Dante has it right: we are on more than a journey; we are on a pilgrimage. Author Dennis Patrick Slattery, who has been teaching Dante's works for more than twenty years, believes that our life stories are embedded in the journey of this pilgrim. In Day-to-Day Dante, Slattery presents passages from Dante Alighieri's fourteenth-century poem The Divine Comedy to assist you in searching for the core elements of your personal myth. Day-to-Day Dante is divided into 365 entries and reflections so you may explore and meditate on one page per day for a year. Each entry and reflection is followed by a writing meditation to help you arrive at your own insights about your personal travels and travails. This examination of Dante's pilgrimage will help you deepen the understanding of yourself and the larger political, social, and religious worlds. Through Day-to-Day Dante you can connect more deeply with your own narrative, following Dante's journey from out of a dark wood to a vision of the transcendent.
Day-to-Day Dante
Exploring Personal Myth through The Divine ComedyBy Dennis Patrick SlatteryiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Dennis Patrick Slattery
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4502-8363-2Contents
Foreword.............................................................xiAcknowledgments......................................................xvIntroduction: Set the Compass. Begin the Journey.....................1Part I: Inferno......................................................11Part II: Purgatorio..................................................133Part III: Paradiso...................................................261Afterword............................................................381Sources Used.........................................................383About the author.....................................................385About the Artist.....................................................387
Introduction
Set the Compass. Begin the Journey
I have been blessed to teach some of the great literary classics primarily of the Western Tradition for the past 35 years. While they often exhaust me, I can never exhaust them, no matter how often I re-read them or what I or my students discover through their words and images. As I grow, these rich expression of the poetic imagination stretch to accommodate where I am on my own life's pilgrimage and in the unfolding of my personal mythology. To read, for instance, Herman Melville's epic novel about whaling, Moby-Dick, or Willa Cather's The Professor's House or Toni Morrison's Beloved at age 18, then again at 28 and again at 46 is to enter each time a very different imaginal experience. Like us, these works and hundreds of others possess a Protean quality; they shape-shift, as does the god Proteus, who in Greek mythology is a carrier of the liquid quality of learning itself. Like Proteus, these marvelous narratives that contain such a storehouse of perennial wisdom have something of a liquid quality to them. By turns they will fill a vessel according to the dictates of its contours. Some energy within us responds differently, and so much more deeply as we ripen in age, to the same story that refuses at once to be the same and yet strives to be so. I believe one way to think about this changing yet perennial quality is by way of myth. Both the poetic work and each of us inhabit a particular mythos; as such, the poem and we ourselves are organically changing as the mythology we are in develops and deepens organically. More than simply a story, myths are perennial guidance systems as well as psychic patterns and structures that can guide an individual and an entire culture. They incorporate ways and styles of seeing, of perceiving and understanding. As such, myths are ever-renewing, shifting readily to accommodate us in our pilgrimage; in addition, they are life-enhancing. Myths are compasses that help us navigate through the events of any given day; they are also value-laden, carry our darkest secrets and secrete guidance when we feel inspired or led by forces outside ourselves.
In this introduction to a pilgrimage through Dante Alighieri's (1265-1321) monumental story of an individual journey to self-understanding and to a sacred reality that informs such awareness, The Divine Comedy, written in 14th. century Italy, should be remembered, reclaimed and reread by a larger reading public, in large measure because of the myths it embodies in poetic form. What is most important is that the reader have an imaginal experience of the poem by putting it alongside his/her own narrative journey. Without the experience, the poem will never mean much because it does not touch the mythic reality the reader lives within. It fails to become authentically present because not seen as an analogy of one's lived life.
First, let us consider in what way this poem, through reflections on a particular canto of Dante's creation, enlarges and deepens my own orbit of understanding of myself and the larger political, religious and social worlds I move within. We could end with a contemplative question: in what way am I transformed by reading this story, especially if I am guided by short passages of it to stimulate my imagination, and then by a short writing meditation, to help me focus my thoughts and experiences in my own language? "This is how I understand it now" is a valid way of knowing the work—it is contemporary, temporary and evolving, as I am.
Sometime during a class reading, say, of Homer's comic epic, the Odyssey, a student will approach me on a break, sometimes wearing a confused expression. He or she will make the following assertion or its variant: "I read this work as an English major 15, 20, 30 years ago (choose one) and saw nothing of what we have been discussing today." Just the other day, one of my mythology students wrote me the following missive: "Moby-Dick became such an incredible experience for me. The richness of Melville's expression, the breadth and depth of his sensitivity has affected me greatly, in ways I cannot speak yet." These examples are both powerful witnesses to the inherent force of a classic narrative as well as the challenging struggle to find one's own language to voice their intimate connection. What the reader can not yet speak of is the power of mytho-poiesis working on him/her as it reshapes awareness that will eventually find language to describe.
What happened? I like to speak about it through myth. Each of us, I have suggested, is living out and within a unique personal myth, or patterned presence in the world, with all its attendant values, prejudices, likes, dislikes, desires, aspirations, shadows, dreams, and fantasies. Our personal myth is a guiding framework which we use to make meaning of the events of everyday by seeking out how they fit into the larger patterned field of meaning. When we read a classic work of fiction, we enter that story with our myth fully intact and engaged, but its inherent wholeness may be disrupted by the narrative knocking on its door. When the work touches deeply a part of that mythos, we pause, we stop; we may then be called to underline or write something in the margin. Or we get excited and want to let others know of this fabulous insight we believe is ours, no matter the source. We long to express what this experience has meant to us. Such is the deep impulse to learn, and, when possible, to learn within a community of shared possibilities with others. It allows me to see that myths serve us as energy fields, ways of power that attract, evoke, provoke and widen our field of vision.
I want to call these works classics for another reason. They are classics in part because they belong to a class of poetic expression that animates the deep experiences of human life which are given a particular coherent and organic form in the making, an angle so to speak, by which to view them and often even instructions on how to read them. These large human experiences, while inflected differently and uniquely in each one, are at the same time universally similar. The mythologist Joseph Campbell borrowed a term from the great Irish writer, James Joyce: Monomyth. By this word he meant that there is one great story inflected differently and distinctly in distinct cultural settings and in an individual life. We can read an Indian epic, or a Japanese novel or a recent fictional work from Kabul or Baghdad and sense in the narrative pieces of the sediments of our own lives, so universally connected are we all in the deepest levels of...
