Yesterday, our reading group did the last canto of Dante’s Inferno. We reached the center, climbed the hairy haunch of Satan, and emerged to a place where above could be seen stars. I’m told each volume of the Commedia ends with stars.
There is in this final fabrication a very science-fictional scenario which can easily be read as a depiction of a singularity. All motion has ceased except for the flapping of Satan’s wings and the gnawing of his three mouths on the bodies of the ultimate betrayers, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. (As in most other places in the Inferno, Dante mixed post Christian Era figures with Classical forms. He is talking about Reality, not denominations.) Ice is everywhere, there is a brief description of the center of the earth being the point where all weight is drawn equally. Time stops.
Dante seems to have grasped the notion that Absolutes embody extreme conditions, that the core of absolute evil will be a thing where the normal laws of motion, of sight and sound, of behavior all exhibit impossible manifestations. All is in suspension.
Imagine cutting your finger. Imagine the razor edge of a blade sliding through the flesh. Now imagine that moment, frozen in time, always being the single sensation you experience, constantly, without beginning or end. Eternity. Pretty bad. Now imagine being constantly eaten.
Now consider: Dante’s theme is that all these people have done this to themselves. Satan didn’t put them here, hasn’t manufactured these punishments. The inhabits did it all on their own. They are trapped in their own constructions.
To escape, all they have to do is imagine a way out of their own concepts and then accept it.
They can’t.
That is the blade through the flesh, tautologically locked into a continuous feedback loop.
Dante was not, furthermore, positing that the “truth” these folks turned their back on has much of anything to do with god or ecclesiastical law. It is entirely to do with their concepts of what constitutes Reality. By Reality, we mean that which we do in the world.
What has become clear through 34 cantos is that Dante was concerned not with the tropes of his poem, but with the realities of the denizens he introduces as he and Virgil descend toward Malebolgia. This is not a religious work. In this sense, it more closely approaches science fiction than fantasy. The ghost in the machine which dominated the lives and decision-making of all these souls permeates the narrative like a Turing Test, set to determine which are aware, which are not, and which are aware of the alternatives and refuse to accept them. Like some pernicious form of nano technology, these people have built their own torments. Inferno is a parody of the Earth, of life, stripped down and fine-tuned to give the inhabitants what they have acted like they’ve wanted. Traps, cul-de-sacs, isolation chambers, pain generators…
And the curious element that recurs throughout is how little they pay attention to anything outside their own small place in the pit. Many resent Dante coming into their midst, seeing them, but then seem to forget about them as soon as Virgil takes Dante onward.
Inferno is a piece of psychology. And the lowest pit is reserved for betrayers who used the excuse of the greater good in order to turn on a friend or leader.
Dante was a believer in self-retribution. No matter what fate these folks suffered in life—and many landed in prison or were murdered or otherwise brought to ugly ends—the ultimate punishment is always the damnation of their own inability to see past their own corruption. It is that which condemns them, which sequesters them. You get the deep feeling that any of them could leave if they could just see. But they can’t. They are morally blind.
Some seem to prefer where they are. They do not want to be “saved.”
Extending this, it would seem that Dante was of the (then heretical) opinion that achieving Paradise was something within our own grasp simply by making a choice.
Choice. The ultimate punishment exhibited in Hell is Satan’s own. He had questioned god’s decision to give humanity free will. He argued that if given the authority he could guarantee humanity’s worship of god, that he would make the ideal boss. He apparently didn’t get the whole notion of free will. And in the end he reins over (or under) a realm occupied by people incapable of choosing any other path than the utterly solipsistic one that brought them here. He is stuck in the hole, plugging the way between what is now Hell and Purgatory, eternally in the presence of people who are there because they simply lack the capacity to be anywhere else. They are chained to their devotions.
It is now January 5th. 2009. We have witnessed the meltdown of everything we thought was a successful business model in this country—in the world—and there are no doubt people who have lost everything who don’t understand what brought them to this hill. They had choices along the way to stop taking profits and invest in something real, but they couldn’t get off the ride. Someone else, they assumed, would pay the price. Well, someone else did. But so did they.
Metaphorically, I find the parallels fascinating. It’s almost tempting enough for me to attempt a fantasy to take advantage of the insight. But then again, it’s not that deep of an insight.
What I will be interested in is what lies ahead, in Purgatorio. Will it be peopled by the collateral damage of all the machinations of those in Hell?
Meantime, I’m writing a new science fiction novel.