Alchemical weathers

Inferno Canto VI; hell's third circle; Florida; palm trees; eternal rain; sulfur-salt-mercury; Bogie and Bacall; Key Largo; Wallace Stevens; glimmers in the gray

Humphrey Bogart + Lauren Bacall at Key Largo premiere, NYC 1948.

1. Let us remember that the souls in hell are bodiless but still undergo physical torments. Here in the third circle, a three-headed dog barking over the wraiths thus submerged, a great gray gluttony noised by sludge-like rain. All lie prone. Post-swoon, Dante traverses the weird weathers without getting hit, Virgil having drug him here during the jump cut from V to VI. Even here in the slowest circles, we find ourselves “in verses wild with motion, full of din, loudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure as the deadly thought of men accomplishing their curious fates…” That’s Wallace Stevens in Le Monocle de Mon Oncle — but, still…

2. I woke thinking about Key Largo (1948), a movie starring Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart (the only Hollywood romance I’ve ever given a shit about, forever at a cellular level, as long before I knew what movies they made or that they were married at Malabar, a farm in Ohio, I had a giant black and white poster in my bedroom as a kid, stayed up through adulthood, a random blown-up candid of them hung over my desk, no clue where I got it, forgot, or why I placed it so prominently. But the duo must’ve marked me, because even now as I write or sit at any desk anywhere, they sometimes get lit.

   

3. Sulfurous, languorous, slithery — the press described Bacall in underworld lingo. And though Bogie was famously much older than Bacall, I recall thinking as they watched over me, that if one thing or the other had to be the case, then she was too old for him, something temperate from weather emanating from her eyes. I could write about Bogie’s own demons (“The problem with the world is that everyone’s a few drinks behind”) or my own gluttonies. But, no. Years later, I found out that Bogie wrote lovingly: “She’s too old for me…” which is a cool way of saying what Dante says in this third circle of hell: “I wish thee still to teach me, And make a gift to me of further speech.”

4. Kathy Acker wrote a short story length “novel” a kind of adaptation of Key Largo, called Florida. Where I am for a few days now. Florida. Once, I drove that road that Bogie drove in the movie, shooting like a throat through the keys. In 1948, gray and glinting with gray water all around, and I pictured them that way, though everything around me was blue-green.

5. Sulfur, one of the three alchemical heavenly substances (the other two are salt and mercury) — is the active principle of change, hot and dry where mercury is cold and wet. As Paracelsus put it in the 16th cent., sulfur is soul (the principle of combustibility), mercury is spirit (the principle of fusibility and volatility), and salt is the body (the principle of non-combustibility and non-volatility).

6. In Key Largo, a hurricane is coming, then arrives. In hell’s third circle, the eternal storm is never impending nor letting up. The ne plus ultra of rotten summers vaulted shut. It rains through-on-around the souls densely. But Dante. Dante?! strung-out sleepyhead, seems kind of nonplussed.

7. Gluttony has to do with the throat. It and whoever it lives in thickens from excess consumption, one way street’d, not enough alteration. Add more soul/sulfur to the vocal chords so as not to stagnate, locate the angel of temperance, who looks like she’s standing on the gulf coast of Florida, pouring a long road of saltwater from one cup into the other so that neither run over nor freeze. Keep it moving. But, devotedly. Not, um, easy.

8. Florida and its keys are all over Wallace Stevens, his poems like layered freezeframes that refuse a moving image. He writes around a gray secret, which is not to be uncovered but attended to as he adjusts its hue. He channels the medievals: “I am what is around me. / Women understand this.” So: “These, then, are portraits.” Sometimes, he is very annoying, heady as fuck and boring. I don’t mind. In Key Largo as in Stevens, palms are barometers. We can tell the weathers and passions by how fronds bend, break, fall, come up again charged.

   

9. “I thought I was hallucinating,” writes Acker Florida: “Layers of gray and layers of gray. Like a numbness you can slice with your hand. When the numbness separates, there’s nothing.” Palm (the inner hand) cuts, and at the palm at thought’s edge, a hand. Palm tree: an invisible substance holding a scene together, and the wind the palm trees seem to be balancing on, but heavy, heavy, even the clear blue day gets a little. Gray? Famously unluminous. Dante leaves the paused souls. He’s gotta go to the next frame. But here and there, the weird seeds of paradiso in the winds and rains. When he stops by the Garden of Eden on his way to the foreverbrightwhiteofFloridasun, he’ll see plants moving in the wind, though he does not feel the wind which makes them move.

10. Inside the gluttony, a glimmer, Holy Water cupped in the freezeframed rain in-on the palm. First stillness. Then, a voice sulfurous. Bacall’d in her memoir that she and Bogie couldn’t be in the same room without reaching for each other though this reaching wasn’t just physical. The invisible weathers make movement, palms outstretched and lining the ancient-newlybuilt sigh of road.