Inferno XX: The Diviners.

Inferno XX: The Diviners

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

Dante arrives at a chasm which is "bathed in tears of agony," and beholds a gloomy, glacial procession of sinners. These are the diviners: magicians, soothsayers, fortune tellers, and military strategists who dared predict the future. Their perverse punishment is to possess a single mode of expression—incessant tears—while walking backwards with their heads twisted around.

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We live where our attention is. When we direct our attention fully to the present moment, we are fully alive. —Eknath Easwaran 

The medieval church considered divination a form of heresy, usurping the omniscience of God as the sole author of fate. Dante's diviners are an absurd brood, weeping in an excruciatingly slow procession while walking backwards, with their heads twisted 180º to enable them to see where they are going.

I'm the least qualified person to discourse on present mindfulness. A consummate worrier, I've nevertheless made an effort, but failed, to "live in the present" over the years. Sure, I believe that the future is not yet a reality and the past cannot be changed, but I spend a lot of time wondering how the consequences of my past idiocy will haunt me in the future.

For years I had a couple of anxiety dreams about the future. One dream was so exquisitely metaphorical that I actually cherished it when it recurred several times, even though it terrified me when it inhabited my sleep. It involved a tornado on the distant horizon, a sure sign of impending doom and destruction. Sometimes I was in a car, and other times I was in some sort of structure—a glass skyscraper, a house, looking out a kitchen window. In each instance I was engrossed in some conversation or some other activity involving other people when my attention would be drawn to the window. Looking out, I would catch sight of the ominous ribbon of black dust and debris, always on the horizon (it had to remain there—otherwise it would be about the present). I would always wake before it tore my life apart.

The second dream was also a recurring narrative that haunted my sleep. It was much more disturbing than the tornado dream, and seemed to be as much about the past as it was about the future. I would find myself in a deep pit somewhere, unable to get out and eventually made aware that I was in the grave with someone I had killed, albeit accidentally. Panic would inevitably ensue when I realized that the body would soon be buried by others, whose voices I could hear approaching from the landscape above. I would soon be discovered and punished, a victim of my own transgressions.

I haven't had either of these dreams for many years, and I do think they stopped around the time that I came out to my kids and separated from the wonderful woman to whom I was married for 20 years. No more fear of consequences for that horrific, unintended crime (which was a metaphor for the secrets I was keeping, I'm sure). To this day, when I reflect on the realism of that dream, I have to remind myself that I'd never harm a fly, and that my future no longer includes fear of being outed as a metaphorical murderer.

Inferno XIX: Comeuppance.

Inferno XIX: The Simonists

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

Our heroes have arrived at the lip of the third bolgia in the eighth circle of hell. Looking across the expanse of stone, they see spirits buried upside down in holes in the ground—dozens of legs kicking spasmodically as the soles of their feet are licked by oily flames. They are, no doubt, very uncomfortable, having been shoved head first into stone. These are the simonists, people who used ecclesiastical positions of power for personal gain, and among them is a particularly noteworthy offender.

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"Sometimes, when I lack the motivation to get out of bed and start the day, I remember revenge..."

Thus spake a particularly witty friend on Facebook last week, delighting me with his self-mocking spitefulness. I'm happy to boast that I'm not a vindictive person, but I do love a good tale of revenge in film and literature. Farrah Fawcett in Extremities, imprisoning her vile attacker in a fireplace. Hansel and Gretel, giving the momentarily clueless witch a run for her money into a blazing oven. Hamlet, hell-bent and psychotically obsessed with avenging his father's fratricide. And of course, there's Steven King's Carrie, launching a blazing, telekinetic massacre in a high school gym while drenched on stage in pig's blood. You go, girl.

Dante sometimes seems all about retribution, and—like many before and after him—he deftly utilizes narrative fiction to skewer his nemeses, wresting complete control in life's infinite power struggle by indulging himself and his reader in wicked comeuppance for transgressors. Dante delights in the imaginary punishment of his contemporaries by an omnipotent God, and their humiliation is made all the more public in the incremental distribution of his poem to the populace.

It's no coincidence that the simonists are buried in holes that resemble baptismal fonts. This instrument of purification and rebirth is perfectly suited to Dante's exquisite irony, and the lead recipient of this punishment is none other than Pope Nicholas III, who foreshadows the eventual arrival of (in Dante's eyes) an even more deserving papal cad—Pope Bonafice, the political leader of the Black Guelphs, the group that banished Dante from his beloved Florence. 

Comeuppance is a word perfectly suited for the concept of exacted revenge, and Dante masterfully guides it in Canto XIX, as things are turned around, over and upside down with cruel yet delightful irony.