And if we approach Dante from this point of view, it will appear that he saw in tradition not so much its dazzling sacred aspects as an object which, with the aid of zealous reporting and passionate experimentation, could be used to good effect.
In Canto XXVI of the Paradiso Dante goes so far as to have a personal conversation with Adam—an actual interview. He is assisted by Saint John the Divine, author of the Apocalypse.
I maintain that every element of the modern method of conducting experiments is present in Dante’s approach to tradition. These are: the deliberate creation of special conditions for the experiment, the use of instruments of unimpeachable accuracy, the demand that the result be verifiable and demonstrable.
The situation in Canto XXVI of the Paradiso can be described as a solemn examination in the surrounding of a concert and optical instruments. Music and optics constitute the heart of the matter.
The fundamental antinomy of Dante’s “experiment” consists of the fact that he rushes back and forth between example and experiment. Example is drawn out of the patriarchal bag of ancient consciousness only to be returned to it as soon as it is no longer required. Experiment, pulling one or another needed fact out of the purse of experience, does not return them as the promissory note requires, but puts them into circulation.
The parables of the Gospel and the little scholastic examples of the science taught in school—these are cereals eaten and done away with. But the experimental sciences, taking facts out of coherent reality, make of them a kind of seed-fund which is reserved, inviolable, and which constitutes, as it were, the property of a time that is unborn but must come. The position of the experimenter as regards factology is, insofar as he strives to be joined with it in truth, unstable by its very nature, agitated and awry. It resembles the figure of the waltz that has already been mentioned, for, after every halfturn on the extended toe of the shoe, the heels of the dancer may be brought together, but they are always brought together on a new square of the parquet and in a way that is different in kind. The dizzying Mephisto Waltz of experimentation was conceived in the trecento or perhaps even long before that, and it was conceived in the process of poetic formation, the undulating proceduralness, the transformability of the poetic matter—the most precise of all matter, the most prophetic and indomitable.
Because of the theological terminology, the scholastic grammar, and our ignorance of the allegory, we overlooked the experimental dances of Dante’s Comedy, to suit the ways of a dead scholarship, we made Dante look more presentable, while his theology was a vessel of dynamics.
A sensitive palm touching the neck of a heated pitcher identifies its form because it is warm. Warmth in this case has priority over form and it is that which fulfills the sculptural function. In a cold state, forcibly divorced from its incandescence, Dante’s Comedy is suitable only for analysis with mechanistic tweezers, but not for reading, not for performing.
Come quando dall’acqua o dallo specchio
salta lo raggio all’opposita parte,
salendo su per lo modo parecchio
a quel che scende, e tanto si diparte
dal cader della pietra in igual tratta,
sì come mostra esperienza ed arte.
(Purgatorio, XV, 16–21)
“As a ray of sunlight that strikes the surface of water or a mirror reflects back at an angle corresponding to the angle of its fall, which differentiates it from a falling stone that bounces back perpendicularly from the ground—which is confirmed by experience and by art.”
At the moment when the necessity of an empirical verification of the legend’s data first dawned on Dante, when he first developed a taste for what I propose to call a sacred—in inverted commas—induction, the conception of the Divina Commedia had already been formed and its success intrinsically secured.
The poem in its most densely foliated aspect is oriented toward authority, it is most resonantly rustling, most concertante just when it is caressed by dogma, by canon, by the firm chrysostomatic word. But the whole trouble is that in authority—or, to put it more precisely, in authoritarianism—we see only insurance against error, and we fail to perceive anything in that grandiose music of trustfulness, of trust, in the nuances—delicate as an alpine rainbow—of probability and conviction, which Dante has at his command.
Col quale il fantolin corre alla mamma—28
(Purgatorio, XXX, 44)
thus does Dante fawn upon authority.
Many cantos of the Paradiso are encased in the hard capsule of an examination. In some passages one can even hear clearly the examiner’s hoarse bass and the candidate’s quavering voice. The embedding-in of a grotesque and a genre picture (the examination of a baccalaureate candidate) constitutes a necessary attribute of the elevated and concertante compositions of the third part. And the first sample of it is given as early as in the second canto of the Paradiso (in Beatrice’s discussion of the origin of the moon’s dark patches).
To grasp the very nature of Dante’s intercourse with authoritative sources, that is, the form and methods of his cognition, it is necessary to take into account both the concertolike setting of the Comedy’s scholastic cantos and the conditioning of the very organs of perception. Let alone the really remarkably staged experiment with the candle and the three mirrors, where it is demonstrated that the return path of light has as its source the refraction of the ray, I cannot fail to note the conditioning of vision for the apperception of new things.
This conditioning is developed into a genuine dissection: Dante divines the layered structure of the retina: di gonna in gonna . . .29
Music here is not a guest invited in from without, but a participant in the argument; or, to be more precise, it facilitates the exchange of opinions, coordinates it, encourages syllogistic digestion, extends premises, and compresses conclusions. Its role is both absorptive and resolvent—its role is a purely chemical one.
When you plunge into Dante and read with complete conviction, when you transplant yourself entirely onto the poetic material’s field of action, when you join in and harmonize your own intonations with the echoings of the orchestral and thematic groups which arise incessantly on the pocked and shaken semantic surface, when you begin to perceive through the smoky-crystalline matter of sound-form the glimmerings embedded within, that is, the extra sounds and thoughts conferred on it not by a poetic but by a geologic intelligence, then the purely vocal, intonational and rhythmic work gives way to a more powerful coordinating activity—to conducting—and, assuming control over the area of polyphony and jutting out from the voice like a more complex mathematical dimension out of a three-dimensional state, the hegemony of the conductor’s baton is established.
Which has primacy, listening or conducting? If conducting is only a prodding of music which anyway rolls on of its own accord, what use is it, provided the orchestra is good in and of itself and displays an irreproachable ensemble? An orchestra without a conductor, that cherished dream, belongs to the same category of “ideals” of pan-European banality as the universal Esperanto language that symbolizes the linguistic ensemble of all mankind.