Canto 33, Paradiso - After the Dream
Like Dante, I’m not entirely sure I’m up to the task of bringing things to a proper conclusion, for mine has always been more an analytic than poetic mind. If I were truly being honest with myself, I’d say that all I have to offer is a mere parody of insight.
Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna, / legato con amore in un volume, / ciò che per l’universo si squaderna: / sustanze e accidenti e lor costume / quasi conflati insieme, per tal modo / che ciò ch’i’ dico è un semplice lume.
In its depth I saw what interns itself, / bound with love in one volume, / that which throughout the universe spreads itself: / substances and accidents and their relations / as if conflated together, in such a way / that that which I say is a simple light.
The punto at the end of the journey of the middle of our lives is a point of convergence for all the substances, those who exist in themselves (humans, animals, angels, etc.), and accidents, that which exists only in substances, of the universe. The Book of Nature, as they once called it, displays itself (si squaderna) throughout the universe in a terrible mess, incomprehensible, like an essay in one hundred disconnected, intermittent pieces. The canto earlier alludes to the oracles of the Sibyl of Cumae, the prophetess at the center of the Aeneid who guides our pious hero through the afterworld to his father. In her cave, she meticulously lays out individual oak leaves–actual leaves not just metaphors for pages of a book–of her prophecies, which are blown away by even the lightest passing breeze. Her divine gift, her visionary insight, is revealed to be pathetic and weak in the face of one of the slightest incidents of the natural world.
The theme of the final canto of the Paradiso, of the final canto of the entire Comedy, is, paradoxically, failure. The poem culminates, reaches its final destination, has its greatest desire fulfilled, and, in so doing, fails. One could argue that there is nothing out of line in this, for it is the pilgrim who culminates, arrives, and burns with the very best longing, not the poem. It is the poem, or its narrative voice, that fails. One could argue that this is all just a versified “you had to be there, man.”
The image of the Sibyl in her cave is something that has stuck with me since I first read the Aeneid way back when… I don’t remember. Her presence in a medieval Christian text is justified, one supposes, by her prophecy in Virgil’s fourth eclogue of a messianic figure many later Christian readers understood to be Christ. Her presence is justified in this essay as an allegory of the brilliant failure. So, bear in mind, dear reader, this thing you see before you is a pale shade of an incredibly difficult (and occasionally boring) poem, which is a pale shade of the journey and the vision it seeks to convey. You and I stand now at a degree removed, scattered throughout the universe, but there is the hope that sometime, somewhere we will occupy the same single point of light.
Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio / che ‘l parlar mostra, ch’a tal vista cede, / e cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio. / Qual è colüi che sognando vede, / che dopo ‘l sogno la passione impressa / rimane, e l’altro a la mente non riede, / cotal son io, ché quasi tutta cessa / mia visïone, e ancor mi distilla / nel core il dolce che nacque da essa.
From there forward my seeing was greater / than speaking shows, which at such a sight fails, / and memory fails at such excess. / As is one who dreaming sees, / where after the dream the passion impressed / remains, and the rest returns not to the mind, / such am I, for almost wholly faded / my vision, and yet drips in / my heart the sweetness that was born of it.
I have said in various dumb ways that this poem is recursive, that it rewards reading again, and so the principle of “reading further” is transformed here into reading again from the beginning. I suppose it goes without saying that a complicated text rewards re-reading, but that doesn’t mean much. When I say that this poem is recursive, I mean its final cantos can function both as a culmination of the poem-as-journey and as preface–we’ve had words with regard to prefaces, I believe–to beginning again in the dark word, the selva oscura. For, arriving at the “end,” I have to say that I am as confused as enlightened.
The failures, then, of the final canto lead the pilgrim back to his condition in the dark wood, even as Heaven’s heavenly-ness erases from him all the mortal impediments that might… impede?… his vision of… something… God? More importantly, because the failures are attributable to the poem, they are also attributable to the poet. This means, rather paradoxically, that as chronologically the pilgrim becomes the poet recounting the journey after the fact, spiritually or perhaps mentally the poet has become the pilgrim at the very beginning of the Inferno, for whom the straight way is lost. Of course, the straight way is lost, because desire causes us to bend, like the arc of the bow and the arrow it shoots toward its mark, its segno, its sign, so bending we come around back again to ourselves. Like the Wheel of Fortune we fall only to rise only to fall only to rise ad infinitum. The poem itself, then, represents a kind of textual eternity, forever bending back in on itself, meaning its failures and failings are the pretext to salvation.
A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa; / ma già volgeva il mio disio e ‘l velle, / sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, / l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
Here power failed high fantasy; / but already was bending my desire and will, / just as a wheel that is moved evenly, / the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
[Image - George Romney]