Travelogue 1233 – 23 January
One Must Understand Their Time

Dante lived in feudal times. As a citizen of one of independent city-states of northern Italy, key agents in feudalism’s decline, he saw through the cracks in the system, without knowing what he saw. He himself was something of an agent of the system’s decline, without understanding what he did.

Some see feudalism coming. There are serious thinkers like Yanis Varoufakis who hypothesize that we have already entered an age of ‘technofeudalism’, a new round of lords and vassals and serfs, this time with the tech lords owning everything and the rest of us working their digital land. Their vassals receive rents in exchange for their fealty and their arms.

Some of us catch, like through the holes of a closing net, glimpses of the world to come, but we can’t make sense of what we see. We might even be contributing to the rising new order without knowing what we are doing. While Dante wrote in support of imperial rule of Italy, he could not know he was part of something bigger than emperors, undermining the order that needed emperors.

Then there are others who gleefully advocate for a new feudalism. Greenland is meant to be a test case for a tech-age feudalistic state, if the ghoulish Boys of Paypal and their lapdog JD Vance get their way. These self-appointed gurus of futurity, in between their immortality treatments and the drug-enhanced mystical rites they perform for shareholders and social media, preach from Olympus about how we need this. We the people.

 As the Greenland case ought to illuminate, the tech bros are trapped in their own fantasies, inspired by too much TV and too much time in role-playing games. These are the dues we pay for guilty pleasures like “Game of Thrones” and “The Tudors”. Billionaires with stunted or deformed moral identities start confusing their scifi with their false history. It all seems very glamorous. We will be new kings and lords! We will commute to Mars! The villagers will watch with awe as we pass through their villages. They will worship us. It’s a new age! Et cetera.

It's interesting to note that the romanticism that attaches itself to medievalism is to some portion traceable back to our troubadours and poets. They collaborated on a wildly successful propaganda campaign for the feudal lords, inventing the entire notion of chivalry.

But I do think of the unlucky king, from almost a century before Dante’s time, who did nothing more than he thought were his rights as king, but who died a miserable death in the field, being hounded by rebellious barons. That was King John of England. John was unlucky in his timing, living through an inevitable decline in his family’s fortunes; he was unlucky in his own unfortunate temperament, arrogant and grasping. Unlike the current U.S. president, he was not pursuing wealth for its own sake, but to recover the lands in France that he had lost during his youth, a development that even the most likeable and strategically minded king might have been unable to stop. John was blind to the shifting sands beneath his feet. The romance of feudalism, the glory of being a great lord, it only allowed him so long a tether, and no more.

One must understand their own time.

Travelogue 1232 – 15 January
His Gentle Heart

To return to Dante’s sonnet, “A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core,” I wanted to consider the last two words of his first line, “gentil core”. He is addressing his audience: to each captive soul and gentle heart. And he is defining them. I had suggested that not every word is equal, and this word “gentil” is fraught with meaning for reader and poet.

Dante wrote the sonnet in 1283 or so. In the thirteenth century, the culture of courtliness and gentility had ripened, an outgrowth of feudalism and the Germanic social codes, stewing with Christian and Latin culture for centuries. Medieval courts, royal and noble, kept poets and musicians as a part of their retinue. This was where our literary movement began, in the telling of stories that resonated within this ascendant culture, what we call the High Medieval, that peaked in the century of Dante’s youth.

Feudal cultures generate a set of ideals appropriate to their structures, valuing courage, lots of combat, service to the lord or king, and religious virtues. In medieval Europe, Christian virtues meant piety, submission, compassion, and humility. The signs of virtue included not only loyalty to the lord, but devotion to one’s lady. This latter, perhaps fusing weirdly with a devotion to Mary, became exaggerated by the poets into romantic and erotic devotion to a worthy lady.

Courtly poetry had a few templates, models based on the tales of mythical heroes. These heroes lived in Charlemagne’s time, some four hundred years earlier, or in the mythical time of Arthur, some eight hundred years earlier. Like most mythologies, this one taught that there was a golden age of feudal values, and that the present times were corrupt.

Integral to the Arthurian mythos was the knight Launcelot, who blindly loved Arthur’s Guinevere. The troubadours, or travelling musicians and poets, worked this model into images of pure, unrequited love and devotion. They resurrected the classical god Amor or Eros as a kind of tutelary spirit, and Launcelot’s hopeless devotion became the sign of real nobility.

Dante’s first stanza identifies his preferred reader, the soul taken (by love) and whose heart is gentle. But “gentle” isn’t describing someone given to soft caresses. It means someone of noble character. Only the noble heart can love, only an aristocrat of the heart. Feudal mores, defined just as the feudal age was faltering, breaking down before the press of incipient capitalism and the rise of the nation-state, feudal sensibility could only define value in the terms of feudalistic nobility. The worthy man was a knight. He had aristocratic blood, perhaps secretly, or perhaps through some spiritual transformation.

It is worth noting that Dante himself was from a noble family. It was a minor lineage, and his father’s line was one of the poorer branches. But he was of noble blood. The opening line of the sonnet is as much a challenge as an invitation: “To every captive soul and gentle heart ….” It is as severe as it is compassionate. Are you worthy?

Travelogue 1231 – 9 January

Stop the Greatness!

 

I write in order to think aloud. It’s healing. As Vittoria Colonna wrote five hundred years ago, “Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia.”

 

I have to say something about Wednesday’s events. Maybe no one will read it. Everyone is talking, and no one is listening. Maybe I have nothing new to say. But I must speak.

 

The public murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis has made me feel sick. I have been feeling despair viscerally, in my gut, and I haven’t been able to concentrate. I want to account for it. I want to reach some understanding, even for myself.

 

The violence is sad and senseless. It is maddening. Watch the video, and outrage rises to the skin. If you admit to any humanity, you react with horror, or something like it.

 

But then ... then there is more. If you feel horror at violence, what happens afterward should trigger waves of repulsion and shame. What follows is textbook shamelessness, something so distilled and unadulterated, it is rare and ugly.

 

I will abbreviate:

1.     Not only is a physician onsite barred from helping the victim of the shooting, he is threatened with violence himself.

2.     ICE bars an ambulance from parking nearby and delays their response. Whether the emergency response was too late to save Ms Good is irrelevant.

3.     The shooter illegally leaves the crime scene and faces no inquiry.

4.     Kristi Noem, betraying no sign of concern or decency, and based on the slimmest pretence of reviewing the facts, insults the victim and protects the murderer.

5.     The FBI takes over the case and denies local law enforcement access to evidence.

 

The news makes my flesh crawl. I feel disgust and grief in the pit of my stomach. It calls into question my fragile faith in humanity. There is a video out there in which an elderly man in Minneapolis is weeping for shame. “I am ashamed,” he cries. Yes, that is the proper response. Finally, some relief from the gaslighting of this shit culture. And still the interviewer asks, “Why are you crying?”

 

Are the violence and the shamelessness signs of “greatness”? I believe they are. These are the hieroglyphs left by the Greatness movement for us to read. This is who they are. And I must say, given that this is so, these avatars of Greatness are justified in declaring – indeed they are obliged to declare, – “You are with us or against us.” Yes, that is manifest. That is necessary at an existential level. If we are to maintain any hope that humanity has meaning, has grace, has evolutionary potential, we must be against you.

 

I want to hear a chant struck up in America: “We don’t want to be great.” We don’t want it.

Travelogue 1230 – 6 January
Winter Colour

This is the most snow I remember seeing since Little Ren’s first birthday. It has been coming down in big flakes, sometimes densely in the air around our yellow and red buildings, among the bare branches of trees, collecting on the grasses in medians, settling into the collars of our coats, settling into the grooves of our tram tracks.

It is all very exciting for the girls. Getting home from school takes quite a long time. The sun has temporarily broken through, but only so recently that the snow has not melted. They are gathering snowballs, and they are pummelling their papa. The snowballs get larger and larger. They like rolling the balls in the snow until they are the size of their heads and then running at me, laughing.

We are still cycling. Most major bike paths have been cleared. The neighbourhood roads are ruts of ice. We can carefully zig and zag our way to points nearby, to stores, to school, and down the hill toward home. I can even carry Little Ren on the seat in back. She has to sit still; the subtlest shift in weight can anger the ice gods. The challenge has its own rewards. The crisp air is refreshing. And the change in scenery, trading the gloomy spectrum of fall browns and grey for winter white is a dose of inspiration. The novelty feeds the spirit.

Travelogue 1229 – 4 January
Words from Long Ago

In looking at the first sonnet (“A ciascun’alma”) from Dante’s book about his youth, “Vita Nuova”, we have studied several features of the dolce stil novo, the sweet, new style that Dante declared that Guinizelli before him and a few of his generation had perfected. There is the troubadour’s dedication to Amore, the focus on romantic love as something divine. There is an argument being presented in the poem, a quirky one in Dante’s case, a kind of narrative argument, a technique familiar to us from his Divine Comedy.

Still to consider are the style and the language itself. Earlier, I had reduced his opening statement for convenience to: “Greetings in the name of Love to any who may see these words.” But, in fact, the opening comprises a whole stanza. I can allow Dante’s namesake, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a voice from the nineteenth century to translate: 

To every heart which the sweet pain doth move,
And unto which these words may now be brought
For true interpretation and kind thought,
Be greeting in our Lord's name, which is Love.

It seems appropriate to allow a nineteenth-century voice here, from an age still capable of and enamoured of ornate rhetorical expression. In the thirteenth-century, a poet was expected to give voice to courtly culture and chivalry. His sonnet derived from the troubadour tradition. Extreme formality, strict poetic form, and words of strong feeling were de rigueur; they were a tonic to the brutal times. To us, the result appears as tortured diction and forced metaphors. It can be difficult to translate. All the time that has passed weighs heavily on the tone and the meaning. Medieval poetry seems inauthentic, in the same way that painting before Renaissance perspective seems like bad art. We can’t unsee what we have been taught.

A more modern translation – leaving aside metre and rhyme - sounds like this: 

To every captive soul and gentle heart
into whose sight this poem may come,
that each may write back with his impression,
a greeting to his lord, that is Love.

Words are not equal in value. One word stands out to me, though Rossetti dropped it entirely in his translation. The word “gentle” is a code for many things, dropped lightly as it is, as an adjective for “heart”. It identifies Dante’s reader quite explicitly, and it offers a definition of his cultural milieu.

Travelogue 1228 – 30 December

A Ciascun’Alma 

Dante is quirky. The use to which he puts poetry is something unique. I was young when I read the “Vita Nuova”, and that is appropriate. The book is a collection of poems by a young man, a self-conscious genius, dangerous to himself, and perhaps to others. He desired to braid a story thread, upon which to string a set of poems, the works that had made his reputation. It was a story to make sense of a decade of his life, the shape of which might have left him uneasy, a period of his life he felt should be interpreted for the public. And he sculpted a story of unrequited love and the death of his beloved, of great chivalry and mystery and romance. He gave it coherence and appeal. He gave himself a mission.

Florentine society was a public one. There was essentially no private life. Someone like Dante would have accrued a set of unedited public stories that dogged him from youth, like fragmented scenes that everyone had seen, that no director had moulded into a play. At best, they contributed to various unflattering portraits that gossips traded in the marketplace. Dante wanted to be the director of an epic film, rather than stock character in a commonplace farce.

The first poem in the book is a sonnet. He wrote it when he was about 18. It was a poem he circulated among his peers, among other poets, inviting their responses. 

A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core
Nel cui cospetto ven lo dir presente,
In ciò che mi rescrivan suo parvente
Salute in lor segnor, cioè Amore.

Greetings in the name of Love, he says, to any who may see these words. He tells the story of a dream. It is three in the morning, and he sees Love walking with his, the poet’s, heart in one hand and Beatrice attending him on the other. He cheerfully bade her eat Dante’s heart. She did, and Amore left, weeping.

Dream literature is not too unusual in medieval culture, but now, recorded in a sonnet, an ornate form still new, evolved from the troubadours’ songs of devotion, and sent around for comment among the young poets of Florence, this was provocative and odd.

“To this sonnet I received many answers, conveying many different opinions; of the which one was sent by him whom I now call the first among my friends [Guido Cavalcanti], and it began thus, ‘Unto my thinking thou beheld'st all worth.’ And indeed, it was when he learned that I was he who had sent those rhymes to him, that our friendship commenced.” This is from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation in the nineteenth century.

A friendly rival, Dante da Maiano, ridiculed him, writing back in his own sonnet response that it sounded as though Dante ought to consult a doctor and have his testicles washed. This anecdote did not make it into the “Vita Nuova”.

But this is how he started. Dante’s work was always personal. He made the general particular. The god Amore took a vivid interest in him. And any description of Hell ought to be eyewitness.

Travelogue 1227 – 27 December
Cold Holiday

It’s been a cold Christmas. There is a thin layer of ice on the canal behind our building, though there is none on the rivers. The waters still dance on the River Schie, under the busy bridges, and the gulls and ducks bathe there, as though it were summer.

The skies are clear, a bright and untroubled blue, like desert skies, like polar skies, perfect as stone, though scarred by the trails of planes. The air they provide us is sharp to the taste, crisp. I cross the bridge with a gaze held up in wonder.

The streets of the city are holiday calm, a relief. I cycle through the cold, grateful for the subdued traffic. There are others. They are bundled up against the chill. They lumber along like bears on their delicate bikes, in heavy coats and hats. They hold the handlebars with gloves. And they pedal less as though they have somewhere to go and more as though they are curious or lost. They might never arrive, though they have left early.

Passing over the river again, I travel down the road made of bricks. The trees have done their work, spreading roots underneath the layer of human work, and rippling the surface, making the bricks buckle and testing the tires of the bicycles that pass there. The bike rattles. I navigate the wrinkled map of the road, as I have done a hundred times before. There is no hurry.