Golden Blunders
Inferno Canto VII; hell's 4th and 5th circles; censorship; kinds of fire; fortune; miserly and prodigal; gold and silver; lunacy and sensitivity
Readings (a few slots open for March)
Void of Courses: The Dream Sequence (4 slots left)
This is the hymn they gurgle in their throats
but cannot sing in words that truly sound (Inferno, Canto VII)
How can I describe my vision, the air of Hell is too thick for hymns! (Rimbaud)
Aurum nostrum non est aurum vulgi (Rosarium Philosophorum)
Those who attempted on earth to outgun Fortune shove heavy weights of wealth against each other in Hell’s 4th circle: the prodigal and the miserly. No individual sinners can be picked out amidst the meaty mass. Here, that ancient connection between riches and the underworld, plus the dangers of holding too hard to the fluxes of an ever-spinning wheel.
Dante places those seemingly opposed relationships to material wealth in the same realm as two sides of the same shiny, heavy metal coin they now literally push around. In our own circles of hell, and Dante presages modernity’s madnesses, one can imagine the apparently sensitive censorious rewriters of Roald Dahl’s books and those pushing book bans, who like to think they’re opposed, spending eternity pressing big stacks of books against each other not bothering to read the words under the words, literal, unimaginative, thick. The commedia too has undergone a sensitivity reading.
Dante shows that the harm done by the ultra-reckless is not wholly different from what’s done by the ultra-careful. Both tend to blunder along the cruder crevices of gold in thick and heaving un-hymnable inchoate sticky atmospheres. This is gold without light/lightness, nightmarish. Or, language without poetry, searched only for utility or x y or z offensive thing…