There is no syntax: there is a magnetized impulse, a longing for the stern of a ship, a longing for a forage of worms, a longing for an unpromulgated law, a longing for Florence.
XI.
Let us turn again to the question of Dantean coloring.
The interior of a mountain crystal, Aladdin’s expanse concealed within it, the lanternlike, lamplike, the candelabralike suspension of the piscine rooms implicit within it—this is the best of keys to a comprehension of the Comedy’s coloring.
A mineralogical collection is a most excellent organic commentary to Dante.
I permit myself a little autobiographical confession. Black Sea pebbles, tossed up by the surf, were of great help to me when the conception of this talk was ripening. I consulted frankly with the chalcedony, the cornelian, crystallized gypsum, spar, quartz, etc. I understood then that a stone is a kind of diary of the weather, a meteorological concentrate as it were. A stone is nothing but weather excluded from atmospheric space and put away in functional space. In order to understand this, it is necessary to imagine that all geological changes and displacements can be resolved completely into elements of the weather. In this sense, meteorology is more basic than mineralogy: it encompasses it, washes over it, it ages and gives meaning to it.
The delightful pages which Novalis36 devotes to miners and mining make specific the interconnection of stone and culture and, by causing culture to grow like a rock formation, illumine it out of the stone-weather.
A stone is an impressionistic diary of weather, accumulated by millions of years of disasters, but it is not only the past, it is also the future: there is periodicity in it. It is Aladdin’s lamp penetrating into the geologic murk of future times.
In combining the uncombinable, Dante altered the structure of time or, perhaps, the other way around: he was forced to resort to a glossolalia of facts, to a synchronism of events, names, and traditions separated by centuries, precisely because he heard the overtones of time.
The method chosen by Dante is one of anachronism, and Homer, who appears with a sword at his side, in company with Vergil, Horace, and Lucan, from the dim shadow of the pleasant Orphic choirs, where the four together while away a tearless eternity in literary discussion, is its best expression.
Evidences of the standing-still of time in Dante are not only the round astronomical bodies, but absolutely all things and all persons’ characters. Anything automatic is alien to him. He is disdainful of causality: such prophecies are fit for bedding down swine.
Faccian le bestie fiesolane strame
di lor medesme, e non tocchin la pianta,
s’alcuna surge ancor nel lor letame.37
(Inferno, XV, 73–75)
If I were asked bluntly, “What is a Dantean metaphor?” I would answer, “I don’t know,” for a metaphor can be defined only metaphorically—and this can be substantiated scientifically. But it seems to me that Dante’s metaphor designates the standing-still of time. Its root is not in the little word how, but in the word when. His quando sounds like come. Ovid’s rumbling is closer to him than the French eloquence of Vergil.
Again and again I turn to the reader and ask him to “imagine” something, that is, I resort to analogy, which has a single goaclass="underline" to fill up the insufficiency of our system of definition.
So, imagine that the patriarch Abraham and King David, and all of Israel, including Isaac, Jacob, and all their kinsmen, and Rachel, for whom Jacob endured so much, have entered into a singing and roaring organ, as into a house with the door ajar, and have disappeared within.
And our forefather Adam with his son Abel, and old Noah, and Moses the giver and obeyer of the law had entered into it even earlier.
Trasseci l’ombra del primo parente,
d’Abèl suo figlio, e quella di Noè,
di Moisè legista e obediente;
Abraàm patriarca, e Davìd re,
Israèl con lo padre, e co’ suoi nati,
e con Rachele, per cui tanto fè.38
(Inferno, IV, 55–60)
And after this the organ acquires the ability to move—all its pipes and bellows become extraordinarily agitated and, raging and storming, it suddenly begins to back away.
If the halls of the Hermitage should suddenly go mad, if the paintings of all schools and masters should suddenly break loose from the nails, should fuse, intermingle, and fill the air of the rooms with futuristic howling and colors in violent agitation, the result then would be something like Dante’s Comedy.
To wrench Dante away from scholastic rhetoric is to render the whole of European civilization a service of no small importance. I hope centuries of labor will not be required for this, but only joint international efforts will succeed in creating a true anticommentary to the work of many generations of scholiasts, creeping philologues, and pseudobiographers. Lack of respect for the poetic material—which can be comprehended only through the performance of it, only by a conductorial flight—was precisely the reason for the general blindness to Dante, to the greatest master-manager of this material, to European art’s greatest conductor, who by many centuries anticipated the formation of an orchestra adequate—to what?—to the integral of the conductor’s baton.
Calligraphic composition realized by means of improvisation: such is the approximate formula of a Dantean impulse, taken simultaneously both as a flight and as something finished. His comparisons are articulated impulses.
The most complex structural passages of the poem are performed on the fife, on a birdcall. Almost always the fife is sent out ahead.
Here I have in mind Dante’s introductions, released by him as if they were trial balloons.
Quando si parte il giuoco della zara,
colui che perde si riman dolente,
ripetendo le volte, e tristo impara:
con l’altro se ne va tutta la gente:
qual va dinanzi, e qual di retro il prende,
e qual da lato li si reca a mente.
EI non s’arresta, e questo e quello intende;
a cui porge la man, più non fa pressa;
e così dalla calca si difende.
(Purgatorio, VI, 1–9)
When the dice game is finished, the loser in sad solitude replays the game, dejectedly throwing the dice. The whole crowd dogs the footsteps of the lucky gambler: one runs out ahead, one plucks at him from behind, one curries favor asking to be remembered; but fortune’s favorite continues on, he listens to all alike, and by shaking hands, he frees himself from the importunate hangers-on.
And thus the “street” song of the Purgatorio—with its crush of importunate Florentine souls who desire gossip first, intercession second, and then gossip again—proceeds in the birdcall of genre, on the typical Flemish fife that became painting only three hundred years later.
Another curious consideration suggests itself: the commentary (explanatory) is an integral structural part of the Comedy itself. The miracle ship left the shipyard with barnacles sticking to it. The commentary is derived from the hubbub of the streets, from rumor, from hundred-mouthed Florentine slander. It is unavoidable, like the halcyon hovering behind Batiushkov’s ship.39
There, there, look: old Marzzuco—how well he bore himself at his son’s burial! A remarkably courageous old man. . . . And do you know, they were quite wrong to chop off the head of Pietro de la Broccia—they had nothing on him A woman’s evil hand is implicated here. . . . By the way, there he is himself—Let’s go up and ask.
Poetic material has no voice. It does not paint and it does not express itself in words. It knows no form, and by the same token it is devoid of content for the simple reason that it exists only in performance. The finished work is nothing but a calligraphic product, the inevitable result of the performing impulse. If a pen is dipped into an inkwell, the work created, stopped in its tracks, is nothing but a stock of letters, fully commensurate with the inkwell.