The First Philosophers

Oxford World Classics

The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists

Personally I like philosophers who don’t just talk the talk but walk the walk. Take Diogenes; he turned social criticism into a performing art. Aptly named the Dog, he lived in a trashcan in the middle of Athens marketplace, and took to censuring his fellow citizens: Masturbating in the street, defecating in theatres, and urinating on his enemies, were his hallmark protests. We will also find him strolling about town in daylight with a lit lamp proclaiming: ‘I am just looking for an honest man!’ Diogenes was a precursor to Rousseau, because he saw civilization as a prison, and obviously just wanted to be free - this is why he is known as the father of Cynicism. 

Of course, Diogenes may not be to everyones taste. If we want to something more Zen, then we can try Heraclitus who offered maxims like: ‘It is not possible to step into the same river twice,’ ‘everything flows,’ and ‘dying is all we see while asleep, sleep is all we see while awake.’ This Grecian Buddha, believed the world was in perpetual flux. However, if he is a little too poetic we could pick Pythagoras: The famed mathematician who saw the world entirely by numbers. He also was also known as a magician, a vegan, a fond musician, and an advocate of reincarnation who heard the voice of dead relatives in dog barks! It was he who discovered the earth is round. 

Parmenides was similar to Heraclitus but also the exact opposite. For him, the more things change the more they stay the same. Our eyes deceive us, the world is not separate, and time is an illusion. In reality all is One and One is all: Indivisible; unborn, uncreated, and unconditioned. Poetry is not the best method to propound logic, nevertheless he argues a case: ‘It must be that what can be spoken and thought of, Is, and it is therefore being. And there is no such thing as nothing. These are the guidelines I suggest to you.’ He eventually decided: ‘It is indifferent to me where I begin, for there shall I return,’ which is perhaps why his ideas, for all there brilliance, reached a dead-end. 

Of course there were those philosophers who were scientists rather than Shamans. Democritus believed the world consisted of Void and little tiny particles called Atoms. In fact ‘the nature of the eternal, consists in minute substances infinite in number [...] to small to be perceived’ which bounce about in a ‘chaotic state.’ Whats more, ‘creation is the combination of Atoms, destruction is their dissolution, and accordingly creation is just modification.’ I’m no scientist but thats what I learnt in GCSE physics! Whats more, ‘A balanced load is better than a heavy load,’ ‘contentment comes to men from a moderate amount of enjoyment,’ and finally, ‘it is important to compare one’s own life with the life of those who are less fortunate [...] and count ones blessings.’ Word.

Sophists were the first Salesmen: Not only were they famed rhetoricians, they were also known to setup schools, charge extortionate fees, and love networking. They would be very happy in today’s world, and obviously have LinkedIn profiles and Twitter accounts, and would most likely be found in the Marketing Department. Nevertheless they also believed philosophy should not just dwell in the clouds, but come down to earth. Sophists taught their students to be savvy, rich, and successful. In doing so, they also paved the way for Sociology and Semiotics. Protagoras the founder famously said: ‘Man is the measure of all things.’ Georgias went further and declared: ‘Nothing exists; even if it exist it no human being could apprehend it; that even if it were apprehended, still it could not be explainable to our neighbour.’ Ah, we all ready see our ancestral Nietzsches here! Sophists believed in relativity, but they were also Postmodernists. All Values have equal validity, but the accepted Value is the one that fits into the ideological discourse. I.E. knowledge is a byproduct of language.  

This Oxford World Classics edition is a great little gem for it offers a concise summary of all those Wisdom-lovers who paved the way for Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Not to mention Descarte, Kant,  Hume, Mill, Hegel, and Wittgenstein. All the present day scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and politicians. Even the lawyers, judges, fat cats and professors. In fact, every branch of human knowledge, can be traced back down a golden path to Ancient Greece. And I’m sure there are some latter-day Diogenes yet. 

The War Against God: The Top Three Promethean Heroes in Literature

The War Against God: Top Three Promethean heroes in Literature

It started with the ousted Titan, who stole fire from the God’s and gave it to humanity. Punished for his iniquity and generosity in equal measure, Zeus, had him chained to a rock for all eternity, while birds devoured his liver. Then there is the Fallen Angel himself, Lucifer also aptly known as ‘the Bringer of Light.’ His first appearance, Genesis, in the slippery form of a serpent. Picture Eve standing before the tree of knowledge, pride of place in the Garden of Eden and being told: ‘The day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’ If the answer is food for thought, then surely knowledge is a good thing? And if fire lights up darkness, then it is a cooking utensil of some capacity. Classical and Religious, the two archetype blasphemers of literature, who defy the gods out of their love of humanity, but there are more. Here are my top three:

Satan, Milton’s Paradise Lost 

Surely the most humane and complex Satan ever seen yet. As Blake declared: ‘'The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and so of the Devil's party without knowing it.' True poet? We can only assume Blake means a writer obligated to truth and sincerity. Milton, like all great artists, can’t help but be a humanitarian, and unwittingly instills this in his diabolical creation. 

Nevertheless we first find Satan, post-rebellion, chained to a lake of fire down in the deepest reaches of Hell. Fitting punishment for a disastrous coup, and a presumptuous challenge to Jehovah’s might. Yet despite the new lodgings Satan will not seek forgiveness, nor kneel. He declares: ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven [...] Here at least we shall be free [...] Awake arise or be for ever fallen.’ These are the words of a emancipator.

Milton also notes Satan is Romantic soul, and quite willing to admit he possesses ‘dauntless courage,’ capable of ‘remorse and passion,’ and that despite his new lodgings he and his fellow brethren can ‘ease out their pain by work and endurance.’ Again this suggests a humanitarian spirit of triumph in adversity. A pragmatic attitude to say the least, which would be well adduced in heaven, hell and indeed earth.

 However, like any latter-day revolutionary, Satan is not perfect. He is prone to rashness, pride and ambition. He is also overzealous with his guns, which is why he is locked down in the inferno in the first place. Flashback to the war in heaven: ‘Chariots and flaming arms and fiery steeds [...]  Those deep throated engines belched [...] with outrageous noise the air and all her entrails tore.’ Alas, the Devil has graduated from his days as the wily serpent, he is now a gristled soldier and statesman a democratic one at that. Of course he has not had the luxury to read Animal Farm and is unable to foresee his revolution is doomed to failure. However as it stands, we have to admire his motive, for he believes election should not be based on divine precedent, but native equality.

God created the world and a lovely little garden and decided something was missing. Out of boredom perhaps, not to mention clay, he moulded our ancestor Adam. Adam also has his grievances, for we find him in Eden already apostrophizing the silent sky: ‘Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man? did I solicit thee, from darkness to promote me. or here place in this delicious garden? [...] Inexplicable thy justice seems!’ 

And here we come to the crux: Adam’s argument is the same as Satan’s. This shows one of two things: Either God is a shoddy artisan and made a man, who is a little too rebellious, and a little too much like those traitors below. Or, more likely, Satan is a little more humane than angelic, a tad more human than divine. 

Both Adam’s words and Satan’s speeches are for us earthlings, for we too are thrown into the world, conscripted to live life and we make the best of it come what will. What’s more, lest we forget, there are communities and individuals in all parts of the world who really are disenfranchised. Christopher Hitchens quite rightly labelled God A Kim Jong Il presiding over a North Korea, and we the oppressed multitude. Satan speaks for them and for us, who also wonder at the incomprehensible laws of the universe. 

At last at one late point Satan stops for a moment to meditate on his madness: ‘The Evil one abstracted stood from his own evil and for a time remained stupidly good,’ and here Milton reveals his conceit. If Satan is good in the abstract, then he is bad in the real. Why? Because God’s abstract kingdom nevertheless has the ability to throw out real jail-time and punishment. Satan’s predilection for being ‘stupidly good,’ reveals his innate worth. He has become bad by circumstances and this is similar to us human beings. Like him we are trapped in the real world of cause and effect, and this is why we are both victim and victimizer, guilty and innocent at the same time. If we all lived in the abstract, then of course we would also be ‘stupidly good’ but we don’t. We live in the real world with real problems. As such Satan shows us, the evils of the world are not metaphysical anomalies, but readily explainable by reason. Not only is Milton party to the devil without knowing it, the devil is party to humanity (but perhaps in this case he does know it)

Captain Ahab, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

The deranged captain of the Pequod whaling ship is leading his fellow sailors on insane quest through the Pacific ocean to hunt down and kill the mythical white whale Moby Dick. Captain Ahab is rightful namesake to his Old Testament predecessor: The wicked demon worshipper and King of Israel who while in command committed ‘more evil than all the kings before him’ and even more wickedly all ‘in the sight of the Lord above.’ 

So we welcome Captain Ahab who ascends the throne of blasphemy. What better way to coronate his new status, than a ritual baptism in fire, for it is out in a lighting storm the hero becomes Prometheus and Lucifer combined: ‘Look aloft! cried Starbuck. The Corpusants! The Corpusants! All the yard arms tripped with pallid fire; and touched with each tri-pointed lighting rod with three tapering white flames, each of all three masts was silently burning.’ ‘Mark it well’ Ahab bellows: ‘I now know that thy right worship is defiance [....] Thou clear spirit of fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back.’ This captain is marked for martyrdom. 

On deck he is a cantankerous disciplinarian: ‘a hard driver’ is old Ahab, who has ‘driven one leg to death, and spavined the other for life.’ He also displays a morbid disposition: ‘joy and sorrow, hope and fear seemed ground to the finest dust [...] in the clamped mortar of Ahab’s iron soul [....] His whole life become one watch on deck.’ So what for that? Despite his difficult personality the captain is never truly evil. In fact his heart is good. We are told ‘from beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.’ 

Clearly one of those tragic heroes, a sick suffering soul, without much hope of a happy ending. And yet where does his blasphemy lie? The answer resides in Moby Dick. For this is not simply any ordinary sea creature, but the primordial Leviathan created by God in the first six days of creation. As such it is personification of God’s omnipotence, and Ahab knows it: ‘The white whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them [...]  All that most maddens and torments [...] All the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab were visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all general rage and hate felt by his whole race [...] And as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.’ 

Needless to say, Ahab’s can only conceive of God as the only true Devil, for it is the very whiteness of the whale that scares him the most. White is the ‘crowning attribute of the terrible.’ ‘the very veil of the Christian deity’ yet the most ‘appalling to mankind,’ because it is also the colour of God’s absence and our loss.

Ahab is Prometheus and aims to bring colour and light back to the world. His hatred for Moby Dick is the sum of humanity’s hatred and fear of all the riddles that haunt this mortal life: Old age, sickness, suffering and death, all witnessed on the backdrop of the arbitrary Laws of the universe.

Towards the end, Ahab at last reveals his essence: ‘I feel deadly faint, bowed and humped as though I were Adam staggering beneath the piled up centuries since paradise [...] Whose to doom when the judge himself [should] be dragged to the bar?’ ‘Were I the wind I’d blow no more on such a wicked miserable world.’ Why such a negative view you might ask? and the captain replies: ‘Ahab never thinks he only feels, feels, feels!’ ‘God only has the right and privilege [to think] and our poor hearts throb.’ Ahab is not interested in intellectual philosophy, all he knows is real heartfelt emotion. He rejects the cosmic order on account of his fellow mortals, who are made to bear the indiscriminate whims of fortune, and out of love for humanity, hunts down the tyrant God personified in that audacious white whale Moby Dick. 

Ivan Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov

James Joyce once said: ‘The Brothers Karamazov made a deep impression on me [....] Madness you may call it, but therein may be the secret of his genius[...] I prefer the word exaltation, exaltation which can merge into madness. In fact all great men have had that vein in them; it was the source of their greatness’ Dostoevsky’s seminal masterpiece is now considered one the greatest works of the Western Canon. Admirers include, Freud, Kafka, Rowan Williams, Pope Benedict, and even Albert Einstein. As for the Karamazov’s, they are a dysfunctional family, of impassioned men, but it is Ivan who towers above all.

 ‘Ivan is a sphinx,’ ‘Ivan is a tomb’ ‘Ivan is a riddle’ ‘Ivan is not one of us’ ‘People like Ivan are like a cloud of dust.’ So the pronouncements follow our Promethean hero, yet every grave must contain its treasure, and every puzzle must be placed. After meeting his youngest brother Alyosha in the pub, Ivan yields up his secret: ‘I have lost faith in life [....] Everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden chaos.’ Whats more of God’s majesty he admits: ‘Although I know it exists, I don't accept it at all.’  However, like all Promethean heroes he cannot shake off his divine heritage. He admits: ‘like a child I believe that suffering will be healed and made up for [...] That in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity.’ For most that should be enough, but not for Ivan: ‘Though all that may come to pass, I don't accept it. I won't accept it. [...] That's what's at the root of me, Alyosha; that's my creed.’ Alyosha being a recently cloistered Monk quite rightly calls this Rebellion of the Satanic form, but Ivan’s war against God is really a humanitarian one. 

He remarks to Alyosha: ‘You see, I am fond of collecting certain facts, and, would you believe, I even copy anecdotes of a certain sort from newspapers and books, and I've already got a fine collection.’ What follows is a list of atrocities. Stories of rape, torture and infanticide, child abuse, and murder, and genocide. After working himself into a masochistic frenzy Ivan cries: ‘Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it?’ ‘While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in the stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to dear, kind God! [...] They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony.’ ‘From love for humanity [...] I hasten to give back my entrance ticket.’ 

Alyosha contends, What about the our Saviour. Doesn’t he count for something? Ivan is ready, not just with more grievances, but armed with a parable that will rival any of Christs. He calls his story: ‘The Grand Inquisitor.’  The ‘story is laid in Spain, in Seville, in the most terrible time of the Inquisition where fires were lighted every day to the glory of God.’ In the midst of such horrors the Son of God decides to reappear: ‘In His infinite mercy He came once more among men [....] The sun of love burns in His heart [...] He holds out His hands to the people, blesses them, and a healing virtue comes from contact with Him.’ Yet all is not well: ‘the Grand Inquisitor, passes by the cathedral [...] An old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken eyes.’ He is outraged by Jesus’s return and quickly arrests him. In the dungeon they confront each other, and the cosmic battle between Hell and Heaven begins. 

The Inquisitor cries: ‘Is it Thou? [....] Don't answer, be silent [...] I know too well what Thou wouldst say. And Thou hast no right to add anything to what Thou hadst said of old [...] why has Thou come to hinder us?’ 

Now for scripture.Matthew 4:1-11, Mark 1: 12-13, and Luke 4:1-13. The devil is out in the the wilderness of the Judaean desert ready to confront Christ: Temptation One: ‘If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread [...] and Jesus answered, It is written: Man shall not live on bread alone.’ Yet in today’s world, what could be more appalling than poverty? The inquisitor ratifies: ‘There is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only hunger. Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!’For the second temptation: ‘The devil led Christ up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world And he said to him, I will give you all their authority and splendor [...] Worship me, it will all be yours.’ Christ retorts ‘worship the lord your god and serve him only.’ Yet what can be more sensible than uniting a divided earth under one banner? The inquisitor remarks: ‘We took from Him Rome and the sword of Caesar, and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth [...] We shall plan the universal happiness of man.’ For the final temptation, ‘the devil led Jesus to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple, If you are the Son of God, he said, throw yourself down, for it is written He will command his angels concerning you to guard you safely’ Christ retorts, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ However, what could affirm life more than a true miracle? The inquisitor snaps: ‘Thou didst refuse  [....] Thou didst proudly and well, like God; but the weak, unruly race of men, are they gods? [...] Is the nature of men such, that they can reject miracle, and at the great moments of their life, the moments of their deepest, most agonizing spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of the heart?’

The inquisitor is triumphant: Feed the world, rule the world, and present miracles to the world, and the world will be healed. He declares:‘Know that I fear Thee not [....] I awakened and would not serve madness. I turned back and joined the ranks of those who have corrected Thy work.’ ‘Or Dost Thou care only for the tens of thousands of the great and strong? [...] We care for the weak too.’

Of course, Ivan’s parable is just that. Like Prometheus this Karamazov must pay the price for challenging the God’s majesty. He descends into full blown psychosis, and instead of meeting Jesus, he meets Satan in the form of a terrible hallucination. And it really is terrible for this is a ‘paltry devil’ who wears ‘a brownish reefer jacket, rather shabby’ and ‘who goes to the public baths.’ This is not an Archfiend to match Ivan’s expectations. So it follows Ivan bears humanity’s suffering alone. His gift of fire that he stole from the Christian God, cannot be shared amongst his peers, but instead consumes his heart. 

Why I Write

Why I Write.

‘Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.’ Graham Greene

‘I am a poet, a seeker and a confessor, obligated to truth and sincerity. I have a charge, albeit small and confined: To help others seekers to understand and to cope with the world, if only by assuring them that they are not alone’ Hermann Hesse.

I could call upon the dozens of writers to furnish the answer to why I write, but in truth, the above quotes just about sum it up for me. The first is true of now, the second is what I one day hope for. Even if this dream doesn’t work out, I hold my vocation close to my heart, because this is the meaning behind it, successful or not. 

For me writing is a healing activity, it helps me make sense of the chaos that I find inside of myself, and the chaos I find in the world. It reconciles me to any pain I feel or have felt and restores me with new hope for the future. As my favourite author says:

 ‘It is the fate of some people to experience life mostly as sorrow and pain, not only in theory, in a sort of literary aesthetic pessimism but bodily and actually. These persons, among whom I alas belong, have more talent for experiencing pain than for experiencing pleasure. Breathing and sleeping, eating and digesting, all the simplest functions cause them pain and distress rather than pleasure. Now despite all this, following a law of nature, these people find in themselves an impulse to affirm life, to find pain good, not to surrender, and so they are extraordinarily obsessed with everything that can give them some joy, can cheer them a bit, can make them feel a little happy and warm, and they attribute to all these pleasant things a worth they do not have for the ordinary industrious man.’

And this is why some strange men will forsake career, money, status, relationships and family, just to write books! I do not want to sound narcissistic here, but I know it is also true, that many people of the world, are happy well-adjusted individuals who live prosperous and fulfilling lives, without so much of a glance at the wider suffering of humanity. It is only right that they do so, for they are being true to their hearts, and if people spent too long time regarding the pain of others, then the earth would would cease to spin. Anyway, whether it is hatred of the world or love of the world that dwells in your breast, both are a form of egoism and morbidity and in the end the world will confound you! Aristotle is right: A golden mean set in the middle of extremities is the best approach to any philosophizing.

Nevertheless, it is also true, that many have the bad luck to suffer: Some out loud, some in silence, but either way, their experience counts for something too. How they feel about life is not so much a intellectual choice but an all too real destiny. Orphan Pamuk says: ‘How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?’ This is true, but I think we all have a duty to at least know the contents of our own minds. To really examine what is going on, is something we can and should do. And when we share it with sincerity, we help others.

There are better men than me who will do more: They will be doctors, social-workers, psychologists, humanitarians, relief-workers and world leaders, but for me I can only give what I have. Emotions are my dowry and thats how I pay my way in this world. My hope is, that one day, someone else, going through a similar experience, perhaps lost in darkness, may take heart from what I’ve written, and so rise to the challenge of life and carry the torch forward. Writing for me is a way to bridge the gaps that keep us apart, literature allows us to see we are not alone, and we are all in this together. 

Yet, Maya Angelo said: There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you,’ And so it is true: Sometimes sharing doesn’t work, and any help you think you can give, isn’t acceptable to the wider public. This is where the other dimension of writing comes in. The personal side. Writing solely for oneself and for one’s own pleasure. All literature, is in some sense a confession, and an explication of that hidden part of the soul that wants to be heard. So it follows, I write, because I want to redeem my own pain, and transform it into something good. Writing as therapy!

Perhaps I am a little sloppy in my craft, because all the novels I have ever wrote, are just refracted versions of myself, only a better version! A hero who starts out with losses, but in the course of the story accumulates riches, begins in despair and ends in exaltation. Freud would call it simply wish-fulfillment: That because I don’t have control over my own life, I compensate by exerting control through writing, and live out my dreams by the quill. In many respects he is right, but it is more than that. For me the task is spiritual. Writing a story is a way to recapture my lost dream of happiness, and my own small prayer to God, even if it goes unanswered. 

I spend hours on it, think about it all day and night, obsess and fret, just to make it perfect; not just in what happens, but in the words, for I want every word to be count. Though it be driven by a kind of compulsion, for me it is something I will always cherish, and always love. A life perfected is a good life, even if it only resides on the page. 

Somewhere along the way, I too developed a knowledge of this so called ‘aesthetic’ and ‘literary pessimism’, and so my works, are distorted! They are filled with chimeras and demons, saints and sinners. I have drawn on Dante, Milton, Dostoevsky and Melville, Levi and Mccarthey. I don’t say this to brag, after all I am a jobbing hack as of yet, I say it only to show that I have masked the true meaning of what I write. But thats the point: So has every other artist, for all this talk about Romanticism, Modernism and Postmodernism, is a deliberate and audacious lie. All writers, no matter how much they dress their work up in literary regality, really write solely to express themselves.

And so in conclusion, it is about helping myself, and helping others. Though every artist is doomed to die, it is the belief and solace of all art and literature, that life is worth living, and we should praise it even in the worst of times. So it follows, I’m not just engaging in a childish fantasy, cobbling out a plot and resolution because I can’t be bothered to do something more worthwhile. To me writing is the most worthwhile thing I can do. I want to bestow all my love and longing, my happiness and sorrow into what I create. I will accept nothing less than the best. Though it is an eccentric cause, it means everything to me. If it doesn’t drive me to madness and insomnia, then it hardly seems worth doing at all. In helping myself, maybe I can help others too. So that is why I write, and why my novel is not yet completed, for I am not just working on a story I am working on a dream.

Why I Read

Why I Read

‘these fragments I store against my ruins’  TS eliot, the WasteLand

‘Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them--if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.’ JD Salinger, Catcher in the Rye.

Words can’t express what literature mean to me. For me these writers, philosophers, and dreamers aren’t dead, they are alive in my heart, living and breathing, and their words blaze fire. It doesn’t matter to anyone else, but it matters to me. Some people will read a book, and feel excited by it, others will laugh or cry, some will want to escape the mundanity of existence, or seek knowledge. For me books are all of these things but more. I may sound completely eccentric but I believe literature is Sacred. There are some novels, poems and quotes, that I think about everyday, that I have sworn allegiance to, that have furnished my soul, and have taught me how to live. There is some literature that has changed my life, transformed me, that is the closest thing I know to having a faith. It is like a teacher-student relationship, and the fundamental lesson learned is how to be a better person, and reach out earnestly for that dream called happiness. 

When I went to university we sat in small dusty offices, and dissected the works of Coleridge, Keats, and Blake. We listened in lectures about the society Dickens wished to portray through his novels, the first world war’s influence on T.S Eliot, how Christianity vexed Milton, and how Robinson Crusoe is a myth of capitalism. In my Masters degree, it went much further we looked at, editions, manuscripts and theory. What constitutes an authentic work of art, which version is the best, does the author have any relevance to the article he produced. To me as much as I engaged with such questions, its was all pretty much humbug, because I was, and am, only interested in how these artists made me feel. I didn’t read Keats to learn about Romanticism I read him because his odes were beautiful and made me feel alive. I didn’t care if Camus’ philosophy was weak and unthought out compared to Sartre’s, I cared about his motive. I didn’t want to examine the minute workings of Milton mind, I wanted to be enriched by the majesty of his and feel kinship to the devil. In truth, I think the professors think the same: That the humanities in general, are really just a great and glorious game, that will actually play, not to contribute something to society, but because deep down we love it and it helps us live. This alone justifies it.

When I wrote my dissertation on Hermann Hesse, I discussed the use of symbol and image in his novels, his exile from German Society, and  his influence on Modernism. If I do a PHD, I will analyze the lyrics of 2pac, his relevance to modern culture, his existential authenticity, and relevance to the black Diaspora. These are really just elaborate cover stories. In reality, I just want to study them, because of how they make me feel. Hesse and 2pac are the two artists who have influenced me more than any other. At it is not an exaggeration to say, that in childhood, they saved my life. Thats how much they meant and still mean. 

So when it comes to why I read, the answer lies in what I writer can instill in me, wisdom and serenity, hope and happiness. I love how if I am feeling sad, I can read Hesse or listen to 2pac. I love how if I am feeling angry at the world, I can pick up the Brothers Karamazov or Pessimistic read Schopenhauer. I love how if I feel inspired, I can recite ode to a skylark or psalm to life. I love how if I feel passionate I can visit Wuthering heights, or Shakespeare’s tragedies. I love how if I need guidance, I can read Christopher Hitchens, or Dalai Lama in equal measure. 

I suppose to a certain extent this love is excessive to the normal person. It is true, it springs from my own personal problems, and my inadequate attempts in dealing with everyday life. But how beautiful, and heartening it is to know that there is commonwealth of shared experience. That although it might be glossed over in today’s world there are people suffering out there. Just to know someone else had gone through the struggle means a lot, and if I listen I will learn, and if my heart is open I will love. So what if Art is only for the sick suffering difficult men, and is no use to anyone but us maladpatives! Its enough to know its there, and it helps. I have more faith in these men than I do in any religion. 

So while others may read for pleasure, I read out of necessity. But literature, should not be used to escape life, but to awaken us to it. In reading, I have learned to live. That is why literature should not just bask in the problems of the world, but attempt to transform them through the medium of language. In modernism especially, their is a tendency to revel is despair, but it is not enough to just reflect the world’s ugliness, the world needs to be redeemed. I read Beckett, Sarah Kane, and Nietzsche at university, and was just disgusted by what critics claimed to be profound thoughts, genuine works of art, and complex innovate genre defying narratives. To me such works are appaling, because they posit a world that has no future, and no hope. Literature and art should be about helping people and restoring their optimism. As Hesse states: 

‘And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment's happiness is flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as their own dream of happiness.’

This is why I will always be a Romantic at heart, because even if I am intellectually persuaded by this literary despair, I could never consent to live by it. To me the fundamental point of life, and the measure of a man, is his ability to give back to others. This is what the commonwealth of artists, writers and philosophers is all about. It’s not just to alleviate my own depression that these writers exist, but to hold a little stash of noble sentiment and goodness, that will outlive all the misfortunes of history. How nice to know that these artists have been safeguarded for the future, and that through all the whims of time and place, their ideas and sentiment will remain chiseled in stone like the law of Moses. This is why I read, and why it matters. 

The Tragedy of King Lear, by Shakespeare

The Tragedy of King Lear

Let me confess to one of my stranger eccentricities. I read Shakespeare. Not only that, I get a kick out of it!

This is for two reasons: The first is that I have a rather lofty (probably misguided) idea of what literature should and shouldn’t be. If I ever have the originality to have any of my own work published (that will be the day!) I want it to imbibe the tradition that precedes it. If I’m ever ply my trade effectively, then best be schooled by the maestro himself Ol Will Shakespeare. The second reason is I actually enjoy it. It would be cliche to say the his work is beautiful, for the language is often brutish, whimsical, witty and  obscure all in equal pitch, but it is true some of his poetry really does have that shine and splendor so harked about. However, for me, it is the magisterial command of language that really enthralls me. Each word is the finely tuned spring of a piano key, that will sing out the glorious symphony or mournful dirge according to the suited occasion. Metaphor, analogy, allegory, simile, pun and homonym all paraded with the pomp of a royal cortege, and with the added finery of philosophy, folklore, wit and wisdom accompanying it. 

So that being said what is the Tragedy of King Lear really about? Even for Shakespeare it is a rather convoluted plot: Princes masquerading as bedlamites, earls as servants,  Kings and Queens, Dukes, suitors, servants, retainers, soldiers, stewards, fools and madmen. However, the gist of the story is this: Lear is tired old king in want of his faculties; his kingdom is in disarray, no son, but competing claimants to the throne, he decides best thing he can do is abdicate and divide the kingdom between his three Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. The daughter who will get the biggest windfall and inheritance, depends on who says the nicest things about their doting dad. Goneril and Regan are smooth operators when it comes to courtly displays of affection, and thus use all the subtle rhetorical tricks to beguile their dear old dad. However Cordelia the youngest is not. Quite honestly she admits she loves her father as any daughter should, no more no less, and has no poetry to add to this. Lear goes ballistic: ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath’ he thunders. ‘I loved her the most,’ ‘here I disclaim all paternal care.’ After disinheriting his youngest, the mad king hands over power to two eldest and their respective husbands. He comes quickly to rue the day he ever did that, as Goneril and Regan, quickly turn into a pair of vindictive shrews, and Lear becomes a crabby old man suffering dementia. Lodging with the pair of them is insufferable, and he takes off into the night proclaiming: ‘How sharper than a serpents tooth to have a thankless child.’ After spending time in the wilderness a plot surfaces to have him executed. With the prospect of being shipped off to dover by loyal retainers and with his own offspring vying for his blood, he descends into full blown madness. However in all the hurly burly tumult, his beloved Cordelia reappears from her exile in France, and father and daughter are reconciled. However, swift capture leads to a trademark tragedy. 

I would think Shakespeare himself would want the moral of his play to be this: ‘The weight of this sad time we must obey: Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.’ Yet, as with all his plays it is so much more! Feminists will praise the ‘thankless’ daughters a heroines subverting the patriarch. Marxists, will question royal bloodlines, and subtle and not so subtle politics of class wars. Psychoanalysts will ponder the idea of surrogate mothers, regressed infantilism, and of course Oedipus. Finally, there may even be room for a new school of literary thought. Geriatric literary criticism; where young scholars, scrutinize the treatment of old senile folk by their ungrateful children. For me however, the play is first and foremost about loss. I think it was Tolkien who said all great art is really about one thing and that is Death with a capital D. Behind all the politics, plots,  coups and exiles is Lear’s final question: ‘Why should a dog a horse a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?’

Death for a latter-day playwright like Beckett (who I incidentally detest) makes life, and art for that matter stupid and absurd. For Shakespeare the opposite is true. Death only heightens life’s vitality, and takes it to the lofty peaks of Mount Olympus. However, Shakespeare is not Homer, Virgil or Ovid, nor is this a Classic of Greece or Rome. As the first modernist Shakespeare was all too aware, the gods have all departed! Man has been left to fend for himself in a hostile and alien world, with no guidance other than the fire of his own heart. Witness Lear’s existential cry to the abyss. ‘Blow winds and Crack your cheeks! Rage, blow, you cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drenched our steeples  [...] Crack natures moulds, all germens spill at once that make ungrateful man.’ ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools’

As another great author said: ‘There is wisdom that is woe, but woe that is madness’ and for this king particular, it is difficult to tell whether he is wise or raving. Lear, like all great heroes, and especially Shakespearean ones, greets death and God’s eternal absence with a glorious display of wrath and indignation. Humanity through such impotent rage and suffering is made great. 

However, returning once more to the beauty of the language, Lear has his tender moments, which more than make up his anger. This is one of my favourite all time pieces of poetry spoken by the king now reunited with his beloved daughter Cordelia but facing the prospect of a lifetime of imprisonment: 

Come, let’s away to prison;

We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage.

When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,

Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;

And take upon ’s the mystery of things

As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,

In a wall’d prison, packs and sect of great ones,

That ebb and flow by the moon.

This is why I read Shakespeare, and why I actually love his work so much! In God’s absence the kingdom of Art is the closest thing to eternity we have yet.

A travellers guide to Dante's Inferno

Dante’s Inferno 

‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’

The immortal worlds that send Dante Alighieri spiraling into the abyss: Nine circles, funneling down, the souls damned for eternity. Here, sinners reside in darkness, punished under God’s mandate: Enslaved and shackled; burned by fire; boiled in pitch; frozen in ice; whipped, maimed and even eviscerated. Not even Orpheus when he sought Eurydice in the underworld, stepped as far as this poet.

T.S. Eliot claimed the Divine Comedy is the foundational work of the European canon: That Dante himself, is ‘the master, for a poet writing today in any language.’ For Eliot, art should to be founded on the tradition which precedes it, and allegory was the exquisite form to bridge the past and present. There are some great writers: Dickens, Wordsworth, Camus, Mann, Chekhov and Twain. Then there are writers who happen to be geniuses; those who have reached such lofty heights, that only the stars surround them: Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Tolstoy, and finally Dante are such examples. 

Dante’s Inferno is not just a grotesque tapestry of darkness and evil. It is also a social commentary. A work which addresses the fate of 12th century Florence, Italy, Europe and even the Holy Roman Empire. Furthermore, it is art at the highest level, because it the addresses the timeless themes of suffering, justice, life and death in analogical terms. This is not Piers Plowman. the Divine Comedy is the foundational book of European literature, because of its form and philosophy, and it starts in the Inferno.

Map I: The Inferno. Copyright: Driftless Area Review

Map II: Bartolomeo's Inferno c. 1430

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Dante begins in crisis: ‘In the midway of this our mortal life, I found myself in a dark forest.’ Lost and in despair, the poet is stalked by ‘leopard’, ‘lion’ and the ‘she-wolf.’ The forest is a metaphor of sin and ignorance. The beasts are symbols of vice: The leopard represents sexual promiscuity, the lion, is a metaphor of pride and the She-wolf denotes ambition. If prey falls victim to predator, as surely it will, Dante’s place in heaven is jeopardized. Luckily he is rescued by Virgil, the classical author of Aeneid. He has been sent by Beatrice, to deliver Dante into the safe hands of God. However first they must go through hell and back. Virgil is the symbol of wisdom and intellect. Dante cannot find salvation alone, and needs reason to discover it. Virgil starts with characteristic foreknowledge: ‘Through me you go into the city of weeping. Through me you go into eternal pain. Through me you go among the lost people.’ In hell, Contrapasso is the rule of law: In other words, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, what you reap is what you sow, and the punishment will always fit the crime. With that in mind, Charon the ferryman leads the two poets into the first circle.

Dark Wood, Gustave Dore, 1890 

Charon, Gustave Dore, 1890

First Circle
Limbo, and here there is a ‘noble castle surrounded by lofty walls.’ The inmates are the righteous pagans, who strove to do good, but nevertheless remain unbaptised, and thus cut out of God’s plan. In the gloomy palace lodge, the poets, Homer, Horace and Ovid. The mathematician Euclid. The statesman Cicero. The doctor Hippocrates. The philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Orpheus, the first artist, is also here among others. In limbo, there ‘sadness without torment,’ which nevertheless makes the very ‘air tremble.’ It is a place of melancholy, but a haven compared to what lies beneath.

The Castle of Limbo priamo della Quercia, 1444-52 

The Second Circle
The supreme judge Minos holds court and decides the fate of the new prisoners. He ‘whips his tail around himself as many circles the sinner must go down.’ The second circle is for those who lived their lives following lust and desire. Here, in the ‘black air,’ an ‘infernal gale, blows and never pauses/directs the spirits which it carries before it, harassing them with turning and buffeting.’ The sinners in their earthly life, where subject to the whims of passion, and so here they must also be subject to the same; thrown about here and there by the insensate gales. Among those being blown about are Achilles, Helen of Troy, Lancelot and Guinevere, and Cleopatra.

Minos, Gustave Dore, 1890

Circle of the lustful, William Blake 1824

Third Circle
Here in the third circle, ‘it rains eternally [...] great hailstones, muddy water mixed with snow, fall through the darkened air.’ Cerebus, the three headed dog guards this realm: ‘His eyes are red, his beard greasy and black, his belly huge, and fingers clawed. He scratches the spirits, skins them and then pulls them to pits.’ This is the circle for gluttons and we all know how greedy dogs are. Accordingly the sinners, ‘were beaten under the heavy rain [...] empty shades which looked like bodies/ they lay upon the ground strewn here and there’. In their earthly life these prisoners were entrenched in greed and addiction. In death, they are entrenched in swampland, force fed whatever falls from out the darkened sky, into their open mouths. 

Giovanni Stradano, Canto 6

Fourth Circle
This the house of avarice. Those who hoarded treasure, and those who squandered it.  Here the sinners, ‘had come together with great howls. From one side to the other, and rolling heavy weights forward against their chest. So they struck one another when they met; and then turned round and rolling back. Some shouted: why hold on, why let go.’ Virgil explains, the arbiter of God’s plan, is Fortune, and in accordance with the divine will, she elevates man only to sink him later. Those who try to outwit Fortune end up here. The rocks are the transformed treasure, accumulated in life, now dragged as heavy burdens for all the next. ‘What do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?’ Dante answers accordingly. 

Avaricious and Prodigal, Gustave Dore, 1890

Fifth Circle
Dante and his guide, next descend to the marshy banks of the river Styx; ‘the sad brooklet’ and ‘I who stood there looking down intently, saw people covered in mud [...] And anger on their faces [...] They struck each other, and not only with their hands, but with their heads and chests, and with their feet, biting each other to pieces.’ The fifth circle is for those who lived an earthly life of rage and bitterness. The prisoners of this realm are condemned to ‘wallow like pigs in the mire,’ and in this sense, anger is a mud that sticks. Wrath the swamp that you drown in it. After passing such scenes, Dante espies ‘the city which takes its name from Dis, with its grave citizens, and huge armies.’ Dis is the stronghold of Satan, the Republic and Capital, of the Inferno. 

The Stygian Lake with the Ireful Sinners Fighting, William Blake, 1824-27

Sixth Circle
 Breaching the iron walls of the city signifies the entry into the deepest part of the underworld. Upper-hell is characterized by sins of weakness: Ignorance, lust, anger, greed, and gluttony. Lower-hell, on the other hand, is for those who act out of wickedness. Beyond the walls, ‘three infernal furies marked with blood rise up [..] [and] around their middles were tied bright green hydras, and they had small snakes and horned vipers for hair.’ Further along the wasteland Dante sees, ‘tombs that make the ground on every side uneven. Among the tombs were scattered flames, by which they were made completely incandescent [...] The lids of all of them were open and from the insides came harsh lamentations.’ The sixth circle is for heretics. Taunted by the gorgons they are condemned to burn in their coffins, while still alive. This is price they pay for denying the existence of the afterlife, and spreading false doctrine.

Farinata, Gustave Dore, 1890

Seventh circle
The seventh circle of hell is famous for a reason: All sinners who have committed acts of depraved violence reside here. Whether it is against person, property or self, the punishments are meted out measure by measure. The first crest of the circle is guarded by the ‘infamy of crete:’ The Minotaur, who stalks the track, ready to gore anyone who dares bate him. Evading the beast, Dante and Virgil approach the Phlegethon: ‘A river of blood in which everyone boils who does harm to their neighbors’ and ‘from which came the shrill cries of the scalded.’ The centaurs running along the bank ‘armed with arrows’ proclaim: ‘These are tyrants who gave themselves over to blood and rapine.’ In earthly life their lust for killing was unquenched, in Hell, they are made to boil in the blood  they shed. Its victims among others, include Alexander the Great, Dionysus, and Attila the Hun. 

the Minotaur, William Blake, 1824-27

Entrance to Dis, Priamo Della Quercia, 1444-52

Dante and Virgil cross the phlegethon and climb down to the second crest, the realm of suicides. In a wood ‘not green, but of a dark colour’ with trees ‘knotted and twisted’  and marked by ‘poisonous thorns’ they learn of punishment given to those who have taken their own life. Virgil commands Dante to pick a twig off one of the branches, and ‘the trunk called out: Why are you tearing me/ It grew a little dark with blood and said once again: Why are you dismembering me, have you no compassion.’ Compassion is the virtue that suicides lack for themselves, and because of this, they will never be resurrected on the day of judgement. As trees, they languish away all of eternity while ‘filthy harpies make their nests’ in the branches. 

Self murderers and the Harpies 

Spendthrifts running through the wood of Suicides, Gustave Dore, 1890 

The third crest is for those who are violent in speech towards God, and the perverts, paedophiles and rapists of the world. Here: ‘Droves of naked souls all of them weeping in great wretchedness’ wander aimlessly or lay supine or sat derelict on the scorched ground. ‘Upon them, all the great sand, falling slowly, rained down dilated flakes of fire.’ God hasn’t forgotten his old method and like Sodom and Gomorrah, this land and its inhabitants are laid waste. For many of the sexual deviants, while on earth their body has been the vessel of pleasure. In death, it is stripped of its dignity and becomes the vessel of pain. 

Violent Against Nature: Sandro Botticelli 1495 

The Eight Circle
Only reached via a black vortex, Dante and Virgil are flown down on the back of Geryon: ‘The savage beast with the pointed tail, who sails over mountains and breaks walls and weapons. The one who infects the whole world.’ Nevertheless Geryon has ‘the face of a just man, so mild [...] yet the rest of his body was a reptile’s.’ Needless to say, looks can be deceiving, and Geryon on an allegorical level is the symbol of Fraud. The first crest of the eight circle is for panderers and seducers. Here, ‘horned devils with great whips lashed [the sinners] from behind.’ Just as they beguiled others to do their bidding, the role is reversed and they are forced to do the bidding of others. 

Greyon, William Blake 1827

The next crest of the circle is for flatterers and Dante sees ‘people plunged in excrement.’ This a visual representation of the known trait of flatterers to speak bullshit. Now instead of exiting their mouth, the false words are going back in, clogging up the throats.

Punishment of the panderers, Sandro Botticelli, 1495

Below is a special place is for those who have committed the crime of simony; the selling of church offices. Dante comes across ‘a livid stone wall full of perforations [...] from each of these holes, there stuck out in the air, the feet and the legs, up to the calves of a sinner, the rest remaining hidden out of sight. [...] The soles of their feet of all of them were on fire, which made the joints wiggle.’ A lot of the clergy end up here, the burns to the ‘soles’ of their feet, is a ghastly inversion of the baptism, which anoints the ‘soul’ residing in the head to God. They also have their head literally buried in the sand, demonstrating their arrogance and ignorance of God’s plan. 

Punishment of the Simonists, Priamo Della Quercia, 1452

still further down, fortune tellers, wander the wasteland ‘silent and weeping.’ To Dante’s horror he sees, ‘each one of them seemed to be twisted round between the chin and the point where the thorax begins [...] So that the head was turned back to front, and they were therefore obliged to walk backwards.’ Fitting punishment for men who claimed to look ahead, they now can only see behind.

punishment of the diviners, Priamo della Quercia, 1452

politicians are boiling in tar in the next crest. Taunted by demons who bellow: ‘Unless you want to feel our hooks better not come up from out that pitch’ ‘Bit with a hundred prongs’ the black pitch is the sticky substance of corruption, that cannot be washed off. 

Hypocrites are seen as ‘painted people, who went around with very slow steps, weeping and looking exhausted’ On the outside their coats, ‘are gilded so that they are dazzling. But inside all lead and so heavy.’ The hypocrite is made to carry the weight of his lying, forced to embody the doctrine all that glitters is not gold. 

The next crest is for thieves: Dante sees them ‘running naked, terrified, without hope [...] hands tied behind them by snakes’ One particular, is so transfixed by a viper that ‘he caught fire, and burnt to ashes, [...] When he was in this manner destroyed, the dust collected itself without assistance and suddenly returned to the same shape.’ Each prisoner is condemned like the phoenix to rise from the ashes, only there is no flight. Instead serpents lay hold of each body and ‘no ivy ever clung so horribly and then they stuck together’ so much so the ‘colours began to run.’ These sinners appear to undergo some sort of grotesque transformation, where man and viper merge into a single monster. Just as they stole from others the substance of their life, so must their very life-substance be stolen from them in death. 

punishment of the thieves, William Blake, 1827

The next crest has men who are no longer human but embodiments of fire. These are the evil counselors and con men, who have encouraged others to illegal activity. 

Below is little nook reserved for the sowers of discord and schisms: Dante wonders: ‘Who could even in prose description, give an account of all the blood and wounds, I saw then.’ ‘Even a cask with the bottom knocked out does not gape in the way I saw one, ripped open from the chin to where he farts [..] Between his legs his guts hanging out.’ In life they caused divisions and split the state, in hell they must also be divided and their bodies split into parts. 

The final crest is for perjurers and impostors. In ‘the air full of sickness’ they are ‘creeping along as best they could.’ ‘Spotted with scabs’ prone to ‘insane itching.’ These counterfeiters, in earthly life were a disease on society, in death they become a disease unto themselves; stricken by leprosy or the plague, they wither away only to live again.  

The Ninth Circle

The final circle is for those guilty of treachery, and is patrolled by ‘horrible giants whom Jove still menaces [...] When he hurtles down his thunder.’ These exiled titans, compass the track, and lead Dante and Virgil into the well of Cocytus: ‘Not a matter to take lightly, describing the lowest point of the universe. Not something to be done in baby-talk.’

Virgil pointing out Ephialtes, Gustave Dore, 1890

The first round of the circle is for those who have betrayed their kin. Dante sees beneath him, ‘a lake, which was frozen [....] discoloured up to where disgrace appears. So were the shadows tortured in the ice, and with their chattering teeth sounding like storks.’

Cocytus, Gustave Dore, 1890

the second is for political traitors. They too are encased in the frozen water: ‘A thousand faces blue with cold’ who have now resorted to cannibalism, for Dante espies: ‘Two so frozen in one hole [...] And as in hunger people gnaw bread, so the one on top fixed his teeth into the lower one, just where the brain joins the nape of the neck.’

The third is for those who betray their guests. Overlooked by the ‘tower of hunger’ ‘the icy cold has harshly bound another group [...] their faces not turned down but thrown back’ Here laying supine ‘their tears do not allow them to weep, and the grief which finds the ice blocking their eyes, turns inward.’

The lowest region of the ninth circle is known as Judecca, after Judas of iscariot who sold out Christ for the price of 30 pieces of silver. This is the prison for men who have betrayed their benefactors. Here resides the angel who instigated the greatest rebellion in heaven: ‘The emperor of the kingdom of pain’  Satan himself, portrayed a giant malformed monster. He is locked waist deep in frozen waters of Cocytus, the lowest point that can ever be reached. Dante marvels at the sight:

‘Half his chest sticking out of the ice [...] 

Three faces on his head.

 One which was fiery red in the front,

 the other two grafted to that [...]

 Under each face protruded two great wings [...] 

that fluttered [...] 

It was by them all Cocytus was frozen.

 With six eyes he wept,

 and down three chins, dripped tears mixed with blood.

 In each mouth he was chewing with his teeth a sinner.’ 

Stradano, Lucifer 

Lucifer, William Blake, 1827

After this final nightmare; the vision that is culmination of all previous visions, Dante and Virgil make their escape. ‘My guide and I started out on that road, through its obscurity to return to the bright world’ Dante leaves us with a final promise: ‘I saw some of the lovely things that are in the heavens [...] [and] emerged to see the stars again.’ 

Dante and Virgil Gazing at the Stars, Gustave Dore, 1890

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I have read Purgatorio and Paradiso but they are forgettable. In today’s world God is characterized by his absence, so to, is happiness for that matter, because it remains something intangible, defined by the stasis, which for us discontented humans can never be reached. Pain on the other hand is visceral and common, and Evil recognizable. Dante’s Inferno is not just under the world but upon it; flooding the surface, as if bubbling up from Cocytus. Punishments laid down there, whether they are executed by fire or ice, are also witnessed in our world. It is the legacy of postmodernism to know that Hell is also a place on earth.

To deviate ever so slightly into theology, this means the divine-plan has failed: We are either all victims, subject to God and the Devil’s capricious Law which attacks the weak and innocent. Or we are all sinners, caught up in a web of evil so vast and interconnected, that it is impossible not to be condemned. Dante’s Divine Comedy continues to resonate with readers, not just because it gives us front row seats to the freak show, but because, the scenes delineated are recognizable. Though couched in the stuff of nightmares, some of what Dante sees has an all too human reality about it. Our knowledge of hell may be belated, but Dante’s vision remains, because it is is a work of art which recognises humanity’s darkest fears, and deepest dreams. It is the poem that has become the palimpsest in which all other latter-day works of art are scribed. 

Allegorical Portrait of Dante, Bronzino, 1530

Early picture of Dante, 1336, by the School of Giotta, Florence