Hell is suspended on the iron wires of urban egoism.

It is wrong to conceive of the Inferno as something volumetric, as some combination of enormous circuses, deserts with burning sands, stinking swamps, Babylonian capitals and mosques heated to red-hot incandescence. Hell contains nothing, and it has no volume, the way an epidemic, an infectious disease, or the plague has none; it is like any contagion, which spreads even though it is not spatial.

Love of the city, passion for the city, hatred of the city—these are the material of the Inferno. The circles of hell are nothing but the Saturn rings of exile. For the exile his sole, forbidden, and for-ever-lost city is scattered everywhere—he is surrounded by it. I should say that the Inferno is surrounded by Florence. The Italian cities in Dante—Pisa, Florence, Lucca, Verona—these dear civic planets—are stretched out into monstrous circles, extended into belts, restored to a nebulous, gaseous state.

The antilandscape character of the Inferno constitutes as it were the condition of its graphic quality.

Imagine that grandiose experiment of Foucault’s carried out not with a single pendulum, but with a multitude of crisscrossing pendulums. Here space exists only insofar as it is a receptacle for amplitudes. To make specific Dante’s images is as unthinkable as to enumerate the names of those who took part in the migration of peoples.

As the Flemish between Wissant and Bruges, fearing the sea’s flood tide, erect dikes to force back the sea, and as the Paduans construct embankments along the quays of the Brenta out of concern for the safety of their cities and bays, and in expectation of spring which melts the snows of the Chiarentana (a part of the snowclad Alps)—such were these dams, albeit not so monumental, whoever the engineer who built them.

(Inferno, XV, 4–12)

The moons of the polynomial pendulum swing here from Bruges to Padua, teach a course in European geography, give a lecture on the art of engineering, on the techniques of city safety, on the organization of public works, and on the significance of the alpine watershed for national interests.

Crawling as we do on our knees before a line of verse, what have we retained from these riches? Where are its godfathers, where its zealots? What are we to do about our poetry, which lags so shamefully behind science?

It is frightening to think that the blinding explosions of present-day physics and kinetics were put to use six hundred years before their thunder sounded: there are no words to brand the shameful, barbaric indifference to them on the part of the sad compositors of readymade meaning.

Poetic speech creates its tools on the move and in the same breath does away with them.

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.