Log24

Commentary on Inferno ,  Canto XVI,  line 84 —

* " when it pleases you to say 'I was' " —
 

See also a 1992 poem by Thomas Lux.

For the title, see posts of March 25, 2013.

For little Colva … a tune from November 2005

and a New York Times  review.

(Continued from this date two years ago)

"Hell is other people." —Sartre
"With a laugh track." —Cullinane

A sequel to Good Will Hunting and Hereafter—

The Emory Board

From October 29, 2006 —

Locating Hell

"Noi siam venuti al loco ov' i' t'ho detto
            che tu vedrai le genti dolorose
    c'hanno perduto il ben de l'intelletto."

— Dante, Inferno, Canto 3, 16-18

"We have come to where
              I warned you we would find
Those wretched souls
              who no longer have 
The intellectual benefits of the mind."

— Dante, Hell, Canto 3, 16-18

From a Harvard student's weblog:

From Dogma Part II: Amores Perros —

"It is night on the fourth of the curving terraces, high above the sea.
The stars are full out, known and unknown. Dante is halfway up the mountain….
It is half through the poem; half the whole is seen and said: hell, where grace
is not known but as a punishment; purgatory where grace and punishment are
two manners of one fact."

— Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, Faber and Faber, 1943

See also Shining Forth.

From "Point," a Log24 post on St. Andrew's Day 2012 —

"….mirando il punto  
a cui tutti li tempi son presenti"

— Dante, Paradiso , XVII, 17-18

 For instance…

Related material —

Today is Kelli O'Hara's last Saturday matinee in "The King and I."

A show that some may prefer —

Related to the plot of Dante's film —

Continued from January 18, 2005 —

See Lili Anolik, "Tiger of the Week," in Princeton Alumni Weekly  
on April 29, 2015, and this journal on that date.

(This post was suggested by the following sentence
by Anolik in Vanity Fair 's current Hollywood issue —

"I think that for the city of Los Angeles,
Didion is the Ángel de la Muerte.")

On a professor of literature who reportedly
died on Michaelmas 2015, a remark by his daughter —

“He was really an artist,” she said.

That’s evident in the 60 years Raffel spent contemplating 
how to translate the terza rima  style of Dante Alighieri’s 
The Divine Comedy — speaking of the three-line rhyme 
scheme first used by the author — before he published
a translation of which he was “most proud” in 2010,
his wife said.

It was his final work.

— Lanie Lee Cook, Baton Rouge Advocate

See the circle of keys.

Related material: The links in a Log24 search for Doctor Sax.

* For the title, see posts tagged Dante Time.

In memory of Reynolds, a Dante scholar who reportedly died
on April 29, 2015 —

(Continued)

Click a course description below for some related material.

See also Strike That Pose and Gone to China.

Quoted here on that date (All Hallows Day)—

See as well A Dante for Our Times.

From University Diaries  yesterday—

"A writer for The Atlantic  applauds Santorum's attack on universities
as secular, amoral indoctrination machines.

What can UD  say to this?…."

Below is a screenshot of the new home page for
Columbia University Department of Mathematics.

The impressive building in the photo is not  the math department.

(Click to enlarge.)

The building is actually Columbia's Butler Library.

"Along the front and sides of the library are inscribed the names of
Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Desmosthenes,
Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Tacitus, Saint Augustine, Aquinas, Dante,
Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire, and Goethe." —Wikipedia

The inscribed names outline a defense of liberal education
perhaps more robust than the Feb. 26 effort of Andrew Delbanco,
which University Diaries  calls "tepid." (See the previous Log24 post.)

Two definitions–

"In Dante's Inferno  the Harrowing of Hell is mentioned in Canto IV by the pilgrim's guide Virgil." —Wikipedia

"The Easter Vigil…. is held in the hours of darkness between sunset on Holy Saturday and sunrise on Easter Day." —Wikipedia

Two more, of acronyms coined by Philip Rieff—

"Rieff is critical of the present 'pop' culture that glories in the 'primacies of possibility' and prefers 'both/and' to 'either/or.' … the 'via'— the 'vertical in authority'—… teaches us our place as we assent to and ascend on via’s ladder." —Philip Manning

Related material:

VIA CRUCIS

The infinity symbol, as sketched in a touching
attempt at scholarship by the late
"both/and" novelist David Foster Wallace—

The Cartesian cross—

The lemniscate—

Lemniscate with Cartesian cross—

Poets.org –

The Annual
Maundy Thursday
Dante’s Inferno Reading

“The reading occurs during the Maundy Thursday vigil, the very hours Dante intended the events in the epic poem to take place.”
 
Featured poets:

Rachel Hadas, Wyatt Prunty, Rachel Wetzsteon, Rika Lesser, David Yezzi, Annie Finch, Honor Moore, Lynn Emanuel, Paul Watsky, Kate Light, Phillis Levin, Michael Palma, Charles Martin

Thursday, April 5, 2007, 9 p.m. to midnight, The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Avenue at 112th St., NYC, NY

Snippets:
A Reply to John Updike

See Updike on digitized snippets.

The following four snippets were pirated from the end of MathPages Quotations, compiled by Kevin Brown.

They are of synchronistic interest in view of the previous two Log24 entries, which referred (implicitly) to a Poe story and (explicitly) to Pascal.

"That is another of your odd notions,"
said the Prefect, who had the fashion
of calling everything 'odd' that was
beyond his comprehension, and thus
lived amid an absolute legion of 'oddities.'
                             Edgar Allan Poe

I knew when seven justices could not
take up a quarrel, but when the parties
were met themselves, one of them
thought but of an If,  as, 'If you said so,
then I said so'; and they shook hands
and swore brothers. Your If is the only
peacemaker; much virtue in If.
                             Shakespeare

I have made this letter longer than usual
because I lack the  time to make it shorter.
                             Blaise Pascal

S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per cio che giammai di questo fondo
non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
                             Dante, 1302

For translations of the Dante (including one by Dorothy Sayers), see everything2.com.

An anonymous author there notes that Dante describes a flame in which is encased a damned soul. The flame vibrates as the soul speaks:

If I thought that I were making
Answer to one that might return to view
The world, this flame should evermore
    cease shaking.

But since from this abyss, if I hear true,
None ever came alive, I have no fear
Of infamy, but give thee answer due.

-- Dante, Inferno, Canto 27, lines 61-66,
    translated by Dorothy Sayers

Updike says,

“Yes, there is a ton of information on the web but much of it is grievously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, I have the impression, to inflame what is most informally and non-critically human about us. Our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant aw-shucks, disarming in its modesty.”

Note Updike’s use of “inflame.”

For an aw-shucks version of “what is most informally and non-critically human about us,” as well as a theological flame, see both the previous entry and the above report from Hell.

Note that the web serves also to correct material that is inaccurate, unedited, unattributed, and juvenile. For examples, see Mathematics and Narrative. The combination of today’s entry for Pascal’s birthday with that web page serves both to light one candle and to curse the darkness.

The Lincoln Brigade



Marches On.

As yesterday’s Lincoln’s Birthday entry indicated, my own sympathies are not with the “created equal” crowd.  Still, the Catholic Fascism of Franco admirer Andrew Cusack seems somewhat over-the-top.  A more thoughtful approach to these matters may be found in a recommendation by Ross Douthat at The American Scene:

Read Eve Tushnet on the virtues of The Man in the High Castle.

Related material: Log24 on Nov. 14, Nov. 15, and Nov. 16, 2003.

Another item of interest from Eve:

“Transubstantiation [is equivalent but not equal to] art (deceptive accident hides truthful substance), as vs. Plato’s condemnation of the physical & the fictive? (Geo. Steiner)”

Related material:

“In Grammars of Creation, more than in his 1989 book Real Presences, Steiner acknowledges that his argument rests on inescapably Christian foundations. In fact, he has in the past sometimes written in a strongly anti–Christian vein, while the present book reflects the influence of, among others, Miri Rubin, whose Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture is credited in a footnote. Steiner asserts that, after the Platonisms and Gnosticisms of late antiquity, it is the doctrines of incarnation and transubstantiation that mark ‘the disciplining of Western syntax and conceptualization’ in philosophy and art. ‘Every heading met with in a study of “creation,” every nuance of analytic and figural discourse,’ he says, derives from incarnation and transubstantiation, ‘concepts utterly alien to either Judaic or Hellenic perspectives– though they did, in a sense, arise from the collisions and commerce between both.’….

The incarnation of God in the Son, the transubstantiation of bread and wine into his body and blood, are ‘a mysterium, an articulated, subtly innervated attempt to reason the irrational at the very highest levels of intellectual pressure.’ ‘Uniquely, perhaps, the hammering out of the teaching of the eucharist compels Western thought to relate the depth of the unconscious and of pre-history with speculative abstractions at the boundaries of logic and of linguistic philosophy.’ Later, the ‘perhaps’ in that claim seems to have disappeared:

At every significant point, Western philosophies of art and Western poetics draw their secular idiom from the substratum of Christological debate. Like no other event in our mental history, the postulate of God’s kenosis through Jesus and of the never-ending availability of the Savior in the wafer and wine of the eucharist, conditions not only the development of Western art and rhetoric itself, but at a much deeper level, that of our understanding and reception of the truth of art– a truth antithetical to the condemnation of the fictive in Plato.

This truth reaches its unrepeated perfection in Dante, says Steiner. In Dante, ‘It rounds in glory the investigation of creativity and creation, of divine authorship and human poesis, of the concentric spheres of the aesthetic, the philosophical, and the theological. Now truth and fiction are made one, now imagination is prayer, and Plato’s exile of the poets refuted.’ In the fashionable critical theories of our day, we witness ‘endeavors of the aesthetic to flee from incarnation.’ ‘It is the old heresies which revive in the models of absence, of negation or erasure, of the deferral of meaning in late–twentieth–century deconstruction. The counter-semantics of the deconstructionist, his refusal to ascribe a stable significance to the sign, are moves familiar to [an earlier] negative theology.’ Heidegger’s poetics of ‘pure immanence’ are but one more attempt ‘to liberate our experience of sense and of form from the grip of the theophanic.’ But, Steiner suggests, attempted flights from the reality of Corpus Christi will not carry the day. ‘Two millennia are only a brief moment.’

11/11 11:11:11

Samuel Beckett on Dante and Joyce:

“Another point of comparison is the preoccupation with the significance of numbers. The death of Beatrice inspired nothing less than a highly complicated poem dealing with the importance of the number 3 in her life. Dante never ceased to be obsessed by this number. Thus the poem is divided into three Cantiche, each composed of 33 Canti…. Why, Mr. Joyce seems to say, should…. the Armistice be celebrated at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month? He cannot tell you because he is not God Almighty, but in a thousand years he will tell you… He is conscious that things with a common numerical characteristic tend towards a very significant interrelationship. This preoccupation is freely translated in his present work….”

— “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” in James Joyce/Finnegans Wake: A Symposium (1929), New Directions paperback, 1972

See also my entry from five years ago on this date:

Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.

First Idea and Last Night

In memory of Saint Norman Cantor, an author of “stunning heartlessness” — my kind of historian — who died on Saturday, September 18, 2004…

a link to Log24.net entries of that date.

Give ’em Hell, Norman.

Above: recommended videos
from the date of Cantor’s death

“Dante’s hell was intended to be a shocking literary device. The Divine Comedy is not a work of theology or a spiritual treatise any more than James Joyce’s Ulysses is a sociological study of Dublin.”

— Norman F. Cantor
   Hollywood, Florida

The Day Justice Died

But all things then were oracle and secret.
Remember the night when,
    lost, returning, we turned back
Confused, and our headlights
    singled out the fox?
Our thoughts went with it then,
    turning and turning back
   With the same terror,
                into the deep thicket
   Beside the highway,
                at home in the dark thicket.

I say the wood within is the dark wood….

— Donald Justice, “Sadness”

In memory of Justice,
Dante excerpts:

Canto I

Midway in the journey of our life
 I found myself in a dark wood,
 for the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard it is to tell what that
 wood was, wild, rugged, harsh;
 the very thought of it renews the fear!

Canto III

— Translation by Charles S. Singleton,
selection by Paul J. Viscuso

Justice moved my high maker…

From the day Justice died,
Friday, August 6, 2004,
The Feast of the Metamorphosis:

Pre- and Post-Cognition

Majority Report:

From

A Matter of Life and Death,

an entry from Sept. 13, 2002, linked to in last night’s ART WARS notes:

“In the sun, Dante and Beatrice find themselves surrounded by a circle of souls famous for their wisdom on earth. They appear as splendid lights and precious jewels who dance and sing as they lovingly welcome two more into their company.”

Minority Report:

Doonesbury, Monday morning, Sept. 8, 2003:

©2003 G.B. Trudeau

For more chanting,
click here.
 

The Eight Revisited

“…search for thirty-three and three…”

— The Black Queen in The Eight, by Katherine Neville, Ballantine Books, January 1989, page 140 

Samuel Beckett on Dante and Joyce:

“Another point of comparison is the preoccupation with the significance of numbers….  Thus the poem is divided into three Cantiche, each composed of 33 Canti….”

— “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” in James Joyce/Finnegans Wake: A Symposium (1929), New Directions paperback, 1972

Into the Dark Woods:  

“– Nel mezzo del bloody cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai in…”
— Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, beginning of Chapter VI

Dante Alighieri Academy:

“‘The Divine Comedy’ celebrates Dante’s journey of knowledge to God through life: hell, purgatory and paradise. Dante Alighieri Academy continues Dante’s Christian philosophy of education….”

Chorus of the Damned:

I don’t know where it is we’re goin’
and God knows if I ever will,
but what a way this is to get there.
I got those archetypal, rubber-room,
astral-plane Moebius strip blues.
I got those in-and-out, round-about,
which way’s out Moebius strip blues.

© 1997 by C.K. Latham

Added March 3, 2003, 6:00 AM:

For a less confused song, click this Glasgow site.

Feast of Saint Marianne

On this date in 1972, poet and Presbyterian saint Marianne Moore died in New York City.

For why she was a saint, see the excellent article by Samuel Terrien,

 “Marianne Moore: Poet of Secular Holiness,”

from Theology Today, Vol. 47, No. 4, January 1991, published by Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, N. J.

Terrien quotes the following Moore poem:

Tonight’s site music, though not played by Gieseking himself, is, in honor of Moore, the following work by Scarlatti from the Classical Music Archives:

Scarlatti’s Sonata in E major, andante comodo  (Longo 23 = Kirkpatrick 380 = Pestelli 483) 

To purchase a recording of Gieseking playing this work,

Culture Clash at Midnight
in the Garden of Good and Evil

In a future life, if not in this one, Dante might assign these two theologians to Purgatory, where they could teach one another.  Both might benefit if Shepard took Apczynski’s course “The Intellectual Journey” and if Apczynski read Shepard’s new book of short stories, Great Dream of Heaven. 

Background music might consist of Sinatra singing “Three Coins in the Fountain” (for Shepard — See my journal notes of December 10, 2002) alternating with the Dixie Chicks singing “Cowboy, Take Me Away” (for Apczynski, who is perhaps unfamiliar with life on the range).  Today’s site music is this fervent prayer by the Dixie Chicks to a cowboy-theologian like Shepard.

Meditation for Friday the 13th

The 1946 British film below (released as “Stairway to Heaven” in the U.S.) is one of my favorites.  I saw it as a child. Since costar Kim Hunter died this week (on 9/11), and since today is Friday the 13th, the following material seems relevant.

The doctor in “A Matter of Life and Death” addresses a heavenly court on behalf of his patient, R.A.F pilot David Niven:

In the film, David Niven is saved by mistake from a fated death and his doctor must argue to a heavenly court that he be allowed to live.

In a similar situation, I would want Dr. Alan McGlashan, a real-life psychiatrist, on my side.  For an excerpt from one of my favorite books, McGlashan’s The Savage and Beautiful Country,

click here.

As Walker Percy has observed (see my Sept. 7 note, “The Boys from Uruguay”), a characteristic activity of human beings is what Percy called “symbol-mongering.”  In honor of today’s anniversary of the births of two R.A.F. fighter pilots,

Sir Peter Guy Wykeham-Barnes (b. 1915) and author

Roald Dahl (b. 1916),

here is one of the better symbols of the past century:

The circle is of course a universal symbol, and can be made to mean just about whatever one wants it to mean.  In keeping with Clint Eastwood’s advice, in the soundtrack album for “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” to “accentuate the positive,” here are some positive observations on a circle from the poet (and perhaps saint) Dante, who died on the night of September 13-14:

In the sun, Dante and Beatrice find themselves surrounded by a circle of souls famous for their wisdom on earth. They appear as splendid lights and precious jewels who dance and sing as they lovingly welcome two more into their company. Their love for God is kindled even more and grows as they find more individuals to love. Among the blessed souls are St. Thomas Aquinas and one of his intellectual “enemies”, Siger of Brabant, a brilliant philosopher at the University of Paris, some of whose teachings were condemned as heretical. Conflicts and divisions on earth are now forgotten and absorbed into a communal love song and dance “whose sweetness and harmony are unknown on earth and whose joy becomes one with eternity.”

Dante compares their dance and song to God’s bride on earth, the Church, when she answers the morning bells to rise from bed and “woo with matins song her Bridegroom’s love.” Some critics consider this passage the most “spiritually erotic” of all the one hundred cantos of the Comedy. It is the ending of Canto 10, verses 139-148.

— Fr. James J. Collins, “The Spiritual Journey with Dante V,” Priestly People October 1997

The above material on Dante is from the Servants of the Paraclete website.

For more on the Paraclete, see

The Left Hand of God.

See also the illustration in the note below.