw a whale with many eyes. Much later, in 2022, I discovered that John Dee and Edward Kelley had had a vision of a whale with many eyes on April 27, 1584. When I saw the date April 27 on the paper, therefore, it jumped out at me. The date of the paper itself was April 21, 2023, but one of the ads mentioned the 27th:

It's an ad for the True Jesus Church, a Chinese Pentecostal movement. By the way, check out the "neutral point of view" on their Wikipedia page:

The headline says "The distance between us and God." The program is as follows:

4/25 Not far from God
4/26 Behold the Lamb of God!
4/27 Love in our life
4/28 Hymn sermon: The peace given by Jesus
4/29 Reflections on the five loaves and two fishes
4/30 The prayer of Gethsemane; Foot-washing ceremony / Holy Communion

Christianity is a small minority religion in Taiwan, so finding the date 4/27 in a Christian context is particularly unusual. Note that 4/30 is close by; my whale and Dee's were separated by exactly 430 years.

The other thing that caught my eye -- the one I somehow forgot to photograph and had to go back for -- was this:

This is about an Earth Day event and gives the date April 22, 2023. On April 22, 1996, I met "Beatrice." As with her Dantean namesake, we only met briefly, scarcely spoke, and never had any sort of relationship, but she became an important symbol in my mind and a source of poetic inspiration for many years. Dante only met Beatrice twice, with the second meeting occurring on the ninth anniversary of the first:

When exactly nine years had passed since this gracious being appeared to me, as I have described, it happened that on the last day of this intervening period this marvel appeared before me again, dressed in purest white, walking between two other women of distinguished bearing, both older than herself. As they walked down the street she turned her eyes toward me where I stood in fear and trembling, and with her ineffable courtesy, which is now rewarded in eternal life, she greeted me; and such was the virtue of her greeting that I seemed to experience the height of bliss. It was exactly the ninth hour of day when she gave me her sweet greeting. As this was the first time she had ever spoken to me, I was filled with such joy that, my senses reeling, I had to withdraw from the sight of others. So I returned to the loneliness of my room and began to think about this gracious person (La Vita Nuova III).

The date on the paper -- April 22, 2023 -- is the 27th anniversary of my first and only meeting with "Beatrice," 27 being a multiple of nine.

The picture of the three interlinked rings also struck me as significant, since the overlapping portions approximate the "Triforce" shape introduced into the sync-stream by Wandering Gondola with a comment on my October 24 post "William Wright is back and he's bringing syncs." In a later comment on the same post, she brought in the theme of additive and subtractive primary colors:

Watching the Tom Petty video, I saw its triangles and strings are red, yellow and blue, the typical "subtractive" primaries of colour theory. The Triforce's attributes (power, courage and wisdom) usually correlate to red, green and blue respectively, and those colours are the primaries of the "additive" colour system used by most screen technologies.

The concept of primary colors is typically illustrated with a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles:

The Triforce was introduced because I had made a connection between three triangles and the number 333. Three threes have a sum of 9 and a product of 27. A week or two ago I happened to watch one of those "people are stupid" videos on YouTube; the guy stops people on the street and asks them, "What's three times three times three," to which many of them unhesitatingly answer, "Nine."

The three interlocked rings are called "Borromean rings" because they were used in Milan to represent the union of the Visconti, Sforza, and Borromeo families. I picked up this factoid at some point in my research on the Tarot, the oldest surviving decks being the ones commissioned by the Visconti-Sforza family.

The juxtaposition of rings with a name so similar to Boromir naturally makes one think of this:

Note added (4:52 p.m.): Just after posting this, I ran a Google image search for triforce venn diagram to see if anyone else had made the connection. The sixth result was this:

I read six of the seven Harry Potter books back before The Deathly Hallows had been written, and I never got around to reading it later. I had never encountered that symbol before. I searched for deathly hallows symbol and found this article (published October 30, 2017; see October 30 in my last post):

The eye radiating light -- juxtaposed with the Triforce -- was featured in my October 25 post "Lines radiating from a triangle."

After skimming the Sun article, I decided to check /x/. First post in the catalog:

Wednesday, September 13, 2023

Syncfest: El-Anor, "Wake Up Time," dreaming in a forest, AE, golden apples, Klein bottle, etc.

This past July, ben, who comments here, alerted me to the fact that William Wright, who (as WW) wrote that interesting guest post for Bruce about orcs, had started a blog of his own, called Coat of Skins. Mr. Wright assumes that both the Book of Mormon and Tolkien's Legendarium are true and writes about how they interrelate -- Abinadi was the reincarnation of Faramir, the Book of Ether contains a hidden reference to the Brother of Jared opening the gates of Khazad-d��m, that sort of thing. It's a bit fringe even by my standards, but I find it interesting and have been reading it regularly.

One of the early posts was "The Liahona as a Palantir (the Anor Stone)" Palantiri are generally black, but Mr. Wright argues that the name Anor Stone (anor being Sindarin for "sun") suggests that this one had a golden appearance, matching the description of the "brass" Liahona in the Book of Mormon. This caught my attention because back in December 2020, I had some syncs (documented in "Red Sun, Yellow Sun") connecting the Liahona with the Sun.

Early on in my reading of Coat of Skins, I Googled an unfamiliar name used in a since-deleted post there and discovered the work of Daymon Smith, who I had never heard of before. He's a Mormon linguistic anthropologist who has written extensively about the Book of Mormon, and whose most recent work also involves treating the works of Tolkien as non-fiction and trying to integrate them with the Book of Mormon. I read a few pages of his Jaredites-from-Numenor story The Words of the Faithful but couldn't get into it. Then I discovered his sprawling Cultural History of the Book of Mormon, which I have found absolutely fascinating. I bought all eight books (it consists of five volumes published as eight books, whatever that means!) and am currently reading the final (eighth/"fifth") one.

On August 2, Mr. Wright posted "Eleanor and 'Wake Up Time.'" He recounts a dream in which he saw a man in a tailcoat playing a grand piano. When the pianist noticed he had an audience, he turned around and said, "Hello, everyone. My name is Eleanor," and then Mr. Wright immediately woke up. Upon waking, he figured the name must actually have been El-Anor, Sindarin for "Sun-Star." Later, he was reminded of this dream when he was watching a documentary about Tom Petty and saw this image:

This synched with his dream because it included a grand piano, the Sun (anor), and "Wake Up Time." (He had woken up from his dream when he heard the pianist say "My name is El-Anor.") Although the post didn't mention it, elanor is also the name of a flower in Tolkien, and "Wake Up Time" is from Tom Petty's album Wildflowers.

The "Wake Up Time" image caught my eye because WUT is visually very similar to my initials, WJT, and because when I was in college people thought I looked like Tom Petty and used to call me Tom. Despite this, I don't really know anything about Petty or his music -- except, now, this song.

Immediately after reading the post and listening to "Wake Up Time," I picked up an old book I had had printed and bound about a week before but hadn't started reading yet: Paradise Found by William Fairfield Warren. I opened it up and found that the very first sentences is, "This book is not the work of a dreamer." This insistence that he was not dreaming when he wrote the book seemed like a potential sync with the idea of "wake up time."

The next morning, I met with a businessman whom I tutor in English. He told me that he'd read an English article called "Why Are Piano Keys Black and White" but didn't want to discuss it because it was too boring. This random reference to piano keys also seemed like a potential sync. It also made me idly wonder how many keys of each color a piano has (I knew the total was 88), so I looked it up: 52 white and 36 black.

Later in the day, I wanted to get some background on William Fairfield Warren, so I checked his Wikipedia page. His first listed publication is The True Key to Ancient Cosmology. I also clicked a link to the article about his brother, Henry White Warren. Among this latter Warren's works was Fifty-two Memory Hymns. So, just after learning that a piano has 52 white keys, I ran into this reference to a musical work with the number 52 in its title, written by someone named White whose brother wrote a book called The True Key. This was enough of a sync to make me curious about the contents of Fifty-two Memory Hymns, so I found it online. The first hymn in the collection includes this stanza:

Enthroned amid the radiant spheres,
He glory like a garment wears ;
To form a robe of light divine,
Ten thousand suns around Him shine.

The plural reference to "ten thousand suns" may be referring to the stars as "suns," making it a link to El-Anor, "Sun-Star."

I discovered all this on August 3. Later that same evening, I was reading the first volume of Daymon Smith's Cultural History. Although ostensibly a history of the Book of Mormon, it includes many long digressions on a variety of other topics, and one of the things I read in it that night was Keith Richards's story of how he "wrote 'Satisfaction' in my sleep. I had no idea I'd written it." He woke up the next morning and found that he had recorded it on a cassette during the night, with no memory of having done so. This happened, Smith mentions, while Richards was "living in St. John's Wood."

So "Satisfaction" is "the work of a dreamer" -- an obvious sync with Warren's assertion that his book is no such thing. The dreaming happened in St. John's Wood, which syncs with the opening lines of Petty's "Wake Up Time":

You follow your feelings, you follow your dreams,
You follow your leader into the trees

The strangest sync, though, was that the story was about Keith Richards, one of the Rolling Stones. William Wright writes that, in thinking about his "Eleanor" dream, he began considering the possibility of "the man introducing himself actually representing a stone," or "that the man and his piano could have represented both of these possibilities -- an actual man and a stone." Keith Richards: an actual man, and an actual Stone.

When I went out on the morning of August 4, I found that this cardboard box had been left out in front of my house for the recycling people to pick up.

SUNSTAR -- a pretty on-the-nose sync with El-Anor. If you've got good eyes and can recognize some basic Chinese/Kanji characters, you might notice that there's a 石, "stone," in the fine print, too (in the phrase 第二石油類, "second petroleum category").

Around noon on August 4, I was pacing around my study thinking of this and that, and I thought how "Wake Up Time" begins with following your dreams into the trees -- similar to how Dante's Comedy begins with the poet sleepwalking into a forest. The very last words of the Comedy are "il sole e l'altre stelle" -- "the sun and the other stars," El-Anor again. Dante's journey takes him in the end to Paradise, so there's also another sync with Paradise Found.

Then I remembered that WW’s post had mentioned that El was also a name of God, and that Dante discusses this somewhere in Paradiso. I thought for a second that Dante even connected El with the Sun, but then I remembered that, no, that was the Irish poet known as A.E. or Æ. (For the relevant quotes from each poet, see my 2019 post "U.E. echoes A.E.") I was, as I have said, pacing around as I thought about all this, and just as I thought of A.E., I turned and saw this on my wife's desk:

She has a whole set of these yellow apples, each marked with a different phonetic symbol. The one marked with the pen name of an Irish poet just happened to be the only one visible, and my eyes just happened to fall on it just as I was thinking about that poet, who wrote of our earliest ancestors, "I can imagine them looking up at the fire in the sky, and calling out 'El' if it was the light they adored."

The apple is the traditional fruit of Eden, or Paradise, and in the Greek version (Garden of the Hesperides), it's even the golden apple. The golden apple is a solar symbol, too: "The Song of Wandering Aengus," by A.E.'s lifelong friend Yeats, begins (like Dante and Tom Petty) in a forest -- "I went out to the hazel wood" -- and ends with the line "The golden apples of the sun."

Then I remembered what had happened the night before (August 3). I was teaching a children's English class in which one of the students used to go by the English name Apple but later changed it when she found out it wasn't really a very normal name. Some of the other students like to tease her about it, and on the evening of August 3, one of them had made a pencil sketch in which there was a big apple in the sky radiating light. The student formerly known as Apple accused him of drawing an apple on purpose to annoy her, but he insisted (in bad faith, obviously) that it wasn't an apple, it was the sun. It was a monochrome pencil sketch, but of course the apple/sun would be understood to be yellow in color. I'm sure Eris was looking down from Olympus and chuckling at these two arguing and fighting over, of all things, a golden apple.

On August 9, I discovered one of Daymon Smith's now-defunct blogs -- called (there's the forest theme again) these mystry woods -- and skimmed, among other things, a 2015 post called "It is what It is," which begins with a picture of a Klein bottle.

This series of thoughts in the post -- I'm quoting three non-contiguous passages here -- got my attention:

"I am that I am" must be saying something about Language, capital L.

Maybe L and the Word, and what-ever-Is-is are really "just" light? Different kinds of Light?

How can we understand L? or EL?

Here the letter L is used to represent Language, and Light, and the divine name El. Remember A.E.'s fantasy of our ancestors looking up at the sun and "calling out 'El' if it was the light they adored"?

Smith ends his post by finally talking about the impossible Klein bottle: Klein bottles "don’t exist here as bottles, but we can describe them. They exist in L."

The next day, August 10, I was reading Smith's Cultural History -- Volume 2A now -- and Smith mentioned that the CJCLDS is "a corporate body with rights of ownership irrespective of human life-spans." This made it sound like copyrights owned by a corporation never expire, which would mean the Book of Mormon isn't in the public domain -- but I was quite sure that it is in the public domain. I ended up Googling it to make sure, and the highlighted answer was no!

Still thinking that must be wrong, I scrolled down to the fourth result, which was from the church’s own website and said the text itself was in the public domain.

Clicking that link for details, I found a forum conversation in which one of the participants had a name and avatar that caught my eye:

That's another Klein bottle, and the guy's name appears to be A.E. The thread is about the possibility of publishing an edition of the Book of Mormon with no verse numbers -- and just such an edition of the Book of Mormon has been published by none other than Daymon Smith, who posted the first Klein bottle!

Oh, and on August 25 I happened upon someone wearing this "Wake Up Time"-esque T-shirt:

Note added: On the same day that I posted this -- September 13, even though it's reporting syncs from early August -- William Wright revisited Tom Petty on his blog, with "Rock & Roll in Rivendell: Tom Petty, Elrond, and Alma the Younger." I'm not sure which of us posted first, but I didn't see his post until the next morning, and there's no indication in his post that he had read mine. Looks like just more synchronicity.

Monday, April 25, 2022

Nineteen translations of Dante ranked by fidelity

I have expanded and revamped by 2010 analysis of English translations of Dante and published it as a page so that I can update it by adding more translations in the future.

Nineteen translations of Dante ranked by fidelity

Conclusion: The most faithful translations are those of Longfellow, Singleton, Mandelbaum, and Sinclair. Esolen, Carson, Binyon, and Ciardi are the worst.

Tuesday, May 25, 2021

Scattered thoughts on the Ganymede model (virtue sets)

"G" of the Junior Ganymede is writing about virtue sets again, and incorporating some of my own work in that area. Most importantly, he now agrees with me that all individual virtue sets are examples of two complementary types of good (Ahuric and Devic) and two complementary types of evil (Luciferic and Ahrimanic). I'm going to go ahead and dub this four-factor theory of good and evil the Ganymede model, unless G strenuously objects and suggests a better name.

Since someone else is also working on this now, I am, in the interests of creative cross-pollination, going to throw out several half-developed ideas in the hope that some of them will fall on fertile ground.

⁂

In defense of opaque terminology

G says he doesn't really like my terminology (Ahuric, Devic, Luciferic, Ahrimanic), but I would like to insist on it and on the importance of not replacing it with more descriptive terminology such as Active/Passive, Masculine/Feminine, etc. Essentially, I think the observation that there are two complementary types of good and two complementary types of evil is prior to any hypotheses about the fundamental nature of these goods and evils. It is important to keep in mind that I arrived at the Ganymede model inductively, by looking at lots of individual virtue charts. This inductive -- "botanical," as it were -- classification of good and evil comes first. Theories about why there are two types of good and two types of evil, and about how these may relate to other concepts, come later. To use descriptive titles rather than just names is to make unjustified presuppositions.

As I explained when I originally introduced the terms, Zoroastrianism contrasts good ahuras with evil daevas, while Hinduism contrasts good devas with evil asuras. The terms are assumed to be etymologically related, but the moral polarity is reversed. These four words, then, would be perfect for the Ganymede model. Asuric evil distorts Ahuric good and opposes Devic good; Daevic evil distorts Devic good and opposes Ahuric good. In practice, though, I think the terms are too phonetically similar to be practical, and would be easily confused. Since Steiner's Luciferic/Ahrimanic distinction fits the Ganymede model so well and is already well established, and since Ahriman happens to be the Zoroastrian name for the enemy of the ahuras, I decided to keep Steiner's terms for the two evils and use Ahuric and Devic for the two goods.

I think the fact that most of the terms are of non-Christian origin is a feature, not a bug. It keeps the terms free of unwanted baggage, since we Christians are unlikely to get sidetracked by arguments over whether Ahriman is truly "Ahrimanic" or the devas are truly "Devic." Lucifer, of course, is a name used in Christianity, so we just have to accept that we're using it in a technical sense in the Ganymede model and are not necessarily claiming that the Lucifer of scripture is specifically "Luciferic" rather than "Ahrimanic" in nature.

⁂

Nietzsche again

I've mentioned Nietzsche's discussion, in The Genealogy of Morals, of Gut-und-Böse versus Gut-und-Schlecht, and identified Böse and Schlecht with Luciferic and Ahrimanic, respectively. The other day I got out The Genealogy of Morals to review some of the specific things Nietzsche had said about this. My copy of this work is bound together with The Birth of Tragedy, which made me realize that another famous Nietzschean dichotomy may also be relevant: Apollinisch vs. Dionysisch. Isn't it obvious that Apollo is Devic/Ahrimanic in nature, while Dionysos is Ahuric/Luciferic?

⁂

Throwing Dante into the mix

Dante's Purgatorio groups the Seven Deadly Sins into three categories: perverted love, insufficient love, and excessive love. Our model tends to identify supposed "excess" of virtue with perversion or distortion of virtue. It would be an interesting exercise to give the Seven Deadly Sins the Ganymede treatment.

From Barry Moser's illustration for Allen Mandelbaum's Dante

⁂

What about Sorath?

Bruce Charlton and I, in our thinking about Steiner's Lucifer and Ahriman, have both come to place more and more emphasis on a third sort of evil, the Sorathic, and to see it as being just as important as the other two. How does Sorathic evil fit into the Ganymede model? Does it have as its opposite some third type of good?

⁂

Masculine and feminine

Looking at lists of Ahuric and Devic virtues, I found that the first list made me think of Jesus Christ and the second of Our Lady. This led me to the tentative conclusion that these two types of good corresponded to masculine and feminine, and that the Ganymede model helped to explain why the two sexes were necessary and eternal.

I had also at one point thought of Ahuric good as primarily "seeking good," and Devic good as "avoiding evil." I was not really happy with those descriptions, though, since "avoiding evil" can be accomplished perfectly by not existing at all! Both types of good must be in some way positive and active, not merely negative and passive.

In his latest post on the topic. G helpfully summarizes the two types of good in a rather different way.

In a virtue set, one complementary virtue will be [an Ahuric] virtue of strength and passion. The other complementary virtue will generally be a [Devic] virtue of control and discipline. The matching vices will be [Luciferic] vices of uncontrolled strength and passion and [Ahrimanic] vices of a lack of strength and passion.

This startled me because, by "coincidence," my wife and I had just hours earlier been discussing (without reference to the Ganymede model) the question "What is masculinity?" and kept coming back to the idea of control and discipline as definitive masculine characteristics. My wife also mentioned that very masculine men -- Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart, James Bond -- sometimes seem to be almost emotionless and not to care about anything. Since I had provisionally been thinking of Ahuric as masculine and Devic as feminine, it came as a shock to see G (correctly) identify Devic virtue with "control and disciple" and Ahuric virtue with "passion." Clearly the relationship of masculinity and femininity to Ahuric and Devic good is more complicated than I had been assuming.

Apropos of this, Ron Tomlinson left this comment on my post "Satan divided against himself" -- a post which discussed Lucifer and Ahriman extensively, before I had developed the Ahuric/Devic concept.

Good men tend to err on the side of Luciferanism (pursue good by evil means)
Good women tend to err on the side of Ahrimanism (avoid evil by playing it safe)

Bad men are often Ahrimanic, e.g. those who pursue power/promotion
Bad women are often Luciferan, e.g. overweight with tattoos

Again, this suggests that sex is an important element in the Ganymede model, but not in so straightforward a way that we can simply identify each sex with one type of good or evil.

Tuesday, March 16, 2021

Virgil in the wood

Virgil in Hell, with Homer and other poets
(Barry Moser, illustration for Mandelbaum's Inferno)

I recently posted on how the Jon and Vangelis song "I'll Find My Way Home" is about Dante in the wood, as recounted in the first canto of his Comedy.

This song is about Virgil in the wood -- how he emerges, a shade, from the dark to guide Dante and to share his road. Reading Dante, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Virgil is damned -- a fact that, if we did keep it in mind, would color every aspect of the Comedy. Not that he's burning in a lake of fire or anything, he hastens to clarify; he and his fellow poets are "punished just with this: we have no hope and yet we live in longing." It seems punishment enough!

Incidentally, I agree with this self-assessment put in Virgil's mouth by Dante. The Aeneid -- a book second only to the Bible in my heart -- is so unrelentingly dark, so deeply and knowingly without hope, that it sometimes feels almost "modern." Virgil was paganism taken to its logical conclusion, paganism pushed to its breaking point, on the cusp of graduating into Christianity. In choosing that particular poet as the guide to take him to the threshold of paradise, Dante shows his penetrating insight and his genius.

Content warning: Teh gay.

Some context:

Tuesday, March 9, 2021

Dante in the wood

Gustave Doré, Dante in the Gloomy Wood

I think I may have mentioned a time or two the awe in which I hold the late Allen Mandelbaum, who might be called in two sense a "translator of genius." He translated geniuses, and he was himself a genius. (Can a mere translator, who adapts someone else's work, be a genius? Yes, just as much as a classical musician who performs works composed by others. Think of Mandelbaum as the Glenn Gould of translation. Interpreting the tongues of angels is one of the canonical gifts of the Spirit.) I've read roughly a zillion English translations of Dante, and they fall into two categories: Mandelbaum, and everyone else. He's also a very strong contender for the title of best English translator of Virgil. Oh, and Homer, too. You know, the three greatest writers who ever lived, and who wrote in three different languages. We won't see another translator like Mandelbaum for a very long time.

Today I picked up Whitley Strieber's Communion for the umpteenth time. It opens with an epigraph from Mandelbaum's Dante, the first lines of the Inferno:

When I had journeyed half of our life's way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.
Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
that savage forest, dense and difficult,
which even in recall renews my fear:
so bitter -- death is hardly more severe!
But to retell the good discovered there,
I'll also tell the other things I saw.

I myself once had a go at translating those lines while experimenting with a new rhyme scheme -- a rhyme scheme which I recently revisited, modified, and used to compose a prayer to St. Joan of Arc. First the opening of the Inferno, then Joan of Arc.

This evening I was listening to some music on YouTube. I started with Ween, whose album The Mollusk I've been playing a lot lately, but then I suddenly wanted to listen to "Joan of Arc" by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark -- a song I had discovered only recently, when it was recommended by some of my readers.

When it was over, YouTube decided that the next thing I wanted to listen to was "I'll Find My Way Home" by Jon and Vangelis (Jon Anderson of Yes, and Vangelis, the Chariots of Fire guy). I'd never heard it before and wasn't quite sure what I thought of it at first, but I soon realized that the lyrics were (not explicitly, but still pretty obviously) about Dante in the wood -- first Joan of Arc, then the opening of the Inferno.

Jon and Vangelis:

You ask me where to begin
Am I so lost in my sin
You ask me where did I fall
I'll say I can't tell you when

Inferno, Canto I:

I cannot say how I had entered
the wood; I was so full of sleep just at
the point where I abandoned the true path.

Jon and Vangelis:

My sun shall rise in the east
So shall my heart be at peace
And if you're asking me when
I'll say it starts at the end
You know your will to be free
Is matched with love secretly

Inferno, Canto I:

The time was the beginning of the morning;
the sun was rising now in fellowship
with the same stars that had escorted it
when Divine Love first moved those things of beauty;
so that the hour and the gentle season
gave me good cause for hopefulness

Jon and Vangelis:

Your friend is close by your side
And speaks in far ancient tongue

Inferno, Canto I: The ancient Roman poet Virgil appears and serves as Dante's guide (too many lines to quote). And as I listened, although the song itself was new to me, it felt familiar because it was after all just my old friend Dante, speaking his ancient tongue close by my side.

After the Jon and Vangelis song, YouTube played another song I'd never heard before, "The Voice" by Ultravox, which begins thus:

Native these words seem to me
All speech directed to me
I've heard them once before
I know that feeling

Ultravox coming right after Vangelis is a further coincidence, since I had recently read a post by Vox Day called "The new Chariots of Fire."

Friday, February 19, 2021

Specs for a "rosariform" poem

Bruce Charlton recently posted about Tolkien's unfinished poem "O! Wanderers in the shadowed land" and his own attempts at composing a suitable final line for it. (Did I resist the temptation to take a stab at it myself? Reader, I did not.)

The content of Tolkien's poem made me think of the beginning of Dante's Comedy, where Dante emerges from a dark wood and begins to climb a sunlit hill, only to be confronted by the three beasts, retreat, and take a minor detour through hell, purgatory, and the heavens.

Back in 2014, I "translated" some of this material (so loosely as to require the use of scare quotes) as an experiment. I was trying to duplicate some of the features of Dante's terza rima without the hard work of making each line rhyme with two others. I called the scheme I used "snake rhyme."

Both terza rima and my own rima serpentina have a chain-like structure which makes the poem as a whole indivisible. Each tercet in Dante or quatrain in my translation is linked by rhyme to the one before it and the one after it.

The trouble is that, as the diagram above makes clear, the first and last "links" in the chain are defective, smaller than the others. For example, the rima serpentina example above has the following rhyme structure:

aba cbdc edfe gfhg h

This defect can be solved by linking the A and H links, so that the chain becomes a circular one, the serpent an ouroboros, like so:

ahba cbdc edfe gfhg

Now it has a perfectly regular structure of quatrain "links" and is now, as I have said, circular. Once you reach the end, you go back to the beginning and recite it again; you can do this indefinitely, for as many repetitions as you like, and the whole thing will still be seamless.

So, I thought, what kind of poem would people want to repeat again and again indefinitely? Well, a mantra or prayer, obviously. Namo Amitabha, Hail Mary, that sort of thing. People who pray that way use a rosary, and a rosary is a circular "chain" of beads. In other words this sort of verse, which lends itself most naturally to writing repetitive prayers, also has the same structure as a rosary!

The Buddhist/Hindu/Sikh rosary has 108 beads -- a number which is conveniently divisible by four. So a perfectly "rosariform" poem would have 108 lines, constituting 27 quatrains of the form given above. The Catholic rosary has 59, a less convenient number.

Monday, October 28, 2019

U.E. echoes A.E.

I recently posted on A.E.'s "language of the gods" -- the attempts of the Irish mystic who wrote under that name to intuit the "true" meanings of the individual letters or sounds of which language is composed.

After laying out his alphabet, A.E. goes on to imagine some of the primitive words our distant ancestors may have created. He gives six or seven examples of such words, the first of which -- obviously suggesting to the mind the Semitic word for "God" -- is El.

I imagine a group of our ancestors lit up from within, . . . feeling those kinships and affinities with the elements which are revealed in the sacred literature of the Aryan, and naming these affinities from an impulse springing up within. I can imagine the spirit struggling outwards making of element, colour, form or sound a mirror on which, outside itself, it would find symbols of all that was pent within itself, and so gradually becoming self-conscious in the material nature in which it was embodied, but which was still effigy or shadow of a divine original. I can imagine them looking up at the fire in the sky, and calling out "El" if it was the light they adored, or if they rejoiced in the heat and light together they would name it "Hel." . . .

⁂

Approximately three days after posting on A.E.'s alphabet, I happened to be reading Serendipities, a translated collection of essays by Umberto Eco, which I had picked up at a used bookstore probably in March or April (when I was writing about the Wheel of Fortune) on the strength of its appropriately serendipitous cover art, which featured (or so it appeared at first glance; more on this below) a Hieronymus Bosch painting which had recently come to my attention during my meditations on that card.

The second essay in that book, called "Languages in Paradise," deals with the evolution of Dante's thoughts regarding the original language spoken by Adam -- specifically with how they changed between De Vulgari Eloquentia and Paradiso -- and speculates about the possible influence of the Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia.

In De Vulgari Eloquentia, writes Eco,

Dante thought that the first sound emitted by Adam could only have been an exclamation of joy that, at the same time, was an act of homage toward his creator. The first word that Adam uttered must therefore have been the name of God, El (attested in patristic tradition as the first Hebrew name of God).

In Paradiso, though, Dante has Adam say that he had originally called God I (thus in the Italian; a single vowel, not the first-person pronoun) and that he became El only later. Eco's translator William Weaver provides what he calls a "literal translation" of the passage in question (Paradiso XXVI, 133-138).

Before I descended into the pains of Hell, on earth the Highest Good was called I, from whence comes the light of joy that enfolds me. The name then became EL, and this change was proper, because the customs of mortals are like leaves on a branch, one goes and another comes.

Having just read A.E.'s account of the ancients "calling out 'El' if it was the light they adored," I was surprised to find the name El here again associated with "the light of joy that enfolds me." I also thought it odd that I didn't remember Dante's ever using that particular turn of phrase -- and, sure enough, he didn't. Looking back at the original Italian, I saw that Weaver's translation was indeed quite literal -- with the single exception of the reference to "light," which does not appear in the original! Dante wrote simply "onde vien la letizia che mi fascia," translated by the peerless Allen Mandelbaum (the gold standard for Dante translations) as "from which derives the joy that now enfolds me." Weaver's addition of "light" is quite unaccountable. Verse translators who fall short of Mandelbaum's virtuosity might fudge like that to meet the demands of meter, but Weaver's translation is in prose and professes to be strictly literal.

The juxtaposition of El and Hell -- echoing the El and Hel of the A.E. passage -- is, obviously, also an artifact of translation.

Eco goes on to speculate as to where Dante got the name I and suggests Abulafia.

[F]or Abulafia, each letter, each atomic element, already had a meaning of its own, independent of the meaning of the syntagms in which it occurred. Each letter was already a divine name: 'Since, in the letters of the Name, each letter is already a name itself, know that Yod is a name, and YH is a name' . . . Paleographers say that in certain codes [sic; codices?] of the Divine Comedy I is written as Y. Why can this not lead us to suppose that the I of Dante was the YOD of Abulafia, a divine name?

This passage, with its reference to each letter having a meaning of its own, was actually the first parallel to A.E. that I noticed. Only after noticing it did I go back and see the various related coincidences discussed above.

⁂

Now, about that cover art.

In my post on some of the early Wheel of Fortune Tarot cards, I noted that one of the creatures on the wheel in the Tarot de Marseille closely resembles the dog in Bosch's painting The Conjuror. I then wrote "Some critics have even identified the other creature, the one in the conjurer's basket, as a monkey, but this is a mistake. The reappearance of this pair in the central panel of Bosch's St. Anthony Triptych leaves no room for doubt that it is a barn owl" and included a relevant detail from that latter painting.

Note that the only reason I mentioned or posted this painting was because of the owl perched on the pig-man's head, which proves that the creature in the conjuror's basket in The Conjuror is also an owl, not a monkey.

The copy of Serendipities I found features on the cover what is immediately recognizable as the St. Anthony Triptych. Not until I wrote this post did I actually take a good look at it and realize that it is not Bosch at all but a terribly amateurish copy -- of which the most striking difference from the original is the complete absence of the owl.

Serendipities cover (left) with detail (right) showing its owllessness

Apparently this is the São Paulo "version" of the painting rather than the more familiar Lisbon one -- and, while I had called the São Paulo painting "a terribly amateurish copy," apparently many art historians are of the opinion that they were both painted by Bosch. After looking at some higher-quality reproductions of the São Paulo painting, I would like to modify my previous statement and say that it is very obviously a terribly amateurish copy! Be that as it may, it's a strange sort of anti-serendipity that the book caught my eye because of the St. Anthony Triptych, that I was interested in that triptych largely because of the owl, and that the version on the book turns out not to have an owl.