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.

Summer Strikes Again

Our allergies have been bad and the temps high. It's lovely here in the Willamette Valley. I potted up about 18 lettuce seedlings yesterday and they're looking good. Bird and I moved the cukes out back, and we noticed a little spotty mildew on the leaves, hopefully the better air circulation will help keep it under control. There have been red and white breasted nuthatches, mucho chickadees, hairy woodpeckers and downy woodpeckers too. I hate to go back to school with the weather so nice... eh

A Sustaining Conversation #1 (maybe a new Sunday Tradition)

Chickadees and Nuthatches have returned to our feeders. The squirrels, who ravaged and destroyed several feeders in spring, have pleasingly gone elsewhere. I find myself excited for autumn although the season here is not much like autumn back home.

The tomatoes have many many little green tomats and I've had to be dilligent about pruning and re-tying the one we've staked. Lesson learned: although stakes cost 50 cents and cages cost 2.50 the cage is much less time intensive, possibly worth it. The baby bean and cuke plants are getting bigger, and the peas that I planted in April are still occassionally issuing a pea or two. The carrots don't seem to be maturing, so perhaps the lesson here is that unlike radishes, carrots don't do that well in a container. Mini-gladiolus have yet to flower, the fuscias are pretty much done flowering, and the herbs are doing well, though they certainly would benefit from being placed in larger pots.

Recently Bird and I have found ourselves answering a number of questions about ecology and sustainability. This is logical I suppose considering that she has a degree in Natural Resources, and I am also a lover of living things. As I think about the questions we've answered and the advice we've given I realize that it might be worth while to share some of that here. We're not saying we're the greatest, we've got many things we'd like to do better, but here are some of the little things we're up to in order to reduce our ecological impact.

House: Since we aren't homeowners we had alot of room to choose with regard to our dwelling. Originally we moved into a large freestanding house >1500 sq feet. In Albany, about 10 miles from Corvallis. After testing out our ecofoot print one day (lots of online quizes to do this) we realized how wretched this choice was for our sustainability goals. We quickly decided to move to a much smaller apx. 500 sq. feet rowhouse just >2 miles from campus. 

Electricity: Aside from the obvious (turning off lights/appliances, unplugging things not in use, using compact fluorescent light bulbs) we also purchased our power through Blue Sky which is all alternative source energy (mostly wind). It is slightly more expensive, but not much (for us an extra 2.00 or so). Options like this are avalable in many places ( in New England,  in Midwest,  and South).

Recycling and Composting: We have worked hard to reduce the amount of trash we make. On average the house of three adults and two dogs produces an average of 2.5 gallons of trash per week. While we think we can do better and are working to improve we do dispose of our trash in Bio-Bags, so at the very least this will help to promote the faster breakdown of our garbage. The rest of our stuff we either compost or recycle. The big thing about recycling that we're trying to promote (especially Bird because she worked for a recycling place) is that you must, must, must Only Recycle Things That Are Actually Recyclable. Putting non recyclable stuff in the recycling contaminates the bins and can cause recyclable materials to be turned to waste.

Food: Here's another area where the choices for reducing impact are many. Here in Casa Colibri we are nearly vegan, a food choice that substantially reduces eco-impact. I say nearly vegan because we have recently become much more concerned with local food as a sustainability practice. When it comes to local food we're so lucky because we live in the fertile and hippy filled Willamette Valley. Here there are tons of organic growers nearby. We buy organic whenever possible. There are certainly some foods that we will only eat organic. Organic is sometimes expensive, but buying locally and in season helps us to remediate these costs. We also dry and freeze items we buy in bulk while they are cheap. Hoping to learn how to can soon for more preservation options.  Another helpful thing involving food is the abundance of bulk suppliers we have down here in Oregon. We buy everything from sugar and maple syrup to canola oil  and soap in bulk. We use and reuse our own containers cutting down on waste and saving money.

 Our Current Sustainability Goals: Stopping our junk mail (we get so much and it is lame!), increasing our gardening capacity, stopping all plastic use and purchase, no new shopping bags, increasing local food purchase, reducing waste to 3 gallons every 2-3 weeks, stopping cellphone use.

Long Term Goals: an extremely fuel efficient vehicle, a green building as our dwelling, all organic, 0 waste, off grid technology (solar, greywater)

By Land and By Sea

 We're back in Corvallis. The ceremony went well, and we enjoyed a few days of sea shell hunting, and thimbleberry eating. 

No books were read. No films watched.

We did however spend a good long time considering the frequency of vehicle references in Cake lyrics.

Another Apex

Well, in spite of all of the other more pressing things I need to get done over the next few days I decided to spend the last five hours finishing my eighth Wharton novel. Although I can see why so many critics think it is "her most sentimental" I am not sure that I completely agree. While there is a romantic happy ending that verges on sappy there are elements in the language that complicate the "sentimental" reading. For example, the last glimpse of the moon, the last line of the novel, is: "a few drops were already falling, the moon, labouring upward, swam into a space of sky, cast her troubled glory on them, and was again hidden". How this should be read is perplexing. 

For my thesis purposes this text might work nicely. It is another novel where water is a significant presence. Ironically it also has characters who hail from Apex City, which is the fictional birthplace of the Spragg fortune in The Custom of the Country. The presence of water in this text however is not strictly as a commodity but is valued more for its aesthetic beauty and emotional associations. I am not sure if this is something I want to really get into, although it is a fact that people in the business of managing natural resources now take aesthetic value very seriously in their planning. 

I suppose now I need to consider what to read next. The search is on.

In the meantime I have to revamp my Eco-Historical Reconstruction proposal for my Columbia Basin class. This is most trying since I feel as though resources are limited and instruction sorely lacking. Oh well. That is due by tomorrow night. I also have  six page paper that is due on Monday. Fortunately six pages is not all that daunting, and I have a good plan for what to write. The real wrench in the works is the fact that I have every intention of spending this weekend in Bastendorff  with Bird and confirming our handfasting vows at the ocean's edge. I suppose that means I should be writing and not blogging. 

Good Finds, Great Foods, and Garden Delights

Today I tried my best to get some work done on the thesis. I started out hearing from Betjemann (superhero lit master/thesis advisor). He essentially assured me that my original thesis idea was probably worth sticking with. We're meeting up next week to discuss it. In the meantime I've been advised to look into Italian Villas and Their Gardens in hopes of some info pertaining to water. Of course in this text I would likely find writings about fountains, ponds etc... I haven't followed this advice yet, but I did read a good essay today; Peter Hays "Undine is Us". The essay gave a good overview of how Undine (The Custom of the Country) is an embodiment of American materialism at its worst. I was also pleased to find several passages in The Fruit of the Tree which referred to swamps and marshes. I am still trying to figure out what state Westmore mills is set in so that I can better guide my historical research though I suppose it doesn't make too much of a difference if it's in New York or New England since the industrial histories of the two are quite similar.

In an effort not to let my whole day be consumed by Edith I took some time to cook world class awesome pancakes, prep a fruit salad, a garden salad, and make a pizza. Of all these I must say the pancakes, although I make them frequently, were amazingly superb. How to make such awesome pancakes?

1 cup whole wheat flour (organic of course if possible)

1 tsp baking powder

1 tbsp cinnamon

pinch of salt

1-2 tbsp raw sugar (or brown sugar)

2 tsp vanilla

1-2 tbs oil

1-1.5 cups water or soy milk

To this deliciousness I added liberal amounts of Wilt's Blueberries.

I also gave my garden some attention. We've finally run out of lettuce. I harvested the last head today and it has been consumed (yum). The tomatoes are looking good, the strawberries also look awesome and have been taken inside to avoid fruit loss to the marauding Western Scrub-Jays. The garden, small as it is and totally done in random containers, has been very productive for us. We've harvested six heads of lettuce, a large pot of salad greens, two types of peas, two types of radishes, cilantro, lavender, sage, oregeno, and strawberries. Still in the works are garlic, carrots, two tomato plants, gladiolas, beans and cukes.

Finley, Fruit, and Film

This morning bright and early-ish Bird and I headed out to the William L. Finley wildlife refuge where Bird is doing part of her study. The place we were looking at is basically a field dominated by various grasses and small rose bushes. Unlike where we were yesterday, Finley had almost no fruiting plants. There were, as far as I could see, no cherries, only a few apples and some other dark berries on a tree I've yet to identify. There were a number of lovely wildflowers, some that I know by name, but many unfamiliar to me. I took photos of them for later identification.  While at Finley we saw a group of about five Western Kingbirds. They are apparently uncommon in this area, so it was a nice find. They were also terribly cute and talkative. 

On the thesis front, my reading of The Fruit of the Tree continues. I spoke with one of the instructors at school today. She is the Composition Coordinator, in other words she essentially runs the writing program and is my boss when it comes to my capacity as a TA. She gave me some advice about planning out the organization of my thesis, and suggested that I make multiple introductions until I can nail down exactly what I want to focus on in the thesis. I told her that my focus might be shifting from Water to more broad connections between Ecology and Wharton's writing. She did not discourage the idea and suggested looking at Woolf also. I've considered combining a look at Wharton and Woolf before, but in many ways it seems like it might just complicate matters, or prevent me from digging deeply enough into either. I am unsure. The deadline for a Conference proposal I had been hoping to submit is tomorrow and I have nothing, but maybe it's for the best. I have a paper from my Columbia Basin Ecology class coming up (eco-historical look at Pendleton), my thesis to work on, and an English class starting on Monday. On top of all this I signed up to be a Comp. Coordinator Assistant this summer and that involves quite a bit of work that I've yet to attend to. There will be other conferences.

For tonight work is over and we're watching a film, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. I read this book some time ago, but so far the film doesn't disappoint.

Red Rose Tea, Birds and a Box Fan

It is finally heating up in the Willamette Valley. Not that I wanted it to get hot, but it had been cool and rainy from October well into June. Enjoyable, but I had wondered if there would be a summer. There is. It is overwhelmingly warm. We have the front door propped open with the dog kennel and a cheapo (though oddly made in the USA) box fan on top of it. 

We fill a giant glass jug with Red Rose and ice every morning and by the next day we need to do it all again. For some reason I love this tea and this tea alone though my current financial straits have prevented me from branching out toward some organic black tea (this will be done eventually, though by then it may not be hot enough to warrant it).

Bird and I went to EE Wilson today to prepare for her upcoming research project regarding mature forest birds in early sucessional forests. EE Wilson is run by the Fish and Wildlife folks, and has some interesting history (good overview at the attached link) .  There we saw a number of birds; osprey, herons, orange crowned warbler, bushtits, pied billed grebe... as well as some great plant life, butterflies, dragonflies, and deer. 

The rest of this day has largely been spent prostrate in front of the fan. I'm about 200 pages into Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree. Originally published in 1907 (after The House of Mirth) this book seems to have been ill received by the public and critics alike, but I am enjoying it quite a bit. It centers on a mill in the North Eastern US (I believe New England though others claim New York). I don't know how useful it will be for my attempt at ecocritical analysis of Wharton, but it is a good read.

On the topic of Wharton I am trying to assemble a list of any novel or story (or poem) of hers which contains suicide or attempted suicide. Any help is welcome. So far I have:

The House of Mirth

The Custom of the Country

Ethan Frome