Wednesday, July 12, 2023

Face It: There's only one circle left!

I often told friends and family that I'm absolutely, positively sticking to a four-part blog aesthetic when I'd initiated this series. I'd argue the length of blog posts and the time it takes to publish them. Holding onto this Inferno series towards a fifth commitment is going to bring a welcome sense of closure as to how Dante wanted to scare the sinners of his time about the atrocities of Hell. Of course, once you collapse from fears relating to work life, lack thereof or realizing your personality hasn't developed since the club days of '00, millennials like me thus wonder if Hell is all its chalked up to be. However, remain in uncertainty no longer, readers!

I'm almost certain Part 5 will have you chilled to the bone.

CANTOS XXIV - XXV THE THIEVES

Virgil and Dante laboriously climb through the broken rock bridge at the Eighth Circle's opposite edge. They've escaped the uncomfortable environment of pacing and fretting souls to arrive at a space between Circle Eight and Nine. Dante's journey moves him closer to the absolute bottom of Hell, where he finds a stressful place full of wandering snakes and reptilian humanoids who wrap themselves around naked sinners; biting viciously with flaming fangs causing immediate combustion, reforming to become snake-people.

Endless and final in Hell, these sinners' very bodies are constantly being stolen from them. Here their humanity is eternally stolen from them, painfully wavering between human and snake. Everything that exists in this space seems to shake and reverberate, causing Virgil and Dante to become dizzy, unbalanced and nauseous.

`Ciardi` Lines 103 - 105 and when he was dissolved into a heap upon the ground, the dust rose of itself and immediately resumed its scaly shape. *CANTO 24*
`Sanders` Lines 91 - 93 And throughout that evil ditch, the sinners ran around completely naked and, in a panic, knowing there was no hiding place to protect them. *CANTO 24*

Like questionable special effects from cheesy horror flicks, humans morphing into animals is something I've never outgrown.

I've even gone as far as to gush about the following "weresnake" chapter when a cute girl started asking me about what I was working on recently (literally shuddering as I type this).

`Ciardi` ~CANTO 25~ Lines 43 - 47 Reader, should you doubt what next, I tell, it will be no wonder, for though I saw it happen, I can scarce believe it possible, even in Hell. For suddenly, as I watched, I saw a lizard come darting forward on six great taloned feet
Lines 53 & 54 its tail thrust through a sinner's thighs and closed its coil over his legs. I saw it with my own eyes!
Lines 56 - 60 as tightly as that monster wove itself limb by limb about the wretch's body; it fused like hot wax, as skin and scale ran together until neither man nor reptile appeared what he had been when he began:
Lines 73 & 74 Their former likenesses mottled and sank to something that was both of them and neither;
Lines 103 - 105 The sinner's legs and thighs began to join; they grew together so, that soon no trace of juncture could be seen from toe to loin.
Lines 109 - 111 The armpits swallowed the arms, and the short shank of the reptile's forefeet simultaneously lengthened by as much as the man's arms shrank.
Lines 133 & 134 The soul that had become a beast went flitting and hissing over the stones,

Although, despite my nerdy passion in explaining this blog, it was kind of cool that I could reference two books in one project, conveniently.

`Sanders` ~CANTO 25~ Lines 91 - 101 It gets worse. As we stood there watching, the snake and this guy, too, started to morph and transform. Each one slowly became the other, with the snake's tail diving down the middle into two parts and the guy's legs mushing into one big thing like a mermaid's tail. The serpent's body began to grow more human, and its scales flattened out smooth; they guy's skin started to splinter and crack into scales. His arms shriveled up into his shoulders just as the snake's body stretched out longer.

Why am I rambling about my true and earnest appreciation to those who have taken the time to keep up on this review's conclusion? Is it important that the series of radiation Virgil and Dante have been exposed to this whole time has worn on their sense of balance, time and space? Does the fact that I have a soft spot for Greek mythology influence a Dantean bias towards seeing the hero Ulysess not tortured by flames in Hell as the author poet would have otherwise?

Sure, maybe. But I'm all about these final Cantos right now at this beginning of the 2023 year because of what they've meant relating to where we've been and where we're going and the fluid parallels of both.

A great deal of CANTOS 26 & 27 are rooted in dialogue between Dante and Virgil - "Look, poet, in the great flames which are their own guilty consciousness," "Such myriads of flame I see shine though the gloom of the Eighth abyss, each sinner swathes himself in his own torment" - and appropriately so. `Ciardi` Lines 13 - 16

Because Dante considered Ulysses' strategies evil during the time of the Trojan War suggests to me that he felt the Greek's eternal suffering was a rather exceptional accommodation.

Lines 55 - 60 Forever around this path Ulysses moves in such pain as once he was in wrath; there he laments the ambush of the Horse which was the door through the noble seed of Romans issued from its holy source;
Line 81 having disappeared from the known world, went to die.

To Dante, the Greeks were the raiders of Carthage and the pirates of Gaul.

`Sanders` Canto 27 Line 85 Virgil, "Unless my moral recollection strays, how good an ape I was of Nature's ways."

Dante's poetic force is obvious within these two Cantos.

CANTOS XXV111 - XX1X THE SOWERS OF DISCORD

Two of my favorite Cantos in either book of Inferno are the following. Our poet duo has climbed over boulders rubbled and sinners cooked to reach yet another rocky ledge of blackness. It's like looking down into the depths of a black hallway. This warped part of non-reality is often cited as what mainstream society considers the epitome of Hell. A great example of these visually disturbing notions are horror movies like Event Horizon and the Hellraiser franchise.

As a kid I was raised on the barbaric genre from hacking up body pieces on family movie nights to sneaking a peek at what my parents were watching after my siblings and I had gone to bed.

The blood and guts that Dante finds in the darkened hallway of the eighth ditch were frustratingly nostalgic for me. A parade of hideously mutilated souls are hacked to pieces by a demon here.

After each mutilation, the formless bodies would drag their entrails across the floor of the circular ditch and return to the beginning of the circuit with their wounds knitted together in time to be inflicted anew. Most grotesque. Regenerating only to get hacked again.

`Ciardi` Lines 13 & 21 whose bodies felt the wet; the mutilations of the ninth pit's crew.

"Those who should be one where my evil turns to pain, an eye for an eye to all eternity; thus is the law of Hell observed in me." - Bertrand de Born (1140-1215) Great Knight of the troubadours of Provence, England, forever damned in the bottom of Hell.

Its barbarically disturbing down there.

`Sanders` Lines 19 - 22 if you put all the dismembered and hacked up limbs of all the wars into the same place, it still wouldn't be nearly as horrible as what I saw in that disgusting and wretched Ninth Ditch of the Eighth Circle.

The plagued, scabbed and fleshless. Coherent speech is indiscernible in the putrid stink around them.

You see, this realm is pretty much a meatgrinder.

`Sanders` Lines 119 - 124 I'm sure I saw it, and it still haunts me: It was a headless corpse that walked just the same as the others, except he was holding onto his own head by his hair, swinging it next to him as he went - like a security guard with a flashlight.

Our poet duo of Virgil and Dante walk further down the rubble, blood and gore to a Tenth Ditch within the Eighth Circle, and they can hear the screams of even more sinners below. Covered in open sores and continually scratching at themselves, some wraiths are forever pissing themselves, others roll in shapeless ruts of shit, without eyes in their sockets and gnawing at the air in mad seizures. Virgil explains through hissing teeth that the suffering of these poor souls is the most wretched in all of Hell.

I could understand how remarkably urgent leaving this miserable pit of Hell would be for Dante.

CANTO XXX - THE REMAINING CLASS

I have a few words left to blog about on the last leg of Dante's journey; he describes the bottom of the Treacherous Universe as a broken well. From beyond the dark notch of a pit they'd just left, Virgil clarifies that the burning ground will cool after eleven painstaking miles toward the center of which lies a well.

`Ciardi` Lines 135 - 138 I grow pale yet at the memory. As one trapped in a nightmare that has caught his sleeping mind, wishes within the dream that it were all a dream, as if it were not -

`Sanders` Lines 48 - 54 I looked around at the rest of the sinners. There was one guy who looked like a broken hourglass, as though his legs were cut off right below the stomach and lying in the mud. He was completely bloated, with all his internal organs bulging out from his swollen chest and stomach. It made his head look tiny.

“I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.”

― Neil Gaiman , The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists

Maybe it was what Virgil had said to Dante at the very start of their journey, that Heaven wanted Dante there to record the many forms Hell represents which coaxes him onward.

CANTO XXXI - GIANTS AND THE WELL

Through the darkness Dante thinks he sees what appears to be two great towers in the fog ahead, but as he and Virgil draw near the obelisks turn out to be giants buried up to their waist in the ground.

`Sanders` Lines 6 - 10 Finally, we turned away from that pit of tortures and walked together along the cliff around the edge. It was like a permanent twilight there, that dim gray light before dawn, and I couldn't see very far ahead of my Guide. [Virgil]
`Ciardi` Lines 19 - 20 And as I stared though that obscurity, I saw what seemed two great steeples,
`Sanders` Lines 16 - 21 through the gloom and the grey, I thought I could make out two tall [spires further forward]. "What city are we coming to?" I asked. "You're trying too hard to see through the dark, perhaps it looks like buildings in the distance, but they're not," Virgil answered. "As we get closer, you'll see what they really are."

Like most of Dante's input throughout the Inferno record, it is a poetical rather than a literal measurement in ascertaining the height of giants. Little by little Dante pieces together the giants as symbols of every devout man's embodiment of unchecked animality. These are the sons of the earth who stand a ceaseless guard beside the well pit with the upper halves of their bodies rising above the rim; they are like elemental forces unbalanced by love and without realization of moral or theoretical law. Raised from the earth, they are now rebounded to the darkness of their agent source, guardians of earth's last depth.

`Sanders` Lines 28-32 As we got nearer to the shapes, they became clear [through the dimness] as if a fog was lifting and the air was [given way]. The closer we got, the more distinctly I could see them, and the more afraid I became.

Actually, these particular two giants are Nimrod and Ephialtes from Greek mythology.

`Sanders` Lines 79-82 Nimrod's right arm seemed tied taut against his back, bound to the well, while his left arm was locked to a chain that ran from his neck and wrapped around his chest five times then down to his waist to the well.

Roughly, from the waist to the collarbone of one of these guys, their faces must be a bit over thirteen feet long. I mean, honestly, though; how tall is a man whose face is that damn long?! If the face represents 1/6th of a person's height, these giant dudes at minimum could figure to be at around seventy-five to eighty feet tall.

`Ciardi` Lines 86-90 Nimrod had one arm pinned behind his back, and the other across his breast by an enormous chain that wound about him from the neck down, completing five great turns before it spiraled down below the well's rim.
`Sanders` Lines 83-87 Virgil said as we stood looking at him, "He and his brother here led all of the giants of their time in an uprising against the Olympian gods in a fit of jealousy. Now he'll never raise his arms again as punishment for raising his fists in sin.

If Nimrod was the symbolic crass big brother of the two, then Ephialtes was the uglier, more remorseful and guilt-ridden younger brother per se; he too, is chained to the well but by only one of his arms. Son of Neptune, he warned Apollo about Nimrod's intentions yet took part in the battle regrettably. Ephialtes' actions were viewed as a message of revolt rather than distorted sin, thus earning him only one arm similarly bound while his other is free to hold his face in eternal woeful guilt. Instead of handing Nimrod a reminder of his chained, rejected afterlife, Virgil lumps a backhanded compliment to Ephialtes as a means to butter him up a bit. Sweet talker, that Poet Guide!

Thinking to add Dante's ability to make the giant famous for a long time to come, Virgil asks if he could be so kind to lift and lower them down to the icy level below.

`Sanders` Lines 130-135 But Ephialtes lowered us down softly over the well's cliff of a rim into the very deepest pit of Hell, where Lucifer himself was sent to sit. Even the great "hero" giant must have dreaded the evil cold of that place, because as soon as he had set us down gently, he drew his free arm back from the cursed depths as if it were snapped by a bungee cord.

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CANTO XXXII - THE FROZEN LAKE COCYTUS

As Greyon led the poet pair down the waterfall many circles above, so does Ephialtes land Virgil and Dante to Hell's final level at long last. Here, rather than burning, punished souls freeze for their sins. Completely encased in ice, these fixed sinners are guilty of treachery against kin and family. They've murdered their families in some way - their parents, siblings or own children. In a symbolic equivalent these murderers are denied human warmth or contact yet remain eternally conscious of their damnation.

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This Hell dimension is considered the bottom of the Universe, the center of all weight, if you will.

While I suggest that Dante means that the bottom of Hell is the center of the earth, most may agree that the center of the Universe is the center of gravity also. That means symbolically, gravity is the focal point of all guilt. So, my tendency is to understand evil is what draws man down directly to this lowest point possible via the soul's realization of the hideousness of their sin.

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`Sanders` Lines 38 & 39 their lips purple with the cold and a haunted, empty, defeated hopeless look of sadness in their eyes.

"Thought you burned not froze for your sins." - Pearl Jam, Let Me Sleep

Unfortunately, in the seemingly lost furtherance of light removed, these sinners are denied all human ties to be bound by unyielding ice. Like bad heads of lettuce kept crisp, these fuckers are fixed here eternally. I believe that many murderers within the last couple decades have wound up here, and they need more recognition over the more commonly known mass shootings gun manufactures have produced. Because if people are killing their own families and are allowed to go and thrive while their own kids are chained, tortured and starved to death, they'd certainly be considered sinners on this planet and worthy of this chilling punishment once they die and are sent to Hell.

CANTO XXXIII - COMPOUND TREACHERY

Let me explain a little bit about this the second to the last Canto of my Dante Series and why the punished here have compounded their treacheries on Earth. Acknowledging this Canto to be the most poetic and dramatic passage in the Inferno, Dante details how the sinners here lie with half their faces above the ice and their tears freeze their eyelids nearly shut.

To me, that feels like it'd be the worst-fitting outfit ever put together then never being able to take it off. Or maybe it would be like a pebble in your shoe, or a belt that digs into the side of your gut? It would be as though even the comfort of tears, this far from light or human emotion would be denied. Either way, it sounds like a scary place for anybody to be for all of continued damnation. At that point, I'd personally prefer a Circle or two above with the screaming and puking up of the guts and all.

This Canto is a very slippery thing. As I read what Virgil goes on to explain to Dante, I assumed that the souls of the guilty, who intrinsically cry icicles, fall to their torments before they die. Virgil clarifies this by saying the bodies of those punished here in this way are inhabited by Demons back up on Earth.

`Ciardi` Lines 128 - 130 [Virgil] I will tell you this: when a soul betrays as these did, it falls from flesh, and a demon takes its place, ruling the body till its time is spent.
`Sanders` Lines 129 - 132 when the soul of somebody who has committed the sins of Compound Treachery is sent down here, then a demon takes over his body up there and can do whatever he wants with it until it dies.

I recommend this trailer to get a glimpse of what such a possession would look like courtesy of the great Sam Raimi. Evil Dead Rise

As previously mentioned, it is particularly cold in this Hell dimension. According to the last lines in Sanders's copy of The Inferno Canto 33 our poet duo strolls into the final and last Canto - #34

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`Sanders` Lines 105 - 112 It was so damned cold down there that my face was numb, but even so, I thought I felt a breeze on my cheeks and asked Virgil, "If it's always dark down here and the sun can't warm the air, where is this breeze coming from?' "Just wait a little longer," he answered, "and you will see for yourself what it is that makes the winds you're feeling in this land of ice. You'll see."

CANTO XXXIV - THE CENTER - MASTER SATAN HIMSELF

Once upon a time, the Devil had three faces. It involved the distortion and perversion of an infernal parody of God - basically, it was the spirit of evil itself manifest in three entire dimensions. As far as I can tell, Satan hasn't slowed on any of his various aliases, disguises or personas. I wanted to create this last Canto of my Inferno blog series as a space where you could face the last depth with an enhanced understanding of Hell's true nature of frigid bitterness and how the only way to get back up is to travel further downward.

In the exact middle of the frozen lake Cocytus our Poet duo Virgil and Dante see Lucifer in the distance. His great black wings beat like a windmill.

`Sanders` Lines 7 - 9 As we got closer, the force of the wind was so strong that I had to hide behind Virgil to get out of its cold blast.

Obviously, it is his thrashing wings that are the source of Hell's icy wind.

`Sanders` Lines 17 & 18 Virgil figured he should prepare me to meet Lucifer, who had once been the most beautiful of all the angels in Heaven.

Upon confronting the glorification of all dread and evil, Dante observes that Satan is fixed within the ice from the waist up, apparently trying his best to escape. Yet the thrashing of his leathery wings only freezes him more surely into the polluted ice of the lake.

`Sanders` Lines 23 - 36 I don't even know what to write - words aren't strong enough to explain what emotions I felt right then. I didn't exactly die or anything, but at the same time I wasn't really alive either. I mean, just think about it for a second: I was down at the very bottom of Hell, neither alive nor dead, but sort of in between life and death. It was heavy. And there before me was Lucifer, the absolute ruler of that whole world of grief and suffering, halfway buried in the ice himself. He was huge. If you compared the giants above to one of his arms, that gives you some proportional idea of how large the guy was. He is hideous to look at. Seeing how ugly he is and thinking how he dared to rebel against God Himself, it's no wonder that he is the source of all sorrow.
`Ciardi` Lines 46 - 54 two wings rose terribly, their span so to proportioned: I never saw such sails upon the sea. They were not feathers - their texture and their form like a bat's wings - and he beat them so that three winds blew from him in one great storm: it is these winds that freeze all Cocytus. He wept from his six eyes, and down three chins, the tears ran mixed with bloody froth and pus.
`Sanders` Line 49 - 52 They looked like bats' wings more than anything else; their strokes caused enough windchill factor to keep this lowest circle of Hell covered in ice, despite the flames on the levels above. All six of Lucifer's eyes were crying at once, and his tears mixed with his bloody drool and wet his three faces.

DETAILS:

Virgil and Dante push on without rest.

`Ciardi` Lines 68 & 69 [Virgil] But the night is coming on and we must go, for we have seen the whole.

Virgil carpe diems their asses outta there by urging Dante to rush at the center crust between Satan's hip area and a bit of broken ice. Together both poets grapple their way between wing flaps through the natty exit door at Virgil's insistence of their only way out.

`Ciardi` Lines 73- 84 My Guide seized the shaggy coat of the king demon; then grappling matted hair and frozen crusts from one tuft to another, clambered down. When we had reached the joint where the great thigh merges into the swelling of the haunch, Virgil straining terribly, turned his head to where his feet had been and began to grip the hair as if he were climbing; so that I thought we moved toward Hell again. "Hold fast!" he said, and his breath came shrill with labor and exhaustion. "There is no way but by such stairs to rise above such evil."
`Sanders` Lines 85 - 91 Virgil pulled himself through a crevice in the rock, setting me down on the lip of it. He then scrambled up right next to me. Dazed, I looked up, fully expecting to see Satan's head in all his disgusting glory, but instead, I saw two long legs reaching up from the bottom of the crater. I was dizzy and disorientated.

Muddy, tired and confused, Dante and Virgil find themselves in a giant cave with a rocky floor and barely enough light to see. As they stand up, Virgil explains what happened back there after climbing down the matted hair of Satan himself. At the very center of Earth, the king demon is trapped, and the poets had been moving downward into Hell the whole time. But during the reversal, they passed through the center of gravity. For such a God and Satan based tale, Virgil's explanation to the poet Dante has suddenly turned quite scientific.

This insight is held onto unflinchingly, borderline stubbornly. It is somewhat credible news for those who might believe in the Flat Earth Theory who are direly searching for support, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Dante writes that where they eventually came to stand was at almost exactly the direct center below the spot where Jesus was crucified up above. The Gross Fiend and Image of all Evil remains trapped, pinched and prisoned in the ice-pack still below them right where he fell when he was banished and thrown from Heaven. The force of his fall from the heights of Paradise pushed him violently through the Earth, forcing and disrupting all the land into craters and rings to form the Circles of Hell.

Virgil knows yet another secret way to emerge out from Hell - a babbling brook that trickles through the cave. Here are the last Lines that I've found to be of importance from each book included in this blog series:

`Ciardi` Canto XXXIV Lines 131 - 134 there is a space not known by sight, but only by the sound of a little stream descending through the hollow, it has eroded from the massive stone
`Sanders` Canto 34 Lines 132 - 139 I followed Virgil along a path through the rocks to be free from the darkness, scrambling right behind him, until we finally came to a small, round opening in the rocks where I could see the beautiful sky above. We clambered out and stood looking again at the stars.

INFERNO'S EFFECTS

The foul creature that is Satan and the interpretations of his three faces are perversions of Sin. Note how closely each sinner's punishment is patterned on their deeds in life on Earth. Dante goes on to writes about the Mount of Purgatory after the Inferno. Naturally, the little stream which helps the poets emerge from the Earth is Lithe, the river of forgetfulness. Their conclusion upwards symbolizes God's ideal, shining virtue.

The moral lesson is that evil will always be punished by equal amounts to the egression of the Sinner.

"Hell is more bearable than nothingness" - P. J. Bailey

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Glorification, magnification, both immediate and enduring. Many massively influential and industry-revolutionizing movies about escaping horrifying prosecution by the Devil continue throughout pop culture today. Movies like Legend, Demon Knight, and even the comedy, Bedazzled.

I've never regretted my early enthusiasm towards a multi-part book review of Dante's Inferno. This has been an enormous undertaking for me with a dedication to long hours towards this project. I was well into Circle Seven by the time I knew my hard work would see that this particular subject got done and done well. There remains a long list of books I have yet to read and places I have not yet been. Hell, and Dante are no longer on my lists.

Thanks to the supporters of my work, I hope you have found it was rewarding as I have.

What do you think of Hell and how human dramas move you through your life towards eventual end?

Free will remains as a fascinating debate.

Feel free to comment on this post or the previous blog posts here or at my website

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Book Review of "The Inferno" Pt. 4

The final levels of Lower Hell

Originally posted Aug 25, 2022 at 10:30 PM

Ferarum Igni Ferroque - Beasts with Fire and Iron

And here we reach the last three circles of Hell. Are you ready? You may soon find yourself wanting to check this book out. Perhaps you may even find yourself asking the same questions as I did upon reading it. Hopefully, this last part of my blog series on Dante Alighieri's Inferno will help.

What will you do? First, you'll get a tasty beverage and take a deep breath. Ok, now you are ready.

CANTO XII, Circle 7. The Violent

The poets Dante and Virgil begin their descent along a fallen rock wall, hurrying past a Minotaur who guards the top of a steep path. Below them marks the edge of the Seventh Circle. They go down a set of rough "stairs" to see The Phlegethon, the River of Boiling Blood. Here, the Violent are punished. As these particular sinners wallowed in blood during their lives, so are they immersed in a boiling bloody river for eternity. Mostly rapists who are now commodity to demons.

Fierce Centaurs patrol the banks ready to shoot their arrows at any person who raises themself out beyond the limits permitted. The shallowest spot within the river's current runs at the opposite side of this Circle which only wades about ankle deep. Jason of Argos is there, along with Cleopatra.

`Sanders` - Lines 58-60 - When they caught sight of us, they stopped together and three of them came toward us slowly with their bows and arrows at the ready.
`Ciardi`- Line 101 - Along the bank of the scalding red river, the shrieking wraiths were boiled and purple dyed.

The policing Centaurs, busy with a handful of sinners, lash out at our poets but allow them to pass by with ease.

`Sanders` - Lines 85 - 87 - Virgil said, "I'm guiding him though this wretched valley. This is not some vacation; he's here to learn a lesson.

Virgil guides Dante through the cleft in the river, blowing past the sinners who are hysterically unaware and oblivious of the river's lack of depth as they grasp at their choking throats.

`Ciardi` - Line 126 - And here we crossed the ford to deeper Hell.
`Sanders` - Line 126 - It was there that we finally crossed the other bank.

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(MOST SPECIAL NOTE OF ALL NOTES)

When I mentioned in my previous blog post that the Lower levels of Hell were where "The Inferno" gets good, I didn't intend that this entire series was meant to be a high school book report. As long as you're a fan of horror storytelling and gore with a gratitude for mind bending macabre, you'll appreciate the following Cantos going forward.

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CANTO XIII, Circle 7. The Wood of the Suicides

Past the bloody river grows a forest of shades who now lie encased in thorny and bent trees. Gnarled with rough bark and twisted branches that bleed, their dry, rotting leaves are plucked and eaten by smelly, odious Harpies - defilers of all they touch - and only as long the trees' blood flows are the souls within able to speak. Thus, those who destroyed their own bodies are denied a human form; only through their own blood do they find voice.

`Sanders` Line 21 - 23 In the woods around us, I could hear moaning and crying, but I couldn't see anyone out there in the trees, and I was getting a little freaked out by it.
`Ciardi` Lines 22 - 24 They [the Harpies] had the faces of women stuck on top of bird bodies, with huge wings and feathered claws, perched in the trees above us as we passed below.

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Then, just as a harpy hisses and brakes off a branch, a face in the tree's trunk shocks Dante terribly.

`Sanders` - Line 41 & 42 I was so startled I dropped the twig in my hands and stood gawking.

He evokes the name of Pier delle Vigne II, 1190-1249, once a fantastic minister and trusted friend of Dante's. Sputtering blood and sap escapes from the branches as he listens to how this soul lived his last wounded years.

`Ciardi` - Lines 58 - 63 I am he who held both keys to Fredrick's * heart, locking, unlocking with so deft a touch that scarce another soul had any part in his most secret thoughts. Through every strife I was so faithful to my glorious office that for it I gave up both sleep and life.
* Fredrick II, a Roman Emperor.

Now, I understand about loyalty and having an affinity to a job, company or employer or whatever, I get it. That's fine; because I had initially read this Canto from an amorous viewpoint, like Pier and Fredrick were gay lovers perhaps.

People need incentives - it's nothing to be ashamed of.

However, to my surprise it was a sub-story of a guy who did everything for his boss only to become distrusted unfairly and locked away in a cell to die. Pier ended up committing suicide rather than starve to death but his means of doing so aren't elaborated on.

The poets, Dante and his guide Virgil, are suddenly and abruptly alarmed.

`Sanders` Lines 109 - 112 Suddenly, two naked guys burst out of the trees on our left and ran past us, bleeding and scratched as they charged through the dry branches and brush.
'Ciardi' Line 117 two torn and naked wraiths went plunging by me.

The two ghosts who swerve dramatically around our poets are chased and ultimately devoured by a pack of gurgling and stinking dogs.

Dante observes the ghosts' reward for their lives of sin: their limbs re-form at their torsos only to flee and be hunted again, as the process must be repeated for all eternity.

In Ciardi's notes he mentions that one of the ghosts is a famous murderer whose favorite prank was arson of the day, Jacomo da Sant Andrea who perished in 1239 probably by the hands of assassins, who alongside him is an anonymous Florentine Christian suicide.

The poets manage to gather their composure and steel themselves for the remaining task at hand and head off into the Third Ring of the Seventh Circle.

"Immortality is proof that we exist. We want gore, preferably in 1080p." - Frank Rose. Editor at Wired

CANTO XIV, Circle 7. The Violent Against Nature

Leaving the woods, Dante and Virgil cross a desert of burning marsh and sand. The two witness flames raining down continuously from the sky onto the sinners who are moved to greater cries of pain. Dante is immensely fascinated by the punishments he finds and records about here.

`Sanders` Lines 28 - 30 Big flakes of fire rained down in slow motion, like some kind of evil Christmas Eve snowfall of flame.

Virgil then recognizes a war captain named Capaneus, who once scaled the great walls of Thebes. He ridicules the man as he and Dante pass by unaffected by the raining flame.

`Ciardi` Lines 62 - 63 and Line 69 Only your own rage could be fit torment for your sullen pride." His slobber is a fit badge for his breast.

The poets' slow passage through the sands is difficult process. Yet they are able to find a margin of lane. It permits them unburnt beyond the desert sands. Their next round of torture and lament lies ahead.

CANTO XV, the Great Cliff at whose foot lies the EIGHTH CIRCLE

Over the next few cantos, I've noticed many homosexual implicated resonances, which made me positively intrigued going forward. I have so many references that I can't wait to share as we continue this journey with our poets.

Dante and Virgil pass a round of stones lining the steaming river, Lethe. Hell offers endless surprises and spawns fresh atrocity for a roving band of sinners called, the Sodomites. They trudge in a ditch alongside the river and stare almost greedily up at the poets as they walk by in observation. The souls who reside here are Greek artists, musicians or Roman military elite. One ghost in particular recognizes Dante and grabs his attention.

`Ciardi` Lines 25 - 27 And I, when he stretched his arm out to me, searched his baked features closely, till at last I traced his image from my memory

The ghost prophesizes that once Dante leaves Hell everyone he knows will die from bad luck in some form or another.

Eventually our poets pass safely alongside the river and arrive at the edge of a great waterfall cliff face. Here, at Virgil's command, Dante removes his belt from around his waist and drops it over the edge of the abyss. In the following Canto - Canto XVI, there's mention of three heckling wraiths asking our poets what the latest happenings in Florence are and seems like a bit of a "filler" Canto for me. In this regard I've skipped over the gossip shared between spirits and men to continue onward with what Dante witnesses next.

CANTO XVII - GREYON, the Monster of Fraud

A shape - so it rose. Through the rust-colored mist. A dragon half reptile half man. Virgil reassures Dante a ride on this horrid beast is better than the alternative, eyeing the roaring chasm below.

The poets mount the great shoulders of Greyon with haste. Into blackness they float their descent further within the bowels of Hell.

Of ragged rock sets the eighth shelf of horrors.

CANTO XVIII, Circle 8, The Evil Ditches

The two now stand at the edge of the Eighth Circle; it is a great stone circuit whose slope is much like that of an amphitheater. These slopes are divided by ten ditches and within them are those sinners punished eternally by different barbed-faced monsters with their own foul purposes and agendas.

A series of rock spokes run from the cliff face down towards the center of the circle to serve as bridges between the ditches.

A crude screenshot of Ciardi's visual description of Circle Eight.

`Ciardi` Lines 34 - 36 And everywhere along that hideous track I saw horned demons with enormous lashes move through those souls, scouring them on the back.
`Ciardi` Lines 103 - 117 Here we heard people whine in the next chasm, knocking and thumping themselves with open palms, and blubber through their snouts as if in a spasm. Steaming from that pit, a vapor rose over the banks, crusting them with a slime that sickened my eyes and hammered at my nose. That chasm sinks so deep we could not sight its bottom anywhere until we climbed along the rock arch to its greatest height. Once there, I peered down; and I saw long lines of people in a river of excrement that seemed the overflow of the world's latrines. I saw among the felons of that pit one wraith who might or might not have been tortured - one could not tell; he was so smeared with shit.

...fresh tormentors...

`Sanders` Lines 104 - 108 At the same time, we could hear them being beaten by demons. A scalding heat rose with a stench from below, and the walls of the pit were covered in moist, slimy mold that stuck to the sufferers like flypaper and smelled like shit.

...with fresh torments.

Both poets literally cannot get away fast enough to pass onto the next ditch.

`Sanders` Line 136 "Let's get out of here," Virgil said. "We've seen enough of this."

CANTO XIX, Pit of Woe

Dante and Virgil come across the following chasm, where they find sinners placed upside down, headfirst into tube-like furnaces with their legs sticking out, flailing wildly in their deserved and eternal punishment.

`Ciardi` Lines 22 - 24 From every stone mouth a miscreant's legs stuck out as far as the calf. The torsos were all ablaze and the joints of the legs quivered and writhed about.

I'd bet this guy got a lil crispy from those furnace holes.
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CANTO XX: The Fortune Tellers and Diviners

Our poets descend further down an arched ledge towards a succeeding trench of damned souls. Here, astronomers and soothsayers turned wretched wraiths parade slowly and tearfully in their enormous void. Since their lives on Earth were spent attempting to glimpse the future by arts forbidden by God, these sufferers' heads are turned a full 180 degrees. Dante reiterates how the sins committed in life are reversed upon the sinner once they've entered Hell. Again.

So, they saw forward in during their time on Earth, so shall they see backwards in death. Again.

`Sanders` Lines 6 - 15 In the bottom of the ditch below us, I saw condemned souls walking slowly, as if dazed, and crying quietly like some tragic, bizarre holiday parade. When I got a better look at their bodies, I realized they were completely deformed: Their chins weren't over their chests and their necks were all twisted around, so that their noses faced backwards.

`Sanders` Line 15 They had to walk backward to get anywhere, because they couldn't see what was ahead.

`Ciardi` Lines 10 - 14 And when I looked down from their faces, I saw that each of them was hideously distorted between the top of the chest and the lines of the jaw; for the face was reversed on the neck, and they came on backwards, staring backwards at their loins,

I tend to agree it's probably not healthy to expose oneself to boiling black tar. Then again, the outside of this ditch is ringed with the gunk to represent these sinners' sticky deeds in life. I mean, boiling tar is probably never safe.

`Sanders` Line 130 And over there, he [Virgil] led me through the pits of Hell.

CANTOS XXI & XXII: Conveniently recalled as the GARGOYLE CANTOS

In his notes, Ciardi mentions Dante being called "The Master of the Disgusting". It is here that Dante certainly attaches his grotesqueries.

The poets move on and arrive at the next ditch which is essentially a broken bridge guarded by hideous demons, who tear sinners apart with claws and grappling hooks. This band of terror are so infamous in Hell that they have their own squad name - The Blacktalons. Each with their own name and distinct personality, I was reminded of a card game from the mid-90s called Werewolf: The Apocalypse. There were a certain corrupt tribe of evil werewolves that kept presenting me with twisted images as I read these Cantos, initially.

The stress on the coarse details marks the beginning of the gargoyle dance that swells and rolls through this Canto and the next.

I remember how excited I was when I first read these Cantos of grotesqueries. Ciardi's version of "The Inferno" had everything appealing to me in the brashest of styles for the day - awesomely dark Demons under desolate bridges! naked sinners being popped and bubbled in gunky oil pits! the poet Dante pressing the whole of his body against is guide Virgil in a suspiciously gay way despite the terrors witnessed around him!? - and my fondness for Demons asking amongst themselves if they ought to touch Dante in the rump was only matched by the delight I found when, years later, I was given the revolutionized version of "The Inferno" by Marcus Sanders complete with illustrated text adaptions. Luckily, I've included plenty of images of what I imagined the aforementioned Blacktalons would look like, each as visually exciting and bloodthirsty as what their names would suggest. Some of them - gasp! - aren't even devil demons at all. So, in that spirit, I present to you the monsters who escort our poet duo over the last ditch's broken bridge towards a cliff's edge.

`Ciardi` Lines 73 & 74 so rushed those Fiends from below, and all the pack pointed their gleaming pitchforks at my Guide.
`Sanders` Lines 76 - 84 [Virgil] "Do you pitiful souls believe I've made it this far down in Hell with nary a crisis without some kind of protection from someone more important than you watching out for me? Get out of the way: You can't stop us! Great God above has decided that I'm to guide this guy through this hellhole without any trouble! The leader of the devils looked pissed, but he backed down, "Let him go for now!" he called to the other, lowering his fork.

Snatcher, Leader of the Blacktalons
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`Ciardi` Lines 118 - 126 [Snatcher] "Front and center here, Grizzly and Hellken," he began to order them.

"You too, Deaddog. Curlybeard, take charge of a squad of seven.

[Snatcher] "Take Pigtusk and Dragontooth along with you.

[Snatcher] "Catclaw, Cramper and Crazyred, keep a sharp lookout on the boiling glue as you move along.

[Snatcher] "Badtail, see that these gentlemen are not molested until they reach the crag where they can find a way across the den."

`Ciardi` Lines 139 & 140 and to their Captain, he [Badtail] made a trumpet of his ass.

CIRCLE EIGHT: THE GRAFTERS

For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.

The poets set off with their escort of demons. As they hopscotch over the broken bridge, Dante notices ripples upon the surface of the black tar pitch beneath them. Here, bobbing and drowning, are the Grafters - sinners who wallow in eternity with only half their faces gasping for air, no matter how putrid the "oxygen". One certain wretch manages to aggravate and antagonize the demons who break out into a battle amongst themselves. In the confusion, Virgil initiates an advantage to slip away from the Blacktalons towards the next cliff face.

As I've mentioned before, I'm completely smitten with gory horror movies. Seeing black tar monsters is scary enough but being an outspoken fan of body gore is a fiercely ballsy statement. For some with the perspective that I've had growing up raised on this type of genre, I was enthralled and horrified at how Curlybeard and Catclaw would rake their pitchforks through the muck to hook these sufferers in this Canto back into such terrifying bogs.

`Sanders` Lines 13-15 We finally headed out with those ten demons, and they were a pretty wild and noisy group, like a bunch of horny alcoholics leaving the neighborhood bar.
Lines 40-42 "Hey, Catclaw," the demon Cramper shouted, "peel that guy's skin off like a banana! Use your claws on him!" They all laughed and egged him on as he tortured the guy.

There are currently massive searches in northern Spain and in Turkey about actual gates to Hell that resemble the ditches and broken landscapes Dante describes as this Eighth Circle.

CANTO XXII, CIRCLE EIGHT:

Picture taken by me at a local clothing exchange shop - Junkees

The cold day in Hell is within reach; the Poets make their escape by sliding down a sloping bank into the next pit.

When I read the next few Cantos, I took small breaks to really appreciate the resonance of particular lines. Going back after a couple months to lament kept me recharged again without feeling completely drained from this last stretch.

After all, the final Cantos are key to Dante's Inferno.

`Ciardi` Lines 22 - 24 "Were I a plane of glass, I could not summon your outward look more instantly into myself, than I do your inner thought.

Now in the Sixth ditch of the Eighth Circle, they see a group of wraiths plodding along in robes of heavy lead.

`Sanders` Lines 59-62 As we watched, they shuffled off slowly to the left and we followed beside them, listening to their wailing moans and crying. Their shawls were so heavy that they moved slower than a tai chi class,
`Ciardi` Lines 55 - 58 About us now in the depth of the pit we found a painted people, weary and defeated. Slowly, in pain, they paced it round and round. All wore great cloaks cut to as ample a size.

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While I must thank my readers here and now for sticking with this book review, we must begin Part 5 of this blog series. It's taken me nearly a year's worth of time and I'm more than excited to see the end of "The Inferno" completion. Part 5 will encompass Cantos XXIV- XXXIV.

This isn't a hobby, and revolutions don't make themselves.

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