From Ultra-Talk: Johnny Cash, The Mafia, Shakespeare, Drum Music, St. Teresa of Avila, and 17 Other Colossal Topics of Conversation, by David Kirby
The University of Georgia Press

 

Before mass transport and the automobile, writers didn't have much choice except to go economy, that is, by foot, rarely choosing business class (mule or horse) and almost never traveling in first class (carriage). Necessity aside, though, there is a connection between walking and intellectual production: "My wit will not budge if my legs are not moving," writes Montaigne

Keats often walked as many as twelve miles a day, even when his consumption was raging. Dickens trod the streets of London all night "to still my beating mind," as he said (quoting Prospero in The Tempest). Wallace Stevens famously composed his poems as he walked to work at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company every morning, jotting phrases on tiny scraps he'd give to his secretary, who would type them up for his collection when he left in the evening; as a younger man, he'd often go out with a single phrase of Verlaine in his head and turn it over in his mind as he walked from New York to Connecticut or New Jersey and back in a single day. He boasted that he could cover forty-five miles in a round trip, but those of us who've exhausted ourselves on a twenty-mile hike can't be blamed for doubting him. (Suffice it to say that, as the poems prove, it's quality that counts rather than quantity.)

And before the Dante of The Divine Comedy walked through the Inferno on his way to Purgatory and Paradise, the real-life Dante Alighieri navigated some byways that might have made Hell's highways look positively inviting by comparison.

"The roads Alighieri walked often gave way to overgrown paths, dense with briars, thick with trees hiding thieves," writes Harriet Rubin in Dante in Love: The World's Greatest Poem and How It Changed History. "The paths led to swamps, where travelers would sicken and die in hours." For five years following his exile from Florence in 1302, Dante was a wanderer; the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam asked, "How many pairs of sandals did he wear out on the goat paths of Italy?"

As Dante wandered, his great poem formed in his mind. The terza rima rhyme scheme that he invented, in which the middle rhyme in every three-line stanza becomes the main rhyme in the next, is a sort of walker's pace: two steps forward, one back, two forward again.

A prior (or sort of senator) belonging to the White Guelf party, Dante had gone to Rome on a diplomatic mission but was exiled as part of Pope Boniface VIII's effort to procure power for the Black Guelfs and Florence for himself. Along with his fellow Whites, Dante takes refuge in Siena, Florence's great rival, and they plot their response to the Pope's actions. But when no one can agree on a plan, Dante splits off from the rest and begins walking.

And poetry changes forever. Scholars have long debated the dates of composition of a poem written around seven hundred years ago, but there is some evidence that he may have written the first two cantos of The Inferno before his exile; certainly these cantos are mild-mannered and sensible, and it is only in Canto 3, when Dante and his guide, Virgil, pass the Gate of Hell, on which is written ''ABANDON ALL HOPE YOU WHO ENTER HERE," that the poet begins to write with that mixture of horrified pity and cold vindictiveness that became his signature style.

Fourteen thousand two hundred thirty-three lines later, following a long slog through The Purgatorio, Dante enters God's presence in The Paradiso. Sadly, Virgil has had to leave Dante midway through Purgatory and return to Limbo, where the Virtuous Pagans dwell; as a non-Christian, the ancient Roman poet cannot go on to paradise. And throughout, Dante has had only occasional glimpses of his feminine ideal, the Beatrice whom the real-life poet fell in love with when they were children yet who figures only sporadically in his life until she dies in her early twenties.

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There is a Casa di Dante in the Via Dante Alighieri in Florence where he is said to have been born, though that may be only a scheme to get tourists through the door; many scholars think he was born down the street in a building long since demolished. Certainly the Casa di Dante is worth a visit, as it is an impressive building in thirteenth-century style and contains an array of portraits and wooden models as well as illustrations from various editions of the Comedy.

Far more moving is the so-called Chiesa di Dante in Via Santa Margherita, which runs by the side of Dante's house. Actually the Church of Santa Margherita de' Cerchi, this is one of those little churches that can get under your skin, though you have to meet it halfway. Whereas most of the churches of Florence fall into two categories, monumental treasure troves like the Duomo and Santa Maria Novella as well as drab parish churches with no art or history to speak of, Santa Margherita belongs to a third category, the churches whose features either provoke a yawn or make your heart leap into your mouth, depending on which aisle you're in.

There is, for example, a beautiful altarpiece by Neri di Bicci of the Madonna surrounded by Saint Margaret and three other female saints. But there are also two contemporary paintings, one silly and the other merely cheesy if, in a strange way, affecting. The silly painting is a huge canvas of Dante meeting Beatrice in the street; there is nothing about Beatrice that suggests she is anything other than pretty in a vapid way, and indeed Dante is looking at her as though she is less his beloved and more someone who owes him money after a late-night card game. The other painting shows Beatrice coming out of the church on the arm of her bridegroom. As the wedding guests cheer the newlyweds, a figure in red scurries away, downcast. It is Dante as he is always depicted, in his prior's robe, and anyone who has ever been shown the door by the person he loves most knows exactly how he feels.

In its haphazard design, Santa Margherita de' Cerchi may remind American visitors of some liberal Protestant churches they have seen in the United States with their blend of standard ecclesiastical interior and what I think of as Minister's Wife Art: there is the crucifix, the stone baptismal font, and the stained-glass window, but also a gaudy knitted work, say, or splashy "modern" portrait of Christ that can only have been placed there by a well-meaning amateur. Yet each of the two contemporary paintings in Santa Margherita de' Cerchi corresponds to one of the two most emotionally charged passages in the Vita Nuova, the masterpiece of Dante's youth and a work he wrote perhaps fifteen years before he began the Comedy.

The first passage is Dante's extraordinary description of his sighting of Beatrice when he was eighteen. Here he makes clear how visceral the reaction of this spiritual poet was to the physical presence of the woman he loved above all others. Even when he had seen her as a child, he writes, "the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith." Now he is a man and approaching the height of his physical and artistic powers, and when she greets him, he writes, "I came into such sweetness that I parted thence as one intoxicated" and goes back to his room and falls to sleep dreaming of Beatrice, whereupon he has a "marvellous vision":

There appeared to be in my room a mist of the colour of fire, within the which I discerned the figure of a lord of terrible aspect to such as should gaze upon him, but who seemed therewithal to rejoice inwardly that it was a marvel to see. Speaking he said many things, among the which I could understand but few; and of these, this: Ego dominus tuus [I am your master]. In his arms it seemed to me that a person was sleeping, covered only with a blood-coloured cloth; upon whom looking very attentively, I knew that it was the lady of the salutation who had deigned the day before to salute me. And he who held her held also in his hands a thing that was burning in flames; and he said to me, Vide cor tuum [Behold your heart]. But when he had remained with me a little while, I thought that he set himself to awaken her that slept; after the which he made her to eat that thing which flamed in his hand; and she ate as one fearing. Then, having waited again a space, all his joy was turned into most bitter weeping; and as he wept he gathered the lady into his arms, and it seemed to me that he went with her up towards heaven; whereby... a great anguish came upon me.

A passion of this immensity is terrifying. If Dante seems a reluctant suitor—if he was as wooden before Beatrice as he appears in the silly contemporary painting in Santa Margherita de' Cerchi—that is because the custom of the day didn't permit him to be otherwise. Yet other lovers flouted the rules and pursued fair ladies hotly, so if Dante kept his distance, it may have been because he realized he was looking at the woman who would one day devour his heart.

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Not many pages later in the Vita Nuova, there is another passage that ranks as one of the greatest failed cover-ups in the history of erotic literature. Here Dante pretends to describe, not the wedding of Beatrice to Simone de' Bardi that is depicted in the second painting in Santa Margherita de' Cerchi, but that of "a gentlewoman who was given in marriage that day." Neither here nor anywhere else in the Vita Nuova is Beatrice's marriage mentioned, though the language he uses to describe his behavior on this day is as tremulous and anguished as that of the earlier passage. As casually as though he were accepting an invitation to go out for a drink, he agrees to go with a friend to the house of the newlyweds and "do honour" there to the ladies who make up the wedding party.

But as soon as I had thus resolved, I began to feel a faintness and a throbbing at my left side, which soon took possession of my whole body. Whereupon I remember that I covertly leaned my back unto a painting that ran round the walls of that house; and being fearful lest my trembling should be discerned by them, I lifted mine eyes to look on these ladies, and then first perceived among them the excellent Beatrice. And when I perceived her, all my senses were overpowered by the great lordship that Love obtained, finding himself so near unto that most gracious being, until nothing but the spirits of' sight remained to me, and even these remained driven out of their own instruments, because Love entered in that honoured place of theirs, so that he might the better behold her.... Many of her friends, having discerned my confusion, began to wonder; and together with myself, kept whispering of me and mocking me. Whereupon my friend, who knew not what to conceive, took me by the hands, and drawing me forth from them, required to know what ailed me. Then, having first held me at quiet for a space until my perceptions were come back to me, I made answer to my friend: "Of a surety I have now set my feet on that point of life, beyond the which he must not pass who would return."

What is Dante talking about here? Obviously it is Beatrice's wedding. If not, he's simply reporting that he felt dizzy one day; if so, why doesn't he just say that instead? One of Freud's discoveries that may apply in this case is that of the "screen memory" or memory of an event that never occurred and which functions to cover up a real memory too terrible to recall. An example might be someone insisting that he had been abducted by aliens and in this way screening a memory of childhood abuse, since it's easier to admit that one has been seized by Martians rather than facing a recollection of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of one's relatives. Dante's account of his trauma on the day of the wedding is totally unself-conscious, as it could only be in a pre-Freudian day when one's bombastic reactions might seem the work of otherworldy powers and thus beyond one:s control rather than evidence of a shameful weakness. Yet Dante admits to a hysterical paralysis here, one that leads him to the brink of blindness. The bride is not named, yet who other than Beatrice was capable of inflicting so crippling a neurosis with a tilt of the chin, a turn of the head, a glance toward the poet and then, forever, away?

Yet this story may have a sequel that was never recorded. Dante was nothing if not self-reflective, and he had plenty of time on his hands during his years of exile. Surely he looked back at this moment, at this "point of life, beyond the which he must not pass who would return," and realized that the start of his great story had fallen into his lap. A man with a story to tell needs a goal, and if it's a long story, that goal had better be elusive. And here, in a narrow street in Florence, was the most elusive goal of all: the woman he would chase through the afterlife and, if he's really lucky, never catch.

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The church of Santa Margherita de' Cerchi is poorly lit and gloomy and becomes even more stygian when one thinks of poor Beatrice, dead when she was just a few years out of her teens, and thinks, too, of the terrible journey that begins at its door, a journey no less awful for being a fiction. Compared to the statues in the nearby Bargello and the paintings only slightly farther away in the Uffizi, the art in Santa Margherita de' Cerchi is negligible. But if, as you face the high altar, you look to your left, you'll see another, smaller altar just under the high-relief depiction of the Madonna freeing some slaves. Below this smaller altar, and you'll have to stoop to see them, are these words: "SOTTO QUESTO ALTARE / FOLCO PORTINARI / COSTRUI LA TOMBA / DI FAMIGLIA / L'OTTO GIUGNO 1291 / VI FU SEPOLTA / BEATRICE PORTINARI" ("Under this altar / Folco Portinari / built the tomb / of his family / On 8 June 1291 / Here was buried / Beatrice Portinari") and then, just below them, "PIETRO TOMBALE DI BEATRICE PORTINARI" ("Tombstone of Beatrice Portinari").

Every old church in Italy can boast that it contains the remains of at least one celebrity, and the more important the church, the more glamorous its necropolis. Santa Croce, for example, which is just a few city blocks to the east, features the tombs of Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Galileo, among others. The older and the more legendary the corpse, the less certain its existence. Yes, Saint Peter is buried beneath the dome of his church in Rome, and the transfer of Saint Mark's body from Alexandria to the Basilica di San Marco in Venice is well documented (he was smuggled out of Egypt in a barrel of pork, his handlers certain that no Muslim would take a second look at a container full of unclean meat). On the other hand, one can't be blamed for asking whether the centurion Longinus, having converted to Christianity at the feet of the crucified Christ, really made it all the way to northern Italy before dying in Mantua and being buried there in the Basilica di Sant'Andrea, where his tomb may be seen today.

Yet it's certain that the bones of Beatrice are there just under the stone in Santa Margherita de' Cerchi; scholars do not argue this point the way they dispute the location of Dante's birthplace. And while one might hesitate to pass one's hand over the tomb of one of the severe fathers of the church, as though he might, even in death, pull away and cast a disapproving glance at the person audacious enough to disturb his eternal sleep, it is hard, as one kneels there under the little altar, not to put one's hands on Beatrice's dusty stone, as though something of her force might come through.

That force was given to her entirely by Dante, of course; of Beatrice herself we know next to nothing. Actually, the most important thing we know about Beatrice is that Dante turned her into a figure with godlike powers. In this respect, Harriet Rubin speculates that Dante may have been influenced by the beautiful Pietro Cavallini mosaics in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere; the poet "would likely have" seen them when he went to Rome for his fateful meeting with the pope. (I both love and mistrust that phrase in quotation marks, one that I have often used myself when I couldn't be sure of a fact yet wanted it to be true.) If so, Dante saw what a twenty-fIrst-century visitor can still see today, a huge image soaring above the altar of Mary and Jesus sitting together as equals, like a Roman dominus and domina.

When I visited Santa Maria in Trastevere and saw this couple, I had two thoughts in quick succession. First, I wondered "Who is that woman with Jesus?" and then "Is that Jesus?" Because as he is always represented by artists of every time using every medium, Jesus has a way of commanding the foreground so decisively that everyone else in the scene comes across as a hanger-on; he's like Elvis with his retinue or a good boy who went away to medical school and came home a doctor, adored by his mother (and everyone else) because he is smarter, richer, better than the others. Even in Caravaggio's Vocation of Saint Matthew across the Tiber in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, the shadowy Christ who beckons the evangelist from the corner of the painting is made central by the gazes of the other figures, especially that of the foppish boy at the physical (yet false) center of the painting and whose face beams at Jesus like a searchlight. But here in the Cavallini mosaic, Christ not only shares the stage with Mary, he has his arm around her. It's as though he's saying, "This is my mother, folks. No mother, no son—no Mary, no Jesus."

And no Beatrice, no Dante. Beatrice sits at the heart of the Comedy like an engine that drives its lines forward. She inspired its author as no other muse, mortal or divine, ever inspired any poet. Though it is many things to many readers—epic adventure, buddy movie, political tract, sci-fi extravaganza, horror tale, poetry manual—the Comedy was, in Dante's mind, a religious essay as well. In this sense, Beatrice was not a sweetheart or heartthrob or Poe-esque beautiful dead woman. She was much, much more. Beatrice was to be chased but never caught, and in that sense, she was, to use a word Dante wouldn't, a goddess.

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As a goddess, Beatrice fits right into the Christian pantheon. The Greek and Roman gods chattered, flirted, and quarreled: they were like us. But in the Christian bible, Jesus says little, God less, the Virgin almost nothing. The essence of Christianity is the pursuit of the unworldly; "my kingdom is not of this world," said Jesus, and a good Christian could not imagine talking to a god who boasted of his affairs with mortals, complained about his wife's stubbornness, and gossiped about his colleagues on Olympus. To a good Christian, the only divinity worth pursuing is a silent one.

And Beatrice is largely silent throughout The Inferno and most of The Purgatorio. Yet she becomes a regular talking machine in The Paradiso, which is one reason why that part of the Comedy is the least successful. Here she goes on about the errors in Platonic thought and the nature of free will, for example, and her final words to Dante, in Canto 30, are not a grand statement about love but a denunciation of his enemy, Pope Boniface VIII. For the great poem to be written, Dante needs to chase Beatrice, not catch her.

Dante's biographers point to various sites that may have suggested to him an entrance to the underworld; high on the list is the volcanic plain of Solfatara, near Naples, which the ancient Romans spoke of as the entrance to Hades and that is visitable today, its soil still hot to the touch. But his journey can really be said to start here in the little church of Santa Margherita de' Cerchi in Florence: it was here that Beatrice was buried into a marriage to Simone de' Bardi, here she was buried out of this world and into the next. In the dream the eighteen-year-old Dante has following his encounter with Beatrice, the "lord of terrible aspect" speaks to the poet yet conceals more than he reveals: "Speaking he said many things, among the which I could understand but few." Everyone who has recounted a dream to someone else knows that often the dream itself is of extremely short duration, though the recounting can take a long time indeed as one remembers (or invents) additional details and realizes the provenance and meaning of those details and elaborates on them. Could it be that the "lord of terrible aspect," who seems as much Satan as he is God, tells Dante the story that becomes the Comedy? Remember, Dante is still a teenager and hasn't grown into the physical and artistic maturity he will need before setting out on the road that leads through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise. Are the "many things" of which the just-wakened Dante remembers "but few" the themes of his terrible journey, the one he won't be ready to take for years? The details of the trip are the poet's invention, but his obsession with Beatrice had already led him to the ideas he would struggle with in his great poem: love, loss, sorrow, salvation.

The bad news is that Beatrice died when she was still young and Dante still loved her; the good news takes the form of the Comedy itself. For, though the poet says in the first lines of The Inferno that our trip is through "a gloomy wood," one that is "wild and rough and tortured," the main point of his poem is not to describe the darkness but to relate "all the good" he draws from his time on the road. Dante was looking for Beatrice on the journey that he undertook down the goat paths of Italy, but he knew he wouldn't find her there.

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Meanwhile, he had a lot of territory to cover before he could join his beloved in Paradise. Exile, friendlessness, heartbreak: this is the food on which Dante dined, which made him a poet whose only rival is Shakespeare. No wonder the great modern artists of renunciation—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud—were drawn to him. "Shakespeare gives the greatest width of human passion," wrote Eliot the poet, "Dante the greatest altitude and greatest depth." Dante, and these others, are each "a stranger to the world," to use Harriet Rubin's expression, certain that perfection is not here but just ahead.

Yet, like Shakespeare, Dante was a rock star in his own age as well as ours. The story is told of Dante passing a smithy one day and hearing the blacksmith chanting lines from the Comedy with more enthusiasm than accuracy, whereupon the poet goes in and begins tossing the blacksmith's tools into the street. "Why are you tossing my instruments into the street?" says the smith. "You have ruined my business," says the poet; "take no offense if I should ruin yours!"

Popular enough to be misquoted then, popular enough to be misquoted now, though this time deliberately: as I write this essay, I walk one day down the busy Via Vincenzo Gioberti, which cuts through our working-class neighborhood, past a restaurant where I see posted a handwritten poem that begins "Nel mezzo del cammin di via Gioberti" and goes on to promise that travelers who find themselves, not before the entrance of Hell, but at the door to Osteria Cocotrippone, will find within, not salvation, but hearty Tuscan food and drink.

Of course, Dante was also very much a man of his own time, and the greatest strength of Harriet Rubin's book is that it shows how he embodied so much of what we now call the High Middle Ages. Rubin argues how his life parallels that of Saint Francis of Assisi, for example, who preceded Dante into exile a hundred years earlier and whose story Dante would have discussed with his friend Giotto, whose murals of the saint's life can still be seen today just a few streets away in the church of Santa Croce.

Dante may have also based the architecture of his masterpiece on the method of Saint Thomas Aquinas. "The Thomist method was to think up orders of images with inscriptions on them, memorized in the order of a carefully articulated argument." writes Rubin, just as Dante and Virgil walk through the Gate of Hell with its chilling words and enter a cosmos consisting of hundreds of levels, each with its distinctive habitats for the damned and the saved, yet all of which is, in the end, a single unified whole.

His wanderings took Dante to Paris, and the Gothic cathedrals he saw in France, with their buttresses and gargoyles and side chapels and crypts, must have reminded him of his own construction. "Eighty magnificent cathedrals were built in France between 1180 and 1270," according to Rubin, "and they were models of the Comedy: books in stone."

Led by Virgil, the poet of ancient Rome and therefore the father of all literature yet a character who becomes a personal father figure to Dante as their acquaintance deepens, Dante enters a Hell that, says Rubin, has "more in common with the Marquis de Sade than with the Gospel of John." Here Dante learns that "everything wrong with a person's vision has to do with energy wasted on the wrong or diverse passions," that "genius is not found in desires, but in the choice of one desire, pursued against all else."

That one right desire is for God, of course, but Heaven is a long way from Hell. Fortunately, there's a zone called Purgatory that connects the two territories, and Rubin points out how taken the rising bourgeois class was with this middle-class middle ground. Purgatory offers a second chance, an opportunity to be neither permanently damned nor saved but to move from one extreme to another. In contrast to Hell, Purgatory represents the viewpoint of nurturing women, not that of stern judges. Here, Beatrice, who briefly flits through Canto 2 of the Inferno and then disappears before her hem could be sullied by the ashes of Hell, returns to give Dante several brisk pep talks which are designed to move him on to the next level, where she will talk his ear off.

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And eventually Dante arrives at—oh, dear—Paradise. Everyone knows that a story without villainy is no story at all; it's a commonplace that, for example, Satan is the most interesting (attractive, appealing, seductive—choose your own adjective) character in Milton's Paradise Lost. Part of the problem is that Dante had to send Virgil back to Limbo, which means the one great source of snappy dialogue is now gone. Without a buddy, the buddy movie turns into a loner's quest for virtue, and who wants to see a person who's pretty good already strive to become perfect? Dante the character is going for the Best Actor award, but he has lost his companion in the Best Supporting Actor category, and a story about one person is no story at all. He gets the girl, of course, but he wasn't supposed to, and the work suffers.

As contrasted to the sweaty sinners in the Inferno who remind us of ourselves, the angels in Paradise are uniform and chilly. Maybe that's what it's really like up there. But "it's not poetry," says contemporary poet Mark Strand, and thus The Paradiso contrasts starkly with The Inferno, the sci-fi/adventure/horror story that is laced with political/literary/religious elements and is, in the words of Harriet Rubin's subtitle, the world's greatest poem.

Available translations of The Inferno are now in the dozens; I'd recommend the one by John Ciardi among the standard renderings as well as the new version by Irish poet Ciaran Carson, who blends eighteenth-century ballad rhythms with Dante's much older measures. Any translation will leave Dante by himself in the dark wood again, for The Divine Comedy ends as it begins, with Dante a mere mortal. He hasn't become perfect, after all; the genius of Dante the poet is that Dante the character doesn't disappear into the light but comes back wiser, chastened, and ready to tell us what he has learned on his strange journey.

And he comes back solitary as well. In Paradise he finds the goddess he has pursued down the goat paths of Italy and through Hell and Purgatory, but he doesn't stay with her. Their parting is astoundingly casual. One moment they are walking and talking, and the next, Saint Bernard has taken her place. Dante cries out after her, but Beatrice smiles and disappears, as though she knows what he doesn't: that he needed to look for her more than he needed to find her.

Besides, Dante has a job to finish, After his long sojourn in the afterlife, the world's greatest wanderer returns alone to this world, to this life, and he begins to write.

 

About David Kirby
David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. He is the author of many books of poetry and criticism, including The Ha-Ha, My Twentieth Century, and What Is a Book? (Georgia). His poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Southern Review, Paris Review, and other publications.

Ultra-Talk: Johnny Cash, The Mafia, Shakespeare, Drum Music, St. Teresa of Avila, and 17 Other Colossal Topics of Conversation

The University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia

© 2007 by David Kirby
All rights reserved
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission