The divine and the
quotidian
Elements from Dante’s Paradiso
in Charles Wright’s Negative Blue
MA Thesis Comparative Literature Author: Beatrice Augrandjean
Supervisor: Ronald de Rooy Examiner: Murat Aydemir
/ ACKNOWLEDGMENT /
At the beginning of my thesis, I’d like to give great thanks to you; The reader, who will be reading this - which is what you now do;
The authors of the poetry that has meant a lot to me Alighieri, Dante, and contemporary Wright Together we’ve dancing, and I kept you in my sight I’ve studied you, back and forth, and all the way - again I’ve learned a lot ‘bout nature, landscape, God, and man
At first I felt uncomfortable, wouldn’t it be cheesy? Dante by a Beatrice; that was her - but… also me
Yet, after all, I dare to say that maybe it was meant to be
Great thanks goes also to the cheering of my friends;
to my family for the food, always bringing up my mood; to the sweetest namorado, for staying the poffertje to pão de queijo
to Murat my examiner - who immediately accepted another thing on his calendar Yet, my biggest thanks goes out to Ron -Without you, I don’t know what I would have done;
My supervisor; friend
— I’ve been enjoying this journey a lot and now I’m not sure
Whether This is the beginning
Or the end.
But let me put it better, Wright: “An end to what has begun
a beginning to what is about to be ended” (83) The journey – it was splendid
The universe – a mystery I now sign this part –
Augrandjean, B.
/ CONTENTS /
/ ACKNOWLEDGMENT /... 2
/ INTRODUCTION /... 5
/ Dante and his Divina Commedia /... 8
Dante in the Twentieth Century... 8
Inferno... 10
Purgatorio... 11
Paradiso... 12
/ Charles Wright /... 14
Negative Blue’s outline... 15
Southener... 17
/ SIDEREAL /... 20
Admiration and anthropomorphization... 21
Ascension... 25 Consideration... 28 Contemplation... 29 / TIME /... 31 Memory... 32 Hooks in eternity... 35
From time to eternity... 36
/ LANGUAGE /... 38 Inadequacy... 39 Neologisms... 41 Paradox... 43 Finitude... 45 / LIGHT /... 48 Light upwards... 49
Earthly light and divine light... 52
Sparks of salvation... 54
The point of Light... 56
/ UNITY /... 59
The Many is the One... 59
Spiritual development... 61
Inward... 65
Bound into one volume... 67
One and one become one again... 68
The final vision... 69
/ CONCLUSION /... 72
/ INTRODUCTION /
In 1954 it was calculated that on average one new cantica from Dante had appeared in English every nine months over a period of hundred years - well over forty complete translations, plus twenty Infernos, eleven Purgatorios, six Paradisos, and many volumes with a selection of cantos (Cachey in Fumagalli ix). If we consider the past fifty years, the number of English translations from Dante and the degree of his popularity are equally impressive (Fumagalli x). Dante’s Divina Commedia has put a clear mark on the English speaking world; a mark that is still not tired of providing inspiration for contemporary literature, art, religion and our culture in general.
As early as the 14th century Geoffrey Chaucer knew Dante well enough to use,
translate and parody him in his Parlement of Foules (Hawkins 137). Even in 20th century
poetry there are still many Dantean themes and fragments. Like bells, we still hear the sound of his ideas and language tinkling in contemporary poetry. Hawkins and Jacoff state that the list of authors in the 20th century who have been in “sustained dialogue” with Dante
is both diverse and long. Moreover, the list is also strikingly full of Americans, whether by birth or residence, like Pound, Eliot, Auden, Lowell, and Merrill. At the turn of the 21st
century important names are Charles Wright, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Nobel Prize winners Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, the American poet laureate Robert Pinsky, and many others (Hawkins & Jacoff 2003, 451). Many poets and writers have been more or less vastly researched in relation to Dante and many authors state that, in one way or another, they have been influenced by Dante and that his writings have marked their life: 1 Borges and his
‘aleph’, Merrill and his The Changing Light at Sandover, and Heaney and Walcott have all received much critical attention. 2
1 Hawkins’ and Jacoff’s anthology The Poets’ Dante offers many great examples of famous poets and their testimonies of what Dante means to them.
2 For a profound analysis of Heaney’s and Walcott’s relation to Dante’s poetry, see Fumagalli’s enlightening book The Flight of the Vernacular. Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.
Hawkins and Jacoff are quite persisting in mentioning Dante’s importance for a poet like Wright next to Pound, Eliot, Walcott, and Heaney and their relation to Dante. 3 Yet, they
don’t elaborate the allusions to Dante to explain how exactly the contemporary American poet can be related to Dante’s Paradiso. Therefore, in this thesis I wish to investigate this matter more deeply. I will look at Negative Blue by Charles Wright and analyze the Paradiso inspired elements in his book. To do this, I will discuss various relevant themes based upon
Paradiso. The first theme is the sidereal; the presence of the stars starts already in
Purgatorio, where Dante arrives at the moment of dawn. As of then, he is not in a world of
pure darkness anymore. The night sky becomes something mesmerizing and beautiful.
Paradiso is, as Hollander (2007, xvii) states, the poem of the stars, with Dante journeying
through the heavens from one star to another, to finally arrive above them all. A further characteristic of Paradiso is the peculiar sense of time: the souls in
Paradise live, apart from waiting for the Last Judgment, timelessly. Dante is absent from the earth for a little more than twenty-four hours, but temporal indications are less precise than they were in Inferno and Purgatorio. As Hollander explains, Dante’s physical universe contains, strictly speaking, only nine spheres – seven of which are planets. The tenth sphere is the Empyrean, existing beyond time and space and yet containing all space and time. It is the abode of God, the angels, and the souls of the saved (Hollander 2007, xviii). Its
inhabitants live in an eternal now. Whereas humans on earth are determined by time and space, the human Dante experiences what it means to be beyond time and space.
This new experience outside of the limits of time and space causes quite a challenge: how to capture the exceptional experience in language? Dante struggles a lot with putting into words what he has lived through, as he already announces at the beginning of the canticle. Words are limited, but the Empyrean is unlimited. Up there everything is eternal; all-encompassing; beyond human language. To verbally transmit his journey, Dante faces the challenge to express the ineffable.
Dante often describes the souls in Paradise as ‘lights’. He does not always recognize the souls immediately, but only sees their splendor. This splendor goes beyond their
personal identity; in the eyes of God the individual does not exist anymore. Dante has to get
3 See Hawkins’ and Jacoff’s A Poets’ Dante (2001), Still Here: Dante after Modernism (2003) and Jacoff’s essay in Metamorphosing Dante (2011). The authors only superficially discuss Wright’s poetry without an in-depth analysis.
used to the amount of light and beauty that radiates from his beloved Beatrice. The closer he gets to the Empyrean, the stronger the light of God. Whereas Hell bathed in darkness and horrors, Paradise is bathed in light and love.
Dante learns in Paradise that multiplicity is an illusion, because the world is bound by Love into one volume, as Dante sees for himself. In God everything comes together. The last theme I will thus focus on is the idea of Unity; of the Many conflated to One.
Hollander explains how “contemporary language of the sublime owes much to Dante, who continues to inspire theologically haunted poets drawn to the power of
visionary language even in the absence of vision itself” (2007, xxiv). Contemporary poetry may be inspired by Dante, but it is often freed from Dante’s original theological dimension. Our present-day society is not impregnated with religion as it was in Dante’s time. We see how literature is a reflection or reaction to the society it originates from. It will be
interesting to pay attention to this theological aspect in the context of the more secular world from which Wright’s poetry arose.
/ Dante and his Divina Commedia /
In the Divina Commedia Dante describes his fictional journey through the afterlife, divided into three parts: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory) and Paradiso (Paradise).
Dante in the Twentieth Century
It is clear that Dante has left an indelible mark on our culture and in the world of literature in particular. Dante helped create the current Italian language, and his presence remains obvious in Italy. That his influence extends to Russian literature (Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky), Irish (Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson) and even contemporary Japanese fiction is perhaps less obvious (Hawkins 137). Even though considering Dante’s work an inimitable example, twentieth-century poets stayed inspired by it. Dante made an encyclopedic work, switching registers and topics in a liberal way touching upon almost all aspects of life.
Dante’s life 4
Dante was born somewhere between late May and early June in Florence in 1265. The first encounter with Beatrice, the woman who inspired him in many ways, was on 29 April 1274. After she died on 30 May 1290 he started writing his first book, the Vita Nuova. Involved in political life, Dante got expelled from Florence in 1302 for two years. It was during this exile that he started writing Inferno, the beginning of his major work that would keep him
occupied the rest of his life. The Divina Commedia’s encyclopedic scope embraces almost every topic of discourse that Dante had thus far engaged in: poetry and prose, literary history and theory, philosophy and political science. Such objective concerns were always related to his own personal life. He discovered that writing was a way to compensate for his losses. He was separated from his family, possessions and securities of daily life and he felt he was losing his identity.
4 For this paragraph I have drawn from Peter S. Hawkins’ Dante. A Brief History. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006 and Dante’s timeline on http://www.worldofdante.org/timeline.html
After having left Verona, Dante arrived in Lucca in 1307 where he started writing
Purgatorio, which took until 1311. On 14 October 1315 Robert of Anjou's vicar in Tuscany
condemned Dante and his sons to death by beheading. It was short after this condemnation that Dante started writing the final canticle of his Commedia; from 1315 until 1320 he was working on Paradiso. He was in Verona as a guest of Cangrande della Scala since 29 April 1312 and would stay there until 1317. Early 1318 to September 1321, during his final days, he stayed in Ravenna as a guest of Guido Novello da Polenta where his children joined him.
We do not know why exactly Dante decided to come to Ravenna. However, with hindsight – as Mazzotta argues - it was inevitable that he should come. Ravenna was a city that was still gleaming with Byzantine art and was a perfect refuge for Dante’s nostalgia of the Roman Empire. The dense woods of pine trees near the city, the tombs and reliquaries of the Roman emperors, the memory of the philosopher Boethius and the Emperor
Justinian, the spiritual presence of the monk Peter Damian in the Benedictine abbeys around the city, and the mosaics of San Vitale and Sant’ Apollinare in Classes were all greatly inspiring to him. Dante evokes and mentions these images of Ravenna in the final part of Purgatorio and in the parts of Paradiso he worked on while he was in Ravenna (Mazzotta 11). Mazzotta further states that Dante’’s poetic vision, like Byzantine art, is the microcosmic recapitulation of the totality of the world. Dante’s physical and spiritual environment thus has had clear influences on his life work. He died in the night of 13 to 14 September 1321 in Ravenna, after which he was buried in the church of San Pier Maggiore, now San Francesco.
As Hawkins states: “tragedy had given him an opportunity to develop his thoughts into an impressive body of prose” (Hawkins 13). Having to leave his beloved Florence felt like having to leave his country. However, Dante’s experience of feeling lost during his exile seems just as relevant today as it was eight centuries ago. People from many parts of the world have to flee their country and leave everything they hold dear behind. People
nowadays seem to be in search of their identity just as much as Dante was, and whether it is due to external crises or inner conflict – ultimately, we are all pilgrims on our journey through life.
Inferno
It is already obvious from the most straightforward Google search that Dante’s Inferno has been receiving a lot more attention than his Paradiso. Googling ‘Inferno Dante’ gives 1.270.000 results (April 2016), whereas the same search query regarding Paradiso only gives 427.000 results (ibid.) - almost one million results less. Video games, Disney, or Dan Brown’s thriller… They all were mostly inspired by Inferno. Yet, as Hawkins states, it is a great pity that Inferno is the only portion of the Commedia most people read, because “the rest of the work serves to melt the Inferno’s deep freeze, to give a sense of hope. The poem is a journey, after all, and not a dead end” (47).
The Divina Commedia begins with the famous image of the protagonist being lost in a dark wood in the middle of his life. His “only way out is through”, thus Dante has to leave the initial dark wood behind, which turns out to be a friendly prelude of what is actually to come. Dante has to go away from the light in order to ultimately find it. With his guide Virgil, sent by the divine Beatrice, Dante visits all circles of Hell and various historic figures. The circles of hell become all the gloomier and more horrific the more Dante descends. The journey through Hell will end at the center of the earth, where Lucifer is located.
From the beginning of the story it soon is clear that the poem can be understood allegorically and that characters, actions and scenes have multiple layers of meaning. This is also one of the powerful aspects of the Comedy: it can be read on many different levels and a politician might enjoy the poem just as much as a theologian. As stated before, the poem is about many facets of life and even now new aspects in the poem are discovered. Dante has the magical literary capacity of describing scenes about a certain theme, without explicitly defining the theme in those terms. As Hawkins explains: “a desperate man aspires to move toward the light without the poet needing to spell out “enlightenment” or “salvation” as the pilgrim’s goal” (34).
Two important notions of the Commedia are freedom and justice. Dante ascribes a major role to man’s free will. His place in the afterlife is based upon the choices he makes before he dies. Man may be influenced by astrology and the position of the planets – a strong assumption during Dante’s time – but he is never determined by it. Man has his reason to make his own choices, beautifully expressed by Marco Lombardo in Purgatorio: “Therefore, if the world around you goes astray, / in you is the cause and in you let it be
sought”” (XVI.82-83). Consequently, justice also plays a crucial role in the Commedia. Man is served justice by God, and Dante introduces the ‘contrapasso’ in hell, so that sinners suffer a process either resembling or contrasting with the sin itself. The reflection upon such
themes in his work underlines the timelessness of the Commedia. In current times where the “war on terror” seems to control our lives, people also struggle with the true meaning of freedom and justice. Man seems to easily forget the divine duty and responsibility that is given to him.
Purgatorio
Once Virgil and Dante have arrived at the center of the earth, the transition from Hell to Purgatory is made. Having encountered the imprisoned Lucifer, they turn themselves around and start climbing upward. They need to climb twelve hours before they arrive at the base of the high mountain which constitutes Dante’s purgatory; the place for the souls who are not yet free of sins, but are blessed enough to enter a process towards salvation. It is divided into three sections: ante-purgatory, purgatory proper, and earthly paradise. Ante-purgatory is reserved for the excommunicated and the saved despite the belatedness of their repentance. Whereas purgatory as a concept already existed amongst Christians although not officially, ante-purgatory is Dante’s own invention. Purgatory’s design as a whole actually became most definite for Christians because of the model Dante envisioned.
Purgatory proper consists of seven terraces, each dedicated to one of the mortal sins. The souls must undergo penitence and are confronted with their sin in order to bring about a transformation. Each sin is connected with a countering virtue to direct the souls to a proper form of love. Where hell was all about eternal damnation, purgatory is impelled by grace for the souls to ultimately reach salvation by becoming fit for Paradise.
At the top of the mountain, Dante meets his Beatrice, whom he is awaiting since the first canto of Inferno. In the Garden of Eden she arrives in a triumphant chariot, making the scene look like the preparation for a marriage ceremony. Dante has to repent in front of the unrelenting Beatrice. Subsequently, Virgil must return to hell and Dante is allowed to proceed up to Paradise with Beatrice.
The great difference between Inferno and Purgatorio is well explained by Hawkins: “instead of continuing to dip his pen in darkness, the poet is now writing with light” (47). Until then we have only seen a negative image, like in photography, which Purgatory will now “develop”” into a true picture” (ibid.). It is indeed light which is first noted when Dante arrives in Purgatory, where the sun is rising and making the sky smile with the beauty of the planet Venus. Dante makes his purgatory a place exposed to light, mesmerizing stars, fresh air, and singing. Art and music play an important role, with God as the master
craftsman. Purgatory forms the figural bridge between the dark and damnation of hell and the light and beatitude of paradise. Souls are pulled upward to reach salvation and come closer to perfected love. Egoism and the fixation on the “I” are being transformed into a sense of unity and “we”.
Paradiso
The whole development of the Commedia is working towards Paradise, the climax of Dante’s journey and his poem. It completes the work of a total of 100 cantos and describes the ascent of the pilgrim through the nine celestial spheres. Placing the earth at the center of the universe after Ptolemaic’s astronomical model, Dante moves up from the earth to end up in the Empyrean. In the Empyrean the celestial rose is situated and here the angels, saints, and beatified souls repose in the eternal light of God. Paradiso’s theme, as described by Dante in his Epistle to Cangrande della Scala, dedicating the work to his host in Verona, is the “status animarum beatarum post mortem” (”state of beatified souls after death,” Epist. 13.33) (Schnapp 675). When exactly the canticle was completed remains unknown, but it is clear that it must have been during final years of Dante’’s life. It is his “ultimo lavoro” (last labor) as stated in the opening canto of Paradiso (I.13); the perfection of his lifework.
In many ways, we can interpret Paradiso as an antonym of Inferno. Leaving all damnation, darkness, and horror behind, Paradise is a celebration of light, love and beatitude. Everything is imbued with God’’s radiance and gleams through His splendor. Dante’s journey ends in the mystical and highly spiritual experience of seeing God “face-to-face”. This entrusts Dante with the great challenge of putting his inner mystical experiences
into words. In regard to this challenge Schnapp explains how, in accordance with the Western mystical tradition, Dante’s emphasis as a poet is twofold: “on stretching the expressive capabilities of language through recourse to neologism, metaphor, Latinisms, and extravagant analogies, and on emphasizing language’s breakdown through repeated assertions of incapacity and ineffability” (677). He argues that this twofold poetic
undertaking makes Paradiso, despite its weighty theological and doctrinal monologues, the most experimental of the Commedia’s three canticles.
Whereas the poet Dante struggled to find the right words for his project, the reader is also being challenged by the weighty theological and doctrinal monologues Schnapp mentions. Despite the canticle’s sublime subject, Dante does not refrain from writing poetry about theological and Scholastic arguments. Paradise is about the perfection of the Intellect and the pilgrim asks many questions, often leading to even more questions. It is a joy to know and this, once again, demonstrates the influence of Aristotle on Dante who began his Convivio by stating, after Aristotle, that all men have a natural desire to know. In Paradiso Dante has abandoned his intellectual pride, and it is like in Inferno V where Dante realizes that living exclusively by literature or philosophy alone is a danger. It has to be accompanied by something more spiritual: theology. In Paradiso Dante makes sure to add this theological dimension to his discourse. As Hollander points out, Dante is able to incorporate subjects in his poem previously reserved exclusively for prose, like moral philosophy and biology, but also astronomy, free will, the theology of history, municipal politics, angelology and its relation to astronomy (Hollander 2007, xv). Paradiso is Dante’s most innovative poetry (Jacoff 108) and “the whole poem might be considered an
experiment in pushing back the boundaries of human expression, at times surprising even its creator” (Hollander 2006, xv).
/ Charles Wright /
Charles Wright was born Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, in 1935. He earned degrees from Davidson College and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and in 1970 he published his first collection of poems, "The Grave of the Right Hand" (Library of Congress 2014). He began writing poetry when he was in the army in Italy, as “metaphysics of the quotidian” (McClatchy 1989). He says about this time: “being in the army is physical, being in Italy is metaphysical” (ibid.). Like many Americans, Wright discovered Dante through the poetry of Ezra Pound. In an interview with Santos Wright explains that Ovid has been very important for him on a structural level, but that he believes that “Dante remains the great Buddhistic center of absolute attention and regard, the true magnetic field of seriousness toward which all real poems gravitate” (Wright in Santos 85, 86). As we saw already, most attention has been attributed to Inferno than to Paradiso, but Wright seems to attribute most of his attention to Paradiso. He comments that by the time he got to reading about the great Rose of Paradise, he realized the Inferno, which he had loved so much was merely gossip,
“inspired gossip, but gossip nonetheless” (Wright in Santos 86). He considers the
Commedia ultimately as a diagram for the salvation of the soul. One can take various truths
from the text, and Wright calls it as “diamond-hearted as the Book of Revelations, and as great-minded” (ibid.). Admiring Dante, Wright considers him ultimately unapproachable, and explains that one is influenced by Dante only in ways that time tells and that one's poems continually aspire to his work (ibid.).
Dante’s most conspicuous influence on Wright is his creation of a “trilogy of trilogies”. He published three books of poetry all made up of three main works. Hard
Freight, Bloodline, and China Trace, together with a prologue from The Grave of the Right Hand, became his first trilogy called Country Music (1982). The Southern Cross, The Other Side of the River, and Zone Journals, together with the epilogue Xionia became The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1990). As a completion of the trilogies, Negative Blue (2000) - the
trilogy I am focusing on - is made up of Chickamauga, Black Zodiac, and Appalachia. Despite this idea of a trilogy in a trilogy, Wright finishes both his second and third trilogy with a
short collection of poems – which Wright calls a “coda” – that had first been printed
separately as a chapbook (Moffett 70). Furthermore, Negative Blue is said to be a collection of selected later poems, but as Byrne notes, the term "selected" may be a little bit
misleading since only a few poems from the original works are omitted (2001). In spite of the trichotomy that Wright set up for Negative Blue, I will discuss my five themes per subject, regarding Negative Blue as a whole like Hawkins and Jacoff do (2003, 459).
Many of Wright’s works have won one or more awards. Robert Casper, head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress, recognized a Dantesque parallel that goes beyond the concept of the trilogies: “In his decades-long career, Charles Wright has created a Dantesque project of spiritual reckoning, one beautiful poem at a time” (Charles 2014). Dante is not the only Italian influence Wright has had. Wright believes that the immediate opening of his poems is inspired by the Italian movies that he saw in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Wright in Turner 2005). Poet David Baker endorses this typical characteristic of Wright’s poetry and adds that “almost nothing ever happens in a Charles Wright poem. This is his central act of restraint, a spiritualist’s abstinence, where
meditation is not absence but an alternative to action and to linear, dramatic finality” (Poetry Foundation 2014). Wright's work has always been influenced by religious language and imagination, both by his Christian education in the south and his later profound
interest in eastern traditions through the work of ancient Chinese philosophers and their poetry. His work often carries a sense of yearning for mystical experience but at the same time the recognition that today this may not be possible anymore (Poetry Archive 2014).
Negative Blue’s outline
In an interview with Ernest Suarez in 1998, Wright describes how he sees Negative Blue following the plan of Country Music, with Chickamauga as the inferno, Black Zodiac the purgatory, and Appalachia the paradise, based on Dante’s Commedia. However, Wright told Daniel Cross Turner in 2005 that after Chickamauga, “Black Zodiac was the second book, which would have been the purgatorial part. Appalachia was the final book, the book of the dead, since I couldn’t write a Paradiso” (Turner 2005). Wright explains that the reason
four syllables, just as Black Zodiac. He considers them silly reasons, but admits that it has something to do with it. Wright keeps the unity of the whole in mind and the amount of syllables to underline this whole, just like Dante made use of numerology to emphasize a message. Regarding Appalachia, Wright added in Turner’s (2005) interview:
Also, Appalachia is the exact opposite of what one might think of as a paradisal place, but, growing up in it, I loved it. I tend to think of western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, that part of Appalachia, as containing heavenly aspects, which I know is not true for most people, but they were for me. This again comes back to all the landscape business. You think about what’’s behind it, but you’re left with what you can see.
It is interesting to note how Wright regards a geographical region as heavenly, related to a Dantean idea; something material and specific as a metaphor for something spiritual. Here Wright shows a similarity with Dante, who regarded a city like Ravenna perhaps just as inspiring for his poetry as Appalachia is for Wright. The very earthly and material connected to something heavenly and almost unfathomable spiritual seems to make the idea of a Paradiso easier for the human mind to grasp. For Wright the landscape is a kind of mirror of the divine and in the end, the landscape – the material – is for human eyes what one is left with to see.
Whereas Jacoff and Hawkins regard The World of the Ten Thousand Things as mostly
subdued with Dante’s presence (2003, 459) I would like to state – in line with Moffett – that Dante’s light is brightest in Wright’s last trilogy Negative Blue. Moffett states that Negative
Blue reaches a kind of transcendence that is not present in The World of the Ten Thousand Things. It is true that Dante recurs most explicitly in the second book of his trilogy of
trilogies, as apparent from poem titles like Laguna – or Hawaii Dantesca or by remembering Dante’’s history and talking about him as if he were still alive. Yet, it is as though Wright has internalized Dante’s work in Negative Blue in his own way. Dante does not get addressed as much anymore, and the poems are less socially concerned as before. The poems in The
United States and Italy, or about specific authors like Dante or painters like Paul Cézanne. In
Negative Blue, a story line is more in the background and not as apparent as in earlier
poems like his journals. Moreover, most poems are very short and self-contained. They seem to be less attached to specific places and people, and turn more towards an abstract kind of thinking. Moffett remarks how the first works of Wright’s trilogy are marked by the area of Greece and conventional Christianity, but that the combination in Negative Blue changes into the American South and mysticism (Moffett 19). This shift illustrates that Wright has evolved towards more mystical and metaphysical poetry.
Wright’s poems are compact and compress many ideas. They contain internal references, but also many references to other authors, of whom many were Christian mystics. They serve Wright as guides, just as Dante had his Virgil or Bernard of Clairvaux. As Moffett explains:
The focus on the earthly in The World of the Ten Thousand Things gives way to an even greater commitment to spiritual matters in Negative Blue, and thus the final trilogy seeks to reflect the “Tomorrow” and “Up There” aspects of the “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow / Down There, Here and Up There” model the poet settled on for his trilogy of trilogies (73).
The elevated theme of Negative Blue resounds Paradiso, and Wright’s condensed type of poetry reminds one very much of the erudite Dante. We see in Negative Blue that the
Commedia is alluded to through the themes and images that Wright evokes, and they shine
as a light behind his poems; as a subtle glow interwoven through the threads of Wright’s lines. His poetry is about subjects like the (night) sky, trees, birds, mortality and the passing of days, months, and time in general. Wright’s poems go beyond the seen and the physical, which explains their metaphysical characteristic. In addition, James Longenbach described
Southener
Coming from Tennessee, Wright is considered a Southern poet. He says that the South has particularly marked him in several aspects, like “the identification with landscape as opposed to what we think of as nature””, “a desire to subtract rather than add”, “a dependence on memory and the past as a condition of my present well-being”, “an assumption that the past is where we are headed”, and ““a weakness for Europe” (Santos 90). These Southern characteristics define a big part of his poetry and explain recurring themes like time and Italy. Wright has said that his work can be read as a “quasi-spiritual autobiography” starting from his first trilogy of trilogies (Moffett 6). When writing the poem “Dog Creek Mainline” (1973), Dante understood that he did not want to write about some abstract subject matter. He wanted to write about his life, and figure it out; he considers himself having done that ever since. He regards poems as having to come out of one’s body - one’s life - “the way webbing comes out of a spider” (Wright in Santos 85). Yet he also thinks they should be as personally impersonal as a spider’s web. How the web came about exactly is not relevant, “what’s necessary is its presence and what it can do” (ibid.). So although being always autobiographical in a sense, his poems should be universal too. This autobiographical part is again a characteristic that is very similar to Dante’s
Commedia, as Dante’s exile and personal history have spun their threads through his work.
Wright says he essentially writes about three things: language, landscape and the idea of God in particular. This content is unchanging and unvarying, and behind all of his poems, “even the ones that may not look like it” (Wright in Brown 2011). Furthermore, Michael Chitwood argues that Wright has indeed produced "some of the most genuine spiritual poetry of the last several decades" (Byrne 2001).
Wright considers a contemplation of the divine one of the true functions of poetry (Santos 92), and Upton notes how Wright’s themes and vocabularies force his readers into a consideration of spirituality (26). In one of Wright’s notebooks from the years 1988-1990 – published in 1992, around the time he was beginning Negative Blue – he included a fragment from W.H. Auden’s evaluation of Vincent van Gogh’s artwork. As Byrne (2001) points out, the evaluation might be equally appropriate and applicable to Wright himself:
Perhaps the best label for him as a painter would be Religious Realist. A realist because he attached supreme importance to the incessant study of nature and never composed pictures 'out his head'; religious because he regarded nature as the
sacramental visible sign of a spiritual grace which it was his aim as a painter to reveal to others.
Indeed, as we will see, Wright can be regarded as a Religious Realist with his love for landscape and its incitement to spirituality.
/ SIDEREAL /
It is quite evident that the stars play an important role in Dante’s Paradiso, simply looking at the fact that Dante is ascending through the universe from the earth up to six other planets and crossing the sphere of the fixed stars. Many of Dante’s similes refer to stars, the planets and their constellations, and I would therefore like to extend the term of the
sidereal to the planets and the sky. Dante refers to the sidereal through expressions like “glorious stars” (XXII), reverent addresses and invocations to planets (Jupiter in canto XX and Mars in XV for example) or through similes like the descending of a soul from the cross compared to a shooting star (XV.18). But whereas Dante’s Paradiso is a journey towards the light in which the stars will ultimately be outshone by the Light of God, this clear
development is not so straightforward in Wright’s poetry - as already mentioned, his use of a linear developing narrative is scarce. There is less of a development regarding the ‘role’ of the stars in Wright’s poetry than in Dante’s Paradiso. Yet the stars and the night sky remain a guiding thread throughout Negative Blue, as a title like Black Zodiac from the second collection of poems makes clear. The word ‘stars’ recurs about fifty times in Wright’s book of 117 poems. Moffett also points to the symbolism of the stars in Wright’s poetry, “often appearing generically but also in specific references to constellations such as the Southern Cross and Orion” (101). Wright’s poems are often about the night or darkness, and
something bright contrasting with that. This lighter element is frequently connected to the stars or other sidereal elements like the shining moon. Dantean references in Wright’s poetry can be found in more or less direct linguistic or thematic allusions. For example, he writes about a “crystalline night” (59), perhaps alluding toDante’s specific term for the ninth and last sphere of the earthly Heavens; the Crystalline Sphere. Furthermore, in Wright’’s poem American Twilight Venus is in the third heaven, and the moon is also placed in a heaven of its own (187). The idea of planets with separate heavens seems inspired by Dante’s cosmological design with different heavens. Wright does not construct a
cosmological model himself, but the sky in general is an important theme for him. Twilight and dusk recur several times and he writes about “star turns” (148) and angels in the sky.
Conclusively, the word ‘sky’ recurs 75 times in the book.
Admiration and anthropomorphization
During his journey upward and coming out of the darkness of hell, Dante is for the first time reminded of the beauty of the stars in Purgatorio, since that is the first thing Dante and Virgil see when they arrive there. Subsequently, in Paradiso even an entire sphere is ruled by the stars; the eighth heaven, or the Starry Sphere. In Wright’s Landscape as Metaphor /
Landscape as Fate and a Happy Life we read:
(…) the stars at midnight blow in the wind like high cotton.
There is no place in the world they don’t approach and pass over. (189)
The lyrical I is aware that the stars move above everything and everyone on earth. In his poem Meditation on Form and Measure, the lyrical I even acknowledges that “My life, like others’ lives, has been circumscribed by stars” and he goes on to quote a phrase from Giacomo Leopardi, an 18th century poet and philosopher, “O vaghe stelle dell’orso /
beautiful stars of the Bear” (92). Just as for Dante, the greatness of the sky with its shining stars is a great inspiration for Wright. This greatness often has a joyful influence on Dante. In the fifth canto Beatrice’s joy increases because she and Dante get closer to God, causing the immutable planet Mercury to glow as they ascend to it from the moon:
And if even that star then changed and smiled, What did I become who by my very nature
Am subject to each and every kind of change? (Hollander 2007, 97-99)
If even the immutable planet changed, Hollander points out that the reader is asked to imagine how much the mortal and transmutable Dante changed (2007, 127). The ascent is a supernatural event, glowing off joy. Although joy is not a distinct theme in Wright’s poetry,
the marvel for the sidereal is omnipresent. In North American Bear Wright talks about the Big Bear constellation - the Big Dipper - and anthropomorphizes it:
The season approaches us, dead leaves and withered grasses Waxed by the wind wherever you look,
the clear night sky
Star-struck and star-stung, that constellation, those seven high stars, General Ke-Shu lifting his sword, the Chinese say.
Or one of them said,
One at the Western Front as part of his army, without doubt. I almost can see him myself,
long-sword over the Bear’s neck,
His car wheel-less, darkness sifting away like a sandstorm to the west. (197) In the poem the Big Dipper is compared to a Chinese general lifting his sword. The source for his reference seems to be the Banenshukai, a ninja manual written in 1676 by the ninja master Fujibayashi Yasutake. The book covers a lot of different subjects, and the big bear is vastly discussed in book 8, volume 17, which deals with astronomy and astrology
(Cummins 1013). Each of the constellation’s seven stars is ascribed a specific name and ‘personality’. Perhaps we should understand in Wright’’s poem that it is the general who ordered the wind to blow furiously for decay down below (“dead leaves and withered grasses”), or even the general’’s own slaying sword (“clear night sky”). The lyrical I says he can almost see the general, as if the man were really there. Although there is no true joy involved in Wright’s theme of the stars, he does anthropomorphize them as Dante did, and a sense of amazement is underlined by puns like “star-struck. The title of the poem might be an allusion to the fact that in ancient China the Big Dipper was called the Northern Dipper (Pankenier 331). He combines the ancient eastern tradition with his home country. Just like erudite Dante, Wright creates a collage of different traditions in his poems.
In the Commedia stars can be human-like, but humans can also look like stars. When Dante begins to see the souls in Canto XIV, he refers to the sidereal with the beauty of the rising sun. He subsequently continues to compare the souls to the evening stars:
And lo, all around and all of equal brightness, rose a splendor, surpassing what had been, as the horizon, at the rising sun, grows brighter. And just as, at the approach of evening,
new lights begin to show throughout the sky, so faint they seem both real and yet unreal, It seemed to me that I began to see
new subsistences there that formed a ring beyond the other two circumferences (67-75).
Making a reference to the night sky, Dante expresses the sense of wonder the sky can awaken, making the stars look paradoxically both real and unreal. The stars are part of this universe, but in our comprehension and admiration they seem out of this world. Dante describes this tension between real and unreal when beholding the stars, especially when the night is setting.
In North American Bear, Wright expresses an overwhelming feeling caused by the sight of the night sky and its stars:
I gaze at the constellations,
forgetting whatever it was I had to say (198). The immensity of the sky renders the lyrical I speechless, although paradoxically still expressing at least that. We recognize such a sense of awe also in Dante’s canto XIV, when he is in the sphere of Mars. The planet is anthropomorphized, too, with its smiling,
reddening and warm reaction to Dante’s prayer of thanksgiving to God. Dante subsequently compares the Milky Way to a cross of crusading saints:
As the Milky Way, arrayed with greater and lesser lights, glows white between the universal poles,
making even sages wonder how and why,
these rays, thus constellated, made, deep within Mars, the venerable sign that the crossing
of its quadrants fixes in a circle. (97-102)
The nearly invisible stars that make up the Milky Way are compared to the souls who make up the cross of Mars. The souls in Paradiso are often compared to the stars in the sky, bringing along a sense of admiration for these beautiful lights.
Subsequently, the tercet that follows expresses how Dante is “simply not able to represent adequately the amazing things that he is indeed capable of holding in mind. By the end of the poem he will not be able to do that, either” (Hollander 2007, 349).
Ineffability will become an increasingly bigger theme in both the poets’ work. I will look deeper into this theme in the third chapter. Something about the stars and the beauty of the cosmos renders the beholder in both Dante and Wright’s poems speechless.
In Wright we also find similarities between the stars and humans. Coming back to his North
American Bear we read how the lyrical I compares the stars with language. The
immeasurable distance between humans and stars is bridged by the idea that the stars also have a language - something characteristically human.
Random geometry of the stars,
random word-strings As beautiful as the alphabet.
Or so I remember them,
Orion, Cassiopeia and the Pleiades,
Stitching their syntax across the deep North Caroline sky A half-century ago,
The lost language of summer nights, the inarticulate scroll Of time
pricked on its dark, celestial cylinder. (196)
Wright poetically describes how the stars ‘write’ across the sky and anthropomorphizes them in such a way that they come psychologically closer to the human being far below them. In Step-Children of Paradise, Wright recognizes that as humans we are not that different from stars, and actually have something in common with these beautiful lights:
We live our lives like stars, unconstellated stars, just next to Great form and great structure,
ungathered, uncalled upon (193).
It is sometimes said that we are all made of stars, which perhaps makes us live our lives like stars according to Wright. Yet, as human beings we are unconstellated, imperfect, next to great form and structure - would that be the perfection of God? It could be, since Wright states that all his poems are about the idea of God even if that seems to be hidden.
Ascension
Through Dante we learn how the stars influence life on earth. He writes in canto VII, when he is in the sphere of Mercury and thus only in the second of the in total ten celestial spheres:
‘The soul of every beast and every plant is drawn from a complex of potentials
The “holy lights” can be understood as the stars, and Dante explains how the sensitive or the vegetative life without the rational soul is influenced by the stars. Moevs (in Hollander 2007, 175) explains the fragment as follows:
The souls of all plants and animals are ‘drawn from’ varying compounds of the sublunar elements (complession potenzïata) by the influence of the stars, but human life (the human intelligence or rational soul) ‘breathes directly’ from the ‘‘supreme beneficence,’ from Intellect-Being itself. That is why the human mind or soul is always in love with, and never ceases to seek union with, the ground of its being, of all being.
The difference between plants and animals on the one side and human life on the other is explained by the yearning to become one with its source again. The human mind will never cease to seek union with the ground of all being, which - for Dante - is God. This is a crucial difference between ‘material’’ and ‘divine’ nature. Due to the possession of the rational mind and free will, the human being is only partly determined by the movement of the stars and seeks to soar upward to God. This ascension goes beyond the eighth sphere of the stars; it goes until the Empyrean, the abode of God.
When Dante is overwhelmed by the journey he experiences, he can fall back on his Faith and has guides who reassure him. In Canto XXIV, when Dante is answering Peter in the Starry Sphere and explains his belief in the Trinity and the evidence for it, he says:
‘This is the beginning, this the living spark That swells into a living flame
And shines within me like a star in heaven.’ (145-147)
A deep knowledge that shines like a star within Dante is instigated by the profound truth of God’s being. Wright, on the contrary, does not explicitly speak about faith or something reassuring and consoling to fall back on. He focuses more on the immensity of the heavens and the frightening part of it, which often appears to be a big absence. In All Landscape is
The sacred is frightening to the astral body, As is its absence.
We have to choose which fear is our consolation. Everything comes ex alto,
We’d like to believe, the origin and the end, or Non-origin and the non-end,
each distant and inaccessible (158).
He writes how everything comes ex alto: from above. “Above” lies the paradox of the beginning and the end that are the same. The idea seems inaccessible to the speaker and scares him. As he writes, “the sacred is frightening to the astral body”. Perhaps this astral body is the sky itself. Yet, the absence of the sacred seems to be just as frightening as its presence. Wright will not give a definite answer in his poetry to themes like these and resolve them with a conclusive narrative. Wright might be writing about the idea of God; it does not mean he envisions an idea of God like Dante did.
Although not directly associating the stars with joy and calling them “stern” in North
American Bear, a page later in the same poem Wright admits he does “feel safe” (197 &
198). Moroever, the idea of ascension is still present: What is it about the stars we can’t shake?
What pulse, what tide drop Pulls us like vertigo upward (…) (196)
There is an unfathomable immensity above us that makes us dizzy while pulling us upward. The yearning for something higher and out of this world keeps coming back in Wright’s poetry, although it is not directly related to God as for Dante.
Consideration
In Canto XXII, Dante observes the spheres and planets beneath him. Hollander uses Carroll’s distinction between Saint Bernard’s terms consideratio and contemplatio to explain Dante’s lines: “Contemplation, from com and templum, the marking out of a
templum, or sacred space open to the sky; and consideration, from com and sidus (sideris) a
star, or constellation, observation of the stars” (2007, 550). Hollander continues Carroll’s explanation by stating that Dante is “considering” the stars in Saint Bernard’s
understanding, but that contemplation of God still lies ahead of him. This shows a bigger perspective that observing the stars is not the end goal for Dante; God lies beyond the stars waiting to be contemplated.
When Dante has almost arrived at God in canto XXX, he first has to drink from the river of light he sees there. It is a beautiful glittering river:
And I saw light that flowed as flows a river, pouring its golden splendor between two banks painted with the wondrous colors of spring. From that torrent issued living sparks
and, on either bank, they settled on the flowers, like rubies ringed in gold (61-66).
The river is like living light and although for Dante this river is not really related to the stars, in Wright’s poetry we do encounter a few rivers that are related to the sidereal. In the poem Looking Outside the Cabin Window, I Remember a Line by Li Po, he writes:
Behind the cloud scuts,
inside the blue aorta of the sky, The River of Heaven flows
With its barge of stars,
What perhaps first strikes the reader of this fragment, is the word ‘scuts’ connected to the clouds. A scut is the short tail of a hare, rabbit or deer, and so Wright seems to bring the sidereal closer to the human imagination. He might refer to the ‘tail’ as the back of the clouds behind which a special river is situated in the blue heart (”aorta””) of the sky. The stars are sailing the river and shine and enlighten most when it is darkest. This Heavenly river seems to allude to Dante’s Paradisian river, adapted to Wright’s style.
In another of Wright’s poems, Spring Storm, he tells that “the stars keep on moving” and that “no one can tie them to one place” (178). It is as if they write, as we saw previously, and now also float across the sky. In the same poem a few lines further he writes about “Stars moving unseen behind the light surge, great river” (ibid.). This seems to connect the image of a river with both the stars and light. Both Dante and Wright’s river are dynamic and filled with light.
Contemplation
Once Dante has “considered” he is ready for contemplation: beholding God. I will come back to the details of his vision of God in the last chapter on Unity. Just like Inferno and
Purgatorio did, Paradiso ends with the word ‘stelle’ (stars). The importance of the stars is
clearly a theme that flows throughout the three canticles, but in particular after Dante arrived in Purgatory. The subtle weaving of the sidereal theme recurs through the whole of
Negative Blue. The final poem of the book, Sky Diving, resembles Paradiso’s final image as
Jacoff and Hawkins have mentioned (2003, 259). Moffett explains how Wright returns once more to the stars at the end of the book by making a division between stars and human-made lights, to which he refers as “arterial pulse of ground light and constellations” (Moffett 101 and Wright 201).
The poem’s final section refers to the point “that moves the sun and the other stars” (201) after which the speaker affirms his fascination for the stars:
What a sidereal jones we have!
Immensity fills us Like moonrise across the night sky, the dark disappears,
Worlds snuff, nothing acquits us, And still we stand outside and look up,
look up at the heavens and think, Such sidebars, such extra-celestial drowning pools
To swallow us.
Let’s lie down together. Let’s open our mouths. (201)
The use of words like ‘jones’ and ‘snuff’’ imply a connection to drugs, as if he is high on his sidereal experience. He is fixated on the stars as a sort of addiction. Immensity fills him and it becomes so overwhelming he needs to lie down to be able to contain it all. The stars have something magnetic and mesmerizing, and both the Commedia and Negative Blue end with the celebration of the magnitude of the stars and the idea that there is something - a “point” - beyond them to which they owe their existence.
/ TIME /
Time is a something peculiar. As St. Augustine wrote in book XI of his Confessiones - a book referred to various times in the Commedia: “If no one asks me, I know, but if I have to explain to someone what time is, I no longer know” (Hermsen 2014). Time is something bound to existence on earth, and as humans we all have to deal with its passing. We cannot see the cause, but only the effect of time. In Paradiso the course of time is quite out of the earthly perspective. This is contrary to Purgatorio, where the inhabitants exist in real, present time. They are time bound until the moment they have completed their penance. In contrast, the denizens of Inferno and Paradiso are in their eternal condition, knowing that they will receive their bodies to wear for eternity only at the Last Judgment (Hollander 2003, xviii). The denizens of both Paradiso and Inferno are aware of time, but do not act in it. The big difference between the two realms is that those in hell are denied knowledge of the present. The dichotomy between Dante’s mortality and his eternal surrounding will grow bigger the closer Dante gets to the Empyrean, where he ultimately momentarily conjoins eternity. He refers to this source of all being as the “eternal fountain” (XXXI, 93). The Commedia can likewise be seen as a journey from time to eternity - even if this eternity lasts paradoxically shorter and longer than any measuring instrument could measure.
As becomes clear from various analyses and interviews, time is also an important theme throughout Wright’s work.5 One of the structures Wright had in mind for his trilogy
of trilogies was: “past present, future: yesterday, today, tomorrow” (Mulvania 2003). This structure is especially present as of The World of the Ten Thousand Things, but according to Wright the structure only got larger. It is as if time is being stretched in his poetry, until it merges more and more into eternity. Byrne writes that in Wright’s poetry time is regarded as the power to share and re-form anything. It is the controlling factor of our life, but it is also beyond our control and the one thing we can never possess, but which will always possess us, “until time comes to dispose of us” (Byrne 2001). He illustrates this by quoting Wright’s Poem almost Wholly in my own Manner from Negative Blue:
Time, like a burning wheel, scorching along the highway side, Reorganizing, relayering,
turning the tenants out. (93)
Human beings will only live on earth as long as the time they are given; when that time is over they die.6 Jarman affirms that Wright’s overarching theme is time: “Perhaps the
curvature of space, suggested by Wright's famous staggered line, is better apprehended in a more condensed form and better serves as analogy for the soul as it moves through time” (Jarman 2011). Wright’’s poetic journey seems rather similar to Dante’s journey in this regard. Dante’s poetry is really condensed, conveying a lot of the narrative in very few words. There is no sense of “waste” of words. Everything in Dante’s journey is working towards the vision of God, who is pure condensation Himself as He contains everything in a single point. In The World of the Ten Thousand Things Wright was writing journals as a type of “soul’s devotion”, as Jarman (2011) describes them. It seems as if this devotion has become more condensed by the use of Wright’s short and staggered line. Jarman additionally explains that Wright’s fascination for time is especially for “time as it has already passed, in some form of realization, and returns in the curving lens of memory” (ibid). Wright sees the movement in his poems as plots that do not run narratively or linearly, but synaptically, “from one nerve spark to another, from one imagistic spark to another” (Wright in Byrne 2001). It is as if Wright’s poems are made up of recollections of memories, which always run associatively touching upon many ideas.
Memory
The possession of memory is one of the crucial differences between the human and the divine. Since man lives in time, there is a distinction for him between past, present, and future. However, since the souls in Paradise live in an eternal present they have “no need / to search the past for some forgotten construct” (XXXIX.80-81). God created man in time, 66 An interesting contemporary take on this dominating life principle is presented in the 2011 thriller movie In Time, where time has become the universal currency. It mirrors how much our life is ruled by time, and the tenuous line between wasting time and taking one’s time, notions that are absent in Paradiso’s eternity.
and therewith made man’s desire to reunite himself with Him sempiternal: having a beginning but not an end (Hollander 2007, 25). Dante struggles with the possession of memory at both the beginning and end of Paradiso. It is a blessing for enabling the recalling of something beautiful and divine, yet it can also be regarded as a burden because it implies corruption and cannot follow after the vision of God. In Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Wright also acknowledges that despite memory’s shortcomings, it is still all he has:
What I remember redeems me,
strips me and brings me to rest, An end to what has begun,
A beginning to what is about to be ended. (83)
As Moffett also points out, the speaker finds his redemption in memory despite the forgetfulness that is starting to possess him (Moffett 87). This expresses the Southern characteristic that Wright explains in an interview: Southeners tend to live in the past or were brought up by people who lived in the past. Wright adds that memory is all man has left after some time, “and so it becomes a great, fertile piece of land to work” (Wright in Byrne 2001). Although memory will never be a piece of land big enough to grow all lived experiences on, it still remains a fertile piece of land for a few unforgettable experiences. Throughout Apologia Pro Vita Sua Wright examines several aspects of time; he determines that “time is the Adversary, and stays sleepless and wants for nothing” (81). This recalls Dante’s comparison of time being an adversary in a duel on horseback. Elsewhere in the poem, Wright understands the diminishing amount of time one has left in life as a reason to place increasing value on the time we do still have:
Time is the source of all good,
time the engenderer Of entropy and decay.
Wright summarizes in a few lines the tension between the two sides of time’s nature: the destroyer, yet the enabler and source of good. Time confronts man with his mortality. Byrne explains that Wright connects mortality and nature to a developing understanding and acceptance of God, while linking landscape to the spiritual (2001). He quotes from Wright’’s poem As Our Bodies Rise, / Our Names Turn Into Light:
How strange to have a name, any name, on this poor earth.
January hunkers down,
the icicle deep in her throat — The days become longer, the nights ground bitter and cold, Single grain by single grain
Everything flows toward structure,
last ache in the ache for God. (45)
It is precisely the understanding of things mortal and finite that makes man recognize that something eternal and infinite exists; for Wright and Dante this is God. Byrne adds that Wright's explorations of abstract images like "time" and "God" are powerful and that Wright’s strength lies in the ingenuity to present such themes in powerful images (2001). Wright acknowledges he finds his spirituality in abstractions (Wright in Turner 2005). For him, spirituality is elicited by landscape. He elucidates that it does not have something to do with the romantic ideal of nature as the great church of man: “I mean that landscape
translates and reinterprets. It’s a kind of string of associative feeling that runs through most of us” (ibid.). In this regard he distinctly opposes himself to the Southern inclination
towards history and the past: “The Southern narrative tradition looks at landscape as history, a door into the dark, as it were. I tend to look at landscape as revelation, a door into the light. When I look at the landscape, I see what’s not there” (ibid.). Wright’s
comprehension of landscape makes it a catalyst of spirituality. It gives man a chance to turn away from time and find a transcendence disregarding these human notions.
Hooks in eternity
Although we easily place the temporal opposite the eternal, they are not as strictly separated as we might think. Dante presents the Starry Sphere in canto XXIII as a liminal space, as if it were the border of the infinite (Hollander 2007, 574). The natural movement from time to eternity is gradual, but knows some intertwining enlightened moments earlier on that we could describe as “kairotic”. In ancient times Kairos was regarded as the god of the correct and true face of time, providing an interval or intermezzo within the strict and linear time regime of the god’’s grandfather, Chronos (Hermsen 2014). During such an intermezzo, a person no longer experiences time as chronological, but rather as if the “past, present and future are balled, rolled or knotted together (…) to create a dynamic form of time driven forth by one’s own experience and which allows for change and new insights” (ibid.). According to poet Maria Szymborska, “kairos has ‘set its heart on happiness’ and also ‘on truth and eternity’” (ibid.). The monotonous chronos time gets interrupted by a “vertical” and more elevated kairos time during moments when a liminal space becomes apparent, and a glimpse of something different is visible. For Dante such kairotic or
epiphanic moments become more frequent the higher he ascends. We can recognize similar moments in Wright’s poetry; “everything terminal has hooks in eternity””, he writes in
Disjecta Membra (136). The terminal things in life are “corrupt”, resulting from “secondary
creation” as Dante explained. They are related to the horizontal chronos time. On the other hand is eternity, the time that does not know time. The “hooks” Wright talks about could be comprehended as kairotic moments in which terminal and eternal moments intersect and create a junction; a hook of the eternal in the terminal. Elsewhere in Disjecta Membra Wright writes:
The abyss of time is a white glove—
take it off, put it on, Finger by finger it always fits, (137).
Time is like a glove one can take off or put on. It seems to convey the idea that with the glove of time on our hands we are caught in finitude, but when we take it off eternity is in our hands. It recalls William Blake’s lines from his Auguries of Innocence: “To see a World in
a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour” (Blake 490). Blake equally presents a paradox related to time; eternity fitting in the finite palm of one’s hand. He conveys how little parts reflect the bigger whole they are part of, which is a theme I will discuss in more detail in the chapter on unity. Pulitzer-Prize winner poet Philip Levine describes Wright’s poetry as catching “the visible world at that endless moment before it trails into eternity” (2007). It is this subtle
transition that becomes more and more important in the course of Dante’s Commedia and Wright’s trilogy of trilogies.
From time to eternity
In Paradiso the transition between the temporal and eternal is between Paradise’s ninth sphere – the Crystalline Sphere or Primum Mobile – and the tenth sphere, the Empyrean. The ninth sphere is the highest part of God’s creation in time, a mixture of form and matter, the heavens. Here the Seraphim reside, the highest order of angels, dedicated to loving God (Hollander 2007, 717). After having bathed himself in the river of light in the Primum Mobile, Dante will not be limited by humanness anymore and is received in God’s eternity. Moevs explains that the Empyrean is out of space-time, untouched by physical law. It is a dimensionless point, “in which all is immediately present, a ‘space’ of consciousness, in which the ‘sight’ of awareness ‘takes’ (prendeva) as itself all it sees, all that exists”
(Moevs.2005.I in Hollander 2007, 753). As of that moment Dante is allowed to see with a new sense of dimension which abolishes spatial and temporal perspective. All things will become equidistant from one another, and no traditional past or future will separate time anymore. God’s habitation is everywhere and nowhere (Hollander 2007, 774). When Dante will ultimately see God in his full splendor, time will have fallen away completely and the mystical moment does not comply with any humanly imaginable laws anymore.
The union of everything into one, of eternity and God, is also captured in Wright’s poem Meditation on Form and Measure:
Time and light are the same thing somewhere behind our backs. And form is measure.
Without measure there is no form: Form and measure become one.
Time and light become one somewhere beyond our future. Father darkness, mother night,
one and one become one again (91).
In a place we cannot measure, time is the same as light. Byrne acknowledges that for
Wright, time is something intangible, yet a life-giving element (Byrne 2001). Time gives life to existence, just like the light of the sun does. Yet “behind our backs”, eternity exist. There, time and light merge together and form and measure unify. They are comprised in the point of God. As this chapter started with a quote from St. Augustine, we could return to him again through Wright’s poem St. Augustine and the Arctic Bear, the penultimate poem of
Negative Blue:
Augustine said that neither future
Nor past exists, as one is memory, the other expectation. (200)
In Confessiones XI, Augustine asserts that all we have is the present moment. Wright and Dante meet where time and light are one. God is light and time is eternity comprising an infinite amount of present moments.
/ LANGUAGE /
Expressing oneself adequately through language remains one of the biggest challenges for a human being. It opposes the limits of language to one’s inner life which feels more
unlimited. Mystics have expressed this struggle in particular. They experience a conflict between telling about the mystical experience and simultaneously acknowledging that all words will fall short to adequately describe it. This tension is also a crucial one for Dante, especially in Paradise where he experienced many unspeakable things. Dante’s interest in the question of language had always been very strong. Moreover, by writing the Commedia in Italian Dante’s poetry helped forge a language that became regional in the fifteenth century and national in the nineteenth century (Hawkins 136). Where Dante created a proper Italian language by making a unique and outstanding work of art, Wright defied his predecessors in his own way. As Turner remarks, Wright is writing nonnarrative verse with only the faintest trace of a story line in his poems, renouncing the Southern emphasis on storytelling. For a while, Wright was the only one doing that (Turner 2005).
Despite Dante’s innovative and original use of language and rhyme schemes, the challenge of expressing oneself through the use of language remains. Language, like time, is typically characteristic of the human being and life on earth. In canto XVII it is confirmed that the blessed souls understand everything in the eternal presence in God. Moreover, the souls of the saved have the capacity to read minds and speech is an unnecessary form of
communication between them (Hollander 2007, 417). The use of language underlines the contrast between the souls in paradise and humans on earth once again.
Prudence Shaw explains that Dante’s words are actually three stages removed from what he is attempting to represent. She calls this a chain of inadequacy because of the visionary nature of the experience Dante is describing: “the mind cannot fully grasp what it experiences, because this transcends the human capacity for understanding; the memory cannot now recall even that which the mind did grasp at the time; and finally, the poet’s words cannot do justice even to what he can recall to mind” (Shaw in Hollander 2007, 743).
