A Progression of Cycles

The Divine Comedy is before my eyes and in my mind. I believe I've mentioned in a previous post that I read with an agenda. With Dante & my previous read, Parzival, I've been reading with an eye toward Finnegans Wake. I've read The Inferno maybe three or four times & even taught it in a world lit. class, but I'd never read the entire Comedy. I'm halfway through The Purgatory, and I think I like it better than The Inferno, which surprises me. I'd figured all the narrative tension would vanish after Dante gets past Satan. It's not your typical narrative arc: Dante, as pilgrim, confronts & overcomes the greatest possible antagonist, and at that point you're only a third of the way through the story. This plot not only defies Hollywood logic--it defies the logic of all stories. Imagine if Odysseus had already returned home a third of the way through his poem; imagine if Hamlet had confronted his uncle in the beginning of the second act; imagine if Gatsby had resolved his issues w/Daisy by page 70. Yet, somehow Dante, as poet, makes it work.

I decided to tackle the Comedy now as a final preparation for the Wake. Joyce has a definite medieval vibe, and I'm swimming down into it beforehand so I'm acclimated before I read that famous first/last sentence. The medieval vibe is a sense of the cyclical. The Divine Comedy is a great evocation of the cyclical. It requires a lot of emotional, intuitive, and intellectual work to truly appreciate the sense of cycles--at least for us. Sure, most of us will readily assent that everything goes in cycles, but that's only words. The truth is us moderns don't think in cycles, or at least we aren't conditioned to appreciate them.

We think in Progress. For us, things go ever forward. To us, the future is a mystery: we can't imagine how things will be in ten years, nevermind fifty. When someone mentions the future, we wonder about technological developments: will everyone have a universal translator implanted in their pineal glands? even dogs, so we can finally understand what we sense they so desperately want to say to us? Will miniature robots clip our toenails while we sleep? Will we finally achieve time travel so we can arrive on time to that important meeting we slept through so many years ago?

Even I, who have devoted so much time and effort to warping the constructs of my mind, have trouble dropping Progress when I want to enter Cycles. Because it's more than a recitation of words or an intellectual grasp--you have to overload the intellectual for long & hard enough that the sense passes into the emotional/intuitive, because only then do you achieve understanding. It's a process I'm becoming familiar with.

Look forward to see backward. As it was in the beginning, is now, and always shall be.

Thursday night, I broke through.

I saw a new world.

I finished a lesson with a student and, while I walked to the bus stop, I looked to the field across the street. In the summer, it grows some variety of leafy green vegetable. The field itself is impressive, especially to a city boy like yours truly. It's large, and it slopes gently upward into the horizon. There are three trees just beyond the slope's crest, and they look as if they are falling off the edge of the world. I once saw the full moon rise over that horizon, and I thought of Godot, and T.S. Eliot's line about three trees on the low horizon.

This time, it was covered in snow and moonlight. It snowed a week ago, and the temperature hasn't risen about freezing yet, so the snow remains.

I thought of how in Florida, when the temperature threatens to drop below freezing, all the farmers spray water on their crops. If the temperature does in fact drop below freezing, the water turns to ice, and the ice actually serves as insulation against the cold.

I looked at the field, and I thought, well I didn't think exact words, but I had a feeling like--the snow covers the field like the ice covers the plants. It protects the life beneath it. I thought of the work, the death, that field must go through so it can produce life again in the next season. The snow, patient & enduring, had kept still for a week and counting so that the work of death, which is the work of life, could continue in the soil of that field. It was breaking down a particular form of life into its essence so that it could nourish a new form of life, which is yet to be born.

I had never felt snow like that before.

And I thought, This is how people used to think 600 years ago. And I thought, I'm finally making real progress on this whole cycle thing.