Of all our arts only painting, and at that only modern French painting, still has an ear for Dante. This is the painting which elongates the bodies of the horses approaching the finish line at the race track.
Whenever a metaphor raises the vegetable colors of existence to an articulate impulse, I remember Dante with gratitude.
We describe just what cannot be described, that is, nature’s text brought to a standstill; and we have forgotten how to describe the only thing which by its structure yields to poetic representation, namely the impulses, intentions, and amplitudes of oscillation.
Ptolemy has returned by the back door! . . . Giordano Bruno was burned in vain!
While still in the womb, our creations are known to each and every one, but Dante’s polynomial, multi-sailed and kinetically incandescent comparisons still retain the charm of that which has been told to no one.
Amazing is his “reflexology of speech”—the science, still not well established, of the spontaneous psycho-physiological influence of the word on the discussants, the audience, and the speaker himself, and also on the means by which he conveys the impulse to speech, that is, signals by light a sudden desire to express himself.
Here he approaches closest of all the wave theory of sound and light, he establishes their relationship.
As a beast, covered with a cloth, is nervous and shudders, and only the moving folds of the material betray its dissatisfaction, thus did the first created soul [Adam’s] express to me through the covering [of light] how pleasant and joyous it was to answer my question.
(Paradiso, XXVI, 97–102)
In the third part of the Comedy (the Paradiso) I see a genuine kinetic ballet. Here we have all possible kinds of luminous figures and dances, all the way up to the clacking of heels at a wedding feast.
Before me four torches burned and the nearest suddenly came to life and became as rosy as if Jupiter and Mars were suddenly to become birds and exchange their plumage.
(Paradiso, XXVII, 10–15)
It’s odd, isn’t it: a man, who intends to speak, arms himself with a taut bow, lays up a supply of bearded arrows, prepares mirrors and convex lenses, and squints at the stars like a tailor threading a needle . . .
I have devised this composite quotation, which is drawn from various passages in the Comedy, to bring into more emphatic relief the speech-preparatory strategies of Dante’s poetry.
The preparation of speech is even more his sphere than the articulation, that is, than speech itself.
Recall the marvelous supplication which Vergil addresses to the wiliest of Greeks.
It is all arippling with the softness of the Italian diphthongs.
Those curly, ingratiating and sputtering flame-tongues of unprotected lamps, muttering about the oiled wick . . .
O voi, che siete due dentro ad un foco,
s’io meritai di voi mentre ch’io vissi,
s’io meritai di voi assai o poco.32
(Inferno, XXVI, 79–81)
Dante determines the origin, fate and character of a man by his voice, just as medical science of his time made diagnoses by the color of urine.
X.
He is brimming over with a sense of ineffable gratitude toward the copious richness which is falling into his hands. He has a lot to do: space must be prepared for the influx, the cataract must be removed from rigid vision, care must be taken that the abundance of out-pouring poetic material does not trickle through his fingers, that it does not disappear into an empty sieve.
Tutti dicean: “Benedictus qui venis,”
e fior gittando di sopra e dintorno,
“Manibus o date lilia plenis.”33
(Purgatorio, XXX, 19–21)
The secret of his scope is that not a single word of his own is introduced. He is set in motion by everything except fabrication, except inventiveness. Dante and fantasy—why this is incompatible! For shame, French romantics, you miserable incroyables in red vests, slanderers of Alighieri! What fantasy is there in him? He writes to dictation, he is a copyist, a translator. He is bent double in the posture of a scribe who squints in fright at the illuminated original lent him from the prior’s library.
I think I forgot to say that a hypnotist’s seance was a sort of precondition to the Comedy. This is true, but perhaps overstated. If one takes this amazing work from the viewpoint of written language, from the viewpoint of the independent art of writing, which in 1300 enjoyed equal rights with painting and music and was among the most venerated professions, then to all the earlier suggested analogies a new one can be added—writing down dictation, copying, transcribing.
Sometimes, very seldom, he shows us his writing tools: A pen is called penna, that is, it participates in a bird’s flight; ink is inchiostro, that is, belonging to a cloister; lines of verse are also called inchiostri, or are designated by the Latin scholastic versi, or, still more modestly, carte, that is, an amazing substitution, pages instead of lines of verse.
And when it is written down and ready, there is still no full stop, for it must be taken somewhere, it must be shown to someone to be checked and praised.
To say “copying” is not enough—rather it is calligraphy at the most terrible and impatient dictation. The dictator, the taskmaster, is far more important than the so-called poet.
. . . I will labor a little more, and then I must show my notebook, drenched with the tears of a bearded schoolboy, to a most strict Beatrice, who radiates not only glory but literacy too.
Long before Arthur Rimbaud’s alphabet of colors, Dante conjoined color with the full vocalization of articulate speech. But he is a dyer, a textile worker. His ABC is an alphabet of fluttering fabrics tinted with colored powders, with vegetable dyes.
Sovra candido vel cinta d’uliva
donna m’apparve, sotto verde manto,
vestita di color di flamma viva.34
(Purgatorio, XXX, 31–33)
His impulses toward colors can be more readily called textile impulses than alphabetic ones. Color for him is displayed only in the fabric. For Dante the highest concentration of material nature, as a substance determined by its coloration, is in textiles. And weaving is the occupation closest to qualitativeness, to quality.
Now I shall attempt to describe one of the innumerable conductorial flights of Dante’s baton. We shall take this flight as it is, embedded in the actual setting of precious and instantaneous labor.
Let us begin with the writing. The pen draws calligraphic letters, it traces out proper and common nouns. A pen is a small piece of bird’s flesh. Of course Dante, who never forgets the origin of things, remembers this. His technique of writing in broad strokes and curves grows into the figured flight of flocks of birds.
E come augelli surti di riviera,
quasi congratulando a lor pasture,
fanno di sè or tonda or altra schiera,
si dentro ai lumi sante creature
volitando cantavano, e faciensi
or D, or I, or L, in sue figure.35
(Paradiso, XVIII, 73–78)
Just as the letters under the hand of the scribe, who is obedient to the one who dictates and stands outside literature, as a finished product, are lured to the decoy of meaning, as to an inviting forage, so exactly do birds, magnetized by green grass—now separately, now together—peck at what they find, now forming a circle, now stretching out into a line.
Writing and speech are incommensurate. Letters correspond to intervals. Old Italian grammar—just as our Russian one—is always that same fluttering flock of birds, that same motley Tuscan schiera, that is, the Florentine mob, which changes laws like gloves, which forgets by evening the decrees promulgated that same morning for the public welfare.