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Dante Zinferno, Kanto 26, 8th Circle, 8th Pouch.
The shades of fraudulent counselors move along a ditch, each one enveloped in a flame.
Their punishment inside flames alludes to the tongues of fire that rain down from heaven on the Pentecost.
Confuring the gift of truthful speech on the apostles so that they might spread the Christian gospel far and wide.
Dante is extremely eager to hear from the horned flame that encloses two pagan heroes,
Ulysses and Diamides.
See that I bend toward it with desire, Dante urges his guide, Virgil.
Worried that the lofty Greeks might disdain Dante's modern idilect, Virgil instructs him to remain silent,
and then addresses the flame in the high style, identifying himself as the author of the anneod,
and asking one of them to recount how he met his death.
What follows is a sublime monologue by Ulysses.
When I departed from Chishay, who held me back for more than a year near Gaieta,
before Anya gave it that name, neither the sweetness of a son nor compassion for my old father nor the love owed to Penelope,
which should have made her glad, could conquer within me the ardor that I had to gain experience of the world and of human vices and worth.
But I put out on the deep open sea alone with one ship and with that little company by which I had not been deserted.
The one shore and the other I saw as far as Spain, as far as Morocco and the island of the Sardinians and the others who chores are bathed by that sea.
I and my companions were old and slow when we came to that narrow straight which Hercules marked with his warnings, so that no one should venture further.
On the right hand I had left Seville, on the other I had already left Cute.
Oh, brothers, I said, who through a hundred thousand perils has reached the west to this brief vigil of our senses that remains, to not deny the experience following the son of the world without people.
Consider your sowing. You were made not to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.
My companions I made so sharp for the voyage with this little oration that after it I could hardly have held them back.
And turning our stern toward mourning of our oars we made wings for the mad flight always gaining on the left side.
Already all the stars of the other pole I saw at night and our own pole so low that it did not rise above the floor of the sea.
Five times renewed and as many diminished had been the light beneath the moon since we had entered the deep past.
When there appeared to us a mountain darkened the distance and it seemed to me higher than any I had ever seen.
We rejoiced but our joy quickly turned to grief.
For from the new land a whirlwind was born and struck the forequarter of the ship.
Three times it made the ship to turn about with all the waters.
At the fourth to raise its stern aloft and the proud to go down as it pleased another.
Until the sea had closed over us and swallowed us up.
Among Inferno's memorable cantos 26 stands out for the way it breaks through the claustrophobia of lower hell and takes us out on the open seas under the stars.
Like the expansive landscape the character of Ulysses himself comes to us as a breath of fresh air.
He exhibits none of the internalized duplicitous self reflexive psychology of the Christian sinners we meet in Dante's underworld.
His narrative is coherent plot driven and it has a decisive beginning middle and end Aristotle would have approved of it greatly.
It begins near Gaetha on Church's island.
Dante here revises the well known traditional accounts of Ulysses as a nostalgic homecomer.
His Ulysses tells us that when he departed from Church's island he had no desire to return to domestic life back on Ithaca.
So he set out on the high streams to explore new horizons with the handful of aged companions who had not abandoned him.
That's the beginning.
Coming far and wide across the Mediterranean in their swatch ship Ulysses and his men arrived at the Straits of Gibraltar where the pillars of Hercules mark the bounds of the known world and warn seafarers not to venture any further.
Here Ulysses fires up his men with a little speech.
Persuading them to forge ahead into the unpeapled world on a high-minded pursuit of virtue and knowledge.
This is the narrative's middle.
Setting a southwest course they leave Gibraltar behind and sail deep into the southern hemisphere.
Five months later they see an enormous mountain dark in the distance which we must assume is Mount Purgatory located at the southern pole.
Ulysses and his crew barely have time to rejoice before the new land Terenova is Dante calls it.
Unleashes a powerful storm that sinks the ship along with all of its men before it can make landfall.
Thus does the narrative culminate in a tragic ending.
That new land as I mentioned is nothing less than the mountain of Purgatory which is located at the pole of the southern hemisphere and in Ulysses' time no one, neither the souls of the dead nor the bodies of the living ever made it to those shores.
The shades of those destined for heaven begin to arrive in Purgatory only after the coming of Christ.
Purgatory is the portal to heaven hence it's closed off to pagans who lived before Christ.
No one can say exactly why Dante transformed the centripetal Homeric hero into the centripetal adventurer in Inferno 26.
Yet it surely has something to do with the way Ulysses' mad flight beyond the pillars of Hercules, foreshadows Dante's own daring journey in the divine comedy.
Ulysses comes forth as Dante's alter ego or better his alted vietor in the sense that both of them embark on unprecedented voyages.
Ulysses down to the southern pole were known and ventured before Dante up to the Imperium in body and soul.
In fact, when he approaches his journey's end and prepares for his face-to-face vision of God, Dante will ask himself whether he's being as reckless as Ulysses was when he ventured into that forbidden beyond region.
When I say forbidden, I mean forbidden for Ulysses. It's not forbidden for Dante.
In fact, the next human being after Ulysses to enter that region alive is Dante himself, who reaches it nine condos later when he and Virgil emerge from hell onto the shores of the island of Purgatory.
Dante will get to Mount Purgatory by going down through the earth while Ulysses arrives there by circumnavigating the surface of the globe.
Yet that's not the main reason why Dante succeeds in making landfall while Ulysses does not.
Dante's journey is divinely sanctioned, whereas Ulysses undertakes his expedition in a spirit of self-reliance, trusting in his own boldness and ingenuity to defy the awe.
To defy the odds and gain access to the off limits.
Dante's Ulysses has all the grandeur of a hero brought down by the implacable forces of fate.
His ship goes down, commit out through Epiacuet as it pleased another, namely the Christian God.
When he declares that upon seeing the mountain in the distance, we rejoiced but joy quickly turned to weeping.
He compresses into one hand-acassillable verse the traditional definition of tragedy as a story that begins in happiness and ends in grief.
Dante's voyage by contrast begins in a dark wood of sin and ends in the full radiance of grace.
We'll never grasp the full scope of the title of Dante's poem, Comedia, Comedia and Modern Italian, without taking stock of the fact that Dante understood tragedy and comedy primarily as historical categories.
Before the coming of Christ, Ulysses belong to an era when the prospect of salvation was closed off to humankind.
Nothing a pagan could do through his own actions and agency could alter the fate of exclusion.
In Inferno 4, Virgil tells Dante that the pagans in limbo did not sin when they were alive.
Yet here in the afterlife, they live out their days in desire without hope.
Desire without hope.
Those three words summarized Dante's vision of the human condition before Christ.
From Virgil's aneid, Dante learned that the best and the most the pagans of Virgil's time could look forward to in the afterlife was the quiet shadow world of the Aleasian fields and Hades.
That is precisely what Dante gives his virtuous pagans, the spectral serenity of Elysium.
Because they did not sin, they do not suffer actively but only passively.
To live in desire without hope amounts from a Christian point of view.
To a quiet, albeit honorable form of damnation.
Ulysses did not live a sinless life, which is why he did not end up with the virtuous pagans.
Yet the question I would ask here is whether he in fact had his sights set on something far more exalted.
In other words, was his mad flight into the unknown, motivated by more than a taste for adventure and a distaste for the converse.
Was he vaguely aware that somewhere out there, in a withheld future as it were, the tragic in-commenceurability of desire and hope might give way to their comic convergence.
To put it simply, did a premature hope for something like Christian transcendence somehow take hold of Ulysses and urge him beyond the pillars of Hercules.
What we can say for sure is that his own desire and ingenuity brought him inside of Purgatory, namely of Christian salvation, before any human souls began to arrive there after their death.
Now these are not idle speculations I'm offering here, at least I don't believe they are, because there was evidence in the text of Inferno 26 that Ulysses failed attempt at transcendence is bound up with the phenomenon of timing.
The first word Ulysses utters when he begins his speech is "quando" when, all that follows unfolds under the eegis of the word "when" which Dante places quite conspicuously at the end of verse 90.
When I had departed from Cheers to held me back more than a year there near Galeta before Anias gave it that name.
It's interesting and significant that Ulysses makes a point of noting that he was at Galeta before Anias named that wild place after his nursemaid by the way, a figure of pure domesticity.
Ulysses disdain for the domestic becomes more explicit in the following verses where he avows that neither fondness for my son nor compassion for my old father nor the love I owed Penelope could quench his order to explore new horizons.
Unlike Homer's Odysseus, Dante's Ulysses had no interest in the grammar of generations that makes a person a copula between father, past, and son, future in a present bound to an aging wife.
Or as Lord Alfred Tennyson puts it in his poem Ulysses, it little prophets that an idol king by this still hearth among these barren crags matched with an aged wife, I meet and dull unequal laws unto a savage race.
In that poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson, clearly inspired by Inferno 26, Ulysses follows his Dante and predecessor by leaving Ithaca once again in his old age, quote, "to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the Western stars until I die."
There is how Tennyson's poem ends, speaking to his men, "Though much is taken, much abides, and though we are not now that strength which in all days moved heaven and earth, that which we are, we are, one equal temper of heroic hearts made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive to seek to find and not to yield."
"Tennyson's Ulysses comes across as a monodimensional character when we compare him to Dante's enigmatic, unsettled, and ultimately reticent hero. What's so remarkable about Dante's Ulysses is that for all his eloquence and powers of persuasion, he leaves a great deal unsaid in his speech. He keeps his deeper motivations to himself,
and we never are allowed into the inner workings of his mind. Indeed, I would say that reticence informs the eloquence of Dante's Ulysses.
More than an adventurer who is strong in will to strive to seek to find and not to yield, Ulysses in Inferno 26 seems like one born too early.
In the penumbra of his luminous narrative, there is a suggestion that on his last voyage he saw an exit from the gloom of a terminal mortality, and entry into a world where renunciation gives way to expectation and sobriety to ecstasy.
In some, entry into a world where desire conjugates with hope. It's in such terms or so I believe that we must understand Ulysses as a figure of priority. He was at Gaieta before prior to Anias. He made it to the southern pole prior to anyone else.
He saw places before they received names, including the unnamed mountain that appeared dark in the distance higher than any I had seen.
After hearing his narrative, Dante will never forget that Ulysses remains his precursor, that Ulysses had arrived near the island of Purgatory long before Dante did, indeed before any Christian souls did.
This is the tragedy of Ulysses. His timing ran ahead of history. He steered his ship into the realm of comedy before tragedy had been overturned by what Saint Paul called the fullness of time.
This is indeed the audacity of hope. Ulysses dared to hope before hope had become historically viable.
Even just in memory.
The snapshot in the family album.
Dang, what you live behind for me.
All of us just in breaking the wall.
All of us don't just break the sin of all.
What I have claimed so far, I believe the author of the Divine Comedy would sanction.
Because I find evidence in Dante's poem that Ulysses figures as a pagan who ventures into a Christian horizon before history had opened it up to humankind.
The speculations that I'm about to offer now, however, do not presume to speak for the poem's author.
At a certain point, a poem like the Divine Comedy transcends its author's visions and intentions.
In mysterious ways, we'll never quite fathom in Inferno 26, Dante's poem follows Ulysses into the uncanny region of an acronym.
Where the hero breaks free of the poem's containment and sails beyond the Christian horizon he sought out prematurely.
What do I mean? I mean that Dante's Ulysses ventures forward into a historical period that was still far in the future at the time Dante wrote that kanto.
I'm referring to the period of Renaissance humanism with its exaltation of the pursuit of knowledge, virtue, and human vices.
I'm referring to the great age of European exploration that discovered new worlds across the globe.
I'm referring to the age of scientific discovery and much else besides.
From our retrospective vantage point, there is a strange, prolific quality about Dante's Ulysses.
He appears to us as an archetype of the major, centrifugal forces that after the death of Dante shaped the modern world we have inherited.
From the 15th, 16th, 17th, and even 18th centuries.
T.S. Eliot once wrote, "Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them. There is no third."
Eliot was wrong. It's the modern world that divides Dante and Shakespeare.
Dante lies on one side of the modern divide, Shakespeare on the other.
The divine comedy gives the medieval Christian world its most quintessential form of expression.
Unlike Ulysses, Dante was not ahead of his time, even if his poem in places remains eerily untimely.
For all his radical genius, Dante himself was deeply conservative for his age, culturally as well as politically.
It suffices to read the central cantos of Paredizo to confirm this.
There, through the voice of his ancestor, Katraguda, Dante laments the expansion of Florence,
beyond its original, swalding walls, and looks back nostologically to the good old days,
when Florence was more of a village than a city.
When the ethnic purity of its citizens was unadulterated by outsiders,
when women still dress modestly, and when international commerce had not crassly increased the city's wealth with quickly made fortunes,
the Subithi Guadani, as he calls them, in Inferno 21.
There's little doubt that Dante would have been horrified by the exuberance of Renaissance Florence with its ostentation,
liberality, and early modern capitalism.
But that said, Dante's cultural conservatism did not prevent his poem from penetrating deep into the ideological recesses of the modern future.
Ulysses may have been shipped wrecked by the Christian God, for venturing beyond the bounds of his historical era,
yet somehow, maybe precisely because he defiantly entered into the vortex of anachronism,
he catapulted beyond the Christian era and became an avatar of modern Western expansionism.
In his voyage across uncharted seas to a Teddanova, we see in him a type for Christopher Columbus, Basco de Gama,
de Cordoba, Pizzaro, and various other trans-oceanic explorers of the 16th century.
When at the Straits of Gibraltar, he urges his men to persist in their pursuit of virtue and knowledge,
Ulysses stands larger than the pillars of Hercules themselves as a champion of the ideals of Renaissance humanism with its emphasis on the Vita Activa,
self-determination, and authorship of our earthly destiny.
Beyond that, in his spirit of self-reliance and the discerning means by which he pursues his end,
we see in Ulysses a figure for the scientific method with its foundations in the Rescogitans and the mathematical method.
We see in him as well a figure for the Enlightenment dream of a refashioned world beyond the pillars of dogma, tradition, and established authority.
Did Dante suspect when he drew that portrait that the spirit of his wayward Ulysses would inherit the earth in centuries to come?
He almost certainly did not.
To begin with, Dante's earth and cosmos were conspicuously finite and self-contained.
They did not allow for an indefinite expansion of limits, whether spatial or temporal.
There is every indication that Dante believed historical time was into its last home stretch.
Convinced at the end of days was not far off, he would not have suspected that history would find a way to drag on.
Well, history did find a way to drag on, precisely by pushing beyond every boundary that had defined the medieval world.
I mean geographical, economical, technological, epistemological, socio-political, and cultural boundaries.
Because our post-Christian age has long been under the compulsion of a relentless drive to overcome limits and expand ever more widely its horizons of possibility, Ulysses transcends his damnation in Dante's hell and appears to us as the shining hero of a future that Dante himself could not have imagined, but that he nevertheless
was precedged when he sent his Ulysses forth into the unpealed world.
You never know what will happen when a work of literature sends someone like Ulysses into the mysterious waters of anachronism and untimeliness.
He can become at once the one who was there before as well as after his own author.
Let me add by way of conclusion that the Ulyssian age of expansion, exploration, and experiment of the relentless defiance of limits and limitations may now have reached what Portuguese seafarers of the late 14th and 15th centuries called "Voltadomar".
"Voltadomar" is their term for the permanent wind circle that enable those seafarers to return home from the Atlantic islands by sailing westward into the trade winds of the great North Atlantic gyre.
That turn marks a return.
The "Voltadomar" is at once a natural phenomenon and a symbol.
The symbol of a finite earth that does not stretch out endlessly but turns to form its self-integrated systems.
I mean the planets atmospheric, meteorological, and oceanic systems.
If nothing else, the age of exploration and discovery map the geographic contours of this finite self-turning phenomenon.
Science in its turn has mapped and continues to map the planets geological, ecological, and evolutionary contours.
All this to say that today, virtual knowledge means something different from what Dante's Ulysses or the Renaissance humanist had in mind when they exalted the heroism of that pursuit.
Today, heroism consists not in an ongoing quest for new horizons but in an acknowledgement of and reconciliation with limits and finitude.
Our historical "Voltadomar" the turning of the onward path into a return path has perhaps only just begun.
Such transformations tend to take place in the realm of mental realization before they translate into material realizations.
In this case, it begins with the realization that our radically finite and mortal planet is the only home we have and will ever have.
In the 1960s, it was still relatively self-evident by the Star Trek television series would define the mission of the Starship Enterprise in Ulyssian terms, namely to explore strange new worlds,
to seek out new life and new civilizations to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Nowadays, what has become self-evident is that space exploration, as we had imagined it, is not only unlikely but impossible.
This realization is finally set in and we are still suffering from its profoundly demoralizing effects.
We live on a different planet today than a few decades ago, a planet from which there is no escape and where there are no more new major frontiers to explore.
The realization is dawning on us that we are stuck on this third stone from the Sun and that we are stuck on it forever and together, for however long, forever lasts with our species.
The challenge we face today is how to make ourselves at home within its limits. It is with this realization that the turn begins.
So I would say that for an age of the turn, we need a different kind of Ulysses than the one Dante gives us in Inferno 26.
Not a hero of the future, nor of the high seas beyond the pillars, but a hero who can say no to the pursuit of knowledge at all costs, no to the lure of novelty,
no to the bioengineering of strange new species that nature never intended to evolve,
No to the imperatives of unending economic growth and no to all the self-enhancements and self-emortilizations promised us by unchecked unregulated biotechnology.
To become a hero of the turn, Ulysses will have to enter the Volta Dormad and use its wind circle to find his way back home.
That is to say, to return to his pre-dante in Homeric vocation of homecoming, call it his re-domestication.
This doesn't mean that he has to give up his thirst for transcendence.
It means that transcendence must now take the form of acceptance rather than defiance.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Thanks for listening.
[Music]
My name is Coopso and I have lived alone.
I live on an island and I break into the dawn of the whole time ago.
I watched him struggle with the scene, and that he was drowning and I brought him into me.
No to date, coopmore, and he says way after one last night, I let him go.
My name is Coopso and I garden overflow.
The game while an hidden is the sweetness there, the grows, I hear it blows long as I sing into the wind.
I tell of nights where I could taste the salt on his skin.
Salt of waves and of tears I'm falling all the way.
I kept to be real free.
I'm falling all the way to the moon.
[Music]
My name is Coopso and I have let him go in the dawn.
He sails away to be gone forever more.
And the waves will take him in again, but there will know there are ways now that we stand around the shore.
We're the clean heart and my song on the wind.
The sand is day my feet and the sky will burn.
It's the only time ahead.
I do not ask him to return.
I let him go.
[Music]