Forbearance is silence…

Forbearance is silence…

Forbearance is silence,

Virtue of the meek.

Silence is complicity,

Oppression of the weak.

Mahatma Gandhi (2010) by Purushotham Adve, Malpe Beach, India

O Beata Solitudo: Duo Poematis

OUR LADY OF THE PHILIPPINES

Trappist Abbey

When the moon climbs the cloudless sky and stillness pours into valleys pooling waters of silence, I rise from sleep to dress, shuffling off loose dreams like a sack.

Stepping outside, I inhale brisk air like snuff—suddenly, I am wakeful, a clock about to spring. I toss out bags of sand to rise more quickly.

In the early chill the mountains stand as guardian shadows and night gleams like dragonfly wings.

I am eager for the work of God beckoning at the end of a solitary path just beyond a row of trees bristling at wind snapping like a flag.

Bits of gravel bite at my soles as turning the corner, I lift up my heart at the sight of light spilling gently from the entrance to the church.

Stepping inside, I am greeted by the bright echo of kneelers knocking the stone floor, and softly rustling pages of stapled paper hymnals.

Gradually, ethereal plainchant rises like a river, gathers itself, solidly transforming into one long sonorous brilliant golden bell.

Brown Madonna (1938) by Galo Ocampo

HERMITS OF BETHLEHEM

Chester, New Jersey

Beyond the threshold is silence.

Stillness suffuses like light.

The world outside is spinning.

Summer flames at its height.

Solitude is a boon companion.

Self-knowledge climbs like a sloth.

The bed is spare, a thin beard.

The rocking chair is a moth.

Dig in a cave in darkness.

Toss out handfuls of soil.

Bake bread in your heart, an oven.

Bring steaming thirst to a boil.

Listen for the least word of power.

Pierce yourself with a sword.

Afternoon deepens day shadows.

The sun is a violent lord.

Dusk emanates blood-red rays.

All trials in an instant will pass.

Gaze upon woods colored jade.

Dream dreams of emerald grass.

Bethlehem—when the trees say nothing

Forbearance is silence…

Forbearance is silence…

Forbearance is silence,

Virtue of the meek.

Silence is complicity,

Oppression of the weak.

Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, Washington, D.C.

The Universe of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy

THE UNIVERSE OF DANTE ALIGHIERI’S DIVINE COMEDY

The purpose of this post is to provide a very brief outline description of the universe of Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia. It is written in explanatory support of my poem, “Divina Commedia” at this link:

https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2014/12/divina-commedia.html 

Dante is a well-known giant of Western literature. In case you don’t know about him, Poetry Foundation provides an excellent write-up at this link:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/dante-alighieri 

Sandro Botticelli’s “Portrait of Dante” below is a likeness based on the poet’s death mask, the original irrecoverably lost.

Image was obtained from this Wikimedia link:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dante_Alighieri's_portrait_by_Sandro_Botticelli.jpg

Portrait of Dante (1495) by Sandro Botticelli

Just a few personal notes. I read Inferno, English translation, when I was in third year high school, parts of Purgatorio and Paradiso sometime afterward. Subsequently, Divina Commedia I took to heart as a marvelous imaginative conception, rich in symbolism, similar in the foregoing respects to Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” It has many enduring literary merits, among them, characters of deep, lasting emotive power. 

Inspired illustrations have been rendered of Divina Commedia episodes. They are as compelling as the story itself is gripping. Here is one example, Gustave Doré’s illustration for the seventh canto of Inferno, the Circle of Greed, wherein souls damned for the sins of avarice or prodigality roll enormous weights against each other interminably, all the while exclaiming mutual accusations and recriminations. The weights are depicted by Doré as huge moneybags.

Canto VII - The Hoarders and Wasters (1857) by Gustave Doré

Handsomely muscled, Doré’s nudes are visually depilated, presumably to somewhat desexualize them and to advance their ostensibly symbolic meaning.

Interestingly, in the visual arts souls in Hell or Purgatory are usually shown naked, while those in Heaven are clothed in white robes. Both motifs are Biblically based (see comment below).

Musicality of Dante’s vernacular enhances Divina Commedia’s antique allure. If you listen to some very short audio excerpts at the University of Texas at Austin website, for example, the musicality comes through. Visit, for instance:

http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/circle7.html#audio

—Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services, “Circle 7, Cantos 12-17,” The University of Texas at Austin

Audio files of Divina Commedia in the original Italian are readily available on the Internet.

Although I don’t understand Italian, it is not entirely alien since I formally studied the related Romance languages French and Spanish, and Latin.

Now to the task at hand.

Note: Images below are widely available on the Internet. I was unable to trace their original sources, and they might still be under copyright. In any case, I am using them according to the principles of fair use, that is, for the purposes of information and education.

Dante’s universe is geocentric, a spherical earth enclosed in a series of crystalline spheres in which planetary bodies and the stars are embedded. Beyond the outermost sphere, known as Primum Mobile or “first moved,” is an Empyrean dimension, Heaven.

This first graphic shows the tripartite world of Divina Commedia. The pit of Hell is accessed from the earth’s surface—in the story Dante travels directly to the gates of Hell and down a harrowing descent—and from Hell’s bottom exits a passageway emerging into the island of Mount Purgatory, directly opposite Jerusalem on the other side of the spherical earth. At the top of Mount Purgatory is the Biblical Garden of Eden.

This second graphic depicts the transparent spheres enclosing the earth like nested Matryoshka dolls. Primum Mobile, the outermost sphere, revolves under its own power, thereby imparting motion to the inner spheres.

This last graphic is a schematic of Mount Purgatory, clearly showing the seven stories of Thomas Merton’s famous mountain. His autobiography apparently conceives of his life before he joined the Trappists as a principally purgative stage, in allusion to Saint Bonaventure’s “The Triple Way,” among others. Presumably, Merton’s entrance into the monastery would mark his embarkation upon the illuminative and unitive phases principally, of the spiritual life.

If this post incites your interest in exploring further Divina Commedia, all’s well then.

In this pursuit, you might want to visit Dr. Norman Prinsky’s notes here:

http://spots.gru.edu/nprinsky/Humn2001/DANTE-NQ.htm

Tempus Fugit: Quinque Poematis

THE CLOCK

We divide the clock

Into pie segments

To show, self-indulgently,

We are masters of time.

Serving up plates, we

Apportion hours a la carte,

Spearing minutes with a fork.

Wistfully, we sip on seconds.

We park our legs high

On a chair, lean back,

Saying, this year I will do this,

Next year that.

But time yields to no master:

Heedless brute, it is an

Inexorable mule,

Spinning sun, ruthless.

Only a cosmic force,

Colossal as stars collapsing,

Warping space like plastic

Has the arm to rein in time,

Rearing neighing stallion,

Bull kept at bay.

Time answers to no one.

We answer to time.

Already it holds us

On a leash, shortening:

We strain forward;

It pulls us in.

Helpless fish,

We must forsake fruit

Just beyond our reach.

And we are bound to tell time

Our narrative when it ends.

Now the clock strikes:

Bells ring, sonorous,

Pure as childhood,

Shining as youth,

Florid as love,

Perfect as wisdom

…the spring runs out.

Grandfather clock face

PROLOGUE

Gloaming is gradually pushing night away.

Casting a magician’s spell, day sweeps

His arm in a wide arc, left to right.

The sky submits to his behest.

Darkness retreats faster than low tide pulling back its forces,

Fading until morning is a garment washed many times.

Dawn is a gray wolf’s coat streaked with white clouds.

Blue and pink light diffuse, a river entering a delta.

Moon and stars now gleam faintly, soft as kindness.

Daylight is spilling, gentle waterfall, over the window sill.

The house begins to stir, a living animal.

I hear tinkling utensils, clattering plates, sloshing glasses.

Coffee is percolating, a gurgling snorkel.

Birds let loose warbles, sinuous wrist movements of a dancer.

Clearing throats repeatedly, roosters do not understand

Only once is necessary to remind everyone day is here.

Din rises, tittering audience before a performance.

Turning squeakily, a faucet drills water into a pail.

Commuters gun their engines. Motorcycles roar, punching holes in paper.

Chaos breaks out, a bull bounding free from a maze.

Bull-leaping fresco, 1450 BCE, Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete

EPILOGUE

Night begins in disquiet, pacing back and forth,

Disturbed by spoons crossing swords with forks

Banging on plates as against shields,

Clinking glasses like missiles pinging helmets.

Rumbling low, a water stream is drumming

An aluminum sink, bottom of a boat.

Beyond the wall, cars whoosh by like subway trains.

Passersby in threes or fours are chortling birds.

Two houses down, a woman hollers faintly at a bawling child.

Cats scrambling after prey kick boxes bumping together as they fall.

A small animal is making tiny scraping noises inside the ceiling.

The wind rises, shakes leaves, dislodging one fruit,

Thudding on the roof, bouncing twice,

Rolling audibly…one, two more follow.

The house folds his hands, sitting silently for a while.

Everything is slowing down, floating brushwood.

The clock is ticking but not on the wall. Time machine

Oscillating to a gradually disappearing frequency,

I listen for the pop of ratchet and spring pulling the hammer backward

To strike the bell once, twice, then push off, sleep pulling at the oars.

Le Sommeil (1937) by Salvador Dali

WINTER SOLSTICE

December 21, 1989

I am prisoner to conversation with an old man with a broken nose, mute with catarrh, sedentary and limping.

The window is squealing like a small animal, trapped.

Outside in the empty parking lot sits an abandoned car, dried out extinct turtle.

Dryness scrapes skin off the flaking season lying lifeless, electricity gone dead.

Clouds cast to the ground the feeble eyes of a pallid man.

Trees written in charcoal thrust into the sky, exclaiming, “I am turned into a pillar of salt!”

Winter breaks its stony face against the hammering wind,

Dust and rocks mix with air,

Grass grinds like pebbles underfoot.

A warm room withers faster than a disconnected leaf.

Memories scatter, twigs across the carpet.

Deaf to clapping, hooded thoughts wander.

Only blue sparks crackle in recognition.

Winter sunrise

SUMMER SOLSTICE

June 21, 2011

Early today, the sun leaps over the horizon, legs and arms spinning, slow motion, gliding, a bird of prey.

Rising light casts elongated shadows running up and down hills and dales. Atop a summit warming rays outspread.

Colors explode, life bursting in dread of death. Stunning dyes ink the sky, veins and washes.

Bright droplets of flowers splash across a palette of meadows. Floating trees at their base join to luminous shades.

Silver rivers transmute into gold. Forest regiments guard eyes hiding beneath shadowy green canopies, shading hands.

Fulsome clouds tumble, hay rolls in a royal blue field. The wind, freshly laving, puffs memories, ardent.

The longest day is glorious, a shining bracelet of hours—agate streaked orange and blue at dawn, dazzling quartz at noon, orange sapphire at dusk. Night fastens the end with a snap.

Summer sunset