Eros, Dantesque and Freudian

When I was younger, in college and grad school, I'd read that someone my current age had won the lottery, and it just seemed so pointless. What would they do with twenty years of money coming in that could possibly make their, or anyone's, life better? There they would be, beaming out of the front pages of the New York Post, their slovenly decrepitude accentuated by the big checks and grins so appropriately transfigured into the harsh half-tone dots of the giant photo.

This was part of a larger combination of fear and hope: fear for what I would be like at my current age, how I would cope with being this old, with having no prospects before me except the dead end one. Hope that by that time I would no longer be myself, but some other person, an older one, who could have nothing to do with the younger me. (Cf. Hazlitt's Essay on the Principles of Human Action.) That unimaginable person really didn't have to be imagined, since he'd be "one of them," those others who belonged to a different time, to a different attitude towards time. I could see that I wasn't one of them, part of that older generation.

At some point I really started liking, because it made life so much more luminous, books by the very old that were written in the voice of the young. In particular, as I've mentioned before, Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, one of the four or five greatest non-fiction books I have ever read. I mention it here, because I think that's when that category occurred to me. (I'd felt the same, I think, about Joseph Mitchell, though I didn't quite put it to myself that way. And of course that's the surprise in Proust: the extreme old age of the narrator, which we discover only at the end.)

I think this seemed luminous to me because it meant the possibility of communication on equal terms with people much older than I was -- it meant I could be friends with them. Those friendships, not many, but real friendships among equals, have mattered a great deal to me. Imperceptibly -- with the same imperceptibility of time passing -- I became aware that older generations were no different. They were neither more nor less insightful than we were. And I'd wanted them to be both.

What I had once imagined was that that difference would reside in a difference in what mattered to them. What matters to the old? Not the love that mattered to us. No: Cranky issues about health, money, rudeness, insult, etc., instead. That's what I thought. So I was not that person, and my fear of becoming that person (as I have said) also brought the reassurance that that person would no longer be me.

But it turns out that (I began to discover from my conversations with my old friends) and is turning out that what matters all the way through is love. ("Love of the real," the pretty old Stevens put it.) That was somehow Dante's insight, and if Freud said the poets were there before him (did he? That's for another post), then Dante did indeed anticipate Freud's most important insight: that our involvement in the world is always driven by, always troubled by, always channeled through love.

That is becoming more and more to me to seem an amazing insight of Freud's: the thing I could not bear to think -- that the relation of the old to the world is the same as that of the young -- turns out to be true. At this age, I'm glad it is; and it's the reason that I'm glad it is.

This probably sounds more sentimental than I meant it to: it's really Freud's insight that's been really striking me.  Dante's version of it can be seen in these lines, I think:

Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta
più caramente; e questo è quello strale
che l'arco de lo essilio pria saetta.

Tu proverai sì come sa di sale
lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale.
                                                      --Paradiso 17:55-60

You will abandon* all things whose delight
is dearest to you: this is the first arrow
that from the bow of exile takes its flight.

Thenceforth the taste of others' bread will harrow
your tongue with salt, and you will have to labor
on others' stairways, hard and steep and narrow.

[More literally: You will abandon* everything most dearly delightful: and this is that arrow which the bow of exile will first shoot. You will experience how salty is the savor of the bread of others, and how how hard a path is the descent and ascent on others' stairways.

-----

*"lascerai," as in "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate": "Abandon all hope, you who enter here," inscribed on the gates of hell. Hope, yes, but not love.]

This is almost the exact center of Paradiso. Dante's twelfth century ancestor Cacciaguida, is prophesying his life back down on the farm, even after he's seen Paradise. Now we know that love moves the sun and other stars in Dante, but the thing that's deepest, that always deepest, is not the love of God (everyone since Plotinus or Plato knows about that) but the love of matter (Philip Pullman) and the material world that represents something different from the love of God.

Where Dante seems to anticipate Freud is the idea that everything is driven by love. Love isn't one principle among others: it's the principle. And the wrong way to read this (the sentimental way I was trying to abjure), is as the apotheosis of love. (It occurs to me that this fits in with stuff I've written about the personification of love.) Love belongs to all: no less to those in the Inferno who love their sins than to those in the highest reaches of Paradise who love their inscrutable God. Yes, those in the Inferno love God too: the point is that even there, everywhere, everyone loves. Love's not an apotheosis because it makes no moral distinctions: the fact that you love isn't a saving feature about you.

Not in real life, anyhow. It is saving as a literary fact: Gatsby and Ugolino alike are great because they love. That's what I like about it: it's a literary virtue, a virtue in fiction. That's why it's not an apotheosis, as Dante and Freud both see. Cacciaguida's speech has always struck me as amazing because of the way it sends Dante back to real life: the exile in which he's writing this poem. Here he's been in Paradise, and he 's been promised that that's where he'll return.  But what presses upon him, more grim than any Purgatory, is exile in this world.  Even in a world with heaven to follow, maybe particularly in a world with heaven to follow, the stops are more poignant than endings.

In our lives, this world is all you get, and its vicissitudes, even terrible ones like exile, are just part of what life is. But in a universe with an eternal afterlife in prospect -- I think this is what's so amazing about Dante -- this life, this brief vigil of the senses -- is all the more precious, since all the rest of it won't be on this earth which is the only place for earthly love, the love that is not apotheosis but fictional (sub specie aeternitatis).  Love up there will be completely secure. But that won't be human experience any more.  The love that is human experience, the earthly love that is the totality of being human, for as long and only for as long as we are human: Earth's, if not the right, at least the only place for that. And Dante, like Freud, sees it as the totaliy of human experience.

The distinction I used to make, between my adolescent concerns for love and the old folks' different ways of being, becomes in Dante a distinction between the real and mortal love of this life, from first to last, young and old, and whatever transcends, and so fails to belong to, this life.  That other love, which moves the sun and other stars, will come when it comes.  But it makes our precarious and mortal love, our precarious and mortal relation to the world, all the more its own, all the more what it means to be in the world, all one's life. All one's life.

That other world is the Truth, and therefore can have nothing to do with the fictional, unreal, real world (whose substance is cathexis alone) which is the only world we live in, and which is utterly and irretrievably bounded and limited by the truth it does not belong to, as all fictions are utterly and irretrievably bounded and limited by the truth to which they do not belong.  The sublunary world we live in, our world, is only here, and being in it is being with what we can only love here, and what we do love here. That's how Dante anticipated Freud.

How literary transference ends

Reading a great note of Jeff Nunokawa's (you may have to friend him on Facebook to read it) -- two notes, actually -- got me thinking about the moment when, seeing Beatrice's presence flame up before him, Dante attains to the full sublimity of the earthly Paradise that Eve has lost and turns to share the transport with Virgil, who's been silent these last cantos, lost in his own awe and wonder. (The higher they go in Purgatory, the more Virgil's authority reduces to his still-parental capacity to ask intelligent questions of the guides they meet and to interpret their answers, even if he can't answer those questions himself as he'd done below.)  She's not only a counter-Eve; she's a counter-Dido too, meeting him "vestita di color di fiamma viva," dressed in the color of living flame, in contrast with the flames of Dido's funeral pyre which Aeneas sees as he abandons Carthage.

This is indeed a return to Eden for Dante: Beatrice has been dead for ten years now, and it's ten years since he felt the awe that now overcomes him again in her presence.  Virgil has seen him through the lowest depths of hell and to this glory, and so now:

Tosto che ne la vista mi percosse
l'alta virtù che già m'avea trafitto
prima ch'io fuor di püerizia fosse,

volsimi a la sinistra col respitto
col quale il fantolin corre a la mamma
quando ha paura o quando elli è afflitto,

per dicere a Virgilio: 'Men che dramma
di sangue m'è rimaso che non tremi:
conosco i segni de l'antica fiamma'.

Ma Virgilio n'avea lasciati scemi
di sé, Virgilio dolcissimo patre,
Virgilio a cui per mia salute die'mi;

né quantunque perdeo l'antica matre,
valse a le guance nette di rugiada,
che, lagrimando, non tornasser atre.  (Purgatorio 30, 40-54)

----

As soon as all my sight was driven wild
by that same force which, timelessly archaic,
transfixed me then while I was yet a child,

I turned back to the left, with hopes as quick
as when a little boy runs to his mama
if he's afraid of something or is sick,

To say to Virgil, "No drop of blood is calm: a
trembling has rapt me: I see all about
the returning fire of that blazing drama."

But Virgil was not there. We were without
him now. O Virgil! sweetest father,
to whom my soul I'd trusted without doubt!

Nor could the world, recovered, our first mother
lost once in Eden keep my dew-cleansed cheeks
unstained by tears I now wept for the other.

Dante lost his mother when he was five years old, and he has already seen that Beatrice must have taken her place in his soul, especially once she too has died. But Virgil has been so tender, and it's to Virgil he turns, as to a mother, as to his childhood, away for a moment from the Godlike blaze of Beatrice.  It's to Virgil that he entrusts his own wondrous and direct acknowledgment that he recognizes the archaic feeling he'd once felt in Beatrice's presence on earth: "conosco i segni de l'antica fiamma," I recognize the signs of that ancient flame (my translation above sacrificed the directness of this line for the even more important rhyme on mama) -- words which directly translate Virgil's Dido -  "Adgnosco veteris vestigia flammae".  Her ancient flame had been for her husband Sichaeus, now dead, and now she fears (accurately) that she will betray his memory and turn from him to Aeneas.

So for a moment Virgil and Dante take on the rolls of women, of Dante's mother and of Dido, while Beatrice takes the role of Aeneas. Since Dante will follow her, he abandons Virgil, perforce, and so he disappears, another abandoning himself before he is abandoned for Beatrice's living flame.  Over now, the fictive world that returned Dante to childhood, and gave him back a mother in Virgil.

If Dante is thinking of the Aeneid he must also be thinking of the binding of Isaac, the moment John Limon aptly describes as Isaac's adulthood.  For Abraham leads him to this terrible pass, seemingly knowing what he's doing but hiding his own terror and bewilderment.  We know this because Isaac asks his what's going on:

And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?

And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.

He doesn't trust Isaac with (what he thinks is) the truth.  (Note that his intended lie isn't going to turn out to be the truth either, since it's a ram, not a lamb, that God provides, falsifying the inadvertent prophecy.)  But then he binds Isaac.  After this episode (as is notorious) Isaac disappears for several years, and we see him again only as an adult, after his mother dies.  The binding of Isaac is the end of his childhood: he has turned to his father in anxiety and trust, and his father has betrayed him.  God intervenes, but that's hardly recompense for the loss he indemnifies.

I don't mean to suggest the Virgil should be equated with Abraham, only to say that Dante is underlining the terrible moment when the child turns to the parent to find that the parent cannot help.  That's in Eden too.

As I say, I was thinking about this because I'd put together the moment in Dante with that in the frame to Turn of the Screw, the story of Griffin's ghost which is about

an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him.

He turns to her and she can't help him.  What scene more archaic than the child turning to a parent when haunted by ghosts? What comfort more primal than that which the parent gives? And when she can't -- that's the failure of Abraham, of Virgil, of Wordsworth in "Surprised by Joy" ("I turned to share the transport, O with whom, / But  thee, deep-buried in the silent tomb"), of the mother in Griffin's story (and of the Governess), of the father dreaming of his burning child whose story Freud reports (how often Abraham must have had this same dream, on his way to Moriah, and on his way home too!), and indeed of Gertrude, that inaugurates adulthood and its ultimate failure to be able to lay the ghosts of mortality that haunt our children.