ASTUZIA

***NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, whose long argument with Inferno 26 led him to write The Prince, abandoned grace as a form of power. Dante is his fictive interlocutor. John Freccero has said: "Machiavelli knew every inch of Dante." He agreed with Dante that "Virtue conquers Fortune." But Machiavelli believed that power is acquired by manipulation. If we are successful, we think it's because we are good, not that we are good. Luck has favored us. Niccolo imagines "an Other" is a woman, and he suggests to readers of The Prince that they treat her violently: "It is necessary to beat her and jolt her." Fortune will betray the ambitious Prince unless he dominates her. Astuzia, astuteness, life-destroying for Ulysses, becomes a valued quality in the Renaissance. Machiavelli is astute.***

(Extraído de "Dante In Love" de Harriet Rubin)

Prosigo con mi investigación sobre T.S. Eliot, subrayando que el Canto 26 del Inferno era su preferido. Y recuerdo haber visto más referencias sobre T.S. Eliot en "Dante In Love", la vida te da sorpresas...

LIES

***Cavalcanti's father hopes to see his son with Dante. He utters words that recall God's words to Cain: "My son, where is my son?": "Where is your brother?" God asks Adam's murderous son. Cavalcanti infers from Dante that Guido -whose love of life on earth, whose belief in individual greatness, led him to achieve his own greatness- no longer feasts "on the sweet light." Devastated, the elder Cavalcanti collapses back into his crypt, among those Dante brands heretics because they believed that pleasure is the highest human good, which meant one needed no gods.
Dante will give Farinata, Guido's father-in-law who raises himself from the same tomb, this message: tell the old man that his son still lives. But it is not true.
Is Dante lying because in Guido's death he suffered the loss of a friend and the loss of innocence? The heresy of the sixth circle is a sin that resides in the mind. Insofar as Dante is concerned, heresy and pleasure are one and the same: an intellectual obfuscation. Guido's father asks a question; he believes by Dante's silence that he hears the answer. Dante tries to speak, but only a partial confession comes from him. In the language he has learned, in the poet he is at this point in his journey, he cannot make himself understood. A new language is needed, one that will carry the truth in all its clarity. No natural philosopher would have said that the mind could sin. Aristotle would not have acknowledged heresy or hypocrisy. These are Dante's demons.
But he is not Dante anymore. He is Dante and Cavalcanti, Dante and Moses in the desert. Experience extends beyond the boundaries of autobiography to become a larger element: Dante discovers the forcefulness of allegory, where his wanderings become a new "exodus". He is all men who have sought freedom and the full expression of the feelings that lie within.
There is a new teacher waiting for him -Beatrice, no longer alive, no longer dead, but in some other state.***

(Del libro de Harriet Rubin: "Dante In Love")

En la pizarra escribí "LIER", la sonrisa angelical corrigió como "LIAR".

THE CHOICE OF ONE DESIRE

***He is brought to questioning the very foundation of the poet's purpose: confronting whether language and truth are compatible. What is true in any action? When we say "I love you," do we feel love? Does our beloved? In the soul and in the body? How is one to convey truth so another receives its full value, not hypocritical or -to use a word from another time- unconscious intentions? Can language bear the weight of truth? These are questions of how to be understood, or "read," in the deepest sense -the quest, at heart, of politicians, philosophers, generals, anyone for whom another's life is on the line. Lovers too.***

(Del libro "Dante In Love" de Harriet Rubin)

***DANTE WILL MAKE hell a place of multiform loves, perversions of love, mistakes of love -as if accepting Guido's inspiration while at the same time denying Guido's influence. Dante's Hell will have more in common with the Marquis de Sade than with the Gospel of John. He will come to see that everything wrong with a person's vision has to do with energy wasted on the wrong or diverse passions. Genius is not found in desires, but in the choice of one desire, pursued against all else.***

(Del libro "Dante In Love" de Harriet Rubin)

***Guido's death fuels new questions in Dante in a way the young scholars in Paris or Bologna never imagined. Dante's search for happiness will take him to realms that intrude on other mysteries than the body, to a different kind of self-understanding. Dante saw the soul after death. Guido's vision, even of the body, was peculiarly blind. Boccaccio tells a story in The Decameron that Guido could become totally unaware when absorbed in chess. As a prank, a boy once nailed down his coattails to the bench while playing, scrunching up several folds of the cloth and driving the nail through. Guido feel nothing.***

(Del libro "Dante In Love" de Harriet Rubin)


así asentaron la frase:
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

HAMARTIA

 
***Is Dante's action murder? The Greek tragedians have a word for this crime: hamartia. They define it as an innocent act with colossal consequences.***

Fragmento de "Dante In Love" de Harriet Rubin

Clouseau se prepara para "el salto de fe", como supuestamente el protagonista Callum Lynch escapa de la máquina de regresión de Sophia Rikkin, escapa del futuro inevitable al apostar al absurdo, si esto tiene origen en Abraham o si Camus lo puso de moda, me da lo mismo.

Me gusta mucho el enfrentamiento de Clouseau con el péndulo de Newton, he ahí la diferencia entre lo que ha sido mi vida y los que han estado cobijados en el orden. ¿Pero habrá orden o siempre hay entropía, es decir, nos dirigimos a estados de más desorden?

CONTRAPASSO

***Contrapasso: counterstrike, one of the fundamental principles in the Inferno. It is an act of divine justice that redirects the essence of a crime back against the perpetrator. Dante suffers the ultimate justice.***

(Extraído de "Dante In Love" de Harriet Rubin)

En Estados Unidos y Canadá como en Rusia, los osos todavía se aprecian en la Naturaleza, recuerdo el film de Herzog sobre el hombre que se atrevió a vivir junto a los osos: Grizzly Man.

IGNATIUS REILLY'S BOETHIUS

***THE VERY MODERN curriculum of the University of Paris was imbued with the teachings of the early Christian philosopher Boethius, who lived from 480 to 524. Dante had read Boethius's work The Consolation of Philosophy in Florence. Much of the prison imagery of Inferno is inspired by this work, which Boethius wrote while awaiting execution. In Paris, Dante would have had access to Boethius's more scholarly writings.
The last thing Boethius saw at the edge of his despair, beyond hope, beyond logic, looking only at sorrow and death as he lay dying in prison, falsely accused of betraying the king, Theodoric, was numbers.***

(fragmento de "Dante In Love" de Harriet Rubin)

***To the eyes of "the last humanist," as Eco calls Boethius, the whole world is the work of a great architect, God. Architecture was frozen music, the music of the spheres. To know the order was to be overwhelmed by bliss. As Augustine wrote, "the most hidden things are the sweetest."
Boethius was, said Eco, a "sensitive intellectual in an age of profound crisis, an age occupied with the destruction of seemingly irreplaceable values. The classical world was vanishing before his eyes. It was a barbaric time. The cultivation of letters was dying out. The breakup of Europe had reached one of its most tragic moments. Boethius sought refuge by subscribing to values which could not be destroyed: the law of numbers, which would govern art and nature no matter what came to pass." Numbers alone were eternal, Boethius wrote. By meditating on numbers, one could free oneself of matter and appearances and learn directly from God.***

(fragmento de "Dante In Love" de Harriet Rubin)

LUNA

BUSCO LA SOLUCIÓN

DE ESTE PROBLEMA OSCURO

EN UN CIELO VACÍO,

DO BRILLA UN ASTRO PURO

LITTLE GIFT: OV'È ELLA ?

***The Greeks believed that memory was a mystic faculty, a gift of the gods. One could not sustain the delights of the stomach or be as thoroughly bewitched by the sex organs as by memory. One could use memory to retrieve the lost and reconnect with the dead. Even more astoundingly, one could lose oneself in these images. Medievals favored constructing such palaces out of memory because they wanted to contain within themselves all of God's creation, the good and the bad, the brute and gentle, ordered and visible. It enlarged their minds. "Solemn and rare memory palaces are the most moving." Cicero had written. Often the palaces took the form of churches. If those impossible cathedrals could be built on land, they could surely be built in the mind. It was a sacred obligation to build them: people had a memory of perfection, it was believed, from way back in Eden. This could be aroused through artificial means, like building churches or palaces in the mind filled with images. Memory was wisdom.***

(Extraído de "Dante In Love", Harriet Rubin)

Una pequeña alegría ya que no necesito recurrir al diccionario para leer fragmentos de "Dante In Love", aunque mi problema fue escuchar el inglés, en la gramática todo iba pavimentado, mi audición en terracería.

Pronto, con ayuda de una traductora, buscaré descubrir el enredo de la frase de Eliot que colgué en mi tesis de licenciatura en el año 2000: 

Lo que llamamos el principio

es a menudo el fin

y llegar al final

es llegar al comienzo.

La casualidad me llevó a fijarme en la frase introductoria de "Lola Rennt", film alemán que vi en el lejano 2003 por afortunada recomendación:

We shall not cease from exploration

and the end of all our exploring

will be to arrive where we started

and know the place for the first time.

Pero, no corresponde esta frase a "Little Gidding", donde hay otra versión apuntando hacia la interrogante entre el inicio y el final.