Curiosity

If the quest to find the first page has not been successful, it is not for want of trying. Sometime in the second half of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese philosopher Isaac Abravanel, who had settled in Spain, later to be exiled and make his exodus to Venice, strict in the principles of his learned reading, raised an unusual objection to Maimonides. In addition to reconcil­ing Aristotle and the Bible, Maimonides sought to extract from the Torah's sacred words the basic principles of Jewish belief.²⁰ Shortly before his death in 1204, following a tradition of summary exegesis begun by Philo of Alex­andria in the first century, he had expanded Philo's list of the five core articles of faith to thirteen.²¹ Thus increased, these thirteen articles were to be used, according to Maimonides, as a test of allegiance to Judaism, separating true believers from the goyim. Abravanel, arguing against Maimonides' dogma, remarked that since the Torah was a God-given whole from which no syllable could be dispensed, the attempt to read the sacred text in order to choose from it a series of axioms was disingenuous if not heretical. The Torah, Abra­vanel asserted, was complete unto itself and no single word of it was more or less important than any other. For Abravanel, even though the art of com­mentary was a permissible and even commendable accompaniment to the craft of reading, God's word admitted no double entendres but manifested itself literally, in unequivocal terms. Abravanel was implicitly distinguishing between the Author as author and the reader as author. The reader's job was not to edit, either mentally or physically, the sacred text but to ingest it whole, just as Ezekiel had ingested the book offered to him by the angel, and then to judge it either sweet or bitter, or both, and work from there.

Abravanel belonged to one of the oldest and most prestigious Jewish families of the Iberian Peninsula, which claimed to be descended from King David: his father served the Infante of Portugal as a financial adviser, and his son was Leon Hebreo, the author of the Neoplatonist classic Dialogues of Love, which the prince of Sansevero later printed in Naples. Abravanel was a voracious bookworm, and he pursued readings of the word of God, not just those written on tomes of parchment and paper, but also those inscribed in the vast book of the world. In the Jewish tradition, the notion that the natural world is the material manifestation of the word of God stems from an apparent scriptural contradiction. The book of Exodus states that after Moses received God's commandments on Mount Sinai, he "came and told the people all the words of the Lord, and all the judgments, and all the peo­ple answered with one voice, and said, 'All the words which the Lord hath said will we do.' And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord" (24:3-4; see also Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Numbers). But the Abot treatise in the Mish- nah declares that "Moses received the Torah on Mount Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets, the prophets to the members of the Great Assembly" (1:1). How to hold together these state­ments since both must be true? Like Maimonides' and Abulafia's attempts to hold together Aristotelian philosophy and the Word of God, Abravanel pon­dered how the apparently contradictory divine texts could be reconciled.

In the first years of the ninth century there appeared a collection of bib­lical commentaries attributed to the second-century master Eliezer ben Hyr- canus, The Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer, which proposes an answer to the co­nundrum: "Moses spent forty days on the Mountain before the Lord, blessed be His name, as a student sits before his master, reading the precepts of the written Torah during the day and learning the precepts of the oral Torah

Detail of the 1933 RCA building mosaic "Intelligence Awakening Mankind," by Barry Faulkner, at Rockefeller Center, New York, showing "Thought" with "the Written Word" on one side and "the Spoken Word" on the other, a modern depiction of God's oral and written books. (Photograph © Christopher Murphy. Reproduced by permission.)

during the night."²² The Torah was thus presented as a double book, written and oral, the written Torah being the immutable core made of God's words and bound in the book that came to be called the Bible, the oral Torah an ongoing dialogue between God and his creatures, set down in the commen­taries of inspired teachers and materialized for all in the hills and rivers and woods of the world itself. In the seventeenth century, Baruch Spinoza recog­nized God's double manifestation in the famous maxim: Godsive natura, "God or [in other words] Nature." For Spinoza, God and Nature were two editions of the same text.

Perhaps because Abravanel understood that our duty is strictly to read the text, not add to it our own words, the learned man of the world mis­trusted the concept of divine inspiration and was skeptical of prophets. He preferred the philologist's task of comparing different editions, and used his political and philosophical skills to decipher the book of the world in the light of the written Torah. Since God, by means of one of his curious instruments, the Catholic crown, had decreed the expulsion of Jews and Arabs from Spain and led him, Don Isaac Abravanel, into painful exile, he would profit from this adversity by transforming his enforced wanderings into an experience of learning: he would prepare himself to study the pages of God's other volume as they now unfolded before him in time and space.

After disembarking in Venice in 1492, Abravanel applied his knowledge of Scripture to the new society that confronted him on every minor and major occasion. He asked himself, for instance, in the light of the Torah, how the doge's government, given the lukewarm welcome he himself had experi­enced, could be compared to the brutal and exclusionary rule of the Catholic kings. Deuteronomy 17:14-20 set down the manner in which a ruler should be chosen in order to rule well; according to Abravanel, the Spanish king had disobeyed these sacred precepts. Ferdinand did not, as Deuteronomy in­structed, "write in a book a copy of the law," nor did he read it faithfully "all the days of his life, that he [might] learn to fear the Lord his God, by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them." Stretching his exegetical rule, Abravanel argued that, according to the Talmudic commen­tary of this passage, Jews were not obliged to be governed by a king or an emperor. However, if they chose to be, the monarch's powers would certainly fall under the Deuteronomical limitations. King Ferdinand had evidently refused to comply with these. Therefore, Abravanel concluded, the Venetian doges were closer to the Torah's law, and even though they manifestly dis­dained another Deuteronomical prohibition—that no ruler should "greatly multiply for himself silver and gold"—by and large it could be said that they submitted faithfully to the sumptuary regulations of the Venetian Republic.

Abravanel became the head of the exiled Jewish community in Venice, using his political skills to help his brethren. He was, above all, a faithful and exacting reader, a rationalist, a practical man, a scientific scholar confident enough even to criticize the "prophetic leanings" of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and he probably knew of Dante and his Commedia, since several Jewish scholars had read and discussed the poem in Rome, Bologna, and Venice. The scholar Yehuda Romano lectured on the Commedia to his community, and translit­erated it into Hebrew script, and the poet Immanuel de Roma (who was per­haps Romano's half-brother) attempted to write his own version from a Jew­ish perspective.²³

The core of Jewish faith is the belief in the promised coming of the Messiah. Based on his close readings of the Torah and using his mathemat­ical knowledge, Abravanel concluded that the Messiah would arrive in the year 1503 (a date postponed by Abravanel's contemporary, the learned medi­cal doctor Bonet de Lattes, to 1505). In this expectation Abravanel was to be disappointed: he died in 1508, without witnessing any of the marvels that were said to announce the Messiah's arrival. A literalist to the end, he as­sumed that the error was in his own reading, never in the sacred texts from which his conclusions had been drawn. It may be supposed that, if any­thing, his failure confirmed his conviction concerning the dangers of exe- getical temptation.

As so many times in the history of human intentions, a grand ambitious curiosity was overshadowed by aleatory failure. Abravanel's struggle to re­store hermeneutical confidence in the totality of the sacred texts and in the mirror of the world was forgotten in the light of his failure to date the Mes­siah's coming. If he had not been able to accomplish the latter, what faith could anyone have in the former?

Abravanel had argued that the proper reading of the Torah was one in which reason and logic must prevail over poetic and visionary disquisitions. But within the ever-constraining limits of the ghetto walls, the Jews of Venice, who by 1552 were to number over nine hundred souls, longed for something more than a strict reading of the Talmud: they longed for a reading that would offer if not magical assistance at least magical hope. In the early twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke described the Venice ghetto as a self-contained city which, instead of spreading out by the sea, because of the constricted space the Jews were allowed, grew into the heavens like a new Babel, a place for storytelling. The stories they chose to tell were tales of magic.²⁴

Rather than profit from the rigorous lessons of the lost master, the ma­jority of the Jews preferred to recall his (however inexact) auguries. In order better to understand, to assist, or even to refute the failed predicted chronol­ogy, the Jews of Venice began to show a thirst for occult learning and ancient conjuring that might help them establish a new date for the certain coming, and a flood of Kabbalistic books, from apocalyptic visions to manuals of divination (such as those by Abulafia), flowed from the Venetian presses under the fluctuating tolerance of the Inquisition, which intermittently allowed and prohibited the printing of Jewish books.²⁵

Among the many titles, the Talmud, above all, was considered a book of both natural and magical knowledge. Though in the Mishnah, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, known as Rashi, the greatest of all Talmudic scholars, had declared that magicians (mekhasheph) who performed a "real" act of magic were to be stoned, the text distinguished clearly between the learning of the occult craft and its performance. Close to his death in 120, Rabbi Eliezer, wise in even the most humble things but forbidden to teach them for having disobeyed the rulings of the Sanhedrin (the council of Jewish leaders), bemoaned like Faust that all his knowledge was now useless. "I know," he said, "three hun­dred rulings—and some say, three thousand rulings—concerning the plant­ing of cucumbers, and no man has ever asked me about it, except for Akiva ben Yoseph. On one occasion, I and he were walking down the road: he said to me, Master, teach me about the planting of cucumbers. I said one thing, and the whole field was filled with cucumbers. He said, Master, you have taught me how to plant them, now teach me how to uproot them. I said one thing, and they were all gathered in one place." On this magical perfor­mance, the Talmud comments: "It says, 'You shall not learn to do' (Deuter­onomy 18:9)—to do you may not learn, but you may learn to understand and to teach."²⁶ The Talmud underscores the difference between the act imag­ined and the act performed, between what is permissible in literature and the imagination but not permissible in life.

To reflect on such weighty matters, access to the Talmud was of the es­sence: the Shulkhan Arukh, or Code of Jewish Law, demands that time be set aside for frequent study of the Talmud. Prior to the invention of printing, yeshiva students either themselves copied individual tractates or commis­sioned scribes for the task, but "the system was slow and prone to error."²⁷ A solution for this problem needed to be found.

Venice, in the early years of the sixteenth century, had already become the undisputed center of publishing in Europe, both because of the skill of its printers and because of the extent of its book trade. Though the first He­brew book printed in Venice, Ya'akov ben Asher's Arba' ah Turim (The Four Orders), had issued from the press of Rabbi Meshullam Cusi and sons, the

Venetian printing business was almost exclusively in the hands of gentiles such as Daniel Bomberg, Pietro Bragadin, and Marco Giustiniani, all of whom employed Jewish artisans when printing Hebrew books "to compose the let­ters and assist in the corrections."²⁸ In spite of this, what mattered was not who printed the books but the mere fact that Hebrew books were now easily available, and in this sense Gutenberg's invention changed the relationship of the Jews to their books. Until the late fifteenth century, few Jewish com­munities could afford to have a good library, and much effort was spent on editing faulty copies to obtain correct texts. With the invention of the press, printers throughout Europe quickly recognized that there was a market for books in Hebrew not only in the Jewish communities but also among the gentiles. Numerous editions of the Hebrew Bible, the prayer book, the rab­binical commentaries, and works of Jewish theology and philosophy poured forth and reached every class of reader, facilitating among Jews the obligatory study of the Torah. A hundred and forty Hebrew volumes were printed during the incunabula period (before 1501) in Europe until Venice established its remarkable supremacy in the international market.²⁹

Arguably, the masterpiece of the Venetian Hebrew book production was the first complete edition of the Babylonian Talmud, printed some fifty years after Abravanel's death, by Daniel Bomberg. Born Daniel van Bomberghen and originally from Antwerp, Bomberg established himself in Venice in 1516, where he translated his name into Hebrew and, during his three decades in Venice (he returned to his hometown in 1548, dying there a year later), pro­duced some of the best and most important editions of Jewish books, among them the Biblia rabbinica (the Hebrew Bible with translations into Aramaic and commentaries by noted medieval scholars), which he astutely dedicated to Pope Leo X. Though Bomberg was, above all, a businessman and pub­lished only what he believed would sell, he was also a man driven by what some scholars have called "missionary intentions," a bookmaker who loved the work in which he was engaged. Probably to divert the censors, together with the Jewish books Bomberg printed in 1539 an anti-Semitic tract, Itinera deserti de judaicis disciplini (The Desert Wanderings of the Jewish People), by Gerard Veltwyck. It was his only anti-Semitic publication.³⁰

Assisted by a friar, Felice da Prato, Bomberg began his catalogue of books printed in Hebrew characters with the Pentateuch, followed by a selection of the Prophets and later by both the Babylonian and the Palestinian Talmuds, including the eleventh-century commentaries of Rashi. For his edition of the Talmud, Bomberg employed a group of Jewish and non-Jewish scholars as­sembled for this purpose, thus setting a model for editing Jewish works that would later be followed by most other printing houses in Europe.

The Babylonian Talmud, printed in sets of twelve volumes, was a gigan­tic enterprise that took Bomberg three years to complete. Bomberg disliked ornamentation: the title page of each volume lacks any hint of a family crest or printer's mark. The title page of the Pesahim tractate (in the third volume) reads:³¹

tractate pesahim pesach richon and sheni with the commentary of Rashi, Tosafot, Piskei Tosafot, and the Asheri free from all im­pediments and precise for the purpose of study. As the hand of the Lord has favoured us, for this has never been printed, may the Lord enable us to complete all six orders as is the intent of Daniel Bom­berg from Antwerp, in whose house this was printed, here in venice

Though a number of individual Talmudic tractates had appeared earlier in other cities, this was the first time that the entire corpus was printed as a scholarly whole. Bomberg relied for his text on the only extant manuscript, known as the Munich codex, of 1334. The layout of Bomberg's edition is re­markable both for its efficiency and its originality: the text of the Talmud itself appears in square Hebrew type in the center of each page, Rashi's commentary is on the inside margin, and the tosafot, or "additions" (other critical remarks by various commentators), are on the outer, both set in the semi-cursive Gothic lettering known as "rabbinical" or "rashi." All subsequent editions of the Bab­ylonian Talmud followed Bomberg's layout, maintaining the disposition of text and commentary, as well as the exact position of words and letters.

It has been suggested by the French scholar Marc-Alain Ouaknin that the layout for Bomberg's Talmud was inspired by the layout of Venice itself; it could also be said that it was inspired by the position of the ghetto within the city, a Jewish core nestled within Venice, the city itself boxed in by land

Pages from Daniel Bomberg's Talmud (Venice, 1519-23). (Photograph courtesy of Sotheby's, Inc., and the Valmadonna Library Trust ©)

and water, a frame within a frame within a frame. Less than a decade after Abravanel's death, on 29 March 1516, the Jews of Venice were ordered for the first time to stay within the walls of the ghetto. To prevent them from "roam­ing about at night," the two gates were locked at midnight by a couple of guards whose salaries the Jews themselves were obliged to pay. The prescribed enclosure is already notable in a perspective map of Venice printed in 1500 by Jacopo de' Barbari: it shows the ghetto enclosed by canals and rows of build­ings, like an island of text in the middle of an annotated page.³²

Like every visitor to Venice, Bomberg must have been struck by its in­laid, convoluted structure. Whether inspired by the city itself and its web of canals and islands or by the enclosed ghetto seen as a microcosm of the larger urban design, it seems likely that, consciously or unconsciously, the printer's imagination mirrored on the page the mazelike contours of the place in which he had settled. Turn a map of Venice and its ghetto sideways and something akin to a page of the Talmud appears, its clean lines twisted and broken like

Jacopo de' Barbari, "Perspective Plan of Venice," 1500. (Palazzo Ducale, Venice, Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource, NY)

a picture in a dream. The singular, unreal city that every visitor discovers is thus echoed in a book that is, like the city, a commentary on God's work: the Talmud glossing the Torah mirrors Venice glossing the book of nature. Just as the Talmud surrounds with its learned annotations the word delivered to Moses for the people, the Venice of fire and air is surrounded by God's earth and water, which gloss the flaming castles floating between land and sea with the responding breath of an enraptured speaker.

G. K. Chesterton once remarked that "perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun; and every evening, 'Do it again' to the moon."³³ On the scale of the stars or of the universe, God's book is at the same time unique and repet­itive, and we, its footnotes, try to follow suit, so that while the invisible and singular core of Venice is forever framed by a cacophony of commentaries— geographical and architectural, poetic and artistic, political and philosophical— the Talmud (aided by Gutenberg's invention) reproduces its established wake of commentaries again and again, in copy after printed copy and in the very design of each of its pages. And because no design is fortuitous, both the layout of Venice and the layout of its Talmud allow readers to test their intu­itive intelligence and cultural memory by means of these cartographies.

As any visitor to the city knows, maps are useless in Venice. Only the repeated experience of its pavements and bridges, its campi and glimmering facades, its Arsenal guarded by stone lions from different ages that Dante must have seen allow a small degree of knowledge of its meandering coher­ence. Getting to know Venice entails losing yourself in it as the Romantics spoke of losing yourself in a book. True Venice connoisseurs, if led blind­folded through the city, will always know where they find themselves, recog­nizing by touch or smell or sound, reading the city with their mind's eye, its every twist and every turn.

The Talmud too is mapless, and yet a constant and wise reader will know what lies on every page, both through memory and force of habit. In a yeshiva reading test known as Shass Pollak (from Shass, an abbreviation of "Talmud" in Hebrew, and Pollak, "Polish"), the Talmud is opened at random and a pin is placed on a word. The reader undergoing the examination is asked what word is in that same place on any other page. Once the reader has given his answer, the pin is pressed through the book until it reaches the page mentioned. If the reader is a true scholar, someone who has "lost himself in the Talmud" and is therefore capable of visualizing the whole text in his head, the answer proves to be correct. A true reader of the Talmud knows always where he finds himself.³⁴

In the thirteenth century, Saint Bonaventure noted that after God created the world through the Word, he perceived that it appeared dead on the page, and "He found it therefore necessary that another book should illuminate the first in order to show the meaning of things." Bonaventure concludes: "This is the Book of Scripture that shows the similarities, the properties and the meaning of things as they are written in the Book of the World."³⁵ For Bonaventure, as for the Talmudists, one book (the Bible) enables the reading of the other book (the world), and both contain in essence the same text. The Talmudic commentaries continue to copy that text, clarifying and ex­panding, and producing in time a layering of readings that recognizes in the book of the world a vast, ongoing palimpsest. In this manner, reading advances in two directions: burrowing towards the universal core text in an attempt to fathom it, and reaching out to the generation of readers to come with an ever new individuated text which adds itself endlessly to the pile.

Perhaps without acknowledging this process of individuation as its own,

Venice too exists in the tension between the two reading impulses. On one hand, few cities are so blatant about their mythology and their history. Ven­ice demands at first sight an exploration of its imaginative roots, in earth and water and in stone and deeds, a deep retracing of every step a visitor takes, following its canals down into its legendary beginnings. On the other, it is through the succession of historical readings that Venice wants to identify itself in the present, discarding every new reading (which at first might ap­pear illuminating) as repetitive, banal, and commonplace, and asking for yet another. There is no satisfying Venice. Pulling the reader in opposite direc­tions at the same time, towards the theoretical city of history books and the imaginary city of the stories and pictures, all too often in the process Venice (like the world itself) is itself lost.

The story of how Venetian zealots stole Saint Mark's remains from his tomb in Alexandria in the year 828 is well known. As a result of this furta sacra, or "holy theft," Saint Mark and his lion replaced Saint Theodore and his dragon as the city's patron, though both saints tower today, in amiable companionship, above Saint Mark's Square. Sometimes with the book open to indicate prosperity, other times with it closed to signal a period of war, often with a sword or with a halo, the literate lion constantly alters or en­riches his own emblematic significance. Though this symbolism has been questioned, these are still the popular readings.³⁶

Maimonides, in his Hilkhot Talmud Torah (Laws for the Study of the Torah), notes that "the time for study is divided in three parts: one third for the written Torah, one third for the oral Torah, and the last third for reflect­ing, drawing conclusions from certain premises, deducing one meaning from another, comparing one thing to another, judging the rules by which the Torah must be studied, until one reaches the knowledge that the Torah is the foundation of the rules, thus learning to understand what is forbidden and what is permitted in that which is learned through hearing. This then is what is called Talmud." For Maimonides, a scholar who becomes wise need no lon­ger dedicate himself to reading the written Torah (the words of the prophets) or listening to the oral one (the learned commentaries) but can devote him­self exclusively to studying "according to the measure of his mind and the maturity of his intellect," pursuing his curiosity.³⁷

Conegliano's lion is, of course, a commonplace in Venice. Bas- and haut-reliefs, gargoyles, banners, coats of arms, fountain decorations, mosa­ics, stained-glass windows, capitals, wellheads, embrasures, keystones, single sculptures like the ones lining the Arsenal, and paintings in every museum: hardly anything in the city is deemed unfit for the lion's presence. Andante, with his head shown frontally or foreshortened, or sitting on his haunches like an expectant domestic animal; reduced like the Cheshire Cat to almost nothing but his grin, or crowding his entire muscled body inside a gilded and opulent frame; stamping his outline in official ex libris or enshrined in plastic bells with artificial snow made in China, the lion is everywhere in Venice. And in every case, whether in his own beastly presence or metonym- ically reflected in his trappings and surroundings, the lion of Saint Mark always stands for more than any single reading presumes. Caught between God's two books, as Conegliano's lion stands between the saints of active and contemplative life, the almost invisible rider explores the solid landscape be­yond the visible emblems of reading, book and world. It is as if, intuiting that neither book suffices unto itself (as Maimonides bravely argued), the artist has placed a third option in the picture, the emblem of something equivalent to Abulafia's intermediary.

Psalm 32 advises: "Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle." To which Psalm 33 adds: "An horse is a vain thing for safety: neither shall he deliver any by his great strength." Curbing the beast's ignorance, knowing that it will not grant protection from harm, directing its "great strength" towards a firm and certain purpose, in Conegliano's painting the rider escapes the strictures of Scripture and of gloss, and creates a new landscape of phrases as yet un­written, evolved in memory and thought, a text permitted to change and transform itself as the remembered pages of words and world are turned and annotated in the curious imagination. Whether exploring the city or explor­ing the book, between the Word of God spoken and written and the human world, the rider is allowed the freedom to seek that every reader must be al­lowed to claim. In the untranslatable, conventional language of ancestral sym­bols, perhaps this unanswerable questioner has his function.

6

What Is Language?

A week before Christmas 2013, in the early evening, I sat down at my desk to answer a letter. But as I was about to write the words, I felt as if they were escaping me, vanishing into air before reaching the paper. I was surprised but not concerned. I decided that I was very tired, and promised myself to stop work after finishing the note. Trying to concentrate harder, I attempted to form in my mind the sentence I was supposed to write. How­ever, while I knew the gist of what I wanted to say, the sentence would not take shape in my mind. The words rebelled, refused to do as I asked them; unlike Humpty Dumpty, I felt too weak to show them "which is to be the master." After much mental strain, I managed, painfully, to string a few words together and set them down coherently on the page. I felt as if I had been groping in an alphabet soup, and as soon as I put in my spoon to grab one, it would dissolve into meaningless fragments. I went back into the house and tried to tell my partner that something was wrong, but I realized that as well as write them, I was unable to mouth the words except in a pain­fully protracted stutter. He called an ambulance, and an hour later I was in the Emergency Room being treated for a stroke.

To prove to myself that I had not lost the capacity of remembering

(Opposite) Dante and Virgil come across the giants trapped in the ice. Woodcut illustrating Canto XXXI ofthe Inferno, printed in 1487 with commentary by Cristoforo Landino. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

words, only that of expressing them out loud, I began to recite in my head bits of literature I knew by heart. The flow was easy: poems by Saint John of the Cross and Edgar Allan Poe, chunks of Dante and Victor Hugo, doggerel by Arturo Capdevila and Gustav Schwab echoed clearly in the darkness of my hospital room. The ability to read never left me, and a few hours later, I found that I was again able to write. However, when I tried to speak to the nurses, the stammer persisted. After four or five weeks of hesitant speech, it gradually disappeared.

The experience, while terrifying, made me reflect on the relationship between thought and language. If thought, as I believe, forms itself in our mind by means of words, then, in the first fraction of a second, when the thought is sparked, the words which instantaneously cluster around it are not clearly distinguishable to the mind's eye: they constitute the thought only in potentia. Their verbal cluster allows the mind to perceive the pres­ence of a shape under water, but not in full detail. Caused to emerge by the language of its speaker (and each language produces particular thoughts which can only be imperfectly translated into another language), the mind selects the most adequate words in that specific language to allow the thought to become intelligible, as if the words were metal shavings gathering around the magnet of thought.

A blood clot in one of the arteries that feeds my brain had blocked for a few minutes the passage of oxygen. As a consequence, some of the neural passages were cut off and died, presumably the ones dedicated to transmit­ting electric impulses that turn words conceived into words spoken. Unable to go from thought to the expression of thought, I felt as if I were groping in the dark for something that dissolved itself at the touch, preventing my thought to form itself in a sentence, as if its shape (to carry on with the image) had been demagnetized and were no longer capable of attracting the words intended to define it.

This left me with a question: What are these thoughts that have not yet achieved their verbal state of maturity? This, I suppose, is what Dante meant when he wrote, "My mind was struck / by lightning bringing me what it wished": the desired thoughts not yet expressed in words. Aristotle spoke of phantasia as the capacity to make present to the mind something which it has not previously perceived; perhaps in humans, phantasia is the capacity to make this presentation through language. Under normal circumstances, the progress from the conception of a thought in the specific linguistic field of the thinker to its verbal constellation and on to its expression in speech or in writing is instantaneous. We don't perceive the stages of the process, except in half-dreams and hallucinatory states (I experienced this when, in my twenties, I experimented with LSD). In this process, as in all our conscious processes, what drives us is desire.

Torn between my desire to put my thoughts into specific words and my inability to do so, I tried to find synonyms for what I knew I was trying to say. Again, a simile might help: it was as if, floating down a stream, I had come to a dam that blocked my way and sought a side canal to allow my passage. In the hospital, finding it impossible to say "my thinking functions are fine, but I find speaking difficult," I managed to say "I have words." I experienced the expression of negatives as especially difficult. In my slowed- down mental process, if I wanted to say, in answer to the nurse's question, "I don't feel pain," I found myself thinking "I feel pain" and adding "no" to the words. Then, accustomed to my normal rhythm of speech, I would try to answer all at once, but the words would come out as "of course" or "yes" before I had time to frame my thought in the negative. Apparently, in my mind, the stage of affirmation precedes that of negation. (This process of asserting something in order then to negate it is in fact a "prototype of nar­ration." Don Quixote is presented as a feeble old man in order to deny that he is a feeble old man and affirm that he is a valiant knight errant, and then to deny that he is a valiant knight errant and affirm that he is a feeble old man.)

Perhaps, I said to myself afterwards, this is how one's literary style works: selectively finding the right waterway, not because of any blockage of the verbal expression but because of a particular aesthetic sense that chooses not to take the commonplace main course ("the cat is on the mat") but a per­sonal side canal ("the cat slumbers on the mat").

Lying in the hospital, allowing my brain to be scanned in coffinlike ma­chines, I reflected on the fact that our age has allowed our curiosity that which medieval theologians believed impossible except for God: the observation of our observing, drawing a chart of our own thinking, enjoying the privilege of being both audience and performer of our intimate mental acts—holding, as it were, our brain in our hands, like Dante's Bertram de Born, who must carry his severed head about as punishment for having parted two who were meant to be united forever.

"The World is like the impression left by the telling ofa story. " —Valmiki, Yoga Vasistha, 2.3.11

_A

sking unanswerable questions serves a dialectical function, as when a child asks "Why?" not in order to receive a satisfactory explana­tion (it may merely elicit an exasperated "Because!") but in order to establish a dialogue. Dante's motives are obviously more complex. Under Virgil's supervision, Dante is confronted with the souls of his fellow men and women, sinners like himself, whose stories he wishes to learn, perhaps be­cause of prurient curiosity (for which Virgil chides him) or to mirror his own condition (of which Virgil silently approves).¹ Some of the souls want to be remembered on earth and tell their story so that Dante may retell it; others, like the traitor Bocca degli Abati, scorn the idea of posthumous fame. The encounters all take place through speech, through that poor and ineffectual instrument whose feebleness Dante laments.

Certainly every tongue would fall short because our speech and our memory have, for so much understanding, so little wit.²

And when finally Dante is ready to tell his readers his experience of the glories of Paradise, he prays to Apollo. Up to this point the inspiration of the Muses has sufficed, but now he must have the assistance of the god himself, however painful it will be—because the presence of a god is always terrible. Dante compares the process to the flaying of Marsyas, the flute player who presumed to challenge Apollo to a contest and after having lost was tied to a tree and flayed alive. Dante invokes the fearsome god:

Enter my breast and blow your breath As when you drew Marsyas out From within the sheath of his limbs.³

Melchior Meier, Apollo and Marsyas: The Judgment of Midas (or The Flaying of Marsyas), 1581. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Phyllis Massar, 2011 [2012.136.725]. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.)

With (or generally without) the help of Apollo, we use words to try to recount, describe, explain, judge, demand, beg, affirm, allude, deny—and yet in every case we must rely on our interlocutor's intelligence and generosity to construe from the sounds we make the sense and meaning we wish to con­vey. The abstract language of images helps us no farther, because something in our constitution makes us want to translate into words even these shad­ows, even that which we know for certain is untranslatable, immanent, un­conscious. Dante's initial forest, for instance, is its own ineffable definition, and yet he tries to render it for our comprehension as "dark" (oscura), "wild" (selvaggia), "rough" (aspra), "strong" (forte), "bitter" (amara).⁴ But semantic innocence is beyond us.

In the final leg of their frightful descent to the pit of Hell, crossing the bank that separates the last chasm of the Malebolge from the ninth circle, where the traitors are punished, Dante hears the loud sound of a horn blow­ing in the thick gloom. Dimly he discerns tall shapes which he takes to be the towers of a city, but Virgil explains that the shapes are those of giants en­sconced in the chasm up to the waist.⁵ They are the biblical Nephilim, who according to the book of Genesis were the offspring of the daughters of men and the sons of God in the days before the Flood. One of them cries out a few unintelligible words: Rafel mai amech zabi almi. Virgil explains:

He accuses himself; This is Nimrod, through whose ill whim a single language is not still used worldwide.

Let's leave him here and not speak in vain; for every language is like this to him, as his to others, that no one understands.⁶

Nimrod's speech "that no one understands" has long been debated by Dante scholars. Though most commentators argue that Dante intended the line to be read as gibberish, some have proposed ingenious solutions to the decipherment of the words. Domenico Guerri has suggested that Dante, following the tradition according to which Nimrod and the giants spoke Hebrew, combined five Hebrew words found in the Vulgate. Guerri argues that the original phrase conceived by Dante was made up of the words ra- phai'm (giants), man (what is this?), amalech (people who touch lightly, who feel their way), zabulon (dwelling) and alma (sacred, secret), distorted, as they might have been by the curse God put on Babel, into the unintelligible Rafel mai amech zabi almi. The hidden meaning of the phrase would then be: "Giants! What is this? People feeling their way into the secret place!"⁷

Perhaps Guerri's explanation is correct, but it is scarcely satisfying. (Borges, in his detective story "Death and the Compass," has a police inspector offer to the investigator a certain hypothesis that might explain the crime. "Your hypothesis is possible, but not interesting," is the investigator's response. "You will reply that reality has not the least obligation to be interesting. To which I will reply that reality can forgo that obligation, but hypotheses can't.")⁸

Dante may have used Hebrew words because according to biblical scholar­ship Nimrod would have spoken Hebrew, and Dante may have distorted these words because Nimrod's speech is condemned to be incomprehensible. But Dante may also have wished Nimrod's speech to be not only secret but dreadfully so because he knew that an enigma that suggests an unsatisfactory solution is more terrible that one that can be dismissed as signifying nothing. Nimrod and his workers on their ambitious Tower were cursed with speaking a language whose meaning had been rendered confused—but not inexistent, incomprehensible but not entirely lacking an original sense. That meaning, distantly glimpsed but beyond the full discernment of Nimrod's audience, will be eternally taken for gibberish. Nimrod's curse is that he is condemned not to silence but to delivering a revelation never to be understood.

Nimrod's speech is not unique. Once before, during their descent, Dante and Virgil have heard incomprehensible words, and once before, Virgil has dismissed them. As they enter the fourth circle, where misers and spend­thrifts are punished, the travelers come upon Pluto, god of riches and guard­ian of the circle, who cries out at them in a hoarse and strident voice: "Pape Satan, pape Satan aleppe!" Pluto's words have been interpreted as a demonic invocation to Satan: most commentators, beginning with the earliest ones, have understood pape and aleppe to be exhortations, the former derived from the Greek papai and the latter from the Hebrew aleph. Pluto's cry, however, is lost on the two poets, and Virgil, with scornful words, causes the ancient god to fall to the ground like "a mast that breaks."⁹

A language can be incomprehensible because we have never learned it or because we have forgotten it: either case presupposes the possibility of an original communal understanding. The search for this primordial tongue long engaged scholars worldwide. Centuries before Dante's era, the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus, according to Herodotus, tried to determine who were the first people on earth, and conducted an experiment that was later copied by a number of other rulers. He took two newborn infants from an ordinary family and gave them to a shepherd to bring up in his cottage, with strict orders that no one should utter a word in their presence, though he was to look after them in any other way that was necessary. Psammetichus wanted to discover what words the infants would first speak after their initial bab­bling. The experiment, Herodotus tells us, was successful. Two years later, the shepherd was greeted by the children with the word becos, Phrygian for "bread." Psammetichus concluded that it was not the Egyptians but the Phrygians who were the first people on earth, and the primordial tongue was Phrygian.¹⁰

In the twelfth century, following the example of Psammetichus, the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II (whom Dante condemned to the sixth circle of Hell among the heretics) tried to determine which was the first natural human language. He arranged for a number of nurses to suckle and wash the children in their charge, but not to speak to them, in order to discover whether the children's first words would be in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, or the language of their biological parents. The experiment failed because all the children died.¹¹

Not to be able to communicate with one's fellow human beings has been compared to being buried alive. In his now classic Awakenings, Oliver Sacks describes the plight of a forty-six-year-old patient whom he calls Leonard L., a victim of the sleeping-sickness epidemic (encephalitis lethargica) which spread through America in the mid-twenties. In 1966, the year Sacks first met him at Mount Carmel Hospital in New York City, Leonard was com­pletely speechless and incapable of voluntary motion, except for minute movements of his right hand. With these he could spell out messages on a small letter-board, his only means of communication. Leonard was an avid reader, though the pages of his books had to be turned by someone else, and he even managed to write book reviews, which were published in the hospital magazine every month. At the end of their first meeting, Sacks asked Leon­ard what it was like to be the way he was. What would he compare it to? Leonard spelt out for Sacks the following answer: "Caged. Deprived. Like Rilke's 'Panther.'" Rilke's poem, written either in the fall of 1907 or the spring of the next year, captures the trapped sense of the wordless:

His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

the movement of his powerful soft strides

is like a ritual dance around a center

in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils

lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,

rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,

plunges into the heart and is gone.¹²

Like the "mighty will" of Rilke's panther, like the persistent will of Leonard, Nimrod's rebellious will is condemned to verbal immobility.

After the encounter with Nimrod, Virgil and Dante come upon An­taeus, one of the several giants who rebelled against Zeus. The son of the gods of the sea and the earth, Antaeus grew stronger whenever he touched his mother, but he was defeated when Hercules held him aloft and crushed him to death. Virgil treats Antaeus very differently from Nimrod: he addresses the giant politely and asks him to help them descend into the ninth and last circle. To persuade Antaeus (as Beatrice resorted to flattery, Virgil resorts to bribery), he points to Dante and offers:

He can restore your fame on earth; because he lives and a long life still awaits him, Unless grace call him to her before his time.

Virgil promises Antaeus Dante's speech: the giant's physical action will be repaid with a future verbal one, communication in space is bartered against communication in time. Antaeus accepts (even in Hell we are left certain choices), scoops the travelers up in one enormous hand, and sets them down again "in the deep that devours / Lucifer and Judas." Then he rises "like the mast of a ship."¹³

Antaeus is a bridge, a transport, a ship, but it is Nimrod and his incom­prehensible words that tower over the final cantos of the Inferno, because the encounter with Nimrod foreshadows the meeting with Lucifer, the arch-fiend who chose to place himself beyond the redemptive power of God's Word.

According to Jewish legend, Nimrod was a descendant of Ham, one of Noah's three sons. From his father, he inherited the clothes God had given Adam and Eve before their expulsion from Eden, which made the wearer invincible; beasts and birds fell down before Nimrod, and no man could de­feat him in combat. His clothes made his fortune: because people supposed Nimrod's strength was his own, they made him their king. Victorious in all battles, Nimrod conquered land after land until he became the sole ruler of the world, the first mortal to possess universal power. This gift, however, cor­rupted him, and Nimrod became a worshiper of idols and later demanded that he himself be worshiped. Nimrod became known as "the Mighty Hunter of Men and Beasts." Inspired by Nimrod's blasphemy, the people no longer trusted God but came to depend on their own powers and abilities. And yet Nimrod's ambition was not satiated. Not content with his conquests on earth, he decided to build a tower that would reach the heavens and claim them as his domain. In the construction, Nimrod employed six hundred thousand men and women loyal to his cause: the first third were willing to wage war against God, the second proposed to set up idols in heaven and worship them, the last third wanted to attack the heavenly hosts with arrows and spears. Many years were spent building the tower, which reached so great a height that it took a worker twelve months to climb to the top. A brick was considered more precious than a human being: if a worker fell, none took notice of it, but if a brick was dropped, they wept because it would take a year to replace it. A woman was not allowed to interrupt work even to give birth: she would bring her child into the world while molding bricks and, after tying it around her waist with a swaddling cloth, she would continue her molding.¹⁴

According to the book of Genesis, "the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Be­hold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imag­ined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city" (11:5-8). Implicit in the Genesis account is the skill of the builders of Babel, whose work required even God to descend from the heavens in order to admire it. The unfinished tower, Talmudic commentators say, was destroyed. A third of it sank into the earth, a third was consumed by fire, and the third that was left standing in ruins was cursed with the power of making passersby forget everything they knew.¹⁵

The notion of a primeval single common language that was fragmented into a plurality of languages bears a symbolic relationship to contemporary theories about the origins of our verbal capacities. According to one of these theories (the "gesture first" theory as opposed to the "speech first" theory), we are mimetic animals and the complex imitation of manual actions (copy­ing a hammering gesture in order to request a hammer, for instance) evolved from such pantomimes to early forms of sign language. These proto-signs, in turn, developed into proto-speech, and both the imitative gestures and the utterances gave birth to proto-languages that became the link between the communications of our earliest ancestors and the first recognizable human languages. In the "gesture first" theory, the reason humans have language (and other creatures do not) is because "the human brain is language-ready, in the sense that a normal human child will learn a language—an open- ended vocabulary integrated with a syntax that supports the hierarchical combination of words into larger structures which freely express novel mean­ings as needed—while infants of other species cannot. Indeed, humans not only can learn an existing language but can take an active role in the shaping of new languages."¹⁶

Chimpanzees, who share 98.8 percent of the human DNA, possess brains that differ from human brains not only in size but also in the range and rel­ative extent of their regions in connectivity and in details of cellular func­tion. Though chimpanzees can be taught to understand spoken words, all attempts to teach them to speak have failed: chimpanzees (and all other apes) lack the neural control mechanisms that regulate the vocal apparatus. Because of their manual dexterity, they can, however, be taught sign language, as well as a symbolic visual language consisting of so-called lexigrams, a reading and writing method "akin to moving magnetized symbols on the door of a fridge." A bonobo ape called Kanzi was able to master 256 of these lexigrams and arrange them in novel combinations. And yet these combinations, how­ever remarkable, are not equivalent to possessing and using a syntax: Kanzi's extraordinary ability was compared by scientists to that of a two-year-old child exposed to an ordinary linguistic environment: there it stops.¹⁷ But what experience does a bonobo like Kanzi communicate, as opposed to that, however rudimentary, of a human child? What experience of the world is he trying to transmit?

In April 1917, Franz Kafka sent his friend Max Brod a collection of prose pieces that included one he titled "A Report to an Academy." It is the first-person account of an ape captured on the Gold Coast and transformed, through training, into something resembling a human being, whose lan­guage ranges from conventional gestures (handshakes, for instance, that "de­note openness") to speech. "Oh, one learns when one has to, when one seeks a way out," the ape explains to the learned members of the Academy, "one learns at all costs." But though the ape can recount, clearly and precisely, the details of his five-year-long education, he nevertheless knows that what he is putting into words is not his experience as an ape but an experience trans­lated into the observation of that experience by his human persona. "What I felt then as an ape," he says to his expectant audience, "I can only represent now in human terms, and therefore I misrepresent it." As Kafka intuited, if the ape's brain is not biologically "language-ready," as a human one is, any transformation into a human "language-ready" brain—in a literary, sym­bolic, even perhaps (in a Dr. Moreau future) medical sense—must render the verbalization of the world seen through the eyes of the ape impossible to communicate, much as it is impossible for the human brain (in Dante's sys­tem of belief) to grasp the Word of God and put it in human terms.¹⁸ In both these cases, translation is betrayal.

"To go beyond the human is impossible / to put into words," Dante says of his experience of Paradise, an opinion confirmed by Thomas Aquinas. "The faculty of seeing God," Aquinas argues, "does not belong to the created intellect naturally, but is given to it by the light of glory, which establishes the intellect in a kind of deiformity"¹⁹ In other words, divine grace can make the human brain "God's Word-ready" just as education can make Kafka's ape "human language-ready." In either case, however, the authentic original experience is necessarily lost in the attempt to utter it.

The progress from proto-languages to languages such as we speak today may have gone through a phase of fragmenting conventionalized verbal ex­pressions or communicative gestures, as an utterance became divided into its component parts or a complex gesture into simpler significant gestures. An utterance that signified, for instance, "there is a stone with which we can crack this coconut" would, according to this theory, be broken up over time into sounds signifying "there," "stone," "crack," and "coconut"—a counterintuitive assumption since it is simpler to suppose that the separate words came first and their combination into a sentence followed later (an assumption perhaps influenced by the single-word speech of Johnny Weissmuller in the early Tar- zan films).

The "gesture-first" theory is only a few decades old. More than fifteen centuries ago, in India, a Sanskrit poet and religious thinker known as Bhar- trihari developed a theory of language that somewhat foreshadowed these modern findings. Information about Bhartrihari's life is vague. Even the dates of his birth and death are doubtful: he is thought to have been born around 450 c.E. and to have lived for some sixty years. Popular stories about Bhartrihari are many. One has it that he was a king who, after discovering the infidelity of his mistress, like King Shahryar in The Arabian Nights, re­nounced the throne and took to wandering in the world. Another says that he was offered the fruit of immortality by a Brahman priest; Bhartrihari, as an amorous gesture, gave the fruit to his queen, who in turn gave it to her lover, who passed it on to Bhartrihari's mistress, who brought it again to Bhar- trihari. Discovering what had happened, Bhartrihari retired to the forest and wrote a poem that ends with these words:

Damn her, damn him, damn the god of love,

The other woman, and myself!²⁰

Bhartrihari's fame as a philosopher spread quickly to other cultures. Just over a century after his death, I-Tsing (Yi Jing), a Chinese scholar and itin­erant, who believed that his homeland was the model for all societies ("Is there anyone in any part of India who does not admire China?" he asked), cited Bhartrihari as one of the luminaries of universal culture.²¹ Perhaps led astray by his own beliefs, I-Tsing mistakenly portrayed Bhartrihari as a de­fender of the Buddhist faith. In fact, Bhartrihari's beliefs were rooted in the sacred Sanskrit texts, the Vedas (a Sanskrit word that means "knowledge"), supposed to have been received by certain elected scholars directly from God and then passed on to the following generations by word of mouth. The Vedas consist of four texts composed in India over a millennium, from ap­proximately 1200 to 200 B.c.E.: the Rig-Veda, or Veda of Hymns; the Sama- Veda, or Veda of Chants; the Yajur-Veda, or Veda of Sacrifices; and the later Athra-Veda, or Veda of Magical Charms. Each Veda is in turn divided into three sections; the third sections, the Upanishads, are speculative treatises on the nature of the universe, the nature of the self, and the relationship be­tween the two.²² All the Vedas are rooted in the belief that the individual soul is identical to Brahman, the sacred power which informs all reality and is equal to it. "Brahman is the vast ocean of being," it says in the Upanishads, "on which rise numberless ripples and waves of manifestation. From the smallest atomic form to a Deva or an angel, all spring from that limitless ocean of Brahman, the inexhaustible source of life. No manifested form of life can be independent of its source, just as no wave, however mighty, can be independent of the ocean." Ralph Waldo Emerson translated the idea for a Western audience in his poem "Brahma":

They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.²³

The fifth-century India of Bhartrihari was, for the most part, a prosper­ous and happy society ruled by the Gupta dynasty. In the early decades of the century, Chandra Gupta II, who took the title "Sun of Valor," made his reputation not only as a warrior but as a patron of the arts. Under his protec­tion, the great Sanskrit poet Kalidasa became a member of the imperial en­tourage, and the literary and philosophical court gatherings were famous be­yond the empire's borders. During the reign of Gupta's son Kumara Gupta, India was threatened by Huns from Central Asia. Having occupied Bactria in the previous century, the Huns for decades tried to enter the Indian Em­pire, mainly through the Hindu Kush; when at last the invasion occurred, the Hun army had become weakened by the endless skirmishes, and India was able to hold them off. But in the climate of constant threat, the authority of the Gupta dynasty declined, and their powerful empire fragmented into a number of smaller, battling kingdoms.²⁴ It was at this period between the wane of the Gupta rulers and the rise of the Indian Huns that Bhartrihari developed his theory of language.

Several fundamental books have been attributed to Bhartrihari: the Vik- yapadiya, a philosophical treatise on sentences and words; the Mahibhish- yatiki, a commentary on the great yoga scholar Patanjali's Vikyapadiyavrtti, a series of notes on his own linguistic treatise; and the Shabdadhitusamiksha. Bhartrihari began by developing a more or less traditional commentary or exegesis of the Vedas derived from older linguistic theories, but eventually he developed a philosophical linguistic theory of his own. Some of the early masters, such as the seventh-century B.c.E. grammarian Panini, had proposed a series of rules governing the Sanskrit language that could be applied to the text of the Vedas; in the second century c.e., Patanjali, following Panini, ar­gued that grammar was the study of the truth of the Vedas and a guide to their recitation. Bhartrihari moved these arguments into the philosophical arena: grammar, he said, could be considered an intellectual instrument to investigate not only the sacred Vedas but also the Brahman, total reality. He postulated that human language was like the Brahman itself, not subject to the avatars of temporal events but something that embraces a timeless and spaceless whole which it names in its entirety and also in each of its compo­nent parts. The first lines in the first stanza of his Vikyapadiya announce Bhartrihari's conclusion: language is "the beginningless and endless One, the imperishable Brahman of which the essential nature is the Word, which man­ifests itself at the Creation of the Universe."²⁵ Without indulging in facile translations, we can note that Bhartrihari's thesis is in essence much the same as that announced by John in the first line of his Gospel.

Language was for Bhartrihari both the divine creative seed and its result­ing creations, both the eternal regenerative force and the plurality of things issuing from it. According to Bhartrihari, one cannot speak of language as being created (either by a divine being or by humans) because there is no time previous to language. As one Sanskrit scholar has it, "Language [for Bhartri- hari] is continuous and co-terminus with human existence or the existence of any sentient being."²⁶

We know that language expresses itself in verbal representations of ob­jects and actions, and in sounds that can be combined in almost infinite ways to name the multiplicity of the universe, and even in that which has no co­gent universal existence. Jorge Luis Borges's Universal Library, the Library of Babel, is a container for this quasi-infinity of words, though the vast majority of them are meaningless: in a note appended to the story, he suggested that a library was not necessary for this colossal project—one volume composed of an infinite number of infinitely thin pages would suffice. In a short essay that predates this fiction by two years, Borges quoted Cicero, who, in Con­cerning the Nature of the Gods, wrote, "If a countless number of copies of the one-and-twenty letters of the alphabet, made of gold or what you will, were thrown together into some receptacle and then shaken out on to the ground, it would be possible that they should produce the Annals of Ennius, all ready for the reader. I doubt whether chance could possibly succeed in producing even a single verse!"²⁷

Cicero and Borges (and many others) noted that the combinatory art of the alphabet allows for a complete nomenclature of existing and nonexisting things, even unintelligible utterances such as those of Nimrod. Bhartrihari, however, argued that language does not just name things and the meaning (or lack of meaning) of things, but that all things and their attendant mean­ings derive from language. Things perceived and things thought, as well as the relationships among them, are determined, according to Bhartrihari, by the words that language lends them. This is obviously true of metaphysical concepts. Alice, speaking to the White Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, argues against Bhartrihari that "one can't believe impossible things." "I dare­say you haven't had much experience," the Queen, siding with Bhartrihari, objects. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."²⁸ Bhartrihari's arguments opposed both those of traditional Buddhists and the Brahmin Nyayas (members of one of the six orthodox schools of Hindu thought). The former hold that meaning is a social convention, and the scope of a certain meaning is the projection of a collective imagination of that convention. The word tree designates a type of woody perennial plant be­cause the speakers of English have agreed that the sound tree will denote a plant and not a body of water, and the scope of its meaning includes an oak, a cypress, a peach tree, and others because collectively and conventionally these things are each imagined as a tree. The Nyayas argue that words have meaning only in reference to external existing things, and combine into sen­tences just as things relate to one another in the world. Tree denotes that type of woody perennial plant because such a thing as a tree exists in reality, and language allows us to construct the phrase "the tree is in the forest" because in reality a tree and a forest form a real relationship.²⁹

Bhartrihari argued that meaning happens in the act of using language, both in the utterances of the speaker and in the recognition of those utter­ances by the listener. In implicit agreement with Bhartrihari, later theorists of the art of reading suggest that the meaning of the text emerges from the interaction of the text with the reader. "Reading," wrote Italo Calvino, "means approaching something that is just coming into being."³⁰ Bhartrihari called this "coming into being" sphota, a term dating back to Panini signifying "spoken language," and in Bhartrihari's theory it defines the act of "bursting forth," spouting, as it were, meaningful sounds. Sphota does not depend on the user's manner of speaking (or writing, so style or accent is not of the es­sence) but carries a definite meaning in the particular combination of words in a sentence. This meaning is not reducible to its component parts: only those who have not learned a language properly divide a sentence into words in order to understand it. In most cases, meaning is apprehended by the lis­tener (or the reader) as a whole, in an instantaneous illumination of what is being conveyed. This illumination is conveyed by the sphota, but, Bhartri- hari argues, it is already present in the hearer's (or reader's) brain. In modern terms, the illumination happens when the sphota is received by a brain that is language-ready.

Bhartrihari goes farther. If perception and understanding are innately verbal, the anguished chasm between what we see and what we believe we see, between what we experience and what we know to be true or false in our experience, becomes illusory. Words create the total existing reality, and also our particular visions of that reality; that which we call our world "bursts forth" from the Brahman in verbal, communicative form. This is what Dante, struggling to express what he witnessed in Paradise, described as a "flaying" of appearance to reveal the meaning of experience in human words.

Dante believed that language was the supreme human attribute, given by God to no other of his creatures, neither to animals nor to angels, in order to allow human beings to express what is formed in their God-given language- ready minds. Language, according to Dante, is the instrument that rules human society and makes possible our communal living. The language we use is made up of conventional signs which allow us, within our linguistic circle, to represent ideas and experiences. Language, for Dante, gives exis­tence to the things it names merely by naming them, because "nothing can produce what itself is not," as he says in De vulgari eloquentia.³ Perhaps for that reason, as a symbol of the unresolvable quest Dante left De vulgari elo- quentia unfinished, in the middle of this sentence: "Words that deny must always be placed at the end; all others will gradually arrive at the conclusion with appropriate slowness . . ."³²

⁷

Who Am I?

I have in front of me a photo taken sometime in the early sixties. It shows an adolescent boy lying on his belly on the grass, looking up from a pad of paper on which he has been drawing or writing. In his right hand is a pencil or a pen. He is wearing a sort of cap and hiking boots, and tied around his waist is a sweater. He is lying in the shade of a brick wall next to what seem like stumpy apple trees. A short-legged dog is close behind him, reminiscent of the dogs that lie on stone tombs at the feet of dead crusaders. I am that boy, but I don't recognize myself in the picture. I know it is me, but that is not my face.

The photo was taken half a century ago, somewhere in Patagonia, during a camping holiday. When I look into the mirror today, I see a tired, puffed-up face circled by gray hair and a jovial white beard. The small eyes, lined with wrinkles and framed by narrow glasses, are olive brown with a few orange flecks. Once, when I tried to cross into England with a passport that stated that the color of my eyes was green, the immigration officer, staring me in the face, told me I should change that to blue, or next time I would not be allowed in. I know that sometimes my eyes look gray. Maybe their color changes from moment to moment, like those of Madame Bovary, but

(Opposite) Virgil and Dante meet Cato on the shores ofMount Purgatory. Woodcut

illustrating Canto I of the Purgatorio, printed in 1487 with commentary by Cristoforo Landino. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

Photograph of the author in early adolescence. (Courtesy of the author)

I'm not sure if that change of color, as in her case, has a meaning. Neverthe­less, the face in the mirror is me, it has to be me. But it is not my face. Others recognize me in my features; I don't. When, inadvertently, I catch sight of myself reflected in a shop window, I wonder who that fat elderly man is walking by my side. I have a vague fear that if I truly saw myself one day on the street, I wouldn't know myself. I'm convinced that I would not be able to pick myself out in a police line-up, nor would I easily identify myself in a group portrait. I'm not sure whether this is because my features age too rap­idly and too drastically or because my own self is less grounded in my mem­ory than the printed words I've learned by heart. This thought is not com­pletely unpleasant; it is also somehow comforting. To be myself, to be so utterly and absolutely myself that no particular circumstance or point of view can impeach the recognition, grants me a happy sense of freedom from the obligation of following the conditions of being who I am.

According to Dante, Christian dogma decrees that after we die we shall regain our earthly bodies again at the Last Judgment: all of us except suicides, "for it is not just that a man have what he has taken from himself." Science teaches us that the human body commits a kind of periodic suicide. Each of our organs, each of our bones, each of our cells dies and is reborn every seven years. None of our features is the same today as it was in the past, and yet we say, with blind confidence, that we are who we were. The question is, what do we mean by "being" ourselves? What are the identifying signs? Something that is not the shape of my body, not my voice or my touch, my mouth, my nose, my eyes—something there is that is me. It lies, like a timorous little animal, invisible behind a jungle of physical trappings. None of the disguises and masks that I wear represent myself to myself except in uncertain hints and tiny forebodings: a rustle in the leaves, a scent, a muffled growl. I know it exists, my reticent self. In the meantime, I wait. Perhaps its presence will be confirmed but only on my last day, when it will suddenly emerge from the undergrowth, will show itself full-faced for an instant, and then will be no more.

The shadow of a fat man in the moonlight Precedes me on the road down which I go; And should I turn and run, he would pursue me: This is the man whom I must get to know.

—James Reeves, "Things to Come"

_T

o allow his words not to deny but "gradually to arrive at the con­clusion with appropriate slowness," throughout his journey, Dante, much like any curious traveler, asks questions about the customs and beliefs, the geography and history of the places he traverses. He is espe­cially keen on knowing who the people are whom he meets, and from his first encounter, with the soul of Virgil, he asks the poet to tell him "whatever you might be, shade or real man!"¹ Some of the souls, like Virgil's, answer him directly; others refuse and must be bribed with the promise of having their story told when Dante returns to earth; still others are forced to submit; several more are questioned by Virgil for Dante's sake. On a number of oc­casions, Dante recognizes the soul as someone he knew when alive; at other times the transformation in the Otherworld is such that the recognition fails, and the poor soul must tell him who it was.

But the journey is not, of course, a mere exercise in reconnoitering: Dante is here to learn about himself and to discover in the mirror of others his own wretchedness and possibility of salvation. The Otherworld is not impermeable: its punished and purged sins, as well as the divine beatitudes, seep sometimes into the visitor and affect him for good or ill. Dante feels in his own heart the anger of the wrathful and the scorn of the proud; in the heavens of Paradise, a glimmer of the divine light shining on the elect is enough to dazzle and transform him. The three-act vision through which Virgil and Beatrice guide him is like an ongoing performance played out for his benefit, in which his own faults, fears, and hesitations, his temptations, errors, and falls, and even his moments of enlightenment are all displayed before his eyes and ears. The entire Commedia is presented to an audience of one, but that single spectator is also the main protagonist. This, in a different context, is what the Jungian analyst Craig Stephenson defines as a place where "still resides the multifaceted ambiguous living archetype of the theatre, with its architecture of memory and liminality, in which are housed the epistemo- logical opposites of acting and observing, of knowing ourselves from within and knowing our world by looking without."²

Not only by the souls' stories does Dante discover who they are or once were. Not far from the summit of Mount Purgatory, walking behind Virgil and the poet Statius, Dante reaches the Cornice of the Gluttonous, where the excess of love for the things of this world must be purged through unre­lieved starvation. While the ancient poets talk about their craft, Dante, now cleansed of the sin of pride that made him accept Homer's welcome to the Noble Castle, walks meekly behind his masters, learning from their dialogue:

They went ahead, and I alone Behind, listening to their discourse Taught me by discussing poetry.

The three poets are greeted by a throng of pale and silent spirits, their skin stretched over their bones, their eyes dark and hollow like gemless rings. Perhaps it is Virgil and Statius's talk of poetry that brings to Dante's mind the idea that things are metaphors of themselves, that in an effort to translate the experience of reality into language, we sometimes see things as the words that name them, and the features of things as their incarnated script. "Who reads OMO in the face of man," says Dante, "would clearly have recognized there the M." Pietro Alighieri, Dante's son, in his commentary to the Comme­dia, noted that the image evoked was well known in his time: in Gothic script, O s are like human eyes, while M depicts the eyebrows and the nose.³ This accords with the tradition of Genesis by which all creatures carry their name inscribed in their appearance, thus allowing Adam to identify them correctly when God orders him to name them immediately after their cre­ation (Gen. 2:19-20).

Socrates, in Plato's Cratylus, also believes that names are manmade: to

The letters OMO depicting a human face, copied from a tenth-century Spanish manuscript (British Library, add. ms. 30844). (Photograph courtesy of the author)

suggest that the first words were given to us by the godhead is, for Socrates, not an explanation but merely an excuse for not having an explanation. The discussion about names in the Platonic dialogue is proposed by two friends of whom we know almost nothing except that they may have been, like Soc­rates himself, Plato's teachers. Cratylus believes that the names of things con­tain "a truth or correctness" derived from nature. Hermogenes, the other participant in the dialogue, disagrees and takes the Sophist position that language is a human creation. "Any name which you give, in my opinion, is the right one, and if you change that and give another, the new name is as correct as the old," he says. "For there is no name given to anything by na­ture; all is convention and habit of the users." Socrates argues (or at least, puts forward the suggestion) that "names rightly given are the likenesses and images of the things which they name," but goes on to say that it is nobler and clearer to learn from the things themselves rather than from their im­ages. In the Cratylus, as in so many of the dialogues, the question under de­bate remains undecided.⁴

A name defines us from outside. Even if we choose a name to call our­selves, the identity purported by the name is exterior, something we wear for the convenience of others. Names, however, sometimes encapsulate an indi­vidual's essence. "Caesar I was, and now I am Justinian," proclaims the em­peror who codified the Roman system of law in the sixth century, and who in Dante's Paradise sums up the history of Rome for his listener's benefit. In another instance, later, in the Heaven of the Sun, Bonaventure the Francis­can praises the founder of the Dominican order and notes that Dominic (meaning "belonging to the Lord") was given this name by his parents when "a spirit from up here moved them to call him / by the possessive adjective of him whose he was all." And of the names of Dominic's parents themselves, Felice (Happy) and Giovanna ("Grace of the Lord," according to Saint Je­rome), Bonaventure notes, echoing the creed in the Cratylus:

Oh, his father, truly Felice!

Oh, his mother, truly Giovanna

If, translated, it means what they say!⁵

A name, however, does not entirely satisfy the question "Who am I?" and it is not through the knowledge of his name that Dante reaches an an­swer at the end of his quest. The question of this final identity merits further inquiry.

At the exact midpoint of the Commedia, in the thirtieth canto of Purgato- rio, as the chariot drawn by the Gryphon appears in the Garden of Eden, three essential things take place simultaneously: Virgil vanishes, Beatrice reveals herself, and Dante is named for the first and only time in the entire poem. Between the disappearance of his poet guide and the humiliating scourging to which Beatrice will submit him, Dante's name is pronounced and makes him turn in recognition: "when I turned to the sound of my own name, / which out of necessity is here set down." Then Beatrice orders him to look at her:

Look at me well: indeed I am, I am Beatrice.

However did you dare approach this mountain?

Did you not know that here a man is happy?⁶

Contrary to Narcissus, who remained enraptured by his own image in the water, when Dante glances down into the river Lethe he cannot bear the sight of himself, and looks away mortified.

My eyes dropped down to the clear fountain;

But beholding myself in it, I drew them back to the grass,

So great a shame weighed down my brow.⁷

After having gone down to the depths of Hell and ascended the cornices of Purgatory, Dante discovers his identity, yet this is revealed to him not by the utterance of his name but by the reflection of his image. Up to this point, guided by Virgil, he has only seen others enact failings that he sometimes recognizes as his, but now, for the first time, Dante is conscious of witnessing his own dramatic performance. Dante must weep, he now learns, not for things outside him but for his innermost being, not over the departure of his beloved Virgil, not for love of the beloved Beatrice, but for his own sins, know­ing at last who he is so that he may repent of who he was. Then he can drink of the waters of Lethe and forget. In Paradise, there is no memory of sin.

The question "Who am I?" is no more fully answered by a name than a book is revealed fully by its title. The cowardly soldier Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well carries a name that (as Shakespeare's audience, with a smat­tering of French, must have understood as an intentional pun) points to his use of words for lying and bragging. Parolles is overheard by two lords as he speaks to himself, seeking a way to escape humiliation, and for the first time in the play, everything he says about himself to himself is true. "Is it possible that he know that he is, and be that he is?" asks one of the lords, amazed that this fool can reason truthfully. He can and he does, because what Shake­speare is attempting with the person of Parolles is to find behind the mask whatever it is that makes him who he is. That is why, when shortly after­wards, the final disgrace comes upon him, Parolles sheds his role of miles gloriosus and becomes utterly his own person: "Captain I'll be no more," he says, "But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft / As captain shall: simply the thing I am / Shall make me live."⁸ "The thing I am": Parolles's sudden illumi­nation answers the underlying sense of Hamlet's much-abused question, and involuntarily echoes the tremendous answer of the godhead to Moses: "I Am That I Am."

Partly, what we are may be what we believe we once were and lost. "I'm looking for the face I had," says a woman in a Yeats poem, "before the world was made." Sometimes the shadow of an identity seems like that face, half-re­membered, now forgotten, as in those early states of Alzheimer's in which we lose some part of the assurance of being whatever it is we are. Aristophanes, in Plato's Symposium, proposed that human beings were of three sexes, males born from the sun, females from the earth, and hermaphrodites from the moon, which partakes of either sex. The hermaphrodites were the strongest and in their vanity tried (like the builders of Babel) to scale the heights of heaven and attack the gods. To prevent this, Zeus split each hermaphrodite in half, causing the male half to desire to be reunited with the female half, and the female half with the male. This resulted in three kinds of couplings: the sun-males desired the sun-males, the earth-females desired the earth- females, the lunar hermaphrodites, now cloven in two, became the hetero­sexual humans who long for the half they had lost. "And so," Aristophanes concludes, "we are all like pieces of the coins that children break in half as keepsakes, making two out of one, like the flatfish, and each of us is forever seeking the half that will tally with himself." For Plato's Aristophanes, love is the impulse bred from these longings, the desire to know who we are by re­calling who we have been.⁹

The first inkling of our identity comes early. In Jacques Lacan's descrip­tion of what he called the "mirror stage," typically between the ages of six and eighteen months, a child, still unable to speak and control its motor ac­tivities, is confronted with an image of itself in a mirror. Its reaction is one of jubilation because the image shows the child a functional unity which it has yet to achieve. The child identifies with that which it will become, but at the same time the image is an illusion, since the reflection is not the child. The child's realization of who it is begins as both recognition and misrecognition, as the physical apprehension of identity and also an imaginary creation. The mirror, like the imagination, sets upon a stage a character who uses our first person singular. Rimbaud intuited that paradox when he wrote: "Car Je est un autre," "Because I is another." Alonso Quijano is both an old infirm gen­tleman with a taste for novels of chivalry and a courageous and just knight whose name is Don Quixote; when at the end of the book he allows himself to be convinced that his literary incarnation is a delusion, he dies. We are all, in this sense, Doppelgangers: seeing our double and rejecting it signals our end.¹⁰

In order to know who we are integrally, in all our components, even that part of ourselves we call the unconscious (and which Carl Gustav Jung de­fined as "reality in potentia'), we question ourselves throughout our lives, seeking for clues. The unconscious, according to Jung, feeds us with such clues in our dreams, "backward-looking dreams or forward-looking anticipa­tions," which, he says, have always, in all cultures, been read as intimations of the future. As images from the unconscious become conscious, telling us something about ourselves, they add to our sense of who we are, like the pages that are already read in a book. In the third century, Augustine com­pared the process to the recitation of a psalm. "Suppose that I am going to recite a psalm I know," he suggests in the Confessions. "Before I begin, my faculty of expectation is engaged by the whole of it. But once I have begun, as much of the psalm as I have removed from the province of my expectation and relegated to the past, now engages my memory, and the scope of the action which I am performing is divided between the two faculties of mem­ory and expectation, the one looking back to the part which I have already recited, the other looking forward to the part which I have still to recite. But my faculty of attention is present all the while, and through it passes what was the future in the process of becoming the past. As the process continues, the province of memory is extended in proportion as that of expectation is reduced, until the whole of my expectation is absorbed. This happens when I have finished my recitation and it has passed into the province of memory." Unlike the psalm, however, the fathoming of the unconscious is never ex­hausted. That lifelong quest, the embodiment of intuitions and revelations about ourselves, Jung calls "individuation."¹¹

In a 1939 essay published originally in English under the title "The Mean­ing of Individuation," and later rewritten in German and much revised, Jung defined individuation as "the process by which a person becomes a psycho­logical 'in-dividual,' that is, a separate, indivisible unity or 'whole'" of all parts assembled and coherent, including those that feel unfathomable and unfamiliar to the person. Jung's first definition of individuation was given when he was sixty-four. Almost two decades later, five years before his death, he put together, partly in conversation with an acquaintance and partly in chapters written by himself, a kind of intellectual autobiography. Towards the end of the book, Jung takes up again the idea of individuation, but this time it is not the knowable and painfully known self that interests him but that other vast uncharted space of his own cartography. "The more uncertain I have felt about myself," he writes, "the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself."¹²

"The meaning of my existence," Jung wrote, "is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am depen­dent upon the world's answer."¹³ The quest to find out who we are, as whole and singular human beings, the attempt to answer life's question is respon­sible, in some measure, for our delight in the stories of others. Literature is not "the world's answer" but rather a trove of more and better questions. Like the tales told to Dante by the souls he meets, our literatures provide more or less efficient mirrors for discovering our own secret features. Our mental libraries are composite maps of who we are (or believe we are) and who we are not (or believe we are not). To admire, as did Freud, the early scenes of Goethe's Faust, or to be drawn to the inconclusiveness of Faust's ending, as was Jung, to prefer Conrad to Jane Austen, as did Borges, or to choose Ismail Kadare over Haruki Murakami, as did Doris Lessing, is not necessarily to take a critical position in literary theory but more likely to respond to a ques­tion of reflective sympathy, of empathy, of recognition. Our readings are never absolutes: literature disallows dogmatic tendencies. Instead, we shift allegiances, prefer for a time a certain chapter of a certain book and later other chapters; one or two characters hold our fancy, but then others take their place. The enduring love of a reader is a rarer thing than we imagine, though we like to believe that our most considered literary tastes change little with the passing of the years. But we change, and our tastes change as well, and if we recognize ourselves in Cordelia today, we may call Goneril our sister tomorrow, and end up, in days to come, kindred spirits with Lear, a foolish, fond old man. This transmigration of souls is literature's modest miracle.

Of all the miracles, however, that pinpoint the histories of our litera­tures, few are as astonishing as that of the birth of Alice in Wonderland. The well-known story is worth repeating. On the afternoon of 4 July 1862, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, accompanied by his friend the Rever­end Robinson Duckworth, took the three young daughters of Dr. Liddell, dean of Christ Church, on a three-mile boating expedition up the Thames, from Folly Bridge, near Oxford, to the village of Godstow. "The sun was so burning," Alice Liddell recalled many years later, "that we landed in the mead­ows down the river, deserting the boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found, which was under a new-made hayrick. Here from all three came the old petition of 'Tell us a story' and so began the ever-delightful tale. Some­times to tease us—and perhaps being really tired—Mr. Dodgson would stop suddenly and say, 'And that's all till next time.' 'Ah, but it is next time' would be the exclamation from all three: and after some persuasion the story would start afresh." When the boating party returned, Alice asked Dodgson to write out the adventures for her. He said he would try, and sat up nearly the whole night putting down the tale on paper, adding a number of pen-and ink illustrations; afterwards, the little volume, Alice's Adventures Underground, was often seen on the drawing-room table at the Deanery. Three years later, in 1865, the story was published by Macmillan in London under the pseudonym of "Lewis Carroll" with the title Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.⁴

Reverend Duckworth recalled the excursion precisely: "I rowed stroke and he rowed bow in the famous Long Vacation voyage to Godstow, when the three Miss Liddells were our passengers, and the story was actually com­posed and spoken over my shoulder for the benefit of Alice Liddell, who was acting as 'cox' of our gig. I remember turning round and saying, 'Dodgson, is this an extempore romance of yours?' And he replied, 'Yes, I'm inventing as we go along.'" Inventing Alice's adventures "as we go along": the truth is unbelievable. That Alice's fall and explorations, her encounters and her dis­coveries, the syllogisms and puns and wise jokes should, in all their fantastic and coherent development have been made up then and there in the telling seems almost impossible. Osip Mandelstam, commenting on the composi­tion of Dante's Commedia, says that it is naive of readers to believe that the text they have in front of them was born full-fledged from the poet's brow without a long mess of drafts and trials in its wake. No literary composition, says Mandelstam, is the fruit of an instant of inspiration: it is an arduous process of trial and error, helped along by experienced craft.¹⁵ But in the case of Alice we know it wasn't so: precisely such an impossibility seems to have been the case. No doubt Carroll, in the back of his mind, had previously composed many of the jokes and puns that pepper the story, since he loved puzzles and word games, and spent much of his time inventing them for his pleasure and that of his child friends. But a bagful of tricks is not enough to explain the strict logic and joyful avatars that govern the perfectly rounded plot.

Alice's Adventures was followed six years later by Through the Looking- Glass, a story that did indeed benefit from the usual desk time, and yet the looking-glass chess game of the latter is not better constructed than the mad card game of the former, and all the wonderful nonsense in both stories ob­viously stems from that single invented "extempore" fantasy told on the pri­mordial afternoon. Mystics are said to receive in full dictation from the godhead, and the history of literature boasts of a few celebrated examples of such in toto compositions—Caedmon's "Hymn of Creation" and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" are two examples—but we almost never have an unbiased witness of these poetic miracles. In the case of Alice's Adventures in Wonder­land, Reverend Duckworth's testimony seems unimpeachable.

No miracle, however, is entirely unexplainable. Carroll's tale has deeper roots in the human psyche than its nursery reputation might suggest. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland does not read like another children's story: its ge­ography has the powerful reverberations of other established mythical places, such as Utopia and Arcadia. In the Commedia, Matilda, the guardian spirit on the summit of Mount Purgatory, explains to Dante that the Golden Age of which poets have sung is a forgotten memory of a paradise lost, a vanished state of perfect happiness; perhaps Wonderland is the unconscious memory of a state of perfect reason, a state which, seen now through the eyes of social and cultural conventions, appears to us as utter madness.¹⁶ Whether arche­typal or not, Wonderland seems always to have existed in some form or other: one never follows Alice down the rabbit hole and through the Red Queen's labyrinthine kingdom for the first time. Only the Liddell sisters and Reverend

Duckworth can be said to have been present at the creation, and even they must have felt a sense of deja vu: after that first day, Wonderland entered the universal imagination much like the Garden of Eden, a place we know exists without ever having set foot in it. Wonderland ("it is not down in any map; true places never are," as Melville noted of another archetypal location)¹⁷ is the recurrent landscape of our dream life.

Because Wonderland is, of course, our world, or rather a stage on which the things of our world are played out for us to see—not in unconscious symbolic terms (in spite of Freudian readings), not as an allegory of the anima (according to Jungian interpretations), not as a Christian parable (in spite of the serendipity of names on the storyteller's journey, from Folly Bridge to Godstow, "God's Place"), not as a dystopian fable like those of Orwell or Huxley (as certain critics have argued). Wonderland is simply the place in which we find ourselves daily, mad as it may seem, with its quotidian ration of the heavenly, the hellish, and the purgatorial—a place through which we must wander as we wander through life, following the instructions of the King of Hearts: "Begin at the beginning," he tells the White Rabbit, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."¹⁸

Alice (as we have said of Dante) is armed with only one weapon for the journey: language. It is with words that we make our way through the Cheshire Cat's forest and the Queen's croquet ground. It is with words that Alice discovers the difference between what things are and what they appear to be. It is her questioning that brings out the madness of Wonderland, hid­den, as in our world, under a thin coat of conventional respectability. We may try to find logic in madness, as the Duchess does by finding a moral to everything, but the truth is, as the Cheshire Cat tells Alice, that we have no choice in the matter: whichever path we follow, we will find ourselves among mad people, and we must use language as best we can to keep a grip on what we deem to be our sanity. Words reveal to Alice that the only indisputable fact of this bewildering world is that under an apparent rationalism we are all mad. Like Alice, we risk drowning ourselves (and everyone else) in our own tears. We like to think, as the Dodo does, that no matter in what direction or how incompetently we run, we should all be winners and we are all entitled to a prize. Like the White Rabbit, we give orders left and right, as if others were obliged (and honored) to serve us. Like the Caterpillar, we question the identity of our fellow creatures but have little idea of our own, even on the verge of losing that identity. We believe, with the Duchess, in punishing the annoying behavior of the young, but we have little interest in the reasons for that behavior. Like the Mad Hatter, we feel that we alone have the right to food and drink at a table set for many more, and we cynically offer the thirsty and hungry wine when there is no wine and jam every day except today. Under the rule of despots like the Red Queen, we are forced to play mad games with inadequate instruments—balls that roll away like hedge­hogs and sticks that twist and turn like flamingoes—and when we don't suc­ceed in following the instructions, we are threatened with having our heads chopped off. Our education methods, as the Gryphon and the Mock-Turtle explain to Alice, are either exercises in nostalgia (the teaching of Laughing and Grief) or training courses in the service of others (how to be thrown with the lobsters into the sea). And our system of justice, long before Kafka described it, is like the one set up to judge the Knave of Hearts, incomprehensible and unfair. Few of us, however, have Alice's courage, at the end of the book, to stand up (literally) for our convictions and refuse to hold our tongue. Be­cause of this supreme act of civil disobedience, Alice is allowed to wake from her dream. We, unfortunately, are not.

Fellow travelers, we readers recognize in Alice's journey, as we do in Dante's, the themes ever present in our lives: pursuit and loss of dreams, the attendant tears and suffering, the race for survival, being forced into servi­tude, the nightmare of confused self-identity, the effects of dysfunctional families, the required submission to nonsensical arbitration, the abuse of authority, perverted teaching, the impotent knowledge of unpunished crimes and unfair punishments, and the long struggle of reason against unreason. All this, and the pervading sense of madness, are, in fact, a summary of the book's table of contents.

"To define true madness," we are told in Hamlet, "what is't but to be nothing else but mad?" Alice would have agreed: madness is the exclusion of everything that is not mad, and therefore everyone in Wonderland falls under the Cheshire Cat's dictum ("We're all mad here"). But Alice is not Hamlet. Her dreams are not bad dreams, she never mopes, she never sees herself as the hand of ghostly justice, she never insists on proof of what is crystal clear, she believes in immediate action. Words, for Alice, are living creatures, and thinking (contrary to Hamlet's belief) does not make things good or bad. She certainly does not want her solid flesh to melt, any more than she wants it to shoot up or shrink down (even though, in order to pass through the small garden door, she wishes she could "shut up like a telescope"). Alice would never have succumbed to a poisoned blade or drunk, like Hamlet's mother, from a poisoned cup: picking up the bottle that says "drink me" she first looks to see whether it is marked poison or not, "for she had read several nice stories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts, and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the sim­ple rules their friends had taught them." Alice is much more reasonable than the Prince of Denmark and his family.¹⁹

Like Hamlet, however, Alice must have wondered, crammed in the White Rabbit's house, if she too might not be bounded in a nutshell, but as to being king (or queen) of infinite space, Alice does not merely fret about it: she strives for the title, and in Through the Looking-Glass, she works hard to earn the promised dream-crown. Brought up on strict Victorian precepts rather than lax Elizabethan ones, she believes in discipline and tradition, and has no time for grumbling and procrastination. Throughout her adventures, like a well-brought-up child, Alice confronts unreason with simple logic. Convention (the artificial construct of reality) is set against fantasy (the nat­ural reality). Alice knows instinctively that logic is our way of making sense of nonsense and uncovering its secret rules, and she applies it ruthlessly, even among her elders, whether confronting the Duchess or the Mad Hatter. And when arguments prove useless, she insists on at least making the unjust ab­surdity of the situation plain. When the Red Queen demands that the court give the "sentence first—verdict afterwards," Alice quite rightly answers "Stuff and nonsense!" That is the only answer that most of the absurdities in our world deserve.²⁰

However, Alice's journey is one from which she emerges not with an­swers but with an open question. In her underground adventures and later through the looking-glass, Alice will be tortured with the thought of not being who she thinks she is, or even of ceasing to be, which leads ineluctably to the terrible conundrum posed by the Caterpillar: "Who are You?' "I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present," she answers shyly. "At least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then." The Caterpillar sternly tells her to explain herself. "I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, Sir," she says, "because I'm not myself, you see." To test her, he asks her to recite things from memory, but the words come out "different." Alice and the Caterpillar know that we are defined by what we remember, since our memories are our biographies and hold our image of ourselves.²¹

Waiting to see the effect produced by the beverage in the bottle that says "drink me," Alice asks herself whether she might end by "going out alto­gether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?" The answer is given in Through the Looking-Glass by Tweedledee and Tweedledum, when they point to the Red King asleep under a tree. "And what do you think he's dreaming about?" asks Tweedledee. Alice says that no one can know that. "Why, about you!" Tweedledee exclaims. "And if he left off dreaming about you where do you suppose you'd be?" "Where I am now, of course," Alice answers confidently. "Not you!" Tweedledee retorts contemptuously. "You'd be nowhere. Why you're only a sort of thing in his dream!"²²

Alice wonders if she might not be Ada or Mabel (but "she's she, and I'm I," she reflects, distraught); the White Rabbit takes Alice for someone called Mary Ann; the Pigeon believes she's a serpent; the Live Flowers take her for a flower; the Unicorn believes that she is a fabulous monster, and proposes that, if she'll believe in him, he'll believe in her. Our identity seems to de­pend on the belief of others. We gaze into the screens of our electronic gad­gets with the intensity and constancy of Narcissus gazing into the pool of water, expecting to be restored or affirmed in our identity not by the world around us, not in the workings of our interior life, but through the often inane messaging of others who virtually acknowledge our existence and whose existence we virtually acknowledge. And when we die, and our fleet­ing communications are inspected for clues of who we were, a little fable imagined by Oscar Wilde will become pertinent:

When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weep­ing through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it comfort.

And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses of their hair and cried to the pool and said, "We do not wonder that you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he."

"But was Narcissus beautiful?" said the pool.

"Who should know that better than you?" answered the Oreads. "Us did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his own beauty."

And the pool answered, "But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored."²³

Alice conceives of a different way of deciding for herself who she might be. Trapped down the rabbit hole, Alice asks herself who she really is and refuses to be anyone she doesn't want to be. "It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying, 'Come up again, dear!' I shall only look up and say, 'Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else.'"²⁴ If things don't appear to have meaning, then Alice will make sure that she chooses a mean­ing (an identity that will denote that meaning) for herself. She might be echoing Jung: "I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am depen­dent upon the world's answer." Alice must make the Caterpillar's question her own.

And yet, in spite of its apparent madness, our world, like that of Won­derland, tantalizingly suggests that it does have a meaning and that if we look hard enough behind the "stuff and nonsense" we will find something that explains it. Alice's adventures proceed with uncanny precision and coher­ence, so that we, as readers, have the growing impression of an elusive sense in all the surrounding absurdity. The entire book has the quality of a Zen koan or a Greek paradox, of something meaningful and at the same time inexplicable, something on the verge of revelation. What we feel, falling down the rabbit hole after Alice and following her through her journey, is that Wonderland's madness is not arbitrary, nor is it innocent. Half epic and half dream, Carroll's invention lays out for us a necessary space somewhere between solid earth and fairyland, a vantage point from which to see the universe in more or less explicit terms, translated, as it were, into a story. Like the mathematical formulas that fascinated Carroll, Alice's adventures are both hard fact and lofty invention.

This is true of the Commedia as well. Guided by Virgil's hand through the treacherous terrain of Hell or by the momentous smile of Beatrice through the adamantine logic of Heaven, Dante undertakes his voyage on two planes simultaneously: one which grounds him (and us, his readers) in the reality of flesh and blood and one in which that reality can be reconsid­ered and transformed. This double reality is like that of the Cheshire Cat perched on its branch, drifting from something bewilderingly visible to the miraculous (and reassuring) ghost of a Beatrician smile.

8

What Are We Doing Here?

The year I worked for a newspaper in Buenos Aires, in my early twenties, I was sent into the countryside to interview a priest, Domingo Jaca Cortejarena, of the parish of Mones Cazon, who had translated the nineteenth-century Argentine national poem Martin Fierro, by Jose Hernan­dez, into Basque under the title Matxin Burdtn. He was a small, fat, smiling man who had come to Argentina in the late thirties and had entered orders during his exile. Out of gratitude towards the country that had welcomed him, he had decided to undertake the translation, but his passion, like that of the elderly Sherlock Holmes, was beekeeping. Twice during our interview he excused himself and went towards the hives that sat in humming rows under the jacaranda trees, and there he performed certain rituals which I didn't understand. He spoke to the bees in Basque. When he answered my questions in Spanish, he gestured vehemently; with the bees his movements were gentle and also his voice. He said that their humming reminded him of falling water. He seemed utterly unafraid of being stung. "When you collect the honey," he explained, "you must always leave some for the hive. Indus­trial collectors don't do that, and the bees resent it and become avaricious. Bees respond to generosity with generosity." He was worried because many

(Opposite) Dante and Virgil in the Wood of the Suicides. Woodcut illustrating Canto XIII of the Inferno, printed in 1487 with commentary by Cristoforo Landino. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

of his bees were dying, and he accused the neighboring farmers of using pesticides that were killing not only the bees but also the songbirds. It was he who told me that when a beekeeper dies, someone must go tell the bees that their keeper is dead. Since then I've wished that when I die someone will do the same for me, and tell my books that I will not come back.

Walking through his untidy garden (he said he liked weeds), the little priest observed that Hernandez had committed a curious error in his poem. Martin Fierro is the story of a gaucho who deserts the army after being forc­ibly conscripted. He is hunted down by a sergeant who, after having him surrounded and seeing that Fierro will fight alone to the death, says he will not allow a brave man to be killed, and, turning against his own soldiers, allies himself with the deserter. The priest said that in the poem the gauchos give a description of the land and the sky, and this is the mistake: that was something city people did, not men of the country, for whom the landscape was unremarkable because it was simply there. Hernandez, a city intellectual, would have been curious about the natural surroundings; the gaucho Martin Fierro would not.

I was taught in school that the model for Hernandez's bucolic interests was Virgil, whose landscapes were not those of the Po valley of his youth (as Peter Levi has observed) but a much more deliberately artificial picture of amorous shepherds and beekeepers inherited perhaps from Theocritus. Vir­gil was the preferred classical author in the schools of the Spanish colonies, along with Cicero; Hernandez would not have studied Greek, a culture ne­glected in Catholic countries because of its uncomfortable proximity to that of the scholars of the Reformation. In spite of the bucolic convention, Vir­gil's woods, streams, and glades are conceivable as authentic landscapes, and his advice about beekeeping and farming is, I am told, perfectly sound. Hernandez prefers to eliminate any sense of artificiality, and in spite of lend­ing his gauchos philosophical ruminations and invocations to all the saints (as Virgil invoked Apollo and the Muses), he manages to ground his char­acters in a believable place. Martin Fierro's pampas are immediately recog­nizable: the vastness, the sudden appearance of a hut or a tree, the endless horizon, which the French writer Drieu La Rochelle described as inducing "horizontal vertigo." If Hernandez fell into the mistake my Basque priest pointed out, it was because he must have felt, like La Rochelle, an outsider, a city dweller for whom it was impossible to stand in these empty spaces under an uninterrupted sky without being overcome by the whirling im­mensity. When Martin Fierro, in his loneliness, stares up at the stars, he sees them as a mirror of his emotions:

It's sad, in the open countryside

To spend night after night

Gazing up at the slow courses

Of the stars that God created,

Without any other company

Than one's loneliness and the wild beasts.

The observer is human, and the landscape he observes becomes contam­inated with human aspirations and regrets: the underlying question is "What am I doing here?" In classical bucolic poetry, the landscape mirrors the nos­talgia for a blissful Golden Age invented perhaps by the Greeks; in Hernan­dez, the nostalgia is, of course, a literary conceit, but it is also historically true. When Hernandez has his hero say the following lines, he is describing not a wishful magical age but the memory of Fierro's own life, or what he felt his life was before the army hauled him away:

I have known this land Where the peasant lived And where he had his home And his children and wife . . . It was such pleasure to see How he spent day after day.

The word gaucho, used as an insult by the Spanish colonists towards the locals, was adopted with pride by those who fought against the Spanish crown, but soon after independence the word relapsed into its pejorative connota­tion to label those who lived off the land without attempting to congregate in cities. A gaucho was seen by the urban dwellers as a barbarian who refused civilization, as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento made clear in the title of his classic Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism. Superb horsemen and herders, settling wherever they chose, far away from the sprawling metropolis, the gauchos lived off small crops and stray cattle, and worked occasionally as hired hands for the wealthy hacendados who had bought or had been given titles to vast extensions of virgin land. Obligatory conscription, expropriation of their homes by the government, and the increasingly frequent incursions of native raiders changed all that, and Martin Fierro incarnated the change. The pampas were no longer an open space where anyone could live without benefit of deed of sale or real estate contract: it had now become, for the gauchos, an alien place that allowed no roots except to those who claimed to have bought it and felt entitled to exploit it. For the gaucho, he and the land were vitally entwined, and what affected the one affected the other; for the landowners, the land was property, to be used as effectively as possible in order to extract the greatest economic profit. "What do you think we're doing here on this earth?" my priest asked, without expecting an answer. "All I know is that whatever it is we're doing, the bees are dying."

Vladimir: What are we doing here? That is the question. —samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, act 2

wo planes of existence are explicit in all three of Dante's realms, that of reality and that of reflection on that reality. Dante's land­scapes, as well as the souls he encounters in them, are simultane-

ously real and imaginary. No detail in the Commedia is arbitrary: the reader retraces Dante's voyage following the path Dante followed and seeing the things he saw. Darkness and light, smells and sounds, rock formations, riv­ers, water that falls with the sound of humming bees (as my Basque priest had remarked), open spaces and chasms, crags and hollows carefully consti­tute the worlds beyond the world. Or, rather, the first two: in Heaven there are sensible presences but no tangible geography, since in Heaven there is no time and no space.

Three main woods grow in the Commedia: the dark forest from which Dante emerges before the encounter with Virgil, the awful Wood of Suicides in Canto XIII of the Inferno, and the Garden of Eden on the summit of Mount Purgatory. Heaven is devoid of vegetation, except for the monstrous rose that congregates the souls in the Empyrean. All three forests exist in re­lation to their inhabitants: they are defined by that which takes place under their boughs, as settings for the story. As always in Dante, our actions deter­mine our geography.

John Ruskin, commenting on the discovery of what he calls "the laws of beauty" in the thirteenth century, remarks that "these discoveries of ultimate truth are, I believe, never made philosophically, but instinctively." No doubt a vast library of learning underpins the Commedia, but as Ruskin rightly warns us, not every detail can be the result of a scholarly process: the total creation is too precise to have been consciously justified word by word. "Mil­ton's effort," Ruskin notes, "in all that he tells us of his Inferno, is to make it indefinite; Dante's, to make it definite." For this reason, Ruskin says, uponreaching the Garden of Eden after daring to cross the purgatorial wall of flames, Dante enters a lovingly described "dense wood" which reminds the reader of the "dark forest" of the poem's beginning. And the "pathlessness of the wood, the most dreadful thing possible to him in his days of sin and shortcoming, is now a joy to him in his days of purity. And as the fenceless- ness and thicket of sin led to the fettered and fearful order of eternal punish­ment, so the fencelessness and thicket of the free virtue lead to the loving and constellated order of eternal happiness."¹

An even more poignant example is given at the Wood of Suicides. After being guided by the centaur Nessus across the River of Blood in which those guilty of murder are punished, Dante and Virgil reach a gloomy wood where, again, no path is visible. This wood is made of negatives, punctuated by a hail of no s that begin each of the first three tercets of the canto, and all the verses of the second. This is a place where being itself is denied.

No, Nessus had not yet returned When we moved deep into a wood That was not marked by any path.

No green foliage, but of a murky hue, No smooth branches, but all knotted and warped, No apples were there, but dry and poisoned twigs.

No undergrowth so rough and thick Have the wild beasts that loathe the farmer's plots Between Cecina and the Cornetto.

Upon these ghastly thorny trees the Harpies make their nests. These mon­strous creatures of wide wings and human necks and faces, with feet like claws and feathered bellies, endlessly utter woeful shrieks that announce the sor­rows to come.²

Before advancing farther, Virgil tells Dante that they are now in the second cornice of the seventh circle and instructs him to pay attention so as to see "things that will strip away belief from my speech" because in this place of shadows speech is disembodied: Dante hears wailings but sees no one, and he wonders whether there are souls hiding in the undergrowth. To dispel his doubts, Virgil instructs him to break off a small shoot from one of the trees around him. Dante obeys, and the tree cries out in pain, "Why do you rend me?" From the stump, dark blood begins to flow.

It said again: "Why do you tear me? Have you no single breath of pity?

"Men we were, and now we're become stumps: Truly your hand should have been more merciful If we had been the very souls of snakes."

As Dante steps back in horror, blood and words gush out together from the broken splint. In the Aeneid, Virgil had described how Aeneas, after leaving the coast of Troy, seeking to honor his mother, Venus, and the other gods with a sacrifice, tears up cornel bushes and myrtle to deck the altar. Sud­denly, he sees with amazement that the stumps begin to ooze drops of black blood, and a voice from below the ground tells him that this is the tomb of Polydorus, treacherously killed by the Thracian king to whom his father, Priam, had entrusted him.³ Virgil, realizing that Dante has forgotten this episode from his epic (on the imaginary plane), has thought it necessary to prove to him empirically the prodigious fact that trees can bleed (on the plane of factual reality). Doing so, Virgil reminds Dante that both planes are necessary to experience existence fully.

However, "to make amends," Virgil now asks the wounded spirit to say who he is so that Dante might later restore his fame in the world of the liv­ing. (Throughout Hell, Virgil, whose own fame on earth is assured, assumes that the dead care about what the living think of them.) The weeping tree proves to be the politician and poet Pier delle Vigne, chancellor of the Two Sicilies and minister to Frederick II, the emperor who so disastrously con­ducted linguistic experiments with children. Delle Vigne committed suicide after being falsely accused of treachery, and is now punished because his soul, thinking it could escape shame through death, "made me unjust against my just self."⁴

The trees can speak only as long as their blood flows. Having had no pity on themselves, they now beg it of Dante, and seeing them Dante feels a pity as strong as the one he felt only once before in this pitiless realm, after hearing Francesca's story in the circle of the lustful. Since pity is always in some measure pity for oneself, Dante the poet, throughout his own painful exile, may have considered the possibility of suicide and rejected it. Certainly the question of suicide was for him a troubled one. Within the dogma of the Catholic Church, suicide was clearly a sin committed against the body as temple of the soul. Saint Augustine had reduced suicide to a simple equiva­lence to murder, forbidden in the Sixth Commandment: "It remains that we take the command 'You shall not kill' as applying to human beings, that is, other persons and oneself. For to kill oneself is to kill a human being."⁵ But among Augustine's (and Dante's) beloved pagan authors, suicide was often considered a noble and honorable act.

In a profound meditation on this episode, Olga Sedakova asks what Pier della Vigne means when he says, "men we were," and suggests that to be human is to be heard, to be able to speak. "Man is first and foremost a mes­sage, a sign," she writes. But what sign? Certainly one that links blood with language, suffering with the need to express the suffering in words. This is perhaps why, taking Sedakova's remarks a step farther, we could say that, considering the ancient metaphor of the world as book, the writing in na­ture's book mirrors both human suffering and the suffering inflicted by humans upon nature. Suffering, whether of a human being or of the earth itself, must be translated into words of revolt, repentance, or prayer. (Some years ago, a poster in British Columbia depicted a landscape devastated by clear-cutting overlaid with a quotation from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, / That I am meek and gentle with these butchers," equating the land with Caesar's butchered body.) Dante, in De vulgari eloquentia, remarks that after the expulsion from Eden, every human being begins a life of suffering uttering a word that denotes pain: "Ahi!"⁶

Sedakova believes that for Dante life and violence are two absolute op- posites, and violence, in every sense, belongs to the realm of death. If this is true, then we can argue that when violence erupts in life, it translates the

Anti-logging poster from British Columbia.

vital, creative human vocabulary into one that denotes its shadow side, the loss of what has been granted us. And since in the Commedia language con­structs the landscape where all action takes place, the intrusion of violent language transforms that landscape into something deadly, a sterile forest fit for the Harpies. In the ancient world, the Harpies embodied dead souls in­tent on despoiling the souls of the living.⁷ Consequently, if violence to the self robs the sinner of his or her own being and transforms the suicide into a tongue-tied and fruitless tree that can only express itself through blood, then violence to nature, the deliberate act of creating such a forest, might be seen as a form of collective suicide that kills the world of which we are part by turning the living ground into a wasteland.

From the time of the earliest Neolithic farmers, our relationship with nature has been an increasingly troubled one, as we have responded in con­tradictory ways to the question of how to benefit from the fruits of the earth without rendering it sterile. Throughout our histories, practical strategies for plowing, sowing, and reaping, irrigating and fertilizing, protecting crops from pests and storing food for times of need run parallel with poetical imag­inings of nature as the Great Mother.

In the ancient world, noted Ruskin, forests were considered "sources of wealth and places of shelter," sacred, haunted sites that were by and large benevolent towards humans.⁸ In the Middle Ages, this vision changed and was reimagined as a dichotomy: the countryside was now seen either as dan­gerous, the demonic shadow of the civilized city, or as a place of ascetic cleansing, opposed to the vices of Babylon. It was depicted both as a savage place of refuge for criminals and wild beasts, outlawed sects and unspeakable practices, and as a paradisiacal realm, home to a lost Golden Age, a sanctuary from the sordid business of everyday life. This dichotomy was reflected in the visual arts. In the early Middle Ages, many artists, concerned with obey­ing as far as possible the tenets of faith and the requirements of portraiture, gradually abandoned certain mundane genres popular in Hellenistic Rome such as decorative landscape painting and turned to allegorical scenes and biblical stories, with depictions of daily life appearing as background. Dante himself, a keen observer of the cycles and changes in nature and knowledge­able about the techniques of agriculture and animal husbandry, describes the landscapes through which he passes in startling detail: they are stages for human events and examples of the inspired creation of the godhead. Whether in the gloom of Hell, where the whiteness of the naked bodies reveals with excruciating clarity their torments, or in the earthly Purgatory, with its dawn, dusk, dark night, and brilliant sunlight illuminating or shading the painful ascent of souls, the landscapes Dante describes are both intensely real and deeply symbolic, form and meaning revealing each other throughout the journey.

For Dante, all possible wisdom, all knowledge of one's own being, all intuition of God's will is made explicit in nature itself, in the stones and stars, "when divine love / first set in motion these lovely things." The experience of nature is the experience of God's hand in the world, and knowing how to interact with all other living things is a way of recognizing our own place in the cosmos. What we do to ourselves, we do to the world; therefore, following Dante's method of contrapasso, what we do to the world, we do to ourselves.⁹ Dante's moods and doubts, fears and revelations are echoed in the everyday life of the landscapes he crosses; the broken rocks of Malebolge, the agonized trees of the Wood of Suicides and the exultant vegetation in Matilda's grove, the burning sands of the seventh circle of Hell, and the breeze-swept meadow of Eden affect Dante in body and in spirit.

Virgil too understood the complexity of our relationship to nature, and how our behavior determines nature's fate and our own. Virgil had lost his family farm after the defeat of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 b.c.e., but his farming experience is evident throughout the Georgics, which could be read as an agricultural manual in verse. Describing the pests and weeds that attack the crops, for example, Virgil admonishes the farmer: "Therefore, un­less time and again your hoe assail the weeds, your voice affright the birds, your knife check the shade of the darkened land, and your vows invoke the rain, vainly, alas! will you eye your neighbour's big store, and in the woods shake the oak to solace hunger."¹⁰

Virgil's views harked back to those of ancient Greece, where two ideas prevailed regarding the responsibility of humans towards the natural world.

One, proclaimed by the followers of Pythagoras for instance, maintained that trees had souls. In the third century c.E., the philosopher Porphyry wrote: "Why should the slaughter of an ox or sheep be a greater wrong than the felling of a fir or oak, seeing that the soul is implanted in trees also?" The other, following Aristotle, taught that animals and plants existed solely to serve humankind. Echoing Aristotle's judgment, Pliny the Elder, in the first century c.E., pronounced: "It is for the sake of their timber that Nature has created . . . the trees."¹¹

In the mid-second century b.c.e. in Rome, it became clear that the peasant families who had long cultivated their small plots were being forced out by powerful landowners, who employed slaves for investment farming. In order to revive the traditional agricultural mentality, in 133, the Gracchi brothers, then serving as tribunes, set up laws to control land reform. At the same time, agricultural manuals became popular throughout the Roman re­public: a few were translations, such as that of the Carthaginian Mago, while others were original works by Cato, Columella, and Varro. Later, the emperor Augustus encouraged poets to take on agricultural themes so as to foster the notion that farming in the traditional way was a Roman gentleman's true occupation. Whether giving practical advice on how to farm, reworking the myths of nature, or comparing the delights of country life with the arduous business of the city, the Latin poets adopted the theme, and echoes of their work persisted for centuries.¹²

Not much documentation has come down to us regarding the develop­ment of agricultural methods in the Middle Ages. In places where two-field rotation was used, more labor and irrigation were required than in ancient Greece and Rome, and this led to the invention of more efficient instru­ments. The Arab conquests brought into Europe a number of new crops and cereals that required no irrigation: above all, hard wheat (which became the staple in most of the Mediterranean region) and sorghum. Though times of hardship were mainly due to natural causes such as floods and droughts, human factors, including over-cultivation and excessive logging, contributed to creating frequent periods of famine. In the Arab world, over-grazing and over-cultivation were minimized by a system called hima, which gave tribes in some regions collective rights over certain lands, but the system proved impractical in Europe. By the tenth or eleventh century, much of the land had been laid waste, rural security had waned, the monetary economy had failed to provide assistance to farmers, and a succession of plagues had led to a general decline of agriculture in Europe. Dante has Virgil say that certain souls in the seventh circle are being punished because they lived "disdaining Nature and her goodness."¹³ Of the opposing notions of how we should be­have regarding the natural world, Aristotle's had become obviously prevalent.

The Aristotelian attitude towards nature has had long-lasting conse­quences. In 1962, an American marine biologist who had been writing since the early fifties about the noxious effects of human activity on nature pub­lished a book, Silent Spring, that was to change the health policies of many countries and initiate the environmental movement around the world. Rachel Carson's early work at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had made her aware of the effects of dumping atomic waste into the sea, as well as the then still undetected phenomenon of global warming; her research into the misuse of pesticides revealed that the agricultural industries were both dangerously inefficient and untruthful in their reports to the public. As her biographer Linda Lear noted, with Silent Spring "Carson did more than challenge the scientific establishment, or force the implementation of new pesticide regu­lations. The hostile reaction of the establishment to Carson and her book was evidence that many government and industry officials recognized that Carson had not only challenged the conclusions of scientists regarding the benefits of the new pesticides, but that she had undermined their moral integrity and leadership." Dante might have judged them sinners against nature, like the woeful souls in the seventh circle who, because they never recognized their responsibility to the natural world, must run eternally on the burning sand, in a desecrated landscape, looking towards that which they have offended. "In these circles of the Violent," noted Charles Williams, "the reader is peculiarly conscious of a sense of sterility. The bloody river, the dreary wood, the harsh sand, which compose them, to some extent are there as symbols of unfruitfulness."¹⁴

Carson conceived the danger of chemical use as one bred from the stub­born unwillingness to look at consequences other than those desired by the practitioner. She understood (as Dante intuited) that deliberate ignorance of collateral lethal results implied a willful blindness towards the "cose belle," the "beautiful things" that nature offers, and is simply a form of self-destruction resulting from lack of humility and overwhelming greed. "Control of nature," wrote Carson, "is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man."¹⁵

This was, as noted, Aristotle's supposition. For Aristotle, property, not work, provides the means of making a living, and entitles a man to be called a citizen. Property consists of that which nature offers for human sustenance: cattle driven by nomad farmers, game taken by hunters, fish and birds caught by fishermen and trappers, and the fruits of harvest. "We must believe," he wrote, "first that plants exist for the sake of animals, second that all other animals exist for the sake of man." (Also slaves, since Aristotle argued that capturing "inferior people" and making them slaves was a natural human activity.)¹⁶

Aristotle's entwined arguments—our right to exploit nature and our right to exploit other "inferior" human beings—run throughout our economic histories to this day. In 1980, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) reported that desertification caused by deforestation threatened 35 percent of the world's land surface and 20 percent of the world's population. The vast process of deforestation in the Amazon, for instance, which after a steady decline spiked again in 2012 by more than a third, employs today tens of thousands of people working under slavelike conditions. A report from the World Wildlife Fund notes, "Poor people, lured from villages and deprived neighbourhoods, are brought to remote soy estates [planted after the trees have been cut down] where they are put to work in barbaric conditions— often at gunpoint and with no chance of escaping. . . . Those who fall sick are abandoned and replaced by others."¹⁷

In recent years, a new branch of psychology has explored the relation­ship between the human psyche and the natural surroundings. Under the somewhat fanciful name of ecopsychology (first used in 1992 by the historian Theodore Roszak, who also coined the term counterculture), it is the study of a phenomenon that poets have understood since they first associated storms with the raging of passion and flowering fields with moments of happiness; John Ruskin characterized it as the "pathetic fallacy." Attempting to analyze our mirroring in nature, ecopsychologists argue that because we are an intri­cate part of the natural world, separation from it (through neglect, indiffer­ence, violence, fear) results in something like psychological suicide. With a possible reference to Aristotle, the psychologist and poet Anita Barrows says, "It is only by a construct of the Western mind that we believe ourselves to be living in an 'inside' bounded by our skin, with everyone and everything else on the outside."¹⁸

In order to explain his own state of mind and his fantastic encounters, Dante will often describe a memory of natural surroundings. Reaching the stone bridge that would have allowed them to pass from the Cornice of the Hypocrites to the Chasm of the Thieves, Dante and his guide discover that it has been shattered, and a feeling of anguish overwhelms them. To explain to the reader what he felt, Dante conjures up a memory:

During that period of the boyish year, When the sun tempers his locks under Aquarius And the nights already wane towards half the day,

When the hoar frost copies out onto the ground The image of his sister white as snow, Though only a short while his pen holds out,

The peasant, whose supplies now are gone, Rises and looks, and sees the fields All white, at which he slaps his thigh,

Goes back into the house, and grumbles to and fro, Like a poor fool who knows not what to do. Then he comes out again and hope returns,

Observing how the world has changed its face In such short while; so he picks up his staff And chases out his lambs to go and feed.

In passages such as this, Dante is recalling, not Aristotle's utilitarian view of nature, but Virgil's, not the lyrical artifice of the Eclogues but the considered reflections of the Georgics, where Virgil abandoned the idyllic vision of coun­try life and concentrated instead on the hardships and rewards of farming, and the farmer's responsibilities towards the natural world. "Toil conquered the world," Virgil wrote, "unrelenting toil, and want that pinches when life is hard." But, he continued, "Nature has ways manifold for rearing trees. For some, under no man's constraint, spring up of their own free will, and far and wide claim the plains and winding rivers. . . . But some spring from fallen seed, as tall chestnuts, and the broad-leaved tree, mightiest of the wood­land, that spreads its shade for Jove, and oaks, deemed by the Greeks oracu­lar." This natural generosity, as both Virgil and Dante understood, entails an obligation.¹⁹

On 31 March 2014 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report about the effects of "man-made climate change around the world." A total of 309 specialized writers drawn from 70 countries were selected to produce the report, with the help of a further 436 contribut­ing authors, and a total of 1,729 expert and government reviewers. Their con­clusion was that since the nature of the risks brought on by climate change have become increasingly clear, governments need immediately to make drastic choices between suffering the consequences of these changes and for­going or decreasing the financial profits sought by our national economies. The report identified vulnerable people, industries, and ecosystems world­wide and found that the risks from a changing climate come from our soci­eties' vulnerability and lack of preparation in the face of future catastrophes. The risks from a changing climate depend strongly on how fast and how intensely those changes will occur; these will determine whether they are ir­reversible. "With high levels of warming that result from continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions, risks will be challenging to manage, and even serious, sustained investments in adaptation will face limits," said one of the chairmen of the panel, adding that climate change has already severely af­fected agriculture, human health, ecosystems on land and in the oceans, water supplies, and people's livelihoods from the tropics to the poles, from small islands to large continents, and from the wealthiest countries to the poor- est.²⁰ Once again, we have been warned.

Dante may have considered Aristotle the supreme thinker, "master of those who know," as he calls him, but throughout the undergrowth of the Commedia creeps the intuitive suspicion that, with regard to our relationship to God's other book, the "maestro di color che sanno" was wrong.²¹

⁹

Where Is Our Place?

On my fiftieth birthday, I stopped counting the places in which I had lived. Sometimes for just a few weeks, sometimes for a decade or more, the map of the world consisted for me not of its conventional representation on a globe, like the one that sat by my bed when I was a child, but of a per­sonal cartography in which the largest masses of land were the places in which I spent the longest periods, and the islands the ones of briefer passage. Like the model of oneself designed by physiologists in which the size of each fea­ture is given according to the importance we lend it in our mind, my model of the world is the map of my experience.

It is difficult to answer the question where is my home. My house and my library are like the shell of a crustacean, but along what seabed am I slowly crawling? "I had no nation now but the imagination," wrote Derek Walcott. This is as true for me today as it was in my childhood. I remember as a child trying to imagine from where I stood indoors the garden outside, then the street, the neighborhood, the city, enlarging the space of vision circle after circle until I thought I could see all around me the pinpointed darkness of the cosmos depicted in my natural sciences book. Stephen Deda- lus had the same impulse when he inscribed on the flyleaf of his geography

(Opposite) Virgil and Dante see the traitors trapped in the ice. Woodcut illustrating Canto XXXII ofthe Inferno, printed in 1487 with commentary by Cristoforo Landino. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

book his name and then "Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sal- lins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe." We want to know the full extent of that which is supposed to embrace us.

The place I live in defines me, at least in part, at least during the time I'm there. The presence of a market or a forest, the knowledge of certain events and certain customs, one language spoken by those around me rather than another, all change a multitude of my actions and reactions. Goethe observed, "No one wanders under palm-trees unpunished, and certainly one's way of thinking alters in a country where elephants and tigers are at home." The local fauna and flora shape my features. Where I am and who I am in­tertwine, and one questions the other. After leaving a place, I ask myself what is different in me now, what quality of taste or touch, what intonation, what subtle shift in the phrasing of a thought.

Memory, too, of course, is different. In Lawrence Durrell's Constance; or, Solitary Practices, a certain Mrs. Macleod, in her diary titled An English­woman on the Nile, makes this observation: "In Egypt one acts upon impulse as there is no rain to make one reflect." For a Sudanese in England the con­trary is true: Mustafa Sa'eed, the enigmatic stranger who confides in the nar­rator of Season of Migration to the North, says that in soggy London "my soul contained not a drop of sense of fun." Places define us as we define them. Cartography is an art of mutual creation.

The places we name don't exist spontaneously: we conjure them up. The universe is blind to its own measures, its dimensions, its speed and duration, and as in the medieval definition of the godhead, the world is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. We, however, carry our center within us and from our secret corner call out to the universe and say, "You orbit around me." Home patch, township, province, father­land, continent, hemisphere are our necessary inventions, like the unicorn and the basilisk. As the Bellman says in The Hunting ofthe Snark:

"What's the good of Mercator's North Pole and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"

So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply, "They are merely conventional signs!"

Faithful to his assertion, the Bellman provides his crew with the best and most accurate map: a perfect and absolute blank—the exact definition of our universe unobserved. Within this blank, we draw squares and circles, and trace paths from one place to another in order to have the illusion of being somewhere and someone. Northrop Frye tells the story of a doctor friend who, crossing the Arctic tundra with an Inuit guide, was caught in a blizzard. In the icy dark, outside the boundaries he knew, the doctor cried out, "We are lost!" His Inuit guide looked at him thoughtfully and answered, "We are not lost. We are here."

We are cartographers at heart and we parcel and label our "here" and believe that we move about, towards alien territory, perhaps merely in order to shift our grounding and our sense of identity. And so we believe that in one place we are alone and look out onto the world, and in another we are among our brethren and look back upon our self, lost somewhere in the past. We pretend to travel from home to foreign countries, from a singular expe­rience to a communal alien one, from whom we once were towards whom we'll one day be, living in a constant state of exile. We forget that, wherever we find ourselves, we are always "here."

Never ask the way of someone who knows it, because then you won't be able to get lost.

—Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, Tales

_F

ar from the Aristotelian notion of a subservient nature, on the morn­ing of Easter Friday 1300, the year of Christendom's first jubilee, Dante emerged from a dark forest. The attempt to describe it to his readers renewed in him the fear he had felt: it was "wild and rough and strong," and so "bitter" that death could scarcely be worse. He could not remember how he had entered the forest because he was full of sleep at the time, but as he finally came out of the darkness he saw before him a moun­tain rising at the end of the valley, and above the mountain the rays of the Easter sun. In his text the exact location of the forest is not given: it is every­where and nowhere, the place into which we enter when our senses are blurred, and the place from which we emerge when the rays of the sun wake us, the dark place Saint Augustine called "the bitter forest of the world." Dark things happen in the darkness, as our fairy tales tell us, but it may be that, since our expulsion from the forest that was also a garden, the path through the other terrible forest is almost certainly our promised path into the light. It is only when Dante has crossed the forest where "I spent the night so piteously" that he can begin the journey that will lead him to an understanding of his own humanity.¹

The entire Commedia can be read both as an exodus from the forest and as a pilgrimage towards the human condition. (Dante himself stresses the importance of reading correctly the biblical verse "When Israel went forth from Egypt.")² And not only towards a perception of the pilgrim's singu­larity: also, and most important, towards his condition as a member of the human fold, contaminated and redeemed by what others have done and what others are. Not once during his voyage after leaving the forest is Dante alone.³ Met by Virgil or by Beatrice, speaking with souls condemned or saved, addressed by demons or angels, Dante progresses through constant dialogue with others: he advances through conversation. Dante's voyage coincides with the telling of that voyage.

As noted earlier, conversation is the reason the dead have not lost the gift of language: it enables them to communicate with the living. This is why their physical form, shuffled off on this earth, is apparent to Dante when he meets them, so that he might know he speaks with humans and not merely with intangible spirits. In the dark forest he is alone, but after that, never again.

Dante's forlorn forest is a place through which we must all pass in order to emerge more conscious of our humanity. It rises in all its awful darkness as a long succession of forests: some older, like the demon forest through which Gilgamesh must journey at the beginning of our literatures, or like the one that first Odysseus and then Aeneas must traverse on their quests; others more recently sprung up, like the live forest that moves forward to defeat Macbeth, or the black forest in which Little Red Riding Hood and Tom Thumb and Hansel and Gretel lose their innocent way, or the blood-soaked forest of the marquis de Sade's unfortunate heroines, or even the pedagogical forests to which Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs entrust their young. There are forests on the edge of other worlds, forests of the night of the soul, of erotic agony, of visionary threat, of the final totterings of old age, of the unfolding of adolescent longing. It is of such forests that Henry James's father wrote in a letter addressed to his adolescent sons: "Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its sub­ject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters."⁴

Such unsubdued forests are always duplicitous: they lend us the illusion that it is here, in the darkness, that the action takes place, and yet we know the forests are defined not only by their trees and filtered light but also by their frame, the land that surrounds them and lends them context. Into a forest we are lured, but we are never allowed to forget that there is another world wait­ing outside. Inside may be darkness (even Milton's over-quoted "darkness visible") and yet a web of shapes and shadows outline the promise of a twi­light sky. There we must stand each alone, in this preparatory stage, an initi­ation ground for that which is still to come: the encounter with the other.

Thirty-two cantos away from the shadows of the forest, almost at the end of Dante's descent into Hell, he reaches the frozen lake where the souls of traitors are trapped up to the neck in ice. Among the dreadful heads that shout and curse, Dante hits his foot against one and then thinks he recog­nizes in the shivering features a certain Bocca degli Abati, who in Florence betrayed his party and took arms on the side of the enemy. Dante asks the angry soul his name and, as has been his custom throughout the magical journey, promises to bring the sinner posthumous fame by writing about him when he returns among the living. Bocca answers that he wishes for the exact opposite, and orders Dante to leave him to his unrepentance. Furious at the insult, Dante grabs hold of Bocca by the scruff of the neck and threat­ens to tear out every hair on his head unless he gets an answer.

Then he to me: "Even if you leave me bald, I will not tell you my name, nor show you my face, even if you pound my head a thousand times."

Hearing this, Dante tears out "more than one fistful," making the tortured sinner howl in pain. (Another condemned soul cries out to him, "What ails you, Bocca"—thus revealing his name.)⁵

Some way farther, Dante and Virgil encounter more souls embedded in the ice whose "very weeping allows them not to weep": their eyes are sealed with frozen tears. Hearing Dante and Virgil speak, one of them begs that the strangers remove from his eyes "the hard veils" before his weeping freezes them again. Dante agrees to do so, swearing, "If I do not extricate you, may I go to the bottom of the ice," but in exchange the soul has to tell him who he is. The soul agrees and explains that he is Friar Abrigo, condemned for murdering his brother and nephew, who had insulted him. Then Abrigo asks Dante to reach out his hand and fulfill his promise, but Dante refuses: "and to be rude to him was courtesy." All the while, Virgil, Dante's heaven- appointed guide, remains silent.⁶

Virgil's silence can be read as approval. Several circles earlier, as both poets are ferried across the River Styx, Dante sees one of the souls con­demned for the sin of wrath rise from the filthy waters, and, as usual, asks him who he is. The soul doesn't give his name but says that he is merely one who weeps, for which Dante, unmoved, curses him horribly. Delighted, Vir­gil takes Dante in his arms and fulsomely praises his ward with the same words Saint Luke uses in his Gospel in praise of Christ ("blessed be she who bore you").⁷ Dante, taking advantage of Virgil's encouragement, says that nothing would give him greater pleasure than to see the sinner plunged back into the ghastly swill. Virgil agrees, and the episode ends with Dante giving thanks to God for granting his wish. Outside the forest, the rules of engage­ment do not follow our own code of ethics: they are not exclusively our own.

Over the centuries, commentators have tried to justify Dante's actions as instances of what Thomas Aquinas identified as "noble indignation" or "just anger," not the sin of wrath but the virtue of being roused by the "right cause."⁸ The other punished souls gleefully call out to Dante the sinner's name: he is Filippo Argenti, Dante's fellow Florentine and one of his former political enemies, who acquired some of Dante's confiscated property after Dante was banished. Argenti received his nickname (Silver) for having shod his horses with silver rather than iron; his misanthropy was such that he rode through Florence with his legs outstretched so that he could wipe his boots on the passersby. Boccaccio described him as "thin and strong, scornful, eas­ily drawn to wrath and eccentric."⁹ Argenti's history seems to bring a sense of private vindictiveness to mingle with whatever loftier sentiments of justice may have driven Dante to curse him in the name of "the right cause."

The problem, of course, resides in the reading of "right." In this case, "right" refers to Dante's understanding of the unquestionable justice of God. "Shall mortal man be more just than God?" asks one of Job's friends. "Shall a man be more pure than his maker?" (Job 4:17). Implicit in the question is the belief that to feel compassion for the damned is "wrong" because it means setting oneself against God's imponderable will and questioning his justice.

Only three cantos earlier, Dante was able to faint with pity when hearing the tale of Francesca, condemned to whirl forever in the wind that punishes the lustful. But now, advanced in his progress through Hell, Dante is less of a sentimentalist and more a believer in the higher authority.¹⁰

According to Dante's faith, the legal system decreed by God cannot be mistaken or wicked; therefore, whatever it determines to be just must be so, even if human understanding cannot grasp its validity. Aquinas, discussing the relation between truth and God's justice, argued that truth is a pairing of mind and reality: for human beings, this pairing will always be incomplete, since the human mind is by nature faulty; for God, whose mind is all- embracing, the apprehension of truth is absolute and perfect. Therefore, since God's justice orders things according to his wisdom, we must consider it to be equivalent to the truth. This is how Aquinas explains it: "Therefore God's justice, which establishes things in the order conformable to the rule of His wisdom, which is the law of His justice, is suitably called truth. Thus we also in human affairs speak of the truth of justice."¹¹

This "truth of justice" that Dante seeks (his deliberate infliction of pain on the prisoner in the ice, and his prurient desire to see the other prisoner tortured in the mire) must be understood (his supporters say) as humble obedience to the law of God and acceptance of his superior judgment. But for most readers, such neatness is not satisfactory. An argument similar to that of Aquinas is put forward today by those who object to the investigation and prosecution of official murderers and torturers who are said to act under government orders. And yet, as almost any reader of Dante will admit, how­ever cogent the theological or political arguments may be, these infernal passages leave a bad taste in the mouth. Perhaps the reason is that if Dante's justification lies in the nature of divine will, then instead of Dante's actions being redeemed by the religious dogma, the dogma is undermined by Dante's actions, and human nature is debased, not elevated, by the divine. Much the same way, the implicit condoning of torturers merely because their abuses are said to have taken place in the unchangeable past and under the supe­rior law of a previous administration, instead of encouraging faith in the pres­ent administration's policies, undermines that faith and those policies. And worse still: left unchallenged, the worn-out excuse "I merely obeyed orders," tacitly accepted, acquires new prestige and serves as precedent for future exculpations.

There is, however, another way to view Dante's actions. Sin, theologians say, is contagious, and in the presence of sinners, Dante becomes contami­nated by their faults: among the lustful he pities the weak flesh to the point of fainting, among the wrathful he is filled with bestial anger, among the traitors he betrays even his own human condition, because no one, certainly not Dante, is incapable of sinning as others have sinned. Our fault lies not in the possibility of evil but in our consent to do evil. In a landscape where a certain evil flourishes, consent is easier to give.

Landscape is of the essence in the Commedia: where things happen is almost as important as what happens there. The relationship is symbiotic: the geography of the Otherworld colors the events and the souls lodged therein, and these color the chasms and cornices, the woods and the water. For centuries Dante's readers have understood that the places of the afterlife are supposed to conform to a physical reality and this precision lends the Commedia no small measure of its power.

For Dante, broadly following Ptolemy, whose model of the universe he corrected under the stronger influence of Aristotle, the earth is a motionless sphere in the center of the universe, around which run nine concentric heav­ens that correspond to the nine angelic orders. The first seven spheres are the planetary heavens: of the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The eighth is the heaven of the fixed stars. The ninth, the crystalline heaven, is the Primum Mobile, the invisible source of the diurnal rotation of the heavenly bodies. Surrounding this is the Empyrean, wherein blooms the divine rose in the center of which is God. The earth itself is divided into two hemispheres: the northern hemisphere, inhabited by humankind, whose mid­point is Jerusalem, equidistant from the Ganges to the east and the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) to the west; and the southern, a watery realm forbidden to human exploration, at the center of which rises the island mountain of Purgatory, sharing the same horizon as Jerusalem. At the top of Purgatory is the Garden of Eden. Beneath Jerusalem is the inverted cone of Hell, at the core of which is embedded Lucifer, whose fall pushed up the land that formed Mount Purgatory. The two rivers, the holy city, and the southern mountain form a cross within the earth's sphere. Hell is divided into nine decreasing circles, reminiscent of the grades in an amphitheater. The first five circles constitute Upper Hell, the following four Lower Hell, which is a city forti­fied with iron walls. The waters of Lethe have opened a crack in the bottom of Hell, offering a path that leads to the base of Mount Purgatory.

So detailed is Dante's geography that in the Renaissance several scholars undertook an analysis of the information provided in the poem to determine the exact measurements of Dante's realm of the damned. Among these was Antonio Manetti, a member of the Platonic Academy of Florence and friend of the Academy's founder, the great humanist Marsilio Ficino. An ardent reader of Dante, Manetti used his political connections to influence Lorenzo de' Medici to assist in the repatriation of the poet's remains to Florence, and his extensive knowledge of the Commedia to write a preface for an important annotated edition of the poem edited by Cristoforo Landino and published in 1481, which included Landino's reflections on the measurements of Hell. In his preface, Manetti discussed the entire Commedia mainly from a linguis­tic point of view; in a text published posthumously, in 1506, Manetti cen­tered his investigations on the geography of the Inferno.

In the literary as in the scientific realm, every original argument seems to elicit its contrary. In opposition to Manetti, another humanist, Alessan- dro Vellutello, a Venetian by adoption, decided to write a new geography of Dante's Inferno, mocking Manetti's "Florentine" views and arguing for more universal considerations. According to Vellutello, Landino's measurements were faulty and the Florentine Manetti, basing his own calculations on those of his predecessor, was nothing but "a man who is blind seeking guidance from a man who is one-eyed."¹² The members of the Florentine Academy received the comments as an insult and swore revenge.

In 1587, to counter the perceived indignity, the Academy resolved to invite a talented young scientist to rebut Vellutello's arguments. The twenty- year-old Galileo Galilei was then an unlicensed mathematician who had made his name in intellectual circles with his studies of the movements of the pendulum and his invention of hydrostatic scales. Galileo accepted. The full title of his talks, given in the Hall of the Two Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio,

A depiction of the terraces of Hell from Antonio Manetti's Dialogo (Florence, 1506). Reading from top to bottom, after Limbo are the terraces of the Lustful, the Gluttonous, the Avaricious, the Wrathful and Sullen, the Violent, and Barrators. The Well leads down to the Frozen Lake. (Photograph courtesy of Livio Ambrogio. Reproduced by permission.)

was Two Lessons Read Before the Academy of Florence Concerning the Shape, Location and Size ofDante's Hell.¹³

In the first lesson, Galileo follows Manetti's description and adds to it his own calculations, with learned references to Archimedes and Euclid. To measure the height of Lucifer, for instance, he takes as his starting point Dante's statements that the face of Nimrod is as long as the bronze pinecone of Saint Peter's in Rome (which in Dante's time stood in front of the church

and measured seven and a half feet) and that Dante's height is to a giant as the giant's is to Lucifer's arm. Using for his calculations Albrecht Durer's chart to measure the human body (published in 1528 as Four Books on the Human Proportions), Galileo concludes that Nimrod was 645 fathoms tall. Based on that figure, he calculates the length of Lucifer's arm which in turn allows him, using the rule of three, to determine Lucifer's height: 1,935 fath­oms. Poetic imagination, according to Galileo, obeys the laws of universal mathematics.¹⁴

In the second lesson, Galileo exposes (and refutes) the calculations of Vellutello, which was the conclusion the members of the Florentine Academy were waiting for. Surprisingly, for those who read them from the distance of five centuries, in both these lessons Galileo embraces Ptolemy's geocentric model of the universe, perhaps because in order to deny Vellutello and side with Manetti, he found it more convenient to take Dante's view of the uni­verse for granted.

Retribution, once obtained, is often quickly forgotten. The members of the Academy never mentioned the lectures again, and neither were the hell­ish explorations of the young Galileo collected by his last disciple, Vincenzo Viviani, in his edition of his master's works, published after Galileo's death in 1642. But certain texts are infinitely patient. Three centuries later, in 1850, the Italian scholar Octavo Gigli was researching the work of a minor sixteenth-century philologist when he came across a thin manuscript wherein he believed he could recognize the handwriting of Galileo, which he had seen once by chance on a piece of paper in the house of a sculptor friend (such are the miracles of scholarship). The manuscript proved to be that of Galileo's Lectures on Dante, which the over-scrupulous secretary of the Acad­emy at the time had not entered into the official registry because the young mathematician was not an elected member but merely a guest (such are the abominations of bureaucracy).

Long ago, Copernicus's discoveries shifted the self-centered vision of our world to a corner that has since constantly shifted farther and farther towards the margins of the universe. The realization that we, human beings, are ale­atory, minimal, a casual convenience for self-reproducing molecules is not conducive to high hopes or great ambitions. And yet what the philosopher

Nicola Chiaromonte called "the worm of consciousness" is also part of our being, so that, however ephemeral and distant, we, these particles of stardust, are also a mirror in which all things, ourselves included, are reflected.¹⁵

This modest glory should suffice. Our passing (and, on a tiny scale, the passing of the universe with us) is ours to record: a patient and bootless effort begun when we first started to read the world. Like the geography of what we call the world, what we call the history of the world is an ongoing chron­icle which we pretend to decipher as we make it up. From the beginning, such chronicles purport to be told by their witnesses, whether they be true or false. In book 8 of the Odyssey, Odysseus praises the bard who sings the mis­fortunes of the Greeks "as if you were there yourself or heard from one who was."¹⁶ The "as if" is of the essence. If we accept this, then history is the story of what we say has happened, even though the justifications we give for our testimony cannot, however hard we try, be justified.

Centuries later, in a severe German classroom, Hegel would divide his­tory into three categories: history written by its assumed direct witnesses (ursprunglische Geschichte), history as a meditation upon itself (reflektierende Geschichte) and history as philosophy (philosophische Geschichte), which even­tually results in what we agree to call world history (Welt-Geschichte), the never-ending story that includes itself in the telling. Immanuel Kant had earlier imagined two different concepts of our collective evolution: Historie to define the mere recounting of facts and Geschichte, a reasoning of those facts—even an a priori Geschichte, the chronicle of an announced course of events to come. Hegel pointed out that in German the term Geschichte comprised both the objective and subjective sense and simultaneously meant historia rerum gestarum (the history of the chronicle of events) and res gestae (the history of exploits or the events themselves). For Hegel, what mattered was the understanding of (or the illusion of understanding) the entire flow of events as a whole, including the riverbed and its coastal observers, and in order to better concentrate on the main, from this torrent he excluded the margins, the lateral pools and the estuaries.¹⁷

In an essay admirably titled Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears, the Hungarian scholar Laszlo Foldenyi suggests that this is the horror Dostoyevsky discovers in his Siberian prison: that history, whose vic­tim he knows he is, ignores his existence, that his suffering goes on unnoticed or, worse, serves no purpose in the general flow of humankind. What Hegel proposes, in Dostoyevsky's eyes (and in Foldenyi's) is what Kafka would later say to Max Brod: there is "no end of hope, only not for us." Hegel's caveat is even more terrible than the illusory existence proposed by the idealists: we are perceived but we are not seen.¹⁸

Such an assumption is, for Foldenyi (as it must have seemed to Dosto- yevsky) inadmissible. Not only can history not dismiss anyone from its course, but the reverse is true: the acknowledgement of everyone is necessary for his­tory to be. My existence, any person's existence, is contingent on your being, on any other person's being, and both of us must exist for Hegel, Dosto- yevsky, Foldenyi to exist, since we (the anonymous others) are their proof and their ballast, bringing them to life in our reading. This is what is meant by the ancient intuition that we are all part of an ineffable whole in which every singular death and every particular suffering affects the entire human collective, a whole that is not limited by each material self, a whole that Dante knows he must attempt to understand through a few of its individual parts. The worm of consciousness mines but also proves our existence; it is no use denying it, even as an act of faith. "The myth that denies itself," says Foldenyi wisely, "the faith that pretends to know: this is the gray hell, this is the universal schizophrenia with which Dostoyevsky stumbled on his way."¹⁹ Our imagination allows us always one hope more, beyond the one shat­tered or fulfilled, one as yet seemingly unattainable frontier that we'll even­tually reach, only to propose another lying farther away. Forgetting this lim- itlessness (as Hegel tried to do by trimming down his notion of what counts as history) may grant us the pretty illusion that what takes place in the world and in our life is fully understandable. But it reduces the questioning of the universe to catechism and that of our existence to dogma. As Foldenyi argues, and Dante would have agreed, what we want is not the consolation of that which seems reasonable and probable but the unexplored Siberian regions of the impossible, the "here" always present beyond the horizon.

If "beyond" implies an open question, it also implies a center from which we conceive the world, a position that enables us to claim superiority over the alien others out there. The Greeks saw Delphi as the center of the uni­verse, the Romans claimed that it was Rome, whose secret name is "Love" (Roma read backwards is Amor).²⁰ For Islamic people, the center of the world is Mecca, for the Jewish people it is Jerusalem. Ancient China recognized that center in Taishan, at an equal distance from the four sacred mountains of the Middle Kingdom. Indonesians see that center in Bali. While the as­sumed geographical center lends an identity to those who assume it, whatever lies "out there" has identifying properties as well that are too often perceived as potentially threatening or dangerously infectious.

Through cultural and commercial contacts, through imagistic and sym­bolic dialogues, what happens beyond affects travelers who leave their home center. Not all show the openness and understanding of the Persian polymath Abu al-Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Blrunlas, known in English sim­ply as Al-Biruni, who in the tenth century visited India and, after observing the local religious rituals remarked, "If the beliefs they hold differ from ours and even seem abominable to Muslims, I have only this to say: This is what Hindus believe, and this is their own way of seeing things." A long tradition of imperialistic thought holds that the only methods for converting the be­yond are enslavement or assimilation. Virgil makes this explicit in the words of Anchises to his son, Aeneas:

Let others fashion from bronze more lifelike, breathing images—

For so they shall—and evoke living faces from marble;

Others excel as orators, others track with their instruments

The planets circling in heaven and predict when stars will appear.

But, Romans, never forget that government is your medium!

Be this your art:—to practice men in the habit of peace,

Generosity to the conquered, and firmness against aggressors.²¹

In 1955, Claude Levi-Strauss published a book that would become fa­mous as an attempt to overcome the imperialist view of how to enter into dialogue with peoples beyond the limits of one's own culture. Among the Caduveo people, the Bororo, the Nambikwara, and the Tupi-Kawahib, Levi- Strauss found a way of communicating and learning without overbearing or translating these people's thoughts into his own system of beliefs. Comment­ing on his reaction to a simple Buddhist rite, Levi-Strauss wrote: "Every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favour of another object of a different nature; this second object requires from us a new effort which destroys it in favour of a third, and so on and so forth until we reach the one lasting presence, the point at which the distinction between meaning and the absence of meaning disappears: the same point from which we began. It is 2,500 years since men first discovered and formulated these truths. In the interval, we have found nothing new, except—as we have tried in turn all possible ways out of the dilemma—so many additional proofs of the con­clusion that we would have liked to avoid." To this, Levi-Strauss adds, "This great religion of non-knowledge is not based on our inability to understand. It bears witness to that ability and raises us to a pitch at which we can dis­cover the truth in the form of a mutual exclusiveness of being and knowl­edge. Through an additional act of boldness, it reduces the metaphysical problem to one of human behaviour—a distinction it shares only with Marx­ism. Its schism occurred on the sociological level, the fundamental difference between the Great and the Little Ways being the question of whether the salvation of a single individual depends, or does not depend, on the salvation of humanity as a whole."²²

Dante's Commedia seems to answer the question in the negative. The salvation of Dante depends on Dante himself, as Virgil at the very beginning of the journey upbraids him: "What is it then? Why, why do you stand back? / Why do you nurse so much cowardice in your heart? / Why don't you show courage and determination?"²³ Dante's will and Dante's will alone will allow him to reach the final blessed vision after having seen the horrors of the damned and been cleansed of the seven deadly sins. And yet . . .

The first image that confronts Dante when he ascends into Paradise is that of Beatrice gazing at God's sun. Comparing himself to the fisherman Glaucus, who, according to Ovid, having tasted magic grass that grew on the shore was seized with a longing to plunge into the deep, Dante is filled with longings of the divine. But at the same time he realizes that the place he comes from is necessarily the human commonwealth—that to be human is not a singular state but one pertaining to a plurality. Personal will and sensa­tions and thoughts are not, for all their individuality, isolated experiences. In the words of Levi-Strauss: "Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among others, so man is not alone in the universe." And using the same rainbow image that Dante describes at the end of his vision, Levi-Strauss concludes: "When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that leading to enslavement."²⁴

This is the paradox: after the unspeakable experience of suffering the world alone, and trying to narrate that experience to ourselves, consciously and unconsciously we enter the world of things shared, but here, we realize, communication, full communication, is no longer possible. Through perfunc­tory verbal excuses we allow ourselves to commit terrible deeds because, we say, others committed them. In the world at large, we repeat the same justi­fications endlessly, doing violence to the violent and betraying the traitors.

The dark forest is terrible, but it defines itself and its limits, and in doing so frames the world outside and allows us to discern that which we want to attain, whether the seashore or the mountain's peak. But past the forest, the world of experience has no such borders. Everything beyond, like the uni­verse, is simultaneously limited and expanding, not boundless but of bound­aries impossible to conceive, utterly unconscious of itself, the stage of both historia rerum gestarum and res gestae. Here we set ourselves up as actors and as witnesses, each a "single individual" and each part of "humanity as a whole." And here we live.

10

How Are We Different?

Among the books of my childhood were many that belonged to a series called La Biblioteca Azul, the Blue Library. In the Blue Library were Spanish translations of the Just William stories and several Jules Verne novels, as well as Hector Malot's Nobody's Boy, which caused me inexplicable terror. My cousin had the complete companion series, La Biblioteca Rosa, the Pink Library, and she bought every newly published volume month after month with indiscriminate collector's pride. It was an unspoken rule that I, as a boy, could only have access to the titles in the Blue Library, and that she, as a girl, was permitted only those of the Pink. I sometimes envied her a title in her collection—Anne of Green Gables or the stories of the comtesse de Segur — but I knew that if I wanted to read them, I would have to find other editions, not segregated by color.

As so many of the rules that govern our childhood, the distinction be­tween what is appropriate for boys and what is appropriate for girls erects invisible but adamantine barriers between the sexes. Colors, objects, toys, sports were identified according to this unquestioned apartheid that told you who you were according to what you were not. On the other side of the di-

(Opposite) Dante and Beatrice in the Garden of Eden preparing to ascend to

Heaven. Woodcut illustrating Canto I of the Paradiso, printed in 1487 with commentary by Cristoforo Landino. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,

Yale University)

vide lay a gender-defined territory in which the natives did other things, had another language, enjoyed different rights and suffered specific prohibitions. It was an axiom that one side could not understand the other. "She's a girl" or "He's a boy" was sufficient explanation for a certain behavior.

Literature, as usual, helped me subvert the regulations. Reading The Coral Island in the Blue Library, I felt repulsed by Ralph Rover's cloying obsequi­ousness and his absurd talent for peeling coconuts as if they were apples. But reading Heidi (in the neutral Rainbow Classics edition), I knew that she and I had many adventurous traits in common, and I cheered when she bravely stole soft rolls to give to her toothless grandfather. In my readings I changed gender with the fluidity of a parrotfish.

Imposed identities breed inequality. Instead of seeing our personalities and bodies as positive features of our singular identities, we are taught to see them as traits that oppose us to the identity of the unknowable, mysterious foreigner, living outside our fortified city walls. From that first negative teach­ing spring all the others, which end up building a vast shadow mirror of everything that we've been taught we're not. In my early childhood, I wasn't aware of anything being alien, lying outside my world; later, I was aware of little else. Instead of learning that I was a unique part of a universal whole, I became convinced that I was a separate entity and that everyone else was different from the solitary creature that answered to my name.

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

—Margaret Atwqod

any times in our histories we have proudly declared that each single individual is part of humanity as a whole. And every time this noble proposition has been uttered, we have opposed it,

amended it, sought exceptions to it, and in the end defeated it, until such time when it is pronounced again. Then, once more, we allow the notion of an egalitarian society to resurface briefly, and once again let it sink.

For Plato, in the fifth century b.c.e., social equality meant equal rights for male citizens, whose number was limited. Foreigners, women, and slaves were excluded from this privileged circle. In The Republic, Socrates proposes to discover the meaning of true justice (or rather, the definition of a truly just man) through a discussion of what is a just society.

Like all of Plato's dialogues, The Republic is a rambling conversation with no satisfactory beginning and no obvious conclusion, uncovering on the way new forms to old questions and at times inklings of an answer. In particular, what is remarkable in The Republic is its lack of emphasis. Socrates leads the dialogue from one attempt at definition to the next, but none seems definitive to the reader. The Republic reads as a sequence of suggestions, sketches, preparations for a discovery that is ultimately never made. When the aggressive Sophist Thrasymachus declares that justice is nothing but "a generous innocence" and injustice a matter of "discretion," we know he isn't right, but Socrates' interrogation will not lead to the incontrovertible proof of Thrasymachus's error: it will lead to a discussion concerning different so­cieties and the merits or demerits of their governments, just and unjust.¹

According to Socrates, justice must be included in the class of things "that, if one wishes to be happy, one must love as much for their own sake as for what from them may result." But how is that happiness to be defined?

What does it mean to love something for its own sake? What results from that as yet undefined justice? Socrates (or Plato) does not want us to take the time to consider these singular questions: it is the conversational flow of thought that interests him. And so, before discussing what is a just or unjust man, and consequently what is justice, Socrates proposes to investigate the very concept of a just or unjust society (a city or polis). "Are we not saying that there exists a justice proper to a particular man, and yet another, as I be­lieve, proper to an entire city?"² Apparently seeking to define justice, Plato's dialogue leads farther and farther away from that ineffable goal, and instead of a straight path from question to answer, The Republic proposes a voyage constantly delayed, whose very digressions and pauses grant the reader a mys­terious intellectual pleasure.

Faced with The Republic's open questions, what hints of an answer can we offer? If every form of government is somehow nefarious, if no society can boast of being ethically sound and morally fair, if politics is condemned as an infamous activity, if every collective enterprise threatens to crumble into individual villainies and betrayals what hope do we have of living to­gether more or less peacefully, profiting from mutual collaboration and look­ing after one another? Thrasymachus's pronouncements on the virtues of injustice, however absurd they may seem to the reader, have been repeated throughout the centuries by the exploiters of the social system, whatever that system might be. These were the arguments of the feudal landlords, of the slave traders and their clients, of tyrants and dictators, of the financiers re­sponsible for the recurrent economic crises. The "virtues of egotism" pro­claimed by the conservatives, the privatization of public goods and services defended by the multinationals, the benefits of unrestrained capitalism pro­moted by bankers are different ways of translating Thrasymachus's dictum that "what is just is merely what is convenient for the strongest."³

Thrasymachus's ironic conclusions are based on a number of assump­tions, principally the idea that what might be perceived as unjust is in fact the consequence of a natural law. Slavery was justified by declaring that the vanquished did not deserve the privileges of the victors or that a different race was inferior; misogyny was justified by extolling the virtues of patriarchy and defining the power and roles assigned to each of the sexes; homophobia was justified by inventing standards of "normal" sexual conduct for men and women. In each of these cases, a vocabulary of symbols and metaphors ac­companied the establishment of these hierarchies, so that women, for in­stance, were assigned the passive role (thereby denigrating or condescend­ingly praising their domestic activities, a fallacy Virginia Woolf understood when she said that a woman's first task was "to kill the angel in the house") and men the active one (exalting the violence of wars and other social com­petitions). Although this was not a universal idea—Oedipus, for instance, in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, speaks of the difference of the roles of men and women in Greece and Egypt: "For in that country [Egypt] the men sit within doors / working at the loom, while the wives go out / to get the daily bread"—it is from such ingrained symbolic roles that the association of women with speech and men with action derives. Also their perceived opposition, so that in the Iliad the fighting stops only when the women speak.⁴

Traditionally however, the speech of women must remain private; pub­lic speech is deemed the prerogative of men. In the Odyssey, Telemachus tells his mother, Penelope, when she addresses an impertinent bard in public, that as far as speech is concerned, "men will see to that." But at times, the private and the public speech of women in ancient Greece overlapped. In Delphi, the Sibyl spoke seated astride a tripod, taking the vapors of Apollo's prophetic spirit into her vagina, thus making, as the classicist Mary Beard suggests, an explicit connection between the "the mouth that eats and speaks" and the "mouth" of her sexual organs.⁵

Even the identity of a society or city is claimed by patriarchal authority. The legend of the naming of Athens is a fair example. Saint Augustine, citing the authority of the Roman historian Marcus Terentius Varro, retells the story. An olive tree and a water fountain sprang suddenly on the site of the future city of Athens.

These prodigies moved the king Cecrops to send to the Delphic Apollo to inquire what they meant and what he should do. He an­swered that the olive signified Minerva [or Athena], the water Nep­tune [or Poseidon], and that the citizens had it in their power to name their city as they chose, after either of these two gods whose signs these were. On receiving this oracle, Cecrops convoked all the citizens of either sex to give their vote, for it was then the custom in those parts for the women also to take part in public deliberations. When the multitude was consulted, the men gave their votes for Neptune, the women for Minerva; and as the women had a major­ity of one, Minerva conquered. Then Neptune, being enraged, laid waste the lands of the Athenians, by casting up the waves of the sea; for the demons have no difficulty in scattering any waters more widely. The same authority said, that to appease his wrath the women should be visited by the Athenians with the three-fold punishment— that they should no longer have any vote; that none of their chil­dren should be named after their mothers; and that no one should call them Athenians. Thus that city, the mother and nurse of liberal doctrines, and of so many and so great philosophers, than whom Greece had nothing more famous and noble, by the mockery of demons about the strife of their gods, a male and female, and from the victory of the female one through the women, received the name of Athens; and, on being damaged by the vanquished god, was com­pelled to punish the very victory of the victors, fearing the waters of Neptune more than the arms of Minerva. For in the women who were thus punished, Minerva, who had conquered, was conquered too, and could not even help her voters so far that, although the right of voting was henceforth lost, and the mothers could not give their names to the children, they might at least be allowed to be called Athenians, and to merit the name of that goddess whom they had made victorious over a male god by giving her their votes. What and how much could be said about this, if we had not to hasten to other things in our discourse, is obvious.

Perhaps "what and how much could said about this" is not as obvious as all that. Gerda Lerner, in an important essay on the origins of patriarchy, argued that what she calls "the enslavement of women" preceded the formation of classes and class oppression by converting, as early as the second millennium b.c.e. in Mesopotamia, the reproductive and sexual capacities of women into commodities. This represented, in her judgment, "the first accumulation of private property." A social contract was established between men and women in which economic support and physical protection were provided by the men and the sexual services and domestic care by the women. Throughout history, though notions of sexual identity vary in the flow of social changes, the contract persisted, and in order to assert the assumption of its validity, commencement stories needed to be told that explained the divine origin of the hierarchical difference between the sexes, as in the legend of the origins of Athens, the tale of Pandora, and the fable of Eve.⁶

Simone de Beauvoir pointed out the danger of reading in patriarchal myths only the sections that can be conveniently reinterpreted from a femi­nist point of view. And yet reinterpretations and retellings, though they can go in opposite directions, can sometimes be of use in helping us reimagine new identities and new contracts. For example, in Dante's misogynist thir­teenth century, certain gaps and tears in the social fabric allowed new ver­sions of the fundamental stories to be imagined—stories that if they did not succeed in effectively subverting the patriarchal norms at least attempted to displace them into different settings that altered their meaning. For Dante, always holding in tension the dictates of Christian theology and his own private ethical notions, the conundrum of how to achieve equal justice is always present, and, within the framework of Christian dogma it concerns all individuals, male and female. Through the voice of Beatrice and other characters, female and male, Dante expresses the belief that the capacity for reason, logical advancement, and enlightenment exists in all, and the differ­ent measures of that capacity are determined by grace, not the sex of the in­dividual. Beatrice explains to him:

In the system of which I speak, by different means, all kinds of things tend to be drawn in larger or smaller measure towards their essence;

wherein they move to various harbors on the great sea of being, and each one bearing the instinct that was bestowed upon it.⁷

Though in Dante's world the different positions assigned to individuals (peasant or queen, pope or warrior, wife or husband) entail particular rights and obligations to be undertaken or refused according to each person's free will, men and women live under the same moral code and must abide by it or suffer the consequences. The vast questions of human life and the aware­ness that much of what we want to know is beyond our horizon are shared by women and men alike.

The minor, fleeting, loving soul who calls herself Pia, whom Dante meets in the Purgatory of the late repentant, says, in one of her seven frugal lines, "Siena made me, Maremma unmade me." Historians have argued, with very little to go on, that Pia was perhaps a certain Sapia, murdered by her hus­band, who had her thrown out of a window, either from jealousy or because he wanted to marry another woman. She speaks to Dante, begging to be remembered, but only after tenderly noting that Dante will be weary after his journey, and that he will need to rest. In Pia's story, what matters is not that she is a woman wronged by a man, but that hers is a compassionate soul seeking to restore a certain balance to a past act of injustice.⁸

This equality of human suffering is made explicit many times in the Commedia. In the second circle of Hell, confronted with the fate of the souls punished for excess of love or misplaced love (Cleopatra and Helen, Achilles and Tristan), Dante feels such pangs of pity that he almost faints. Then, out of the whirlwind of the lustful, Francesca speaks both for herself and for her condemned lover, Paolo, with whom she is imprisoned for all eternity, and tells Dante how they fell in love with one another while reading the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere. Hearing the confession, Dante is overcome by the same pity he has experienced earlier, but this time it is so strong that he feels as if he were dying: "And I fell as a dead body falls." Dante's growing pitiful sorrow for the suffering of others turns into compassion (com-passion, or shared passion or feeling), reminding him that he himself has been guilty of the same sin as these lovers. As Dante knew, literature is the most efficient instrument for learning compassion, because it helps the reader take part in the emotions of the characters. The secret love of Lancelot and Guinevere in an old Arthurian romance revealed the love that Francesca and Paolo did not yet know they were feeling; Paolo and Francesca's love revealed to Dante the memory of his old loves. The reader of the Commedia is the next mirror in this amorous corridor.⁹

One of the most complex ethical dilemmas presented in the Commedia is the question of free will in the case of a person forced to suffer or commit an infamous act. At what point does a victim become the accomplice of the victimizer? When does resistance cease and acquiescence start? What are the limits of our own choices and decisions? In Paradise, Dante meets the souls of two women who have been forced by men to break their religious vows. Piccarda, the sister of Dante's friend Forese Donati, is the first soul he en­counters in the Heaven of the Moon, and the only one he recognizes un­aided (in Heaven, souls acquire an extraterrestrial beauty that changes the appearance they had when alive). Piccarda was forcibly removed from her convent by another of her siblings, Corso Donati, to be married into a pow­erful Florentine family that could assist Corso in his political career. Piccarda died shortly afterwards, and is now in the lowest of heavens. The second soul is that of Constanza, the grandmother of Manfred, a rebel leader whom Dante met in Purgatory, who will be discussed in Chapter 12, below. She was forced to marry the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, after being removed, like Piccarda, from her convent, according to a legend that Dante takes for fact. Piccarda, however, claims that though Constanza was forced to aban­don her nun's veil, "she was never freed from the veil of her heart," a willed act that has assured her a place in Paradise. The canto ends with the singing of the Ave Maria, the hymn in praise of Mary, the fundamental Christian symbol of constancy in the heart. With the spiritual weight of her words, Piccarda vanishes, "as something heavy into deep waters."¹⁰