Day-to-Day Dante: Exploring Personal Myth through The Divine Comedy
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Day-to-Day Dante: Exploring Personal Myth through The Divine Comedy
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781450283632 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | iUniverse, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 01/28/2011 |
| Pages: | 404 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
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Day-to-Day Dante
Exploring Personal Myth through The Divine ComedyBy Dennis Patrick Slattery
iUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Dennis Patrick SlatteryAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-8363-2
Introduction
Set the Compass. Begin the Journey
I have been blessed to teach some of the great literary classics primarily of the Western Tradition for the past 35 years. While they often exhaust me, I can never exhaust them, no matter how often I re-read them or what I or my students discover through their words and images. As I grow, these rich expression of the poetic imagination stretch to accommodate where I am on my own life's pilgrimage and in the unfolding of my personal mythology. To read, for instance, Herman Melville's epic novel about whaling, Moby-Dick, or Willa Cather's The Professor's House or Toni Morrison's Beloved at age 18, then again at 28 and again at 46 is to enter each time a very different imaginal experience. Like us, these works and hundreds of others possess a Protean quality; they shape-shift, as does the god Proteus, who in Greek mythology is a carrier of the liquid quality of learning itself. Like Proteus, these marvelous narratives that contain such a storehouse of perennial wisdom have something of a liquid quality to them. By turns they will fill a vessel according to the dictates of its contours. Some energy within us responds differently, and so much more deeply as we ripen in age, to the same story that refuses at once to be the same and yet strives to be so. I believe one way to think about this changing yet perennial quality is by way of myth. Both the poetic work and each of us inhabit a particular mythos; as such, the poem and we ourselves are organically changing as the mythology we are in develops and deepens organically. More than simply a story, myths are perennial guidance systems as well as psychic patterns and structures that can guide an individual and an entire culture. They incorporate ways and styles of seeing, of perceiving and understanding. As such, myths are ever-renewing, shifting readily to accommodate us in our pilgrimage; in addition, they are life-enhancing. Myths are compasses that help us navigate through the events of any given day; they are also value-laden, carry our darkest secrets and secrete guidance when we feel inspired or led by forces outside ourselves.
In this introduction to a pilgrimage through Dante Alighieri's (1265-1321) monumental story of an individual journey to self-understanding and to a sacred reality that informs such awareness, The Divine Comedy, written in 14th. century Italy, should be remembered, reclaimed and reread by a larger reading public, in large measure because of the myths it embodies in poetic form. What is most important is that the reader have an imaginal experience of the poem by putting it alongside his/her own narrative journey. Without the experience, the poem will never mean much because it does not touch the mythic reality the reader lives within. It fails to become authentically present because not seen as an analogy of one's lived life.
First, let us consider in what way this poem, through reflections on a particular canto of Dante's creation, enlarges and deepens my own orbit of understanding of myself and the larger political, religious and social worlds I move within. We could end with a contemplative question: in what way am I transformed by reading this story, especially if I am guided by short passages of it to stimulate my imagination, and then by a short writing meditation, to help me focus my thoughts and experiences in my own language? "This is how I understand it now" is a valid way of knowing the work—it is contemporary, temporary and evolving, as I am.
Sometime during a class reading, say, of Homer's comic epic, the Odyssey, a student will approach me on a break, sometimes wearing a confused expression. He or she will make the following assertion or its variant: "I read this work as an English major 15, 20, 30 years ago (choose one) and saw nothing of what we have been discussing today." Just the other day, one of my mythology students wrote me the following missive: "Moby-Dick became such an incredible experience for me. The richness of Melville's expression, the breadth and depth of his sensitivity has affected me greatly, in ways I cannot speak yet." These examples are both powerful witnesses to the inherent force of a classic narrative as well as the challenging struggle to find one's own language to voice their intimate connection. What the reader can not yet speak of is the power of mytho-poiesis working on him/her as it reshapes awareness that will eventually find language to describe.
What happened? I like to speak about it through myth. Each of us, I have suggested, is living out and within a unique personal myth, or patterned presence in the world, with all its attendant values, prejudices, likes, dislikes, desires, aspirations, shadows, dreams, and fantasies. Our personal myth is a guiding framework which we use to make meaning of the events of everyday by seeking out how they fit into the larger patterned field of meaning. When we read a classic work of fiction, we enter that story with our myth fully intact and engaged, but its inherent wholeness may be disrupted by the narrative knocking on its door. When the work touches deeply a part of that mythos, we pause, we stop; we may then be called to underline or write something in the margin. Or we get excited and want to let others know of this fabulous insight we believe is ours, no matter the source. We long to express what this experience has meant to us. Such is the deep impulse to learn, and, when possible, to learn within a community of shared possibilities with others. It allows me to see that myths serve us as energy fields, ways of power that attract, evoke, provoke and widen our field of vision.
I want to call these works classics for another reason. They are classics in part because they belong to a class of poetic expression that animates the deep experiences of human life which are given a particular coherent and organic form in the making, an angle so to speak, by which to view them and often even instructions on how to read them. These large human experiences, while inflected differently and uniquely in each one, are at the same time universally similar. The mythologist Joseph Campbell borrowed a term from the great Irish writer, James Joyce: Monomyth. By this word he meant that there is one great story inflected differently and distinctly in distinct cultural settings and in an individual life. We can read an Indian epic, or a Japanese novel or a recent fictional work from Kabul or Baghdad and sense in the narrative pieces of the sediments of our own lives, so universally connected are we all in the deepest levels of our hearts.
The great quality of classic works of literature—I include here all works of fiction: plays, short stories, novels, epics, fairy tales, legends—is that they each have their own myth in their deepest core, their own way of seeing and apprehending the world according to a certain pattern of values and beliefs, prejudices, shortcomings and discoveries—what we might sum up as a world view. When we enter into their territory and read them openly, freely, without prejudice or agenda, we engage what the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge advised—to willingly suspend our disbelief so that we might be able to believe we are vulnerable to change. This he called poetic faith, based on our imaginative capacity to yield to a larger story line and in the process discover more deeply our own. When we engage it authentically, our own personal myth begins to entwine with the myth that a poem like Dante's Commedia makes available. It is a way of reading analogically so as not to literalize the poem into a political pronouncement or a sociological credo, but rather to experience it as a symbolic expression of particular and often shared human conditions, situations and beliefs. Its lived crafted reality finds analogies in the world we are comprised of and may be shaped anew in this poetic encounter.
In such an engaged, imaginative and complex process, we find ourselves in sympathy not only with the characters and plot of the work, but in added sympathy with our own lives and those of others. Our personal myth may be stirred deeply by the actions of the classic. I think one of the ends of this form of study is to cultivate in ourselves the gift of compassion, both for ourselves and for others because we sense on a broader plane the shared distresses and nobilities of other humanities. So less concern is given to "hidden meanings" to be discovered and more to moments of revelation and of lasting insights, new ways of entertaining ideas and images, story lines, plot twists, paradox, ambiguity that mirror qualities of our own being. In short, classics of world literature offer ways to meditate on the grand mystery of life itself through its marvelous and mysterious particulars, if we can enter into a conversation with it and come to know and be transformed by its psychopoetic action. This latter is what I am proposing the reader do through Dante's profound poetic achievement. His story is in myriad and profound ways, our story writ large. Our own poetic comedy will be given deeper roots through the largesse of its poetic expression.
So to the work at hand: Dante's gnarled, twisty, mystical, psychological, mythic, political and theological poem. It is not read much today and certainly not in its entirety. Yes, Inferno is still up for grabs in the academic world; Paradiso almost never. For this voyage there is no short cut or abridged travelogue; we enter instead the complete journey as Dante envisioned it for us.
You are invited along, not just by me but by the author of the poem. I say this because we will soon notice that no less than 22 times explicitly and any number of times implicitly, Dante himself as pilgrim and as poet who recounts his adventures through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven addresses us as readers. He assumes we are a major player and character in the action, for his story of being lost and confused at a moment in his life, followed by a slow and gradual revelation of his own shadows and virtues, guided by various mentors on the way, is our story in the same instant. Of course the content is uniquely ours, but the patterns they embody belong to humankind. We can participate in these patterns by analogy and through the symbolic landscape of the imagination it engenders, and in this imaginative act recognize what is hidden beneath the floorboards of our own seemingly ordered existence. The poem's progress will reveal to us we are more complex and multi-layered than we realize. Finally, Dante's frequently recurring call to us suggests as well that we are an essential figure in completing the poem under the language, habits and afflictions of our own personal mythology.
Topography of The Divine Comedy
Dante's poem of a little more than 14,000 lines consists of 100 cantos divided into three canticas: Inferno (Hell) Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise). Inferno has 34 cantos while the other two canticas have 33 each. Symmetry was the order of the day in the Middle Ages and Dante was very much a part of such an exacting numerical schema.
Essentially, the poem comprises a recollection by Dante the poet of a journey he had as a pilgrim through these three landscapes. Dante the poet now is thus recollecting the adventures of Dante the pilgrim then. On his journey he is blessed with various guides, each of whom takes him as far as each is able before passing him to the next mentor. These major presences include the classical Latin poet Virgil; Beatrice Portinari, who died young and whom Dante loved very much in Florence; St. Bernard of Clairveaux who devoted his professional life as abbot to the study of the Blessed Virgin Mary and was one of the most influential writers of the mystical way; the mother of God herself who leads Dante to his final vision in the highest realm of Paradise.
Along the way, dozens of souls from history, myth, literature, politics, philosophy and theology instruct him. Many of these individuals Dante knew personally; others he was familiar with through his studies. It may be helpful to reflect while on the journey, of the nature of the seven deadly sins: pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth, as various ways that an individual may love—either excessively, insufficiently or distortedly. Love is indeed the central theme of the poem; as such it welds all the cantos together in their complex collaboration. The journey Dante undertakes is to witness first all the distorted or incomplete forms of loving exhibited in Hell. This he does with Virgil's guidance as they spiral down through the various regions of suffering until they come to the earth's center, where the figure of Dis, Satan, is frozen in ice in a violent and despairing rage. Concentration on one's self exclusively is the ultimate prison. We might think of these "sins" as forms of pathology that soul assumes as it seeks its way towards wholeness and towards a sense of sacredness. Knowing pathos is part of the journey to blessedness; the soul can migrate through this landscape imaginally rather than through a literal event. Dante's poem gives this sense to us both ways, as physical journey and as poetic pilgrimage.
He then ascends, with Virgil's continued guidance, the mountain of Purgatory by circling it, wide at the base, narrower towards the top. This mountain was formed from the earth displaced when Satan, challenging God, was defeated and hurled to the earth. He impacted it with such force that he displaced the earth from one side of the world to the other. In one forceful motion he created the cavity that is Hell while creating the mountain that is Purgatory. That act alone is worthy of our reflection. Concentration on the communal quality of shedding the blinders of human weaknesses comprises the action of purgation.
At the top of Mount Purgatory, Dante and Virgil enter the Earthly Paradise where Adam and Eve were originally created to love God. Here Virgil silently leaves his student when Beatrice enters in a lavish pageant and greets Dante with a coolness that surprises him. She will nonetheless initiate him into the next region, Paradise, and guide him almost to journey's end. In the last few cantos Dante is guided by St. Bernard until he too abrogates his student to the Blessed Virgin, who emerges as the pilgrim's final guide to an ultimate vision that ends the poem. His journey is one that takes him from being lost in life in a gnarled and twisted sense of his own identity and purpose, to finding within the mystical realm of love, always embodied, the image of God that will guide him when he returns to the land of the living to relate his story. At the end of the poem his own desires and will and intellect are in perfect conformity with the Love that turns the planets and stars of the created order. Love as a marriage of wills is the vision which he attains at the poem's end. He has, in the creation of the poem in remembrance, achieved an unusual measure of wholeness and self awareness, fully conscious in the reality of the sacred's healing presence.
We as readers, he assumes, in taking this same journey with him in recollection, may experience what he did through the elegant and persuasive poetic telling of his tale. For our own stories are deeply imbedded in his pilgrimage, which is a work of art, full of aesthetic force and power, not unlike our own composition.
My journey of creating this work occurred between 4 and 6 a.m. over a 24 month period. I discovered years ago that rising at 4 a.m and reading, meditating, and writing, when the soul is porous to influences that emerge from the sleeping/dreaming psyche, are more the presences of others than my own ideas; I therefore willingly gave myself over to what the poem wanted to say through me. I simply listened closely and wrote what I heard. My hope is that I got part of it right. Any shortcomings are mine, not Dante's poetic imagination.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Day-to-Day Dante by Dennis Patrick Slattery Copyright © 2011 by Dennis Patrick Slattery. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword....................xiAcknowledgments....................xv
Introduction: Set the Compass. Begin the Journey....................1
Part I: Inferno....................11
Part II: Purgatorio....................133
Part III: Paradiso....................261
Afterword....................381
Sources Used....................383
About the author....................385
About the Artist....................387