Day-To-Day Dante: Exploring Personal Myth Through the Divine Comedy

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction:

Set the Compass. Begin the Journey

Part I:

Inferno

Part II:

Purgatorio

Part III:

Paradiso

Afterword

Sources Used

About the author

About the Artist

Foreword

Dante is one of those classics whom few read today. He seems dour, depressing, and even the usually chipper Emerson said that Dante is not a person one would invite home to dinner. But Professor Slattery has brought Dante to our attention once more, and insists that we take him seriously in this age which seems so antithetical to the tone and temper of the 14th century. And he is right, for Dante’s gift to us these centuries later is to help us enter more fully the invisible world which drives this visible world.

How do we bring the invisible world, the world which drives the visible, with all its obsessions, compulsions, distractions, projections, into consciousness? Sometimes we do it by examining our history, seeing patterns there, and intuiting their origin in the unconscious; sometimes we read our symptoms as expressions of the hidden will of the psyche; sometimes we incorporate the experience of others who offer insight and guides to the conduct of our lives. Sometimes we find the artist has, through the powers of the imagination, plumbed the depths of our beings and given form and shape to what Shakespeare called aerie nothings.

William Butler Yeats, perhaps the greatest poet in the last century, called Dante the chief imagination of Christendom. Having Yeats pay such homage to the Florentine is impressive enough, but Professor Slattery goes one better—he suggests that Dante’s vast portrait of the moral compass is still relevant, still germane to this world of texting, internet, Wall Street, moral relativism, and whatever lies next around the corner.

How can this be? When Dante walked the earth the world was flat, ostensibly part of a three-storied universe, the medieval institutions of mace and mitre ruled by both secular and divine fiat, and life, in the words of Hobbes a bit later historically, was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. How can someone who lived with such a different worldview than ours provide insight and guidance to our lives these seven centuries later?

For the answer to that question we have to turn to two sources. In his illuminating study of myth, Mythopoesis, Harry Slochower observed that artists turn the life of the spirit to material form in their songs, plays, novels, dramas, poems, when they feel that the values they celebrate are already beginning to slip away. Thus Don Quixote embodies chivalric ideals in a cynical and corrupt age. Faust embodies the noble search for truth when containing boundaries are shattered and the door to absolutism is opened. So, we see in Dante an urge to preserve order in a disordered world, an effort to ratify an explicit hierarchical chain of values with its metaphysical ground increasingly relativized, and an effort to link the choices one makes to consequences which ripple out into eternity amidst a world increasingly living precariously on the edge of the moment. So, this Dante, who seems tied to the disappearing values of an other epoch, scarcely appears germane to ours. But those same forces, those moral, psychological, and sacred concerns are all the more critical in a our time where, despite people’s conscious professions of belief, the world is ruled by existential anxiety, projections of the good life onto the visible world of materialism, and to the sundry distractions we conjure up to camouflage the fact that we float over the abyss.

The other source is C. G. Jung, whose notion of the archetypes reminds us that humanity continues to repeat itself, albeit in different guises and disguises, with varying levels of technological facility. The needs, motives, and agendas of the human psyche that moved Dante Alighieri to shape the chaos of life into such fearful symmetries still haunt our daily newspapers and the dreams we dream. The consequences of choices we make, or avoid, continue to pile up on our shores. Accordingly, Dante asks: you want material abundance? Then here are boulders to shove around for eternity. So we still must ask: how happy has our material abundance made us, how satisfied, how connected to something that really matters? Dante asks, since your mouth is full of deceit, here you are in a pool of excrement so that you swim in what you yourself generate. And do we not live still in a world of betrayal, insecurity, and distrust of ourselves and of others? Or, he says, are you bound by guilt and consequence to the choices of the past? How may one, by attending to the guidance of the soul (L. anima) can you find your way toward release and homecoming? That is certainly a question we are still asking.

While the language and metaphors of Dante and Florence have changed, there are still corrupt politicians, venal clergy, and folks like us lusting after one thing or another, and, finding it, grow bored and move onto the next luminous seduction. And while many will not embrace the particular moral compass Dante found, that is, the principles of medieval Christendom, the reader will find that Professor Slattery has managed to reframe the images and their abiding psychological principles in ways which honor both their author and the sensibility of the modern. This is no small feat.

In literary criticism there is something called the intentional fallacy, namely the assumption that the meaning of a work is what its author intended. No doubt Dante wanted to persuade his contemporaries of the truth of his faith, and summon them to accountability (and at the same time take a few cracks at his political enemies who sent him into exile). One need not accept his specific premises to experience the familiar dilemmas of the human condition which have not changed since. (After all, Dante called his poem The Comedy, not because it is funny in the contemporary sense, but because it has a happy ending, namely salvation. It was later critics who called the work divine as an expression of their appraisal of its merits). If Slochower is right, and I think he is, Dante already intuited that the Christian myth was slipping from beneath his feet, yet his magnificent effort to crystallize and preserve that large vision engages us today with the same questions, dilemmas, and decisions.

Dante asked, as did Socrates before him, that we live an examined life. Professor Slattery’s fine book asks the same of us. He not only allows us to revisit the original, but to see its patterns, its questions, its options unfolding anew in all our separate lives. One will not be able to read Dante, or Day-to-Day Dante, without living a more thoughtful, more considered life. For that, we may thank them both.

James Hollis,

Jungian Analyst

Houston, Texas

Acknowledgments

In completing this pilgrimage through Dante’s masterpiece, I wish to acknowledge the late Professor Raymond DiLorenzo of the English Department of The University of Dallas for introducing me to Dante’s medieval world, his La Vita Nuova and the Commedia that grew from Dante’s initial sonnets. I thank as well Professor Louise Cowan for introducing me to the theories of literary genres and revealing to me the three moments of Comedy that Dante so fully delineates in his poem.

For reading all of the manuscript, I offer my deep appreciation to Ginette Paris, who accompanied me throughout the entire journey. For reading parts and offering sage suggestions, I thank as well Edie Barrett, Tom Elsner, Cynthia Hale, Michael Hommel, Jane Mickelson, Neora Myrow, Elizabeth Nelson, Bern Primosch, Jennifer Selig, Shantena Sabbadini, Jacob Wright, and Willow Young. All of these close readers of the poem offered valuable suggestions on how to strengthen the work. To James Hollis for providing a perceptive and affirming Foreword I extend my gratitude. To Elizabeth Fergus-Jean, who has in the past and once again now, has offered her own art work and designed the cover for this volume, thank you for your generous spirit. Your aesthetic touch to my books has been a treasure. I am also grateful to Candice Moss for her technical expertise with formatting the manuscript.

I am very thankful as well to three radio hosts who invited me on to their shows to speak about this book: Taira St. John, Jungian therapist, who hosts The DNA of Carl Jung on KPFZ radio in Lakeport, California, and Phillip Lynch, who hosts In Touch With Carl Jung on blogtalkradio from the Centerpoint Foundation in Maine.I thank as well Elizabeth Stewart who invited me onto her radio show in Santa Barbara, Arts and Antiques, to speak about the manuscript and its value. Their generosity and incisive questioning challenged me further to define what I had created.

I also acknowledge with much warmth my friend and poet, Stephanie Pope. At an earlier stage of this work, she gathered a group of people on-line to work many of the entries. The responses she sent me from their group work were hugely gratifying. See www.mythopoetry.com

I also thank, as always for her unwavering support of my efforts over the decades, my wife of 43 years, Sandy. She said to me one day, quite casually, how is your day-to-day Dante book coming along? I had titled it differently, but when I heard her inclusive title, I immediately changed it; I think it captures the daily pilgrimage sense I hope is alive and moving in the following pages.

Finally, I acknowledge all the students who have studied this poem with me over the decades. I know their insights are imbedded here with mine and I thank them for taking me to further depths of the poem. It is, as are all classic poems of world literature, without a bottom.

Introduction:

Set the Compass. Begin the Journey

I have been blessed to teach some of the great literary classics primarily of the Western Tradition for the past 35 years. While they often exhaust me, I can never exhaust them, no matter how often I re-read them or what I or my students discover through their words and images. As I grow, these rich expression of the poetic imagination stretch to accommodate where I am on my own life’s pilgrimage and in the unfolding of my personal mythology. To read, for instance, Herman Melville’s epic novel about whaling, Moby-Dick, or Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House or Toni Morrison’s Beloved at age 18, then again at 28 and again at 46 is to enter each time a very different imaginal experience. Like us, these works and hundreds of others possess a Protean quality; they shape-shift, as does the god Proteus, who in Greek mythology is a carrier of the liquid quality of learning itself. Like Proteus, these marvelous narratives that contain such a storehouse of perennial wisdom have something of a liquid quality to them. By turns they will fill a vessel according to the dictates of its contours. Some energy within us responds differently, and so much more deeply as we ripen in age, to the same story that refuses at once to be the same and yet strives to be so. I believe one way to think about this changing yet perennial quality is by way of myth. Both the poetic work and each of us inhabit a particular mythos; as such, the poem and we ourselves are organically changing as the mythology we are in develops and deepens organically. More than simply a story, myths are perennial guidance systems as well as psychic patterns and structures that can guide an individual and an entire culture. They incorporate ways and styles of seeing, of perceiving and understanding. As such, myths are ever-renewing, shifting readily to accommodate us in our pilgrimage; in addition, they are life-enhancing. Myths are compasses that help us navigate through the events of any given day; they are also value-laden, carry our darkest secrets and secrete guidance when we feel inspired or led by forces outside ourselves.

In this introduction to a pilgrimage through Dante Alighieri’s (1265-1321) monumental story of an individual journey to self-understanding and to a sacred reality that informs such awareness, The Divine Comedy, written in 14th. century Italy, should be remembered, reclaimed and reread by a larger reading public, in large measure because of the myths it embodies in poetic form. What is most important is that the reader have an imaginal experience of the poem by putting it alongside his/her own narrative journey. Without the experience, the poem will never mean much because it does not touch the mythic reality the reader lives within. It fails to become authentically present because not seen as an analogy of one’s lived life.

First, let us consider in what way this poem, through reflections on a particular canto of Dante’s creation, enlarges and deepens my own orbit of understanding of myself and the larger political, religious and social worlds I move within. We could end with a contemplative question: in what way am I transformed by reading this story, especially if I am guided by short passages of it to stimulate my imagination, and then by a short writing meditation, to help me focus my thoughts and experiences in my own language? "This is how I understand it now" is a valid way of knowing the work—it is contemporary, temporary and evolving, as I am.

Sometime during a class reading, say, of Homer’s comic epic, the Odyssey, a student will approach me on a break, sometimes wearing a confused expression. He or she will make the following assertion or its variant: I read this work as an English major 15, 20, 30 years ago (choose one) and saw nothing of what we have been discussing today. Just the other day, one of my mythology students wrote me the following missive: "Moby-Dick became such an incredible experience for me. The richness of Melville’s expression, the breadth and depth of his sensitivity has affected me greatly, in ways I cannot speak yet." These examples are both powerful witnesses to the inherent force of a classic narrative as well as the challenging struggle to find one’s own language to voice their intimate connection. What the reader can not yet speak of is the power of mytho-poiesis working on him/her as it reshapes awareness that will eventually find language to describe.

What happened? I like to speak about it through myth. Each of us, I have suggested, is living out and within a unique personal myth, or patterned presence in the world, with all its attendant values, prejudices, likes, dislikes, desires, aspirations, shadows, dreams, and fantasies. Our personal myth is a guiding framework which we use to make meaning of the events of everyday by seeking out how they fit into the larger patterned field of meaning. When we read a classic work of fiction, we enter that story with our myth fully intact and engaged, but its inherent wholeness may be disrupted by the narrative knocking on its door. When the work touches deeply a part of that mythos, we pause, we stop; we may then be called to underline or write something in the margin. Or we get excited and want to let others know of this fabulous insight we believe is ours, no matter the source. We long to express what this experience has meant to us. Such is the deep impulse to learn, and, when possible, to learn within a community of shared possibilities with others. It allows me to see that myths serve us as energy fields, ways of power that attract, evoke, provoke and widen our field of vision.

I want to call these works classics for another reason. They are classics in part because they belong to a class of poetic expression that animates the deep experiences of human life which are given a particular coherent and organic form in the making, an angle so to speak, by which to view them and often even instructions on how to read them. These large human experiences, while inflected differently and uniquely in each one, are at the same time universally similar. The mythologist Joseph Campbell borrowed a term from the great Irish writer, James Joyce: Monomyth. By this word he meant that there is one great story inflected differently and distinctly in distinct cultural settings and in an individual life. We can read an Indian epic, or a Japanese novel or a recent fictional work from Kabul or Baghdad and sense in the narrative pieces of the sediments of our own lives, so universally connected are we all in the deepest levels of our hearts.

The great quality of classic works of literature—I include here all works of fiction: plays, short stories, novels, epics, fairy tales, legends—is that they each have their own myth in their deepest core, their own way of seeing and apprehending the world according to a certain pattern of values and beliefs, prejudices, shortcomings and discoveries--what we might sum up as a world view. When we enter into their territory and read them openly, freely, without prejudice or agenda, we engage what the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge advised—to willingly suspend our disbelief so that we might be able to believe we are vulnerable to change. This he called poetic faith, based on our imaginative capacity to yield to a larger story line and in the process discover more deeply our own. When we engage it authentically, our own personal myth begins to entwine with the myth that a poem like Dante’s Commedia makes available. It is a way of reading analogically so as not to literalize the poem into a political pronouncement or a sociological credo, but rather to experience it as a symbolic expression of particular and often shared human conditions, situations and beliefs. Its lived crafted reality finds analogies in the world we are comprised of and may be shaped anew in this poetic encounter.

In such an engaged, imaginative and complex process, we find ourselves in sympathy not only with the characters and plot of the work, but in added sympathy with our own lives and those of others. Our personal myth may be stirred deeply by the actions of the classic. I think one of the ends of this form of study is to cultivate in ourselves the gift of compassion, both for ourselves and for others because we sense on a broader plane the shared distresses and nobilities of other humanities. So less concern is given to hidden meanings to be discovered and more to moments of revelation and of lasting insights, new ways of entertaining ideas and images, story lines, plot twists, paradox, ambiguity that mirror qualities of our own being. In short, classics of world literature offer ways to meditate on the grand mystery of life itself through its marvelous and mysterious particulars, if we can enter into a conversation with it and come to know and be transformed by its psychopoetic action. This latter is what I am proposing the reader do through Dante’s profound poetic achievement. His story is in myriad and profound ways, our story writ large. Our own poetic comedy will be given deeper roots through the largesse of its poetic expression.

So to the work at hand: Dante’s gnarled, twisty, mystical, psychological, mythic, political and theological poem. It is not read much today and certainly not in its entirety. Yes, Inferno is still up for grabs in the academic world; Paradiso almost never. For this voyage there is no short cut or abridged travelogue; we enter instead the complete journey as Dante envisioned it for us.

You are invited along, not just by me but by the author of the poem. I say this because we will soon notice that no less than 22 times explicitly and any number of times implicitly, Dante himself as pilgrim and as poet who recounts his adventures through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven addresses us as readers. He assumes we are a major player and character in the action, for his story of being lost and confused at a moment in his life, followed by a slow and gradual revelation of his own shadows and virtues, guided by various mentors on the way, is our story in the same instant. Of course the content is uniquely ours, but the patterns they embody belong to humankind. We can participate in these patterns by analogy and through the symbolic landscape of the imagination it engenders, and in this imaginative act recognize what is hidden beneath the floorboards of our own seemingly ordered existence. The poem’s progress will reveal to us we are more complex and multi-layered than we realize. Finally, Dante’s frequently recurring call to us suggests as well that we are an essential figure in completing the poem under the language, habits and afflictions of our own personal mythology.

Topography of The Divine Comedy

Dante’s poem of a little more than 14,000 lines consists of 100 cantos divided into three canticas: Inferno (Hell) Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise). Inferno has 34 cantos while the other two canticas have 33 each. Symmetry was the order of the day in the Middle Ages and Dante was very much a part of such an exacting numerical schema.

Essentially, the poem comprises a recollection by Dante the poet of a journey he had as a pilgrim through these three landscapes. Dante the poet now is thus recollecting the adventures of Dante the pilgrim then. On his journey he is blessed with various guides, each of whom takes him as far as each is able before passing him to the next mentor. These major presences include the classical Latin poet Virgil; Beatrice Portinari, who died young and whom Dante loved very much in Florence; St. Bernard of Clairveaux who devoted his professional life as abbot to the study of the Blessed Virgin Mary and was one of the most influential writers of the mystical way; the mother of God herself who leads Dante to his final vision in the highest realm of Paradise.

Along the way, dozens of souls from history, myth, literature, politics, philosophy and theology instruct him. Many of these individuals Dante knew personally; others he was familiar with through his studies. It may be helpful to reflect while on the journey, of the nature of the seven deadly sins: pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth, as various ways that an individual may love—either excessively, insufficiently or distortedly. Love is indeed the central theme of the poem; as such it welds all the cantos together in their complex collaboration. The journey Dante undertakes is to witness first all the distorted or incomplete forms of loving exhibited in Hell. This he does with Virgil’s guidance as they spiral down through the various regions of suffering until they come to the earth’s center, where the figure of Dis, Satan, is frozen in ice in a violent and despairing rage. Concentration on one’s self exclusively is the ultimate prison. We might think of these sins as forms of pathology that soul assumes as it seeks its way towards wholeness and towards a sense of sacredness. Knowing pathos is part of the journey to blessedness; the soul can migrate through this landscape imaginally rather than through a literal event. Dante’s poem gives this sense to us both ways, as physical journey and as poetic pilgrimage.

He then ascends, with Virgil’s continued guidance, the mountain of Purgatory by circling it, wide at the base, narrower towards the top. This mountain was formed from the earth displaced when Satan, challenging God, was defeated and hurled to the earth. He impacted it with such force that he displaced the earth from one side of the world to the other. In one forceful motion he created the cavity that is Hell while creating the mountain that is Purgatory. That act alone is worthy of our reflection. Concentration on the communal quality of shedding the blinders of human weaknesses comprises the action of purgation.

At the top of Mount Purgatory, Dante and Virgil enter the Earthly Paradise where Adam and Eve were originally created to love God. Here Virgil silently leaves his student when Beatrice enters in a lavish pageant and greets Dante with a coolness that surprises him. She will nonetheless initiate him into the next region, Paradise, and guide him almost to journey’s end. In the last few cantos Dante is guided by St. Bernard until he too abrogates his student to the Blessed Virgin, who emerges as the pilgrim’s final guide to an ultimate vision that ends the poem. His journey is one that takes him from being lost in life in a gnarled and twisted sense of his own identity and purpose, to finding within the mystical realm of love, always embodied, the image of God that will guide him when he returns to the land of the living to relate his story. At the end of the poem his own desires and will and intellect are in perfect conformity with the Love that turns the planets and stars of the created order. Love as a marriage of wills is the vision which he attains at the poem’s end. He has, in the creation of the poem in remembrance, achieved an unusual measure of wholeness and self awareness, fully conscious in the reality of the sacred’s healing presence.

We as readers, he assumes, in taking this same journey with him in recollection, may experience what he did through the elegant and persuasive poetic telling of his tale. For our own stories are deeply imbedded in his pilgrimage, which is a work of art, full of aesthetic force and power, not unlike our own composition.

My journey of creating this work occurred between 4 and 6 a.m. over a 24 month period. I discovered years ago that rising at 4 a.m and reading, meditating, and writing, when the soul is porous to influences that emerge from the sleeping/dreaming psyche, are more the presences of others than my own ideas; I therefore willingly gave myself over to what the poem wanted to say through me. I simply listened closely and wrote what I heard. My hope is that I got part of it right. Any shortcomings are mine, not Dante’s poetic imagination.

The Translation Used

There are many beautiful and insightful translations of Dante’s poem. Looking at many of them, I saw how translation is a profound and at times idiosyncratic form of interpretation. I could have chosen another. But I decided on the following translation in one hardback volume. The Divine Comedy, translated by Allen Mandelbaum. Introduction by Eugenio Montale. New York: Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Also in print is a three volume bi-lingual edition of the same translation, published by Bantam Books. I will occasionally use a word or phrase from the Italian translation in these volumes as well.

The God Language

I find no way to waltz around or ignore the fact that Dante’s poem arises and is nourished by a particular mythos of the Divine: the Christian story that combines, among other traditions, the Old and New Testaments as its backdrop and guiding principle. But I also believe that one is not locked in, as reader, to just this principle of the sacred, divinity, the mysterium tremendum, as Dante himself was not. He used, for example, scenes from mythology offered by Ovid, Homeric epics, classical references from philosophy and history, mythic figures throughout, dreams, as well as a host of other sources. My point here is that through the Christian myth, the ordering principle and world view of the day, Dante went deep into the realm of archetypes, universal impulses and patterned forms and tendencies in the soul of all of us, to excavate the most profound and universal layers of our humanity. The Christian myth, moreover, carries within its narrative so much of the archetypal patterns that haunt and host each of us in the world; in that spirit Dante’s story is to be journeyed through as a universal force that we each live out individually as readers.

The reader, in other words, need not be baptized exclusively into this myth of the sacred in order to gain from the poem a deeper sense of one’s self. But there is no fully acceptable way around the fact that I am attempting to appropriate one myth and carry it into the fabric of another. I accept all shortcomings and areas where the reader may be put off by sin, redemption. purgation and the like that make him/her feel that a Christian baptism is imminent. I simply ask the reader to accept the deep mytho-poetic structure of the poem and not be paralyzed by anger or fear or to recoil from the tenets of Dante’s myth. He uses them to reveal that the soul is full of pathos and prayer, deformities and divinities, the grotesque and grace. If we do not become too lopsided in our reading, then we can appreciate the struggle this one pilgrim underwent in the service of the deep mystery of being human and the daily struggle that increased consciousness seems to demand of us.

My own suggestion is to invite the poem to accommodate your own belief system, your own sense of a Higher Power, a sense of the sacred, a Primal Source, or a symbol of the Self and the ineffable qualities of the numinous. We acknowledge that he was writing from inside a coherent and forceful and all-pervasive mythos. I do not believe, however, that it therefore precludes other mythologies from entering and learning from his zeitgeist. Dante’s rendering of the Christian narrative is elastic enough to accommodate a plurality of readings.

Structure of Each Page

I have divided my 365 entries and reflections so that one can pilgrimage through and meditate on, through reading and writing, one page per day for an entire year. I have chosen in most cases between 5-8 lines in each entry: approximately 121 passages from Inferno, and the same number from Purgatorio and Paradiso, plus 2, for a total of 365. Each direct quote is followed by several lines which summarize the cited material. Next is a brief reflection on the passage, some observations included, such that one senses some possible ways the passage may be traversed. In this way, we canvas as readers the entire poem in three equal installments.

Lastly, each entry and reflection is followed by a Meditation I invite you to respond to in writing. You may choose to skip over many of them while choosing others that have a particular attraction or relevance for you at this place in your own life pilgrimage. My hope is that you might come to your own insights about your personal travels and travails. You might even think of working these passages with a friend or with a small reading group, so that you can help one another out if one gets stuck in a place where a guide might be both necessary and welcome. Several readers have done this with the manuscript with rewarding consequences.

I would also mention here, in the service of moving slowly through the passages, that in a letter Dante wrote to a benefactor, Can Grande de la Scala, who helped the exiled poet with money and a secure place in which to write the poem, he affirmed: My poem is not for speculation but for implementation. In short, he wants us not just to read it, but to take it into our own life struggles, disappointments, failures, successes, achievements, bewilderments, and then to implement what we learn so that our own lives are fuller, more blessed, full of grace and insights we might share with others.

That, in short, is my intention: to share each day of the year through the poem. You will never run out of things to say, see or write about. For each of you who engages this difficult but deeply rewarding poem, one which repays in abundance every moment you spend with it, the poem will breathe in the larger world that much more. When the spirits move you, buy a copy of the poem and read it in its entirety. If not, let these vignettes of Dante’s genius suffice for now. One thing is certain, however: no one out there is not on a pilgrimage somewhere. My belief is that Dante’s story raises to a higher level of consciousness the terms of our own storied journey so that we can see our plot with greater awareness and track the trajectory of our personal myth at the same time.

May the unique gift of your own journey, including its suffering, pain and shortfalls, as well as its achievements, moments of courage and grace, offer you a deeper sense of your own unique contribution to the world story, of which we are each a narrative essential.

Part I:

Inferno

To journey to Hell means to become Hell oneself.

C.G. Jung, The Red Book, p. 240.

January 1

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,

I found myself within a shadowed forest,

for I had lost the path that does not stray.

Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,

that savage forest, dense and difficult

which even in recall renews my fear. (Inferno 1. 1-6)

Dante’s loss of himself in wilderness suggests he has now regained consciousness and seeks to know by expressing his dilemma, what actually happened to him. With the word our (nostra), the poet/pilgrim invites us as readers into his poem as a journey that begins in a dark wood. I call it the forest of awakening. Falling asleep to ourselves, our goals, desires and purposes is not a strange experience for any of us. In fact, we may fall asleep a number of times before a full awakening occurs. He also reveals the power of memory here to recreate the past with such force that the original fear accompanies it. His recollection is a recreation and with it, a reliving of the original experience.

When and by what means we awake is a crucial and often transformative moment because it determines what we will pick up again or retrieve from our life before we lost consciousness of our true path. It is a moment that reminds me of a threshold because we decide at such a juncture or crossroad what to let go of that bought us to such an impasse. Perhaps to go on, we must forget certain circumstances, forgive certain people, to be free of what traps us in the woods. They are a place of awakening and entrapment at once.

The path that does not stray is our path to wholeness and completeness, one that yields joy in the making. Awakening renews the path of discovery.

Meditation:

What are three forces, powers, or presences in your life that put you to sleep in the shadowed forest in the first place?

January 2

And almost when the hillside starts to rise—

Look there!—a leopard, very quick and lithe,

a leopard covered with a spotted hide.

…he so impeded my ascent

that I had often to turn back again

…

[then] I beheld a lion…

And then a she-wolf showed herself; she seemed

to carry every craving in her leanness; (Inf. 1: 31-35;45;49-50)).

As if his newly-awakened state were not threatening enough, the pilgrim then sees a lion and a she-wolf, in addition to the leopard. Together the three beasts are determined not to let him move to the base of Mount Purgatory, the geography of Hope. Climbing up and out is not to be the pilgrim’s path; rather, climbing down and in is the way through Hell, an obligatory journey so that Dante becomes fully aware of the horrors that the human heart is capable of creating. Turning back, retracing one’s steps, re-membering earlier conditions—all are necessary for a deep reflection of his life. No shortcuts are allowed, though they may be sought.

What attacks us, blocks our path, and threatens to devour our most noble intentions in life to make our pilgrimage more rugged than we ever imagined? No one escapes jaws that can clamp down to tear asunder our best laid blueprints, our goals and dreams.

Some of the fiercest appetites that arrest our movement are beastly, instinctive and threatening to our more civilized nature. Yet they are part of each of our instinctive lives. Denying their existence and power is sentimental, angelic and destructive.

Not facing, often alone, the possible consequences of such impasses can leave us in a condition worse than asleep: that of a cowardly and fearful disposition that paralyzes desire and arrests new growth.

Meditation:

What is your leopard, lion or she-wolf that keeps you from the geography of Hope?

January 3

"But why do you return to wretchedness?

Why not climb up the mountain of delight,

the origin and cause of every joy?"

And are you then that Virgil, you the fountain

that freely pours so rich a stream of speech?

I answered him with shame upon my brow. (Inf. 1.76-81)

Virgil has just appeared to Dante, sent at the behest of Beatrice to help him rediscover the straight path of love in due measure. Virgil questions Dante’s turning back to the safety of the wilderness where he will be secure and unconscious, devoid of life and growth. Dante recognizes him after Virgil has told his history; now the lost pilgrim feels some hope, for the gifted poet of the classical world will guide him not just through the territories of Hell and Purgatory, but through the wilderness of verse as poet and mentor.

His new guide will assist him in creating the poem as he recreates himself in the process.

To find or to be gifted with a guide in this life, or for Dante very shortly through the state of souls after death, is a blessing and an act of grace. Going it alone into new territory is often far too great a challenge for most people. Yes, we can consciously seek out mentors, teachers, guides on life’s pilgrimage or be offered them as gifts in our life’s passage. Will we have the wisdom to accept them?

But the mystery of life gathers around those helpers and mentors who are offered to us as part of a divine or extraordinary plan. They step forward out of the mist to tell us what we need but perhaps don’t want to know. They may be temporary and serve to re-orient our journey. Others may remain with us in life or in memory as constant touchstones for our thoughts and actions. Guides may appear in the form of a person, a song, an animal, a book, a magazine article, even a phone call.

Meditation:

Describe a guide/mentor that has appeared to you with no seeking on your part. How did it change your life?

January 4

If I have understood what you have said,

replied the shade of that great-hearted one,

"your soul has been assailed by cowardice,

which often weighs so heavily on a man—

distracting him from honorable trials—

as phantoms frighten beasts when shadows fall." (Inf. 2. 43-49)

Virgil, the classical Latin poet whose work Dante emulated in his own craft, discerns the weak or soft spot that Dante wears like a lead mantle that suffocates his progress out of the dark wood. He explains to his pilgrim what he cannot see: what it is that keeps him from progressing out of the woods. Virgil distinguishes mortals from beasts through an interesting analogy: cowardice is to individuals as phantoms are to beasts. Both are stopped in their tracks under the burden of being arrested. Perhaps honor is lost by both in those moments of fear. Virgil also implicates the close relationship between courage and freedom, crucial for Dante to grasp at this early stage of his struggle.

Often the voice of discernment by another allows us to see what otherwise we may remain blind to. Other eyes, especially those of others we respect and admire, become essential for our freedom, eyes that both discern accurately and compassionately our malady or emotional failing, and then a voice to relate honestly to us what we suffer.

A diagnosis is the first step to curing what ails us as illness: loss of courage, or envy, resentments, lack of enthusiasm, or clinging to beliefs that no longer help us. From his mentor, Dante is able to see