The Lesson is Love : When A Broken-Hearted Pagan Reads Dante

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble. – Joseph Campbell

Just as Catholic Dante was guided by a pagan, I am guided by two Catholics, one living, one dead. That Dante and Deacon Anderson are guiding me -- showing me the way through this dark wood, by revealing allegory and encouraging me to decipher my own-- is not surprising. For myself, being pagan, the concept of allegory is strong. Moreover, as Campbell says in the quote above Every religion is true one way or another. I believe this and I am very interested in the presence of a pagan as the guide in the Inferno. I feel there should not be a bitter disconnect between the faiths. The allegory of love, sacrifice, journey… these things transcend Dogmatism. This is Dante’s experience, and it is mine.


Forgetting this inner essence seems to be the path to sin.

in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value… we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive—Joseph Campbell

Most of the sins represented in The Inferno are attached to the concept of a failure to read or seek the symbolic in some way. The poem suggests that one can see the world in base material form or one can seek for something deeper. In the levels of Hell there is little more than base material vision and obsession. The Hoarders and Wasters for example are described as having “labored to be blind”, I take this to mean that they had an inappropriate relationship to the physical because they labored to be blind to deeper meanings (VII. 53). The symbolic is the level at which the divine operates in Dante, and in my life. For me each moment, is layered with many meanings. The more significant moments are deeply woven with symbolic elements.

For me the most significant event in my life thus far has been my marriage. Every bit of that event is heavy with allegorical meaning, strange symbolisms.

When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity. – Joseph Campbell

Years before I met my wife, I had 2 significant dreams. Dreams are so momentous in my life, powerful and allegoric, a moment of contact with the divine. One of these two significant dreams showed my wife Bird to me before I ever knew her, and another introduced me to two figures who have followed me in my mind wherever I go. This second dream occurred in 2003. “The Old Women Dream” in which two very old women were helping me fix a problem. Several days ago I held a door open for an old woman. As she entered she stopped and looked at me and I realized that she resembled one of the dream “old women”. She then spoke to me in Spanish and English. I was especially amazed by this because Bird and I both have a strong affinity in dreams and in reality to Spanish, yet I don’t look Spanish at all, so why would this woman speak to me in Spanish, it was quite moving. She said “You make the world a better place. My name is Gloria. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.” Before the old woman appeared I had been standing outside of Gilke thinking about my wife. When Gloria left I looked up and saw a small office window with a statue of an eagle in flight. This seemed very significant since an eagle showed Bird and I where we were married. The day before our ritual, we walked the banks of the Columbia looking for the place that felt right. Suddenly, an immature bald eagle flew out of the low branch of a tree very close to us. That is how we knew the place.
Perhaps it is a symptom of my current mental state, but the central idea of Dante’s poem seems to be love. Love, as the guiding force that redeems and gives meaning to life and death. Love as an extension of creation, which is present in all living things. Dante is redeemed in a way through love. His recognition of the divine in Beatrice is a pathway to connection with deeper meaning.


I am very moved by this concept.

Midway in our lives journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. How shall I say
what wood that was! I never saw so drear,
so rank, soarduous a wilderness!
It’s very memory gives a shape to fear (Inferno I. 1-6)

These lines were like the narration of my last few months. Still alive after a long and horrible straying. I too came to find myself in a dark wood which gave shape to fear. When things in my marriage fell apart, or were smashed but ill spent emotions and language I could not have described it better than Dante has here. In the first moments of reading The Inferno I could not help but think and feel that Dante and I are not so unlike. Too similar really at that moment. For I had gone astray from love, from mystic and spiritual connection. As Joseph Campbell describes, I had been “doing things … of outer value” and “forget the inner value”. That was the first step in all of our problems.

Now, my Bird gone far away, my entire life profoundly altered I spend long hours pondering. Introspective by nature, I wonder over and over considering my deep want to honor her and our commitment. A deep want to heal and protect that love. A love that brought us together, allowed me a new access to and understanding of the world, and the spirit. I wonder is this Prideful or honorable? To pride oneself on loving, healing protecting someone and then to breach that by a personal flaw or failing is a crushing blow. An immense humbling, but is it prideful to want to heal that damage, to renew the bond which is sacred?

Putting faith in the gods, guides and ancestors and working hard to improve myself and show her my earnestness… this is how I proceed. Faith and works.

Forces will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses… miracles and coincidence will bring the inevitable to pass – Joseph Campbell

It is no coincidence that I met Gloria and saw the eagle statue. It is no coincidence that I am reading this text at this moment. The hand of the creator is at work in this moment. The lesson seems to be love.

Does my love beseech the higher love to help me through this dark place? Is she like a living Beatrice? I cannot say. In all of this, my mind thinks of “Beata Beatrix” by Dante Gabrielle Rossetti. A painting I have long loved though I did not know the story it told. Thinking of this painting what strikes me most is the red bird, Bird, my beloved’s name. Allegory upon allegory. This is how my mind reads my life, this is how I read Dante, and my coming to Dante.

Will it Never End?

Seriously.... I feel like this is the term from hell, and winter break promises little relief. The paper is in process, but I am not sure it is making any sense. Oh well. I will simply be glad to be done with it.

Introduction So Far

On November 9, 1989 representatives from fifteen countries gathered together to discuss the politics of food. From their discussion the Slow Food International movement was formed and began to promote their manifesto that, “[i]n the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer” (“Manifesto” par. 8). Since its inception the Slow Food movement has spread to 122 countries. This movement is not the only one of its kind. In recent years the focus on food has been a critical part of the ecological movement, introducing new concepts and even new language to describe the human relationship with food (locavore for example). These movements represent a sensible ordering of thought around a logical central idea. Food is a logical point around which to organize ones feelings and actions regarding their relationship to nature and resource use, because food is one of the few items that make obvious human reliance on and interconnection with the natural world.

The body of American literature contains multitudes of works focused on humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Many of these works, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, rely upon a worldview which vilifies the urban and elevates the wild as a sacred place apart. This tension between urban and wild is a central element in Willa Cather’s 1925 novel The Professor’s House. Characters such as Tom Outland and Louis Marsellus seem emblematic of this dichotomy. Even their names provide support for this concept, Outland (out-land) as the mesa dwelling place apart, and Marsellus (mar-sell- us) as the eager capitalist who Cather portrays as corrupter of Outland’s legacy. While this division has been widely accepted in many circles for generations, the concepts of glorified “wild” and vilified “capitalist” are not in the end polar opposites, but rather reflections of a similar human desire to manipulate and organize the natural world while conveniently ignoring the relationship between humanity and nature that exists at all levels of landscape.

A useful place for interrogating this binary in The Professor’s House rests in Cather’s representation of gardens. According to garden enthusiast and philosopher Mara Miller, “[t]he task of the garden is to mediate those tensions or polarities which are important for a given culture” (25).

Ending with a Boom/ Beginning with Slow Food

It was the last regular day of 121 for my classes today. We ended on a great note, especially in my 10 am class. They were so intensely interested and interactive, it was tremendous. We laughed and joked and learned. I was totally delighted by the experience and I hope some of them will end up in my 214 class. 

In my own work, I've been pleasantly surprised to find that very little has been done addressing food and ecocriticism. In my brief preliminary search I found only a few links. One of the most interesting was a Call For Papers that I wish I'd found sooner.  Even this however does not make the link between food, ecocriticism and fiction. It seems much more interested in the literature of slow food or locavore movements. 

I am eager to really begin the paper, hopefully my enthusiasm will last. 

I also need to find a copy of "Loving Ourselves Best of All". A brief glance at this article has me pretty excited.

Ecocriticism and the Locavore

Today I started working on the introductory paragraphs of my Cather seminar paper. In the paper I intend to look at how productive garden's in The Professor's House occupy a place between the idealized wild and vilified city. For me the garden is a place that destabilizes the civilization/nature binary. 

To kick off the essay I've begun by looking at how food has become intimately related with ecology and environmental movements. I will claim that food is a logical point around which to organize ones feelings and actions regarding their relationship to nature and resource use... then examine it in the Cather novel... 

It is only a beginning, but if feels like a good move.

Primal Scream

The past few days I have felt like I am just squeaking by. It's conference week so almost every minute of my day has been tightly packed with scheduled events. On top of this the term is winding down so there are many projects with fast approaching due dates.

I managed to get all of my reading done on Death Comes for the Arch-Bishop, which is great, because I actually enjoy this novel, (which means I got to do something I enjoy for a little bit) and I always feel miserable when I fail to complete the reading for Betj's class.  I also tapped into the Cather Studies website and found a bunch of info for my upcoming seminar paper. 

I have a presentation of sorts at the upcoming Information Literacy Summit which I haven't worked on much and will likely spend my weekend trying to tackle. There's also a draft due on Tuesday for my final paper in SJ's class, but I feel pretty much prepared for this.

It's nice out today, lightly overcast, warmish...

Fifteen conferences, two large assignments, and several chapters to go until the week-end

Arggg!

One Down

Today I went to PDX and took the English Literature Subject GRE. I was much dismayed to see that almost all of the questions were British Lit pre-1800... egh. This of course is a section of lit that I know almost nothing about. I answered what I could and left some blank since blank spaces don't really count against you. It was three hours of testing that I would have been happier without, and 150 bucks I would rather have spent on --well on just about anything-- but sadly the Subject GRE is needed by most of the schools I'm looking at.

I registered for the test before I decided not to apply immediately for the Ph.D. Since then, I've decided to put off applying to Ph.D. programs in hopes that the bridge position might be available and attainable. If that falls through I figure there's plenty of other things I could do for a year while I'm waiting to see who wants me as a Ph.D. candidate.

In other news I need to get cracking on my thesis... egh. I bought some Eco and more Wharton at Powells today, but really I need to stop reading, and start writing.

Dialouge and Commodity: an ending

Today in the grad only meeting of Women't Lit class we started discussing Linda Hutcheon's Theory of Adaptation. In the course of this discussion we read where Hutcheon states that "sequels and prequels are not really adaptations...nor is fan fiction" (9).  I found this comment somewhat bewildering. Although I realize that in some ways the three excluded modes do not substantially depart from the "original" or "adapted work", I think that they do fit the three primary criterion Hutcheon establishes earlier in the text (8). Furthermore I think that it might be interesting to pay some attention to the rather recent phenomenon of creating print spin-offs of film and television productions. For me this shift in media strongly suggests adaptation. 

I mentioned this in class by specifically referencing CSI which began as one television program, and is now three television programs which have been the source for a number of paperback novels, magazines, video games, board games etc... This topic brought us all rather quickly to the issue of commodification. Since CSI is a television show produced to make money (not "art") how does this effect the idea of the CSI novel as adaptation? Are the novels:

1) Not adaptations because they are part of a moneymaking franchisee phenomenon?

2) Not adaptations because they are like prequels, sequels and fan fiction?

3) Cross media adaptations which meet the three major criterion set out by Hutcheon regardless of her later caveat and the market forces behind CSI?

I'm voting three. There is no real point in arguing high culture v. low culture since all modes of communication and literature can be valuable sources of information, the study of which can provide the scholar with critical insights. Furthermore regardless of whether it is Dean Koontz or Edith Wharton or the Bible for that matter, market forces play a role in the availability and production of texts. 

Our little group briefly talked about how the idea of dialogue separate from commodification might benefit entry level academics (i.e. freshmen). Although I can imagine the value of such a worldview, where learning and texts are cherished and explored for no real "market" reason, I have a difficult time envisioning this. If everything is subject to the market in our time and place, then what dialogue is there that is not impinged by the market?

I like to think that I do what I do because I love literature. Ultimately this is probably about 85% true. Somewhere in there you can add in egotism and money, then you'd have a fuller picture.

Today my summer term partially ended. 

Tomorrow more Pendleton.