The saintlike folks over at Metropolitan Review were kind enough to publish my yearlong, exiled sperg out / theological treatise on THE ORIGINS OF DIVINITY and how it is connected to THE STARS. Believe it or not this is a highly compressed (albeit still 18,000 word) version of the full book or pamphlet or rant, which is about twice as long. I hope it still makes some sense trimmed down like this, though I wouldn’t bet on it. Shout out Ross Barkan, Lou Bahet, Django Ellenhorn, and Cally, for the care and patience they put into this long, unwieldy text, bless u guys.

Here in this post I’ve attached my voiceover of the entire thing, with time stamps, I recommend taking in a “Part” at a time, there are seven, comment below where you tapped out. Thanks for reading and listening.

THE TEXT:

The Metropolitan Review

STARGAZER

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22 days ago · 49 likes · 1 comment · Sean Thor Conroe and The Metropolitan Review

AUDIO:

A GUIDE:

EPIGRAPH/SUMMARY (VOLLMANN) (0:08)

I. (1:11)

2025

II. (12:44)

JUNE 6 — THE FACTS — ST. PAUL’S MONASTERY AT JARROW —JUNE 8 (PENTECOST) — MY GUIDES — THE STARS — THE EARLIEST DIVINITY

III. — (39:55)

JUNE 9 — ADONIS — SACRED MARRIAGE — THE STANDSTILL

IV. — (58:00)

JUNE 11 — JUNE 12 — THE UNDERWORLD — THE STAR OF SALVATION — JUNE 13

V. — (1:11:26)

JUNE 16 — THE TAIN — THIRTEEN — PARZIVAL

VI. — (1:46:16)

JUNE 21 — ST JOHN’S DAY — THE GREEN MAN — STARGAZER

VII. — (2:02:22)

JULY 1

It’s Monday, 6.22.26, almost 1 PM, and as of an hour ago, the legendary music agent and writer and publisher and now damn PHILANTHROPIST OF THE ARTS Adam Voith is busy at work shipping out 1000 copies of my book THE WALK BOOK, which I’ve worked on and off on for over a decade, and which was excerpted in Issue 246 of The Paris Review, to the first 1000 people to click ORDER (for a whopping ZERO DOLLARS) on the littleengines [dot] shop website.

Last he texted me, over half of them are gone.

I thought I’d take a sec to break down the full lore of this book.

~

INITIAL INCEPTION

The short and direct of its initial inception was, all of 2013, my last year of undergrad, I was cooped up in the top floor closet room of the off-campus student house at Swarthmore College, “The Barn,” which cost $275/month, and which you could blast cigs inside in, which I spent all year doing, almost fully nocturnal, psychotically stimulanted. I already had a full “need-based” ride, but I’d “dropped out” the previous spring, after my junior year, when my then girlfriend, who was a year older, graduated, before returning after a semester: I was working at a coffee shop, reading all of Bolaño, and trying to write a novel; after a few months doing that, I realized I could just return to school and do that there. In school.

And so that’s what I did for all of 2013, starting in January. I drove back across country from California to Philly with my girlfriend, in the freezing snow, she got an apartment in West Philly, and I re-enrolled for my final year—but offset, given I’d taken that semester off. I made up a “self-directed thesis project”—to read all of Bolaño, chronologically, over one calendar year—and did a year-long “creative writing thesis. I even got a “research grant” to keep working on the project over the summer.

Somewhere deep down I knew, however, as the year progressed, and I more fully understood Bolaño’s message, that I was eating off the system and writing a nonsense project, disconnected from my own voice, from the streets, from the world.

It was sometime during that fall, when my bloated Bolaño book ballooned out of my control, and my novel spiraled in pointless, frivolous directions, that I got this idea of a new project: to walk all day, every day, sleep wherever I ended up; to say and write no words unless I encountered something tangible, in the world, outside of the cloistered institution, related to my real-life survival, worth telling about. My view of literature has always been almost barbarically literal, I think I inherited a ramped-up nervous system from both my mother’s Japanese side, her father was the only survivor in his family, along with his father, in the Tokyo Bombings, and also on my father’s side, filled with stoic toxic military men (which I say with love), and would often go full nocturnal, unable to sleep, neurotically fixated on some new task that would save me, with catastrophic consequences for my relationships and my ability to function in society. Writing and reading, then, for me, has always been inextricably tied to calming myself down, temporarily making my body inhabitable, the world bearable. Given all this, I was primed, in my way, to engage in this belligerent quest.

Starting in March of 2014, I walked all day every day for 100 days, from Philly to La Junta, Colorado.

~

EARLY WALK BOOKS

As early as age seven, when I lived in Aberdeen, Scotland, at a self-sustaining community for handicapped people, where my parents worked as caretakers, I remember how, over the winters, my big sister and our friend Andrew would build igloos on the field between the four main houses, make a pile of snow and dig out the middle till we could sit in there, and light a single candle in the middle of the igloo, it would get dark around 3 PM over winters and we’d do that each day, till one day Andrew or my sister came up on some stray change lying around, and we somehow decided we wanted to get some snacks for our igloo fort, only all our food was from the Garden and the Farm, we ate all meals with the handicapped folks, with food we grew and raised, and so Andrew and Marie, who must have been 10 or 11, wanted to get some REAL SNACKS, and led me off the community grounds, down this perilous dirt road, onto the main thoroughfare, to the Sainsbury’s grocery store, where we got, I remember so tactilely, so tangibly, a big bag of salt and vinegar crisps, and I still don’t know how my little-ass managed to walk down that big-ass road, but I swear we did, we brought the crisps back to our igloo fort, and we rationed them, nibbling a couple, burying them in snow and “saving them for later,” only for, the next day, some winter vole or something to have gotten into them and torn them to pieces. I don’t know if it was the walk to the store itself, or the terror of seeing the crisp bag all torn apart, and the mystery of who’d done it—a monster?—that makes this memory so vivid as one of my earliest: either way, that was my first walk book.

The second formative experience that made me feel equipped to walk on highways random roads wherever my map led me each day was how once, musta been circa 2005, when I was fourteen and in eighth grade, in the final of my three-year stint at the Waldorf School in Santa Cruz, where my mom taught and so earned my and my sisters free tuition, I remember I showed up to school one day late in the year and my teacher Mrs. Davies, a small but formidable Welsh lady who always wore these kooky headbands, flamboyant silk scarfs wrapped around her head, causing her boycropped dyed red hair to shoot out in all directions all crazy, informed us that we’d be doing no classes for the second half of the day; instead, we would be doing a whole school cleanup. I mighta just woken up on the wrong side of the bed that morning, but when Mrs. Davies told me that news that day, I found this to be unacceptable: I had to be studying or training for the basketball team at the public high school I’d be attending following year, this janitorial work was beneath me. I said, Fuck that, if we’re cleaning all day there’s no reason for me to be here, I’ma dip out I got shit to do—

I remember how Mrs. Davies looked at me then, all sneering and laughing at me—I was a very sensitive child, and didn’t appreciate being ridiculed—and so she went, “Is that right, Shooon”—she said “Sean” like that, with her Welsh accent—“and how exactly are you going to get home, Woooolk?”

Because the thing about it was, the Waldorf School was a fifteen-minute drive up into the Santa Cruz Mountains, up Highway 9, or Empire Grade Road, up and down and winding and blind turn after blind turn, one narrow lane each way.

This is a big part of the Walk Ethic: There are things you think you can’t do, not for any courageous elitist reason, like you’re better than anyone, but also in that no one would think to do such a thing, that you, nonetheless, if you want to do, CAN DO.

Like walking against traffic on Empire Grade Road, keeping your ears primed for oncoming cars, jumping into the ditch in case one comes whipping around a blind turn right when you’re approaching a blind turn.

And it might take a sec to walk that entire fifteen minute drive, a couple hours of steady walking, but walking doesn’t expend that much energy, it’s just a thing you have to consistently keep doing, which is what writing is also, it’s not some burst of inspiration, some perfect representation of an idea, crystalized first try, it’s steadily continuing to do the thing you’re concentrating on, and the magical thing that happens, where a crystalized idea hits you, happens naturally, outside of your control, from that state of consistently concentrating and doing the thing you’re doing (walking on Empire Grade Road).

By the time I got back into the town proper, when Empire Grade became High Street, near UCSC’s campus, my mom had heard from the school that I’d done the middle school equivalent of taking my ball and going home, and she pulled up in her teal chevy four-door and yelled, What the heck are you doing!

So that was my other Walk Book.

The final experience that made me feel able and even inclined to sleep outside by the highway each night, was this wilderness camp I went to at the base of Mount Shasta as a young teen. At the Waldorf school in Santa Cruz, where I went for middle school, every eighth grade goes on a class trip, they fundraise in the years leading up to it and go somewhere as a group to culminate their eight years together. I remember I wanted to go somewhere fun like Hawaii, where the previous year went, but one of the mothers of my classmates suggested this wilderness survival camp at Mount Shasta, and it took hold, and somehow it was decided that this was where we would go.

It was a week of learning to build lean-to shelters, Native American style, with branches and boughs and pine needles for a mattress, twine to tie the branches together, to make fires with flint and tinder—all of that—culminating in a vision quest, where you took a knife and a bottle of water and went out into the woods and found a spot and built a shelter and stayed in your spot for twenty-four hours. I was initially the most resistant to this trip for some reason but ended up being the most into it.

What really hit home was when I met my bro Viva my Junior year of high school, with whom I’d form a lifelong friendship to this day, and with whom I made many mixtapes under secret aliases on the internet, and that was one of the first things we connected on, that he knew all about that wilderness camp, he’d gone a bunch of times; and then my senior year of high school, late in December, he wanted to hit this winter version of the wilderness week, in the snow, only at this point it was the middle of the basketball season, and I was team captain, but I was also already committed to play at Swarthmore the next year, and had an ongoing beef going with the coach all season, and so when Viva proposed hitting that wilderness camp I felt like I had to go, and so I MISSED A DAMN GAME and we went way up on the mountain with no tent, and made a shelter, and tried to make a fire, only it smoldered all night, all the wood was frozen, I remember staying up all night hacking the log in half with my knife to get at the dry wood inside, but we nonetheless made it through—

And so, you know, by the end of that 2013 year when I was considering hitting the road and walking till it got dark each night (I’d end up leaving March 13, so a week before spring), that experience on Mount Shasta definitely made me feel able to do it.

~

BOLAÑO and AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING

Over the years, I often think about this line from Bolaño. About “autobiographical writing,” or “autofiction.” From Between Parentheses.

A literature of the I, of extreme subjectivity, of course must and should exist. But if all writers were solipsists, literature would turn … into a river of autobiographies, memoirs, journals that would soon become a cesspit … literature would cease to exist. Because who really cares about the sentimental meanderings of a professor?

Listen: I don’t have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that’s twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age. So long as the author of the tome in question has lived a remarkable life.

At first glance, it seems like he’s solely disparaging writing about oneself. But it’s actually solipsism that he’s railing against; and the line between solipsism and an outward-facing, world-accepting orientation, I’d wager, is actually neither topical nor formal. The Savage Detectives is, for all intents and purposes, a portrait of himself (through his alter ego “Arturo Belano”) and his best bro Mario Santiago (“Ulysses Lima”) and all the young poets, under nom-de-plumes, who peopled his joke (yet also deadly serious) literary movement as a young man — the visceral realists. On some level, The Savage Detectives is very much art from life, about him and his best friend, yet in its orientation, its form, is outwardly directed towards the world and towards finding Cesarea Tinajero, the forgotten woman poet who started his fake literary movement.

And so The Walk Book comes very much from this place. Of disgust with the ninniness, the clever righteousness, the insularity of the Institution and the Literary World. In barbarically literal fashion, it’s an act of breaking out of the cloistered walls (as is this drop). Of, like Amalfitano does, hanging up the geometry book on the clothesline outside, to let it get battered by the elements. All that 2013 year, my two twiddling book projects languished in solipsistic self-concern despite being, on the surface, extremely outwardly directed (the thesis was meant to follow the tenets of Benjamin’s unwritten book, the book he said he wanted to write, where there would be no text whatsoever of his own, his idea was to write a book consisting entirely of quotes from other books, but so seamlessly chosen and arranged that no additional text was necessary… and yet, it was insular and masturbatory). The Walk Book only records what it sees, “in plain speech…,” like its Don Quixote epigraph says, and it’s belligerently unadorned. Did something happen worth writing about? Say only that.

~

OVER THE YEARS

Initially, it was over 300,000 words. This was because, for the first 50 days of the walk — till Indiana, at the Eastern-Central Time Zone line — I was refusing to write, I’d simply take out my voice recorder, there on the highway, and report anything worth reporting, and the initial transcriptions of all these rants just went on and on. Because it spans the entire spring season (it ends on the solstice, that’s why it’s dropping today), it also spans all of Lent (the day I decided to walk was Ash Wednesday), and so it became this text I’d return each spring, revisiting each of the hundred days on the actual days on the actual walk, imbued with increasing significance the more I learned about the primordial significance of spring, and of Lent, which are of course the same thing.

In Fuccboi (2022), “Sean” is trying to work on a book called “The Walk Book” with editor bae, an agent from New York City he has a vaguely romantic involvement with. Their attempts to publish it, and cultivate their relationship, fail roundly.

In the years after Fuccboi came out, I was struggling to find the right book to put out next. I had one book I was already halfway finished with when Fuccboi sold, the sequel to Fuccboi, Edgeboi, about a young man who is trying with all his might to remain abstinent. The traumatic events that surrounded the completion of Fuccboi, however, changed the meaning of Edgeboi entirely, and I was having trouble seeing that project clearly. A slightly altered version of a chapter of this novel, now a novella, appeared recently in Playboy. At the same time, I was trying to write my new book, that fictionalized the universe that Fuccboi was spawned in, and the events it led to, and this was just so difficult and delicate a story to tell, I’ve rewritten it countless times over the past five years, and it’s looking like it just might come out on Dalkey Archive next fall. But so, in 2023, when The Paris Review asked me for new work, it was The Walk Book that I felt most comfortable sharing. The novelist Andrew Martin was working as an editor at the time, and he, along with Emily Stokes, both edited the long excerpt that got published in Issue 246. The majority of those edits stayed.

It’s one of those things where you can’t be out here living recklessly seeking out experiences just for the sake of writing about it, that’s psychotic; and yet… the core message Bolaño’s work demonstrates, and that I was enacting, is about an open, unpretentious, generous orientation towards the world

That’s what the Walk is about, and so it just made sense when Adam reached out to me earlier this year and proposed releasing it in this way.

The great AL JACOBS shot the author photo on the back, that was Adam’s idea, I think it looks pretty fucking sick.

Might do some events starting next week if we still have any books left, possibly with a second printing. Hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading.

Saturday May twenty-three two forty one pm a coffee shop on thirty seventh that’s randomly become my office spot whenever I’m down here, a chain coffee shop that’s attached to some office building, the music is too loud but I like how spaced out the tables and I’ve got good headphones, the perfect distance from A’s where I’m often posted at when I come down, far enough to feel “I walked somewhere” yet not too far that I can’t retreat back if I realize I’ve forgotten something, or for whatever other reason need to get back. And only here since it’s raining, this week has been hot and summery, have been working at the tables on the water, on the Hudson, the piers might be the most underrated area of New York City, abundant benches and grass and even full-on tables to sit at unmolested by the Capitalists. Residing in Vollmann Land these past months as I finished my Vollmann piece, and much of that final week before finishing it cocooned in the final third of Fathers and Crows, it gets really glorious around the five to six hundred page mark, up through Amantacha’s death on page 666, Amantacha was the first ever Native American Jesuit priest, the first to be baptized in a Church in France in the early 1600s, the son of a Huron chief, though Amantacha and the Huron people will get brutally extincted by the Iroquois with arquebuses given them by the other group of colonizers, the Hollanders, in I wanna say 1649, this is what Fathers and Crows winds inexorably towards over its near thousand pages, the final battle, after the fourth consecutive plague, between the Iroquois and the Huron peoples—

But so living in Vollmann Land in early Native American mode (in current day Quebec, Canada), and every month is a Native American Moon-month, Vollmann did all that work researching to put you into the Native American (and also the early Jesuit) headspace so seamlessly, what you realize reading from this time and place and outlook is how alive and prominent the rivers were not only for transportation and trade but as charged cosmic centers, spiritual portals, the rivers that flowed forcefully and directly to the Atlantic were the most important rivers, the Fleuve Saint-Laurent, the Susquehanna, the Hudson, and Vollmann draws a lot of these maps in Fathers and Crows, in all of his Seven Dreams books he does,

and finalizing the Walk Book for a limited release in a month, I recently redrew all the maps of every state I walked across, but emphasizing the main river in each state, we sleep on the fact that every squiggly border of a US state is a river or the coast.

In an ideal world, it wouldn’t be raining today, and I’d be back working by the Hudson River, like the priest king Amantacha; sometimes it be raining though.

2. Rain

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—WILLIAM T VOLLMANN, The Rifles (1994)

May 11, 11:57 P.M.

In my reading chair in my living room beneath my brightest lamp, the rest of the lights in the house off, trying to remember the earlier version of myself who could commit to the optimism of sitting down and writing a thing as if it mattered, could matter, been at it working on this Vollmann profile I’m working on, I’m going to need the money soon and so I know it will get done when that time comes, but in the meantime I’ve just been reading, reading the Vollmanns I haven’t read, or don’t remember well enough to write about, when Max and I interviewed him just over a month ago, throughout that conversation, the transcript of which I’ve been going over and massaging, it’s hard to know what exactly to cut and what to keep, in the Age of the Livestream it’s almost like everything should stay, the pauses, the awkward exchanges, but since it’s for a Publication I’m going to try to reduce it down to Vollmann’s best meteors of wisdom — the clock just struck twelve, I heard my watch go off somewhere across the room, so it’s May 12 now — but Vollmann mentioned a good number of his favorite protagonists throughout that conversation, most of whom I knew, though a couple I didn’t, or didn’t realize the significance of the first time I read the books in which they were referenced, or hadn’t realized they were the book’s hero, this is one of my goals in the piece, to indicate who the heroes in The Ice Shirt, in Fathers and Crows, in Europe Central are, and why, they each have a hero, Vollmann is at his core a heroic writer, I’m realizing, not to mention is himself a national hero— but so I’ve been reading every book with a hero he mentioned in our talk—

But what got me writing this wasn’t specifically the Vollmann, it’s this stuck static slightly confused feeling I’ve been feeling, that I always forget that Proust jolts me out of, a single page of Proust does it, I just woke up from a nap, all weekend I’ve been working on various tasks with more pressing deadlines than the Vollmann, reading and thinking and touching up my draft since I’ll be driving up north to work with Eric first thing in the morning and all week, I worked all last week with him doing carpentry again, remodeling a kitchen, tearing out the old one and replacing it with new flooring and sheetrock and paint and a new sink and counter and the nice new cabinets Eric made—

Paused to roll a cig and now out on my stoop smoking sitting in my fold out chair, 12:06 now, listening to Nils Frahm’s top songs just playing however they play, completely dark night out can’t see a single star, and it’s a bit too cold to stay sitting out here, and I’m just about out of propane for my little Buddy heater I’ll often spark beneath my fold out table so I can sit outside indefinitely—

Back inside and like I was saying it was uncanny how I just grabbed one of the Prousts at random, Volume V, The Captive and The Fugitive, I read them all in college and I’ll reread Swann’s Way but I never randomly open to one of the middle ones, it was only out because I got into a thing on the pod some months back when people were saying Proust was seven volumes and I was convinced it was six, like My Struggle, since Knausgaard supposedly only read Proust while writing My Struggle and that’s why he made his series six volumes, to mimic Proust (it’s because “the Captive” and “the Fugitive” are sometimes individual volumes, but more commonly are a single volume, making them total six volumes…)— but I read a single page of the Proust and immediately wanted to start writing in this immediate curious way again, it was amazing—

How it starts, day is finally dawning, I wonder if this is the same night he tries to go to sleep in the first volume, At daybreak, my face still turned to the wall, and before I had seen above the big window-curtains what shade of colour the first streaks of light assumed, I could already tell what the weather was like—, it’s gotta be the same night, what is it about this mode, which Bernhard, which Fosse, do so well, where no time passes real time, very little time passes, and we fold our memories and scenes and observations and whatever scant wisdom we were able to pick up along this short blip of time we’re here into that limited stretch of book-time, I just love that mode, and I realized it’s not just that Proust moves so patiently and perceptively and clausally expansively through time in his work that makes it infectious, it’s the combination of this sort of enforced myopia, the limiting of one’s purview to what you’re focused on — some type of bird chirping layered over this sort of metallic organ in the Nils Frahm now, I’m tempted to look up to check the song title but want to keep my fingers typing, this just feels good to let things flow and bleed and leak out like this, I’ll check back on it and let you know later — but so it’s something about Proust focusing on his memories and knowing, as a reader, that you’re going to stay locked in on his core memories and him sitting in bed thinking about his dead mom and himself as a child trying to go to sleep, to make it through the night…

and I’m now naturally segueing into the second part of what makes Proust and good literature good is his melancholy, his Okayness with the sadness, I’ve been editing the talk I did with Max, I’ll post it soon so you guys can flame me in the comments and in your tweets when I’m literally just gifting you gleaming nuggets of light in this dark bleak unforgiving world, but I don’t know if he or Harold or anyone for that matter agrees with me, though that’s neither here nor there, it’s probably a temperamental preference, but when you don’t avoid the melancholy with mania, when you just sit and dwell in the melancholy, find a quiet strength despite it, this is what Proust does, this is what good Literature is, in any case it’s what made me start typing this now.

~

~

12:22. A calmer Frahm song now, just piano with a bit of reverb, I just put my feet up on the coffee table in a weird semi-leg-crossed position except I’m too far away so I’m sort of elongated, I feel a bit like a praying mantis, or a woman in labor, but it’s comfortable for now—

I think I’ve just been feeling such a deep core cosmic sadness about some recent developments that I won’t go into fully just yet, but will if I’m forced to, it’s just that so many people, I feel, experience such crushing hardships, and are in so much pain, and there are so few things that can ameliorate these facts of life, the strange courses our lives take, the actions taken that you can’t take back, conditions you find yourself in that you can’t, for the life of you, just bootstrap your way out of, and there are so many lazy toxic fake remedies to these facts that are pushed on us, that we push on each other, as if there’s a cure, and there are so few things that can induce any lasting calm, and one of them, I must believe, is to try, however you can, to shape these core pains into some type of concerted action, some type of crystallized art, mold them into concentrated compact communicable text-blocks, and it’s just so nonsensical and maddening all this chatter about

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It’s Monday morning of 3/2, I’m out on the porch upstate, it’s iced over still but sunny out, I feel cleansed from a weekend of revelry, some ancient primeval fire festival I manifested with the boys, it was Wilton’s birthday and he was in town so we linked upstate with Eric in the forest and got incredibly sparked and lit a huge bonfire, and sat by the bonfire till round 3 AM. The moon was beamed and Jupiter was blazing in the sky, exalted in the sign of the Crab. The moon will go full at around 6 am eastern tomorrow morning—3/3—and it will be a total lunar eclipse, which means the earth will pass directly in between the sun and the moon, as they sit directly across from each other on the zodiacal wheel (what a full moon is).

All that night by the bonfire I kept trying, through the shiitake mushrooms and coca leaf and countless cans, to explain to the boys that this near-full moon we were witnessing marked the start a long 6,000 year cycle we’d just stepped into—since Neptune and Saturn, last week, went conjunct at the World Point, or zero degrees of Aries, starting over the entire zodiacal cycle together—and what this means, and why this meeting and spontaneous bonfire had to be some ancient pagan festival we’d unwittingly tapped into to inaugurate this new era,

—only of course I was way too sparked to make any kind of sense,

—so jotting all this now, to explain what I was trying to say…

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February 8

The wind is whipping so fast it’s lifting up clouds of snow-mist and hurling them across the plain. During porch-smokes the Buddy heater stays lit if I make two wind-walls with my legs, singeing my shins slightly. Keep imagining the haircut I’ll give myself but don’t want to deal with the mess. The Venerable Bede in AD 700 was firing off letters to Northern Heathens instructing them not only when and how to properly celebrate Easter, but how to cut their hair. A proper tonsure means fixing your crown of thorns, perpetually rocking thorns. Your hair is your crown. Feel like this used to be part of my editing process, cutting my own hair. It’s elsewhere, in Samson, in Judges. In the instructions to the samurai in Hagakure (1716).1 Where else. I can feel myself copying Greta’s flow right now, but her flow felt influenced by mine, from before, and this feels good again, reciprocating flows. When did it stop feeling like this. I get it it’s biological they just want to feel safe. Sometimes I feel like he would have hated all of this, like you guys ruined everything. Other times I’m not thinking anything whatsoever about any of it.

February 9

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June 2019

I couldn’t forget the version of myself that walked the city alone nightly, jobless and desperate.

I was happy to be employed. That everything was different now.

But things were so different now bc I’d been so alone so long. Bc that contrast.

Couldn’t forget that.

Not that it was difficult to not.

The EMT going steady with EMT bro. The editor done done. And on the first, I helped N pack his shit and move to his new spot, with his girl, in South Philly.

No one to hang with anymore.

This was fine.

It was time to write again.

My thing had become, after work or on an off-day, walking down 41st to Market, hanging a right, and walking down 42nd to Pasquale’s. Beer n pizza spot you could cop a sixer and drink in, at one of the tables there. They gave you a cup and everything.

I’d been stalking the incel.

Keeping tabs on him.

On his mental health developments.

Never liking any of his tweets or even following him, for fear of co-cancellation by association. But doing Twitter daily almost solely for the purpose of checking in on him.

I don’t know why, exactly.

He’d snapped. No one who was previously going to publish him was going to anymore. And no one who might in the future would anymore, either, given all the spazzing.

He was pretty clearly succumbing to a rage that, by expressing it publicly, would further isolate him.

This was pretty clearly not the move.

It wasn’t till my cousin E’s birthday, last January, just pre-hospitalization, that I reached out.

Tried to ‘help.’

Turnt that night, the last night I’d turn up before the full-on hospital crash out to out-crash all crash outs.

Seeing the incel tweet that he’d self-pubbed his book.

That, if anyone wanted to read it, to dm him for a pdf advance.

Dunno why but, the minute I saw it, I immediately and unthinkingly hit him like Bro what’s good hit me w that pdf.

I wound through the beer tunnel to access the beers. Settled on a sixer of Narraganset ($5.99). A lil 6-oz. sippy cup to pour it into.

I nestled into a corner table. By the window. Facing away from it so I wouldn’t get distracted by Outside.

Removed my single-side printed Walk Book manuscript.

Looked at it for two seconds before flipping it over.

Couldn’t do it.

It was time to move on. To let go.

Whipped out the uni-ball and continued writing my next one—the one that would change my life—on the back.

I was three beers and one chapter in when I got a dm from the incel.

Sean! How are you?

So chipper, so out of sync with his online persona. Like it was a troll, it almost seemed.

Only it wasn’t, I was almost positive.

Was lit so responded immediately.

Like You know. I’m out here. Grinding.

Told him I was thinking about moving to NYC. To do an MFA.

Still didn’t think I was gonna. Know how I’d be able. Was just saying it to hear how saying it aloud sounded.

He said Yo me too!

Well. Not the MFA. But moving there. To NYC.

Oh damn! I said.

Yeah, he said. Got a publishing deal!

They’re flying me out!

Bro wut?! I said.

Amazing, bro. Happy for you.

We gotta link out there, he said.

For fkn sure bro.

…

And your health? I wanted to know. You staying active? Getting out there? Meeting ppl?

He said Not so much. Started going in about this artist girl he was obsessed with. Couldn’t get over. Whom all his poems were about.

Aw man, I said. I know about that.

How you mean.

I told him I’d been living blocks from my ex, whom I, to some degree, had followed out here. Whom I kept lapsing back into. Kept wanting to be near.

Ah. Can’t do that, he said. Follow a girl.

Anyway, I said. Why I’m tryna get out! Why I gotta find a way to.

He asked if I had anything I wanted published on his site. Something no one else would publish.

I thought about this. Scanned my sent emails for pieces I’d sent myself.

He’d written about getting wrongly accused of stalking. I didn’t know whether he had or not.

I knew he was angry. That he’d had lapses into psychotic states where he’d spazzed. Would likely have future lapses / spaz outs.

I wanted him to settle. To help him find a way to.

It was on me to help him. I’d be able to.

I wouldn’t want to be associated with him if/when he spazzed on women in the future. Like he possibly had in the past.

I wasn’t saying he had or hadn’t. I just didn’t know.

Still. Boxing out the lowlifes, the sinners, the cancelled. Wasn’t the wave.

I found a poem I’d written, the only one I’d ever written. That dealt with something so difficult to look at it had required the ambiguity of poetry to even attempt to.

I didn’t write it with the intention of sharing it. It was something I’d written to address directly some core pain-rage I knew was down there, could only access peripherally. I wrote it for that purpose: so I could look at it at least peripherally. Then recite, like a mantra, in the future. To keep from losing my shit.

SILENT POEM

We married shortly after

The baby

We of course

Aborted

But with tats

In place

Of rings.

Hers an acorn

For how small

A thing trees

Once were;

Mine a sailboat

Eulogizing my days

Of travel.

I was finished

Had done enough

Was Here Now,

I said on the way

To CVS

For Lubriderm.

Getting, staying

Ready. So next time.

But these rings,

I couldn’t help

But keep

Thinking,

Are permanent.

How then could you

Could we have.

Oh but we didn’t,

She’d said.

I did.

Still, I maintain

That someone

Thing

Else did.

Only never

Aloud,

Only to

Myself,

So as to not

Burden

Belabor her

Needlessly.

I pasted it into a message, hit send, and told him I’d have to talk to who it was about before I even considered sharing it, but.

He went quiet a sec, reading it.

I cracked my last tall can. Surveyed Pasquale’s.

It had filled up since I’d last looked up, who knows how long ago. Since I’d cranked the volume on my playlist, rested my elbows on my knees, and gotten to thumb-typing. Sitting alone facing the wall, in the corner.

There was a couple on a date, across the way, at a two top. A group of eight next to them, playing Magic the Gathering, at a big circular table. The Sixers game on on the TV, in the corner.

The whole place humming with convos I couldn’t overhear over my music.

The incel messaged back.

Sean! Love this! Made me feel so much. Tysm for sharing.

I thanked him for reading.

Lmk if you get around to talking to her. I’d love to post this!

Later that week, on my next day off. After grinding at Reanimator all afternoon.

I started to text her. Before, on a last-minute whim, calling.

Straight to voicemail.

Tf?

It was a little after 5. Didn’t think she had classes this late.

Was her phone on DND?

I tried again. Same thing.

Feeling blood rushing to my head. Like This bitch. Thinking she’d blocked me.

Oh so I’m a stalker now.

My fingers got to typing.

Wow. I see I’m blocked now. Sick, dude.

Send.

Immediately regretting that.

Nah I mean, I guess I don’t know that. My bad. But had something I wanted to talk to you about! Hmu when ya can.

Then, a few days later.

Ok, I guess I’m cut off. I’ve been thinking about why it’s taken me so long to move on. I wrote this to genuinely try to understand. I shared it with someone who tryna post it, and I was considering doing so. But wanted to check that it was ok, or how you felt about it, first. Given what’s in it.

Then pasting the poem into the body of a text and hitting send.

And then, a few days after, deeply regretting that. So shooting off another text, taking it back.

A few days after that, getting mad at her radio silence and spazzing on her again.

By mid-month, there were a dozen blue messages in our text thread, all down the right side.

Read chapter 1.

The reason why Faulkner is goated is that all the foundational questions he’s asking—what a possessive man might do about a disobedient woman (what Adam and Eve is about), how to curb the urge to control women and people, how to find one’s way to the Good amidst possessiveness, greed, vice (what all great stories are about, starting with Genesis and continuing in the Gospels)—these questions are not theoretical for Faulkner. They’re real, he feels them—and it shows that he does. His novels, then, chart the miraculous, courageous triumph of light over darkness IN HIMSELF. The reader is invited, indeed induced to feel these core shadow urges in themselves, in all their horror, and led to see them through to something different. It’s no triviality that his most formative, important story, The Sound and the Fury, is set over Easter weekend (April 6, 7 and 8, 1928), the dates of the events that redeem the Fall of man. Faulkner’s redemptions are always of women: Miss Quentin escapes the tomb of the oppressive patriarchal home on Easter Sunday morning; Lena Grove escapes at the end of A Light in August; and even Addie Bundren gets her cutting, unsettling say from beyond the grave, amidst the chorus of her needy bumbling offspring, in As I Lay Dying. And yet, the path to this point of on-paper literary humanism is not pretty: one senses Faulkner has to wrestle himself to get there, in the realest way. This very real wrestling is what is lacking in contemporary literature: One never doubts whether Ben Lerner (bless his soul) feels so possessively and wrongly towards a woman that it could be legitimately problematic. One never for one second fears that Franzen could have wrong politics. I needn’t even mention Sally Rooney‘s political pamphleteering. Adam is NOT HAPPY when Eve returns from her foray with the snake, and it’s unclear from the telling, as evidenced by the range of interpretations of the fall, whether Eve is legitimately to blame. It’s a legitimate fall and failure, with stakes, that results from this story. If you don’t read this story in this way, of how you might be complicit, you’re reading it wrong. If you don’t confront the Judas in yourself, filled with impotent rage, greed, possessive misogyny at Christ’s forgiveness of Mary Magdalene, despite her lifetime of whoring, you’re not reading the gospels right. Indeed, if you’re not confronting the heroic, seismic act Mary Magdalene achieves, of forgiving herself—allowing yourself to be forgiven, the stunning grace required to do so—you’re not reading the gospels right. In order to resurrect, you must truly descend. In order to find your way back, you must truly lose yourself in the desert. Must truly go there. Faulkner goes there. “Once a bitch, always a bitch, what I say. I says you’re lucky if her playing out of school is all that worries you. I says she ought to be down there in that kitchen right now, instead of up there in her room, gobbing paint on her face and waiting for six n——s that can’t even stand up out of a chair unless they’ve got a pan full of bread and meat to balance them, to fix breakfast for her….” starts Jason the money watcher’s monologue—the money watcher of the Compson clan, like Judas was Christ’s—set on Good Friday of Faulkner‘s 30th year. Jason continues, a bit later: “I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I’m going to give her. That’s the only way to manage them. Always keep them guessing. If you can’t think of any other way to surprise them, given them a bust in the jaw.” And of course, Jason gets ridiculed in the end when Miss Quentin steals back all the money he’d stolen from Caddy, that Caddy had sent Jason for Quentin. But it’s only by looking into the abyss, by going fully into the darkness and finding your way back, that you can lead a reader who finds himself fully in the darkness back to the light. It’s no easy task. Virtuous posturing, self-righteous sneering, will not do. If you go there, today, you will be castigated, that is to be sure. And yet—this remains the task.

5.

Late-May 2019

Called my grandpa W after the dentist one day.

Night sesh, second of the day. To finish up a cap my Medicaid-covered dental-student dentist Drew was taking his sweet-ass time on.

Cramming to get everything done by school year’s end, his finals. My itemized cavities-to-fill, crowns-to-crown, his sylla-bus.

Steadying that hand still in need of work.

And needling. Jamming that ’caine all up in there, over-shooting it every time ever since he’d undershot it once, and numbing my whole damn face.

Not even realizing how clumsily he was jamming it in till I felt how gracefully Dr. See, in periodontics, did it last week. 

Unaware that it could feel different, till I felt how different she did it. How soft her touch.

 ~

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4.

May 2019

The second time I went out to NYC for an MFA thing. This time for an admitted student’s night. And to see/harass the editor.

To try to.

Double the attendance of the last. Folks flying out from all over for this. Still feeling like this was some fun game I was playing.

FULL FUNDING OR BUST.

This one at a different location, nearer to campus proper.

Like they were gradually allowing us closer and closer.

Some Faculty House type spot.

After some inspirational spiels about how we were the future, how this spot was the plug spot of all plug spots, they unleashed us into a mingle pool.

Open bar, eats.

Looking around like So these the type kooks that get admitted to shit like this.

~

I got too lit, bullshitting rambling basking in the performance of my newfound functional, social self.

Late in the night, out front chain-smoking talking folks’ ears off, went back inside to nab my pack, inside of which was the first part of Fuccboi, handwritten on printer paper.

Gone.

As was everyone. The party had ended.

Panicking.

Harassing the staff on site for where it might be.

Convinced one of them had nabbed it, out of spite for how privileged we were. A spite I fully understood/felt.

Telling them The only version of my novel is in there. Find that shit!

They looked.

Then told me Hit public safety the next morning. That everything was on camera if someone had nabbed it. That it would be there if someone returned it.

~

I’d arranged to crash with a friend from undergrad I hadn’t seen in years, who worked in tech and lived way downtown.

It was hours after we’d arranged to meet. And, given I had to be back at 6 a.m. the next morning, soon as the public safety office opened.

I asked Daniel, a young writer from Ohio I’d been broing out with if I could crash. He had a hotel room a couple blocks away and wasn’t flying back to Ohio till Sunday.

He seemed slightly unsure. Or actually, he didn’t. Or, if he did, which I was convinced he was, he didn’t show it.

We pit-stopped for pizza and a sixer, despite being double-digit open-bar beers in already, before heading back. Ranting about how we were gonna change the game.

He did standup. Was coming to NYC to do comedy, too.

I said I was a comic also. Or, that I wrote comically. Or that, unless whatever I thought to write made me laugh (or cry), I didn’t write it.

I said I got the sixer. He said Sweet, I’ll get one too.

I told him about Fuccboi. About each of the “baes” I was writing about. That everything was lost, now that I’d lost it. That I was meeting one the next morning.

“Which one?” he said.

“Which bae you mean?”

“Which bae.”

“Editor.”

*

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I spent all of April back home in Japan. My baba passed away mid-March, so the initial impetus of the trip was to attend her funeral, in the beginning of April. In the outskirts of Tokyo, where she lived all her adult life, where I was born. But it had been so long since I’d been back, I decided to stay out for longer; for the second ten days of April, I visited my dad in Hokkaido, where he’s lived the past twelve years, and who I’ve only visited once since. And for the last ten days, I stayed in Tokyo, at various Airbnb’s and at my baba’s. The great started a new lit mag, The Places Review, and I’m writing a three-parter about the whole thing for him. Here’s Part 1:

The Places Review

Japan: Part 1

Thursday, April 24 — 10 PM…

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a year ago · 12 likes · The Places Review and Sean Thor Conroe

The last day roaming away from Shinjuku Station, the Shinjuku Gardens cost 500 yen, something about that against gardens plus too early in the day on our trek to enter A morning of news and achievements on our screens, Pluto in Aquarius means

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Good Friday 2019

Totally burnt after a full day of work in a way I hadn’t been in longer than I could remember.

Still no one to hang with, like people do with others after long days of work, but OK.

OK with tall cans (3, $1 each) from the beer spot one block NE, and General Tso’s ($5) from the Chinese spot across from the beer spot.

Pleased with this being something I was able to do now, without shame/guilt.

I’d earned this.

~

Patronizing spots directly north of me on foot still somewhat new.

It wasn’t that I was shook; I wasn’t shook anywhere. Just felt like a turf thing.

Like my presence north of Haverford was so anomalous as to be implicitly ostentatious.

Like not a single white or white-adjacent person roaming here-abouts bro what.

But since I’d started delivering veggies, I’d been driving straight north on 41st, to Girard.

Going north part of the daily route now.

Having eased into it with my whip, walking it was now whatever.

~

Something had just gone down, either in the NBA or in rap, I was listening to either Stephen A Smith or DJ Akademics on YouTube, it was a ten-minute video, I remember because that was the perfect amount of time to walk to and wait for Chinese food.

In soccer shorts, Adidas slides, a beater.

Holding my phone out front of my face, smiling quietly to myself.

Huge crew of youngins pulled up, the whip idling out front to keep slapping tunes out of. A few girls but dudes mostly, a couple of em looking keyed.

One dude coming real close to my face with a deadpan serious look, going “You want blow I got blow.”

“Oh word? Hell yeah,” I said. “But I’m straight.”

He goin Why you LYin, wringing his hands super exaggerated and slightly violently, to see if I flinched, felt like.

My eyes my instincts locked in tensed up when he first went to do that, for that split second, before I recognized what he was doing and realized I could always swing fast if he swung at me. Plus his was the only energy, of the group’s, that was wild like that. So I was good. 

And anyway, if he swung at or tried to step to me otherwise, that didn’t matter either. The worst that could happen was I died / got killed. 

But when I didn’t flinch and he noticed me not flinch, I realized that he had in fact been seeing whether I would flinch.

Yo you wilding, I said, big-broing slightly but with a friendly grin he had to look bashfully away from.

I retreated into the corner. ‘Giving them space to order.’ Till mine was ready.

~

Couldn’ta been more than seven minutes after that—the vid was still going—that I—we all—heard a Kendrick DOOT DOOT but that sounded more like a PAP PAP and then a SKRRRR of wheels skidding out.

Peeking up the street, out the Chinese spot’s entrance, catching sight of an SUV flipping a hard U back in the direction we were, but up onto the wide sidewalk, other side of the parking meters.

It plonked down onto the street, off the curb, to shadow an Oldsmobile two-door headed our way.

“Ohhhhh fuuuuh,” I said, instinctively booking it back into the corner and standing back-against-the-wall like a spy approaching a corner he was about to spy around.

Except this was to make myself thin enough to be least likely to get hit with a stray.

Everyone else lined up next to me, against the walls.

The girls going I DONT LIKE THIS I DONT LIKE THIS.

The dudes thinking this but not saying it.

The Chinese lady behind the counter just going about her business, putting plastic forks and napkins and soy and duck sauce into plastic bags. Because the bulletproof glass.

~

The Oldsmobile then the SUV whizzed past, the SUV a half-length behind and driving in the shoulder, so sorta next to it. Like if he shot we’d be directly in the line of fire.

All of us going Ahhhhh! Bruuuh! Yo chill-chill-chill like we were all going down the first dip on a gnarly roller coaster together.

Once it passed, one of the dudes bravely stuck his head out to see what was good.

“Oh we straight,” he said. “They ain’t coming back.” 

A couple dudes, then me, then the girls tentatively stepped away from the wall. All looking at each other, eyebrows raised, like Duuuuude!

Till the Chinese lady went General Tso’s! No not you, not you, batting down coked-up dude’s outstretched hands and holding it away from the window, till he fell back, and she could safely hand it off to me.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is Chapter 2 of my novella, Edgeboi, written 2020-2021. Read chapter 1.

2.

April 2019

Off-day grinding at Reanimator, new coffee spot on 48th and Spruce the homie N put me on to.

Writing Fuccboi (2022), reading Dept. of Speculation (2014). The editor’s rec.

Transcribing this when I chanced upon it.

Imaging studies have found that the pain involved in romantic breakups is not just emotional. Similar areas to the ones that process physical assault light up in the brains of the recently jilted.

Immediately wanting to text the editor this. Before remembering.

I no longer did that. No longer did thirsty reach-outs.

So texted N instead.

Wanting to tell him. To explain its implications.

That I wasn’t just being a big baby refusing to move on.

That my body was undergoing pain akin to physical assault.

~

N said Come thru.

Asked if I wanted to co-walk Prez, N’s roomie’s dog N was dog-sitting, when I pulled up.

I was enthusiastically about this. Said as much.

Lil Prez seemed to hear me, because he started doing a horse-neighing thing, rearing up on his back legs and sorta batting me on my legs with his front paws.

Needless to say, we hit the bowl one time before heading out.

~

Outdoor Prez was so damn funny.

I’d only ever seen Prez indoors.

Just spastically going this way, going that. Sniffing this, starting to pee on that. And then changing his mind and stopping.

Like Nope! That ain’t it!

Waiting for the perfect thing to pee on.

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Inferno by Dante, tr. Hollander

Purgatorio by Dante, tr. Hollander

Paradiso by Dante, tr. Hollander

The Aeneid by Virgil, tr. Mendelbaum

The New Science by Giambattista Vico

Mimesis and Dante: Poet of a Secular World by Auerbach

DANTE IN SEZZE

First I read the Commedia (1321), Dante’s three-part, 14,233-line, encyclopedic, divine poem, was in 2013. I was twenty-two. I read it quickly, reading minimal annotations—the Mendelbaum translation, during my final semester of college.

I got the basics: Dante has been banished and exiled, and so reads his favorite poet Virgil, who guides him out of the darkness he finds himself in; he writes a poem mirroring this process, imagining Virgil leading him through Hell and up the mountain of Purgatory; before eventually being led up to Paradise by a woman Beatrice.

If you asked me what the meaning of the poem was, I’d likely say something like,

When you find yourself exiled, castigated by your peers, in a crisis you see no way out of, go inward; find a literary father, read him diligently, let him lead you through your hell of unknowing; embark on the treacherous path of alchemizing your life into art, following the precepts of your chosen guide; and only then, once you’ve ventured through that darkness, climbed the mountain of Purgatory, can you let a lover lead you back into the world.

This is a perfectly reasonable reading. Dante can’t return to his home city of Florence, he’s been kicked out by his wife and wife’s family for political reasons, and so he relates to and retells Book VI of Virgil’s the Aeneid, in which Aeneas, after being ousted from his home city of Troy by the Greeks, in the Trojan war, descends into the underworld on his way to Rome.

Dante, went my twenty-two-year-old thinking, was just rigorously reading his favorite author, emulating his form, charting how he led him him out of a crisis, before being led by his lover Beatrice back into the world.

And this would prove relevant to what I was on then: I’d just spent that year reading and writing about Bolaño, my chosen guide, for my undergrad thesis, living with my girlfriend. And then would get exiled, when my thesis got rejected and I wasn’t able to graduate due to needing to complete a final credit and being unable, for financial reasons, to return.

And so, in 2014, on the heels of this maiden, somewhat surface reading of Dante, I did what my Virgil (Bolaño) said to do, which was, as I saw it, to start walking across the country, sleeping wherever I ended up each day, and only setting something down if it was worth setting down. And only once I’d done this, I thought, could I face up to my girlfriend, my Beatrice, and return to her and the world.

I’d go on to walk for 100 days—the same number of cantos in Dante—following the dictum first of my Virgil, Bolaño, of seeing what’s outside the window, writing in direct contact with the world, doing like Amalfitano, the geometry teacher in part two of 2666 who, while going mad, stays calm and solves the geometry problem no one else even understands by hanging the book outside on a clothesline, to let it get battered by the elements. Before, like Dante, after climbing the mountain of Purgatory (walking across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and mind-numbingly flat Kansas), I’d do like Dante does at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, as he approaches the Garden of Eden, leave Virgil behind and start following Beatrice—let my girlfriend pick me up and start a life together in California.

(Although, perhaps notably, I actually stopped at the base of the mountains—the Rockies—so perhaps I only made it through Hell; in any case, this is what, for the past ten years, Dante has meant to me.)

I. Holy Week…

It wasn’t till this past spring, till right around the spring equinox of my thirty-third year, that I felt moved, indeed divinely called, to revisit Dante.

We were coming up on the three-year anniversary of a catastrophic Holy Week, during which three things happened in quick, shocking succession: the novel I’d been working on with my mentor and guide, Gian, the editor and publisher of Tyrant Books, for the previous eighteen months had finally, or so it seemed, been birthed into completion; my girlfriend Kyra, who I’d been with for the past eighteen months, had an adverse reaction to her medication and took her own life; and not 72 hours later, I spoke to Gian for the last time—he’d been in town, visiting from his home in Italy, to try to secure investors for the new press he wanted my book to spearhead—on Palm Sunday, I’d later realize. He would overdose that night. No one had heard from him, and we wouldn’t realize this till Holy Wednesday. And Kyra’s friends and family and I would bury Kyra that Friday—Good Friday.

Around this time, I was considering traveling back to Gian’s home in Sezze, Italy, like I’d done over Christmas of 2020, when Gian flew me out to do final edits on my book. We’d worked on it over a year; we’d done four rewrites. This was peak Covid, a month after the 2020 election, the travel restrictions were heavy. But it was a thing Gian was adamant on doing, editing in person. He was generating hype for the new press. This was months before he died.

Shortly after his death, Catherine, a writer and close friend of Gian’s, started a foundation, the Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation for Literature and the Arts, to fly writers out like I did that Covid Christmas, to hold residencies like he used to hold, to keep his memory alive. She’d given me an open invitation to come out and stay on the property, in a mentorship capacity, during the residency.

Dante had been important to Gian, it was one of the books Gian compared my novel to, in handwriting (if jokingly, in that way where you can’t tell whether or not it’s a joke), on the back of the last version he edited. Like Dante, we were inventing a new language, a new type of vernacular.

But so I’d already been thinking about Holy Week, about the meaning of stories of death and rebirth, starting to understand the connections between Christ’s Good Friday descent and older, pagan underworld harrowings, reading Holy Week texts only, trying to make sense of the utterly nonsensical, when I came upon another discovery.

Dante’s Commedia is not just a retelling of Aeneas’s descent and resurrection; it also mirrors Christ’s—it starts on Good Friday and spans one week.

And Beatrice wasn’t just a symbol; she was a real woman, who died in 1290, at age 25, ten years before Inferno is set.

More, the day Dante harrows Hell, the day the Inferno is set, is Good Friday as it’s observed in the classic Christian calendar, March 25—the same day I signed Gian’s contract, the day Kyra died. “Dante could hardly have chosen a more propitious date for a beginning: March 25 was the anniversary of the creation of Adam, of the conception and of the crucifixion of Christ.” (Inf. I.1, notes)

This hits me like lightning.

I didn’t realize Dante was retelling the story of Holy Week, nor that Beatrice was a real woman, who lived and died, whose soul Dante is re-communing with.

It’s at this moment that I realize I must reread Dante and return to Sezze.

II. Dante thinks he’s a sacred scribe...

Dante is midway through his life—around the age Christ lived to—when he finds himself in a dark wood, the straight way lost. In a state “so bitter death is hardly more so.” (Inf. I.7)

He is, if not explicitly suicidal, feeling a type of crisis like he wouldn’t mind if he died.

The poem begins right before dawn on Maundy Thursday, the night Christ goes out and is betrayed, in the year 1300, and it remains Maundy Thursday through the second Canto, in which he encounters Virgil, the Roman poet from right before Christ (70–19 BC).

Right off the bat, Dante is “trying to remember” all he’s seen, telling the reader he’s doing his best to. Claiming that this all happened just like he’s about to tell it. Worried people will think him mad for telling of how he did. “I am not Aeneas, nor am I Paul” (II.32)—Aeneas meaning the hero of Virgil’s Aeneid who, after losing the battle of Troy, on his way to Italy to found Rome, washes up on the shore near Naples and descends into the underworld to speak to his father and his deceased lover Dido; and the apostle Paul who, in AD 55, twenty years after Christ’s death and resurrection and ascension, writes that he too ascended to heaven, “was caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words, which man is not permitted to speak.” (II Cor. 12:4)

Dante adds, “Neither I nor any think me fit for this… I fear it may be madness.” (Inf. II.33-35)

Dante, as a regular guy, is comparing himself to the cthonic heroes of yore, who ventured into the underworld and resurrected back to earth to tell about all they saw (Aeneas goes into Dis before he can found Rome; Odysseus, on Circe’s orders, in Book XI of The Odyssey, must harrow Hades before he can return home to Ithaca; and the myths of Hercules and Orpheus both involve journeys into the underworld).

Dante is also claiming he ascended to the heavens, meaning the literal heavens, from planet to planet, star to star, in order of ascending distance from earth according to the Ptolemaic system of his time (the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—where Beatrice leads him, in Paradiso), till he sees the light that illuminates all the stars, “the Eternal light,” (XXXIII.124) that is to say God himself, at which point, overwhelmed by all he’s seen, his wings fail, his mind is struck by a bolt of lightning, (XXXIII.140-2) and he tumbles back down to earth.

The Commedia ends with him saying he must rely only on his will, desire, and Love—the Holy Spirit—to try to communicate all he’s seen.

He’s claiming, in other words, to have been granted a divine vision, to have the status of a sacred scribe, like the authors of the Bible—Paul, John—were inspired by God to write what they wrote about Christ.

And the timeline of his poem reflects this explicitly: once through his despair and confusion on Maundy Thursday, Dante enters Hell proper, descending, for the next twenty-four hours, deeper and deeper into the underworld, completing his descent in Judas’s circle, at the end of Good Friday. Just like Christ enters the underworld—is crucified and buried—on Good Friday in the year 34.1

He then takes another twenty-four hours—Holy Saturday—to travel back up to the earth’s surface, like Christ laid in the tomb all of Holy Saturday.

Before, like Christ resurrects at dawn on Easter Sunday, popping back up to the earth’s surface, to begin his ascent up Purgatory, on Easter Sunday morning.

III. Vico... cthonic heroes

Dante’s project, and for that matter the story of Christ, concerns, above all, the idea of incarnation. That is, the divine in man.

In line with the Medieval troubadour love poetry tradition Dante comes out of, it is the mystical beloved he describes who becomes the Christlike incarnated one; it is through the description and deification of, in Dante’s case, Beatrice, that an entirely new kind of incarnation—the perfection of the divine, mixed with the particularity of the human—exists in a single form. This is the subject of Dante’s early book Vita Nuova, written about Beatrice before her untimely death at age 25, a series of poems loving her and elevating her to a divine status.

And the story of Christ, as Auerbach explains in his 1929 book Dante: Poet of a Secular World, marks the shift in human consciousness where the divine, previously something above and outside of man, incarnates into man; more, into a common man, who takes common men—fisherman and publicans—as his disciples, and as a literary work includes incidental encounters, as it were extras in scenes previously populated entirely by semi-divine protagonists with fixed fates. The gods and heroes in Classical myth played out fates inherent to their character. Aeneas marked a shift, since he is told by the Gods that he has a sacred mission (to found Rome), and must carry out that mission, a hitherto unheard-of idea, of a common man serving as a vessel for divinity. Dante continues this progression of expanding the breadth of people allowed to be included in the drama of divinity—Dante, the storyteller and protagonist, is just a regular guy claiming that this supernatural journey happened, that with his own eyes he saw his sacred vision.

Dante claims, on the one hand, that those who, hiding behind positions of divinity, act in base, selfish ways, are the most unforgivable sinners—those who pridefully believe they are divinely ordained but are not. At the same time, Dante believes that the divine, through proper humility, contemplation, love and knowledge can radiate from and flow through the flesh.

Of course, how could he not think that, if he considers himself to be a sacred scribe—a vessel for the Holy Spirit to flow through him.

The audacity of Dante, what Goethe, in 1821, described as his “repulsive and often disgusting greatness,” (Mimesis, 185) is how far he extends the reach of the divine into the incidental and the everyday. For Dante, it’s On this day, in this specific year, that I looked over my left shoulder, and I promise you, reader, I saw this—something he obviously didn’t see. Putting his most random contemporary right next to the most mythical archetype. And yet, despite this bravado, Dante emphasizes that contact with the divine is about humility; he frequently quakes with fear at what he’s seen. If done correctly, one’s association with an older, archetypal story is an act of humbling, a submission of yourself beneath something higher, a recognition of your cosmic smallness. Which then, through faith, becomes something you can bind yourself to (religare, literally to bind).

*

This progression Auerbach charts only really started to make sense to me once I traced his research back to who he was reading. How did the notion of the divine, something higher than man, that man must humble himself beneath, begin in the first place?

Writing four centuries after Dante in Naples, right up until his death in 1744, Giambattista Vico (b. 1668) charts the roots of this connection, implicitly tying the Christ story to the first myths, the first heroes. Vico, who Auerbach spent ten years reading before writing his book on Dante, and who Joyce read to write Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, in his New Science (1744), explains anthropologically the origins of the human orientation towards divinity, towards something higher, and shows how this impulse led to the organization of civil societies, which are distinguished foremostly as those humans who began practicing the rituals of marriage and burial.

He explains the origins of the human orientation towards divinity as follows:

In the beginning was the universal flood, related in all the foundational myths, at ~4000 BC; and then it was the first humans, roaming the primeval forest, foraging and killing and taking whatever they wanted, then fleeing to the next cave-shelter they could find. There was no reason to stay put, to act outside of one’s immediate urges. No such thing as Time, since there was nothing to mark it with (no harvests). There was no writing, since humans had to flee constantly to find new meals, new shelters.

Man needed something higher to humble him, and a reason to be humbled. This, Vico argues, was the weather. Thunder and lightning. Various thunder and lighting gods developed in various foundational peoples—various Jupiters. And it was the advent of agriculture that led to humans having something to fear, when the weather got bad. They had to protect their crops. They weren’t merely fleeing to the next cave. Years began to be measured by harvests, and humans for the first time stayed put and waited out the dark times, the winters with no crops, rather than fleeing. They began praying to the heavens for the sun to return from above, and for the seeds to sprout up from below.

They began changing their behavior, not simply acting on their immediate urges. They began to practice marriage, the custom of choosing a particular woman, now that they lived in a particular place. They began to practice burial, consecrating their dead rather than leaving them out in the primeval forest like compost. This led to telling stories about the dead. This is why the earliest texts consist largely of lists of marriages and deaths (the Old Testament).

Next humans looked to heroes as divine, not simply humbling themselves beneath the weather, but beneath an individual archetype who went into the unknown, outside of the visible domain, and did a courageous act that led to the okay-ness of the group. The story they brought back and told would get retold. Hercules is the earliest example of this; the first of his twelve trials is to venture into the ancient forest to slay the Nemean lion—that is, raze the primeval forest to create fields for growing crops.

Spewing forth flames, this beast [the lion] set fire to the Nemean forest. When Hercules killed it, he donned its skin as a trophy and ascended to the stars. … this lion represents the great ancient forest of the earth, which was burned off and placed under cultivation by Hercules. (2)

We see that the divine hero, which is less an individual than an archetype of a neolithic hunter, must venture beyond the domain of the group, into the darkness (like Christ enters the underworld), to achieve a task necessary for the survival of the group (razing the forest so they can grow crops; redeeming humanity from its fallen state) and then return to the group to tell of what he saw (as Christ is resurrected), at which point stories about him sprout up. He then ascends to the heavens (Hercules, in his twelfth of twelve trials, must venture into the underworld to face Cerberus, the three headed dog, before he can ascend to his rightful place in the heavens).

We see this concept continued in Virgil and Homer: the hero must fight the war, outside the domain of the group, that founds and protects the nation; and it’s symbolized by a descent underground, followed by an ascent up into heaven, like Christ descends than ascends, like Dante goes into Inferno and up to Paradiso.

And yet, this archetype is not brash: Hercules, like Christ, is symbolized by the courage to slay the prideful, and to protect the weak. If they didn’t act in this just way, it wouldn’t lead to the benefit of the group, and their stories wouldn’t be retold.

This is the tightrope Dante walks; claiming status as a sacred scribe, while maintaining his humility beneath something higher.

IV. Flying out… pulling up…

I fly to Rome on April 26th. It’s the date of the cheapest ticket listed in the window of dates Catherine gave me. A couple days after the other residents arrive. I’ll stay till May 9th.

On the flight, I read Canto X, the circle of heresy, in which Dante encounters the leaders of the political factions in Florence that led to the conflict that got him exiled. Both treat the rightness of their side with religious fervor. That is their sin. Neither actually care about the people, or establishing peace.

Like Dante idealizes Christ as the paragon of how to live as a man infused with the divine, Dante also idealizes Julius Caesar, and the Pax Romana he established up until 44 BC as the prime historical example of a just, peaceful leadership. He feels his exile is due to the greedy, corrupt successors of a once sanctified Church abusing their power, like Tiberius Caesar abused the power and peace his predecessor created, some 70 years later, when he crucified Christ.

It’s muggy and surreal when I step out of International arrivals in Rome. Like Aeneas touching down, back in Caesar’s domain. Just like I did three years ago—

I’d been awake almost twenty-four hours, it was a whole process to fly during that time, the day after Christmas 2020, arriving to JFK six hours in advance to get all my documents sorted, to prove that I was allowed to fly to Italy during that time, then another few hours after to go through the line to get tested once in Rome, everyone lined up to get that cotton swab jabbed into their nose by hazmatted health workers. I stepped out into that dank, cloudy morning to find Gian M-95’d, hunched and cheeky in his big-ass florally lapelled fur coat. Hugging him in a delirium, in disbelief that we’d actually pulled this off.

This time I walk right on through customs. I start to tell Catherine about all the synchronicities I’m feeling, revisiting this Dante. Not going too crazy, so she doesn’t think I’m totally insane.

And we drive south to Sezze, along the highway that runs parallel to the Appian Way, the earliest and most important road connecting Rome to Naples to Brindisi—

Gian drove casually along the water, parallel to the water, pointing out landmarks. This whole area, these lowlands, the Pontine Plains, he explained, was for most of time uninhabitable, due to being too swampy. Too wet to grow crops. It would get overrun by mosquitoes, drawn to the muck, and people traveling to and from Rome would get bitten and die of malaria.

Julius Caesar, it was said, had plans to irrigate it and make it suitable for crops. But it wasn’t, interestingly enough, till Mussolini exercised his unilateral power to make it happen, that the area got drained.

Sometimes it takes unilateral, tyrannical power to get something that needs doing done; and yet, it’s so rare that unilateral power remains untyrannical.

Gian was the last of his kind. A unilateral leader, he responded only to his own taste. People looked to him for what was good, and he simply made things happen when no one else could. And it was respected and venerated, because he wasn’t acting selfishly, he cared about what was good for literature, and he did what was good for literature.

Catherine and I stop at the mozzarella shop we went to last time, one of the few places we went with all the restrictions. There were yellow days, red days, green days, seemingly arbitrarily controlling civilian movement. They’re out of the mozzarella we want to get. They make it fresh every morning, and every day it sells out. We settle for a smoked version.

The property sits regally atop a hill in the center of Sezze. Pulling up to the entry gate like Dante pulling up to the first circle: it’s now the Giancarlo DiTrapano foundation, there’s a new plaque. I get flooded with memories and intuitive nudges. Catherine drives up the hill, and shows me my spot. It’s in a side house, set off from the other residents. Where Gian used to go to be alone and think. There’s a huge poster over the bed of an old Tyrant Magazine cover, a play on The Smith’s album The King is Dead, except it says The Tyrant is Dead.

Giu, Gian’s widower, whom I haven’t seen since that last trip, is out at work.

I drop my bags and Catherine says take a shower, do what you’ve got to do. I’ll be up at the house.

There are all these plants on the side of the hill out the main window, and then there’s a porthole at the other, with no screen, that I open for a cross breeze. Pollen blows in through the window. Out of it you can see the Tyrrhenian sea off in the distance, some six miles down the way. And a small protrusion, Circeo Mountain, a hill on an inlet Odysseus mistook for an island. It’s Circe’s Island, where Odysseus gets stuck for seven years before finally being allowed to leave on the condition that he venture into the underworld.

I walk down the hill, out the gate and into town. I sit on a bench and open Dante. I’ll greet the rest of the residents once I return.

I wouldn’t know this before, and I’ll be shocked to learn this in some months, but Sezze, as legend has it, was founded by Hercules. After fighting off the Lestrigonians down in Sicily, he traveled up here, and settled in these very hills. Sezze’s town crest, in fact, is Hercules slaying the Nemean lion.

I’m in Canto XII, and Dante and Virgil transition from the sixth to the seventh circle of hell, which marks the shift from sins of Incontinence (sins of passion, or heightened appetite) into sins of violence (intentional, willful behavior). They’re in the circle of Anger, and are scaling a rock face, when there’s an earthquake. Virgil tells Dante about “the other time I came down into nether Hell this rock had not yet fallen … it was just before He came who carried off from Dis the great spoil of the highest heaven.” (Inf. XII.34-39)

Virgil is referencing the earthquake that happened during the crucifixion, that shook the tomb open and allowed him to resurrect. Virgil would have been in Limbo, as a Pagan who died 19 years before Christ.

The Christ story participates in the pagan notion of the divine being associated with higher, divine auspices; it’s an earthquake that, like thunder and lightning—nonhuman rumblings from above and below—humbled the first humans. Only, now, the divine auspice is associated with a man.

Back up at the house, I greet the rest of the residents. Over dinner, I try to explain all the things I’ve been feeling and thinking, but my words fail me. Giu shows up right as we’re wrapping up. It’s good to see him again.

V. The first morning…

The first morning I’m up at five a.m. I arrange my desk, facing the window, lay out all my papers and get to work.

I try to assume a perfect state of concentration, there’s no Wi-Fi in the room, and my international phone plan is slow. Like St. Benedict on Saturn, the seventh circle in Paradise, like I’m assuming a perfect state of contemplation (though I won’t have a clue about this yet). I work till noon, then need to move. It’s hot as shit out. I bring Dante with me and head down the hill, shortcutting down the steps rather than taking the winding path, out the front gate and to the park at the end of the main drag there. Past the roundabout. It’s a bit overgrown and a free for all—trash strewn here and there, evidence of teen loitering, drinking, on the thin grass around the benches.

I find a bench and sit.

The number of the Canto, XIII, strikes me as menacing somehow, how it looks at the top of the page. Sitting there amongst the trees, a foursome of non-Italians in rhinestone tees and with skin fades across the way, lounging and sipping tall Stella’s, I open my book and read.

And it takes me a sec to realize what I’m reading.

We’re in the second ring of the seventh circle. Violence—wilfill, deliberate. The first was violence against others. This is violence against the self.

Virgil and Dante, as soon as they enter, get hit with the Harpies, the half bird, half woman monsters who attack Aeneas and his men on his way to Rome from Troy, via Carthage, where he falls in love with, and then leaves, Dido. Aeneas doesn’t know what happens to her after he leaves. He’s just traveling along, and gets attacked by the Harpies, who hit him with “doleful prophesies of woe to come. They have broad wings, human necks and faces, taloned feet, and feathers on their bulging bellies. Their wailing fills the entire trees.”

I’m sitting here in this park, and the trees around me look doleful and sad.

Aeneas must then go into the underworld. In order to enter, he snaps a golden bough off a tree.

Here, Dante snaps a twig off the tree, despite Virgil’s warning not to, “that his present thoughts will be cut short,” and the stem cries out, “Why do you break me?”

It’s Pier della Vigna, a trusted confidant of Emperor Fredrick II who, accused of treachery, was thrown into prison and blinded; soon after he committed suicide.

Virgil asks if they’re ever set free from being turned into a tree for committing suicide.

Dante writes, “When the ferocious soul deserts the body after it has wrenched up its own roots, Minos condemns it to the seventh gulch. It falls into the forest... Terrorized by harpies, they must drag their bodies for eternity.” (XIII.94-108)

I feel totally unsettled. My body tensed, blood rushing to my brain.

I put the book down, walk deeper into the park. I’m surrounded by trees. I can only hear voices all around.

Aeneas, too, encounters the suicides on his journey into the underworld. When he comes upon “those who, although innocent, took death by their own hands; hating the light, they threw away their lives. But now they long for the upper air, and even to bear want and trials there. But fate refuses them: the melancholy marshland, its ugly waters hem them in.” (VI.573-580)

And he’ll come upon Dido, whom Venus, with the help of his son Cupid, will make fall in love with Aeneas in Carthage, where he washes up on his way to Rome. They’ll spend some time together, and Dido will be smitten, want him to stay through the winter. Till Jupiter learns of Cupid’s trickery and grows angry that Aeneas is going against his Fate—he must start Rome, this will lead to the Pax Romana, the time of Julius Caesar, where the world, at least for a time, will be ruled in peace, with divine justice, laying the groundwork for the birth and crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, redeeming humanity.

Dido, though, knows nothing of this. She simply wants to spend the winter with her love Aeneas, who showed up out of nowhere and who gave her a renewed sense of hope ever since her first husband, Sychaeus, was murdered by her brother.

So when Aeneas tells her he must leave, indeed leaves with almost no explanation, simply “since Jupiter—the gods—told him to,” she falls into a rage, curses him, and slays herself. “She died a death that was not merited or fated, but miserable and before her time and spurred by sudden frenzy.” (IV.958-961)

I think about how, on that fateful 2020 winter solstice, right when Gian finished the final version of Fuccboi, and I was preparing to fly out to Rome, Kyra fell into one of her depressive states. Into “a sudden frenzy.” I didn’t know what to do whenever this happened. Especially with the task I had before me—somehow defying the powers that be, that said we had to stay locked inside. We, Gian and I, had start this new press, to found a new city. I just sort of shut down. This was the same type of state she fell into the night she died.

Unlike in Purgatory, where they know they’ve done wrong, and in Paradise, where they’re exemplars of the right, in Hell, no one can admit that they’ve done anything wrong. They’re fully in denial, justifying what they’ve done, blaming others.

VI. Fossanova…

I stay up damn near all of the first three days. No matter how late I stay up, drinking and talking with the other residents, I awake at the same time. Five a.m. Sometimes 4:55. Point being, I must be up at five, at my window, writing. Reading. Working. Up at the house, I joke that Gian’s spirit is waking me up. Telling me to get to work.

On Sunday morning of the third day—Eastern Orthodox Palm Sunday—I get a notification in the group chat that some people want to go to mass. I’m in a groove, I consider staying. At the last minute, I throw on a button up, tuck it in, untuck it again, and bound up the steps just as the cars are pulling out. I ride with Giu.

On the way, he expounds on what Gian told me last time about the swamps.

I remember the story, but I let him tell it again, feeling like time is a spiral.

I learn a new detail: what took them so long was, they kept trying to irrigate it perpendicular to the shoreline. When what they needed to do, counterintuitively, based on the physics of it, was dig parallel.

~

It’s an astounding church. Fossanova Abbey, just down the way from Sezze.

We stand in the farthest back pew of the stunning, vast space. I can’t understand the mass, but I pick up some words.

After, Giu leads us on a tour through the belly of the chapel. Into an inner sanctum, trees in the middle, two circular areas that run around it, one covered, one not, for Benedictine monks to pace around, rain or shine. He leads us up some steps to Thomas Aquinas’s tomb.

Dante will encounter Aquinas, the Dominican friar born in 1225, right before Dante’s time, in Paradiso X. The didactic aspect of Dante’s work is drawn heavily from Aquinas’s teachings. It was a comment Aquinas made, about poetry serving no moral instruction, that pushed Dante to write his poem how he wrote it.

To return to the question of the possibility of incarnation—of the divine to exist in and through man—if we ever left it: through Inferno, we encounter a series of historical and mythical and contemporary characters, all of who committed some sin, in ascending order of greater sins: we have Popes, corrupt clergymen, diviners and deviants, etc. We have those who thought they were doing right, who thought they were divinely inspired.

In Purgatory, everyone encountered knows they’ve done wrong, and are repenting for their sin. If they manage to repent sufficiently, they’re led to the next level.

But in Paradise, we encounter, in the final four of seven planets, starting with the sun, exemplars of real life people who, as Dante saw it, lived their lives on earth in a divine way, according to the trait of the specific planet. On The Sun we find exemplary divine knowledge; on Mars, exemplary war; on Jupiter, exemplary divine rulership; and on Saturn, the last planet and first pagan god, exemplary divine contemplation (St. Benedict, the monk the monks here at Fossanova followed).

Aquinas, in Canto X, exemplifies perfect divine knowledge. Aquinas, who died here at Fossanova, in 1274.

Dante starts out Canto X: “Gazing on his Son with the Love the One and the Other eternally breathe forth, the inexpressible and primal Power…” (Para. X.1-3) This cryptic passage, believe it or not, communicates something deep. It has to do with the Holy Trinity. The “inexpressible and primal power” is the Father, or God. The “love … eternally breathe[d] forth” is the Holy Spirit. And “the one and the other” means the father, or God, and the Son, or Christ—what the Holy Spirit flows through. This was cause for much contention, and in fact is the main reason for the split between Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox Catholicism. Since the council of Nicea in 325, the Eastern Orthodoxy maintained that the Holy Spirit, God’s love and wisdom, can flow only through the father.

It was Eastern Orthodox Palm Sunday now, three years after I last spoke to Gian. And here I see Aquinas’s tomb, a man who, like Dante, believes the Holy Spirit can flow directly through the son.

The implications this has, in terms of man’s ability to act with direct divine guidance.

What’s spookier is, Aquinas was “summoned to defend [this position] against the Greek deputies at the Council of Lyons in 1274…” (X.1-3, notes)

He was on his way from Naples, walking with his donkey, along the Appian way, to defend the idea of the son’s ability to channel the divine directly when… he got overcome by an illness and died!

Damn, I say to Walt. He got bit by a mosquito from the swamps.

Thought the Holy Spirit flowed through him, but God thought otherwise and got him!

~

The next morning, something hits me. Something’s off. I’d noticed something the night before, how my face was feeling. My face was feeling off. My eye. Something wet and weepy. I fall asleep reading the next canto, the sexual deviance canto.

I wake up and my eye is sealed shut. Red and swollen and ballooned.

There’s something weird about this. This hasn’t happened to me since the time of the book that I wrote, that I worked on with Gian, the book that’s about a death and a resurrection.

This is what was happening in the timeline of my book. That the protagonist must heal is way out of.

I don’t have my meds on me, I packed the bare minimum. And the drug that I got on in order to resurrect me, again, in the time of the book, I didn’t renew, out of laziness. I’ve gotten prideful and slothful, thinking I’m no longer susceptible to the storms that are always liable to hit, it’s only when an empire or a nation or a body gets their defenses up so high that they start to think that they can play god, and abuse their power—thinking that the Holy Spirit flows through them directly, that they can do, eat, drink whatever.

I walk up to the house. Walt goes, Ohhh shit, bro. What happened?

I don’t know, I say. I think a bug or spider must have bit me. A mosquito.

A mosquito? Bro—you got Aquinas’d!

I head down the hill and walk into the Farmacia. No one speaks English; one lady sort of does. I just walk up to the counter, point at my eye, and say, Antihistamines? People clear a path for me. She gives me some antihistamines. And also some prescription eyedrops, some steroid cream.

And finally—I’m literally replaying the time of the book—some internal steroids. Like I didn’t learn anything after all.

VII. Circe’s island…

On Wednesday, my eye has subsided some. Still very uncomfortable. I’m back at the park. I read my customary daily canto, and then, hit with a surge of feeling, roam to the edge of the park like I did before. I can see the ocean off in the distance, like a mirage. Last I came out here, that was one of the first things that Gian pointed out. Circeo Mountain. Where both Odysseus and Aeneas got washed up. It wasn’t an actual island, it just looked like one.

I consider walking out to it. It’s six miles. Walking up the hill, on the way back, will be brutal. I start moving, scaling the periphery of town, looking for a way down. It’s a steep switchback with guardrails, though I did see bikers biking it one of the days. I pass the road and end up at a church. I sit there at a bench out front while an African dude plays Afro pop songs on a bluetooth. An old Italian man sits on a bench, looking out at the ocean. He doesn’t seem bothered by the music. I initially am, then realize I kinda like it; I pause my music but keep my headphones in, pretending I’m listening to something else but listening to his music.

Circe lures people onto her island and turns them into animals. She feeds them the mystical mandrake plant, and they can’t resist her charm. They gorge themselves on food and drink and never leave. Odysseus is only able to resist because, wily schemer that he is, he is prepared with the counter drug. Still, he stays stuck there, on the island, for seven years. He’s only able to leave on Circe’s condition that he go into the underworld.

I don’t think I was as attentive to Kyra as I could have been last I was out here, in eyeshot of Circe’s island. It was so isolated and cold in the city, being locked down like it was, Kyra kept calling me I remember. I’d left her there all alone.

I decide I won’t walk to the island after all.

VIII. Naples / Cumae…

On Eastern Orthodox Good Friday, the property goes dead silent. My face is feeling a bit better. I baptize myself in the pool. My eye is still deformed. I look and feel like a primeval giant. I work through the morning, and then right at noon head up the main house to do my one duty—water the plants Giu said to water, that he’s trying to grow on this patch of dry dirt right by the entryway. I tend to my garden. Then head down the hill to read my Dante.

The next morning, we all get onto a train and head into Naples. Catherine has gotten an AirBnB. There will be a reading for the foundation that night, in collaboration with an Italian press. I’ve prepared a bit of new writing I’ve written, that Catherine got translated into Italian, so the audience can read them side by side. I’m trying to write about Her in a way that doesn’t presume to know what she was going through, to not reduce her to her final, impulsive act.

And it’s a route I took with Gian three years ago, down south along the water to Naples, and there’s this area right when you start to enter it, when the coast curves in a bit, and I don’t even realize we’re whipping it right by Cumae, past Lake Avernus, literally where Aeneas washes up in the beginning of Book VI, where he finds the Sybil and begs her to take him into the underworld.

It’s Orthodox Holy Saturday and we’re traveling right past the entrance to Virgil’s underworld, past where Dante’s “dark wood” of Maundy Thursday is based off of.

And I’m reading over the bit I’m going to read, a meeting between a Young Man and a Taken Woman, a woman with a Husband, how from the first moment, their fate was sealed, and—

The moment Aeneas and Dido mate for the first time, “confusion takes the sky, tremendous turmoil... lightning fires flash, the upper air is witness to their mating... and That day was her first day of death and ruin...” (Aen. IV.219)

And the moment Dido sees Aeneas’s ships leaving, because he must go to Rome, to found a new city, Dido laments, “And why was it not given me to lead a guiltless life, never knowing marriage, like a wild beast, never to have touched such toils? I have not held fast the faith I swore before the ashes of my Sychaeus.” (IV.762)

But pious Aeneas, following God’s orders, off to Italy to found Rome, doesn’t even know of Dido’s fate, not until, here at Lake Avernus, meaning “no birds,” since birds would die from the noxious fumes of the underworld, he finally enters, led by the Sybil, and encounters, there in the underworld, Dido herself. And to her he says, “Dido, is it true...? Did I only bring death to you? I swear by the stars, the gods above, I was unwilling when I had to leave your shores. But those same orders of the gods that now urge on my journey through the shadows, through abandoned, thorny lands and deepest night, drove me by their decrees—” he’s still moving quickly, he still must go soon, urged by the gods, even now—

And Dido, anyway, wants nothing of it. “She tore herself away; she fled—and still his enemy—into the forest of shadows.” (VI.621)

And that night I read the story I wrote, about the Young Man and the Taken Woman, I read last, and it goes alright, a bit of a let down perhaps, it’s not the upbeat stylish tone expected of me, it’s dense and thorny and heavy, it falls on deaf ears.

And we roam Naples, into the night, drinking Aperol spritzes till the wee hours.

And in the morning, on Easter Sunday morning, Catherine takes us to Capodimonte, the museum at the top of the hill in Naples.

And it’s like the garden of Eden at the top of mount Purgatory.

And the rest of the writers move through quickly, but I’m just overwhelmed by everything, I can’t understand what all is happening. I see a group of nuns and I follow them through, and on this day I learn more about March 25, I realize that’s also the day of the Annunciation, the day the Angel Gabriel told Mary she was pregnant, March 25 in the year 1, nine months exactly before Christmas, and it’s also that date because it’s right around the spring equinox, a time of supposed renewal, and no matter what type of hell you’re undergoing there must be a possibility for renewal, that’s the message of the Christ story, there must be a return of spring, right?

And that Monday we’re back in Sezze and all goes quiet and calm, and I return to the Dante, and I read Canto XXVI, and I’m just stunned to find Ulysses, that is, Odysseus there, Dante has placed him in there, just like Homer places Hercules in his Hades, and Dante fashions a story of Ulysses being a tempter, a fraudulent counselor, who, like the snake in the garden, tempted those around him to travel further than was humanly reasonable, than had ever been traveled, convincing a whole crew of men to forge their way to the ends of the earth, to eschew filial duty, his responsibility to Penelope his wife, in order to find knowledge and wisdom, only they push too far, a whirlpool hits, and takes out his entire crew—

Odysseus told his crew they would find truth and beauty at the end, but they all died.

And in Hell he’s defending his actions, saying “It was their choice!”

And is that what happened, is that what I was doing, pushing the limits of storytelling, of doggedly creating art in a time when no one was, in a way no one had—

But of course isn’t that what Dante is doing, pushing the limits of language, creating a new language—

And that is what we were doing, Gian and I, creating a new language, not like Nimrod, who I encounter some Cantos later, who tries create a single language, to build a tower of Babel directly to heaven, only for it to all come crumbling down and scatter everywhere— (Gen. 11:1-9)

No, Dante and I, I thought, were doing the opposite, taking the scattered language, creating a new language that incorporated all languages, the high and the low, the vulgar and the refined—this is what Dante was doing, this is why Gian said what he said that New Year’s Eve toast he did, over the twelve days of Christmas I was here last, he said, To a new language, looking right at me.

But nonetheless it stuns me, reading this.

And I can’t help but think of Giu, how we haven’t been able to talk face to face, directly, about everything—

Till the last day, once all the residents have left, and I have forty eight hours on the property to myself, and it’s the Wednesday after Easter Sunday, in Dante’s time he’s in the garden of Eden, he’s said goodbye to Virgil and now Beatrice is leading him, and Giu says why don’t we go have a meal together, there’s town a few towns over called Cora, it’s the last night and there’s a storm hitting but we head there and we eat one on one, a good few courses, and we eat our fill and head back in the storm, in the dark.

And that night in Dante time Dante is going with Beatrice from planet to planet, on the sun he encounters Aquinas himself, Aquinas was Dante’s teacher’s teacher, and Aquinas gives a speech, and he exhibits astounding humility, he spends the first part of his monologue homaging his teacher, listing all his teachers, not puffed up with pride as Ulysses was, speaking only about himself, defending himself—

And if it’s a matter of whether you’re capable of having a divine vision or not, and Dante clearly is someone who believes that he is, then what a thin line it is that separates Odysseus from Aquinas, they both cross a boundary line, which echoes the boundary line crossed by Adam and Eve, Dante doesn’t single out Eve when he encounters Adam in Canto XXVI of Paradise, Adam is held responsible for the actions of Eve, and Adam is so calm when asked, somewhat rudely, by Dante, why he committed the sin that led to all of humanity being in a fallen state for 4,302 years (XXVI.119-20) until finally, on March 25 of the year 34, he was redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ. That most important love act, to know you are going to be betrayed, yet to go out and love your betrayers nonetheless. To accept everything that comes to you with love, even the darkest night of the soul where you are mocked and turned on and crucified. This redeems Adam, and Adam, in response to Dante’s question about it, addresses it directly, just says what happened.

Because what distinguishes Ulysses from Aquinas, the weather-fearing Pagans from the giants, Christ from Judas, is one thing: humility.

Mere man is capable, Dante believes, Aquinas believes, of having a divine vision, of acting as a vessel for the Holy Spirit, so long as he remains humble.

It is pride that led to the primeval fall—Satan’s fall out of heaven. He couldn’t handle that God was God, and that he wasn’t.

It is pride that led the giants to go against Jupiter—to defy the thunder and lightning.

~

I haven’t seen everything through, I’m into the giants (Inf. XXXI), about to enter Judecca, Judas’s circle (Inf. XXXIV), really still reeling about Ulysses, feeling like I’m the fraudulent counselor, guiding others to the ends of the earth no matter what, causing their ruin, when Giu says, Why don’t we go to Dante’s house, the house Dante exiled in, in Rome, on the way to the airport tomorrow.

Only he gets caught up with something, and he arrives much later than our meeting time, we might have to skip it, and we get back on the road, headed north to Rome, right along the path Aquinas was walking when he got bit by that mosquito, and we’re talking about Dante, and we’re talking about Dante’s rigor, his ambition, and we talk about Gian, how he was like Caesar, a tough but fair tyrant, irreplaceable, he has no successors, only heirs, heirs that needn’t be crowned, they’re implied, and we finally talk about what we’ve been ducking talking about all week, we talk specifically about it, and it’s so cathartic, and I love this man Giu, and we get closer to Rome and traffic starts hitting, and it’s a bit of a time crunch, and Giu’s going, I’m not sure if we’re gonna make it, and I go you know what let’s not, it’s all good, all week I’ve been ranting about Dante, pushing so hard about Dante, the other residents are tired of it, they think I’m tweaking, maybe I should let up on my mission to voyage to the ends of the earth to find truth, I’m thinking Giu thinks I was like Ulysses, pushing so hard—

But right when we’re about to abort our mission, turn off and head for the airport, Giu looks at me and says, You know what? No. Let’s keep going. We’re so close.

And we push a bit further and make it and it’s under construction but we give it a once over, and Giu tells me about the history of it, and we grab a coffee and we head to the airport train and it’s all good.

I give him a big hug and I thank him for everything and I get on the train and make my flight just fine.

IX. Ascension…

And on Thursday, May 9th, Ascension Thursday (or, in Eastern Orthodox time, the Thursday a week exactly after Maundy Thursday, that is, the day Dante encounters God himself in the final circle of Paradise, and then falls back down to earth, at which point he must translate all he’s seen) I fly out of Rome.

And late that night I stumble back to my apartment in Manhattan, all banged up, leaking out tears of disbelief or confusion or prostration, letting the warm rain wet the cracks in my roid worn skin.

And twenty-four hours later the sun rises anew onto the city, in through my window,

And twenty-four hours after Dante and Virgil manage to escape the final circle of Hell, jumping onto Satan’s tail when he’s not looking and climbing up the dark craggy cliff, higher and higher, navigating only by the sound of trickling water, they climb their way back to the surface of the earth, and up they sprout onto the base of the mountain of Purgatory, like plants after the long winter, and we begin Purgatory, the process of purification, as the sun on Easter Morning rises, Christ has risen, and who do we find here in the first Canto but an unlikely placement, Cato the Younger, the third betrayer of Julius Caesar, only unlike the other two, he’s not in the final circle of Hell, he’s at the entrance of Purgatory, even though he’s a suicide—he betrayed Julius Caesar, and then “resolved, rather than fall in Caesar’s hands... [to] put to an end his own life, after spending the greater part of the night in reading Plato’s Phaedo on the immortality of the soul,” 46 years before the birth of Christ,

Only his suicide, unlike Pier’s back in Canto XIII, is redemptive and Christlike rather than destructive, it’s an act he decides to do on his own for the freedom of the people.

And Virgil introduces Dante as a man who “has not yet seen his final sunset, but through his folly was so close to it his time was almost at an end,” clarifying the implication alluded to in the opening lines how down bad Dante was in that dark wood, “the straight way lost,” “so bitter death is hardly more so—”

And Virgil asks Cato about his wife but Cato, Hollander notes, “unlike Orpheus, will not look back for his dead wife.” (I.85-90)

And so Dante has now dug himself out of that state he was in on Maundy Thursday eve, they travel along the lonely plain, and they come “to the empty shore. Upon whose waters no man ever sailed who then experienced his return,” (I.130-2) they’re just like Ulysses, traveling along seas never traveled, telling a story never told.

And they turn the way Cato directs them, to the entrance of Purgatory, so they can begin the long process of climbing that mountain, of humbling themselves, and they, like Aeneas must do at the entrance of Cumae, pick from the plant, like Aeneas picks the Golden bough to offer Persephone.

Like the tree branch Dante plucks back in Inferno XIII, in the sixth circle of hell,

Only this time he isn’t hurting anyone, the branch doesn’t yell in pain, it simply, humbly, miraculously sprouts back,

And “what a wonder it was that the humble plant he chose to pick sprang up at once in the very place where he had plucked it.” (I.134-6)

Strive, in plain speech, with words that are straightforward, honest, and well-placed, to make your phrases sonorous and entertaining, and have them portray, as much as you can and as far as it is possible, your intention, making your ideas clear without complicating or obscuring them.

—DON QUIXOTE

His original purpose: to record, day after day, his experiences on a voyage whose monotony and uselessness were, perhaps, alleviated by his work as a chronicler.

—ALVARO MUTIS

I HAD a backpacking backpack, a parka. I came up on a pair of low-top Merrill hiking shoes from Aaron, he’d just gotten a new pair. I got a base-layer compression outfit, two underwears and sock liners, an undershirt that I’d wear daytimes and let dry out at night. I had a -15 °C sleeping bag. I got a one-man single-layer bivy tent, super light. A tarp. I assembled a first aid kit, band aids, Neosporin, Ibuprofen, in a Ziploc. Baby wipes. These waterproof green swishy pants I found at the thrift store, I’d alternate between those and soccer shorts. A hat. A beanie. Shades. A marathon-runner tank top. A fleece hoodless sweater that would double, when folded neatly, as a pillow. A single-burner stove that screwed directly onto a butane tank—I couldn’t find the right fuel, but would, once on the road. A compact camping pot that would double as a bowl. A camping spork. I’d make grocery pit stops every couple days. I’d just carb-load, eat pop tarts, peanut butter, sammies, I’d burn it all off anyway. Sunscreen. A Kindle (books too heavy). A voice/lecture recorder; a notebook; a pen. And my 15-inch MacBook, wrapped in multiple Ziplocs. No smartphone, just my Samsung brick phone. Phone charger. A 52-state atlas, Pennsylvania’s page torn out and folded up and tucked, also in a Ziploc, along with my voice recorder, tobacco, and a lighter, in my fanny pack. A battery-powered headlamp. A knife.

*

It was a week later, on a cold but sunny Thursday, that I set out. All week, Sophie had seemed amused, like she didn’t really think I was gonna; I’d delayed some already. Maybe she was relieved when I finally left. The moment I was about to, her whole demeanor changed. Her face went crumpled, and she started looking away from me, like she didn’t want me to see. Sophie, I said, holding her. I could feel her silently shaking. That was when it hit me, how alone I’d be, what a shit show sleeping out each night would be, how much I’d been relying on her, staying with her.

Seeing that, I started shaking, too.

And we just stood there a sec, both silently shaking, both leaking out of our faces.

She might’ve said Why, or Do you really have to.

I tried to project confidence, to smile and stay light.

But seeing how she looked—warding me off, like she just wanted to get this over with, like she was dissociating in order to—it started all over again. The shaking, the stalling.

It was time to move.

I said, “I love you,” or “It’s gonna be all good,” or something, turned and walked down 45th, across Pine, towards the SEPTA station but past it. Angling diagonal to Baltimore Ave. Past the outer edges of West Philly, all those townships. Till I got too tired to keep crying and all there was left to do was walk.

Portions of this book originally appeared in the PARIS REVIEW.

1.

March 2019

I’d gotten accepted into an NYC MFA.

No way I was gonna go, given my ideologies, my finances.

But RSVP’d for the event anyway, since it was right by where the editor lived, and was the specific MFA the editor, way back when, suggested I apply/go to.

With the, at the time, probably wishfully imagined but nonetheless seeming implication she’d be sweet to me again if I got into / went there.

I wanted to flex on / try to go see the editor.

~

I missed my Bolt Bus turning up too hard with the EMT the night before, flexing on her about the potential power/success getting into an NYC MFA promised. About how different things were gonna start going for me.

Didn’t even buy a bus ticket till the last minute, while already turnt the night before, after texting the editor that I’d be in her hood for a thing the next morning, and her responding like Sean? Sure. I’ll be around.

Like maybe she’d… deleted my number?

Had tried to erase me but then… couldn’t resist?

Either way.

Texted back I’ll text ya and bought a ticket before heading back inside, from the stoop, for another round with the EMT.

~

I realized that, even though I’d missed the bus window, I could drive and still make it.

The event was at noon; I’d arrive at noon exactly if I left immediately.

Felt reckless, even with how much I’d been driving my van of late for my new CSA delivery gig. NYC driving was some other driving.

Probably wouldn’t have even considered this a possibility though, had it not been for how much I’d been driving my van of late.

Crossing the George Washington Bridge, Jersey into NYC, on the final stretch. My first time crossing it since mobbing up to the Vermont farm job I crashed out at last August, I realized, once on it. Only this time around I was way less fucked.

This time around, I was the one driving.

The event was at this modern-looking, glass-paned spot on 125th, not far off the Hudson.

Only three minutes late.

Open spot out front.

Sunny out.

Crisp.

~

They hit me with a nametag in the lobby. Told me 7th floor.

Another dude in a suit and a nametag, at the elevator entrance, ushering me into the elevator. Hitting the 7-button, then stepping out before the door closed.

Eager energy, palpable optimism, all around.

Vibes I woulda scoffed at, a year ago. That I, even now, had to stop myself from scoffing at.

Caught the tail end of the faculty speaker, the Great Author’s, inspirational spiel.

Standing around shifting, uncertain a sec. Although everyone was.

Once the spiel ended, a lotta milling about mingling.

I hadn’t had time to eat so beelined it for the food/coffee station, stashing my pack behind a column, in the corner.

Sun radiating in through the glass-paned walls. Killer view of Manhattan, the Hudson; Jersey, beyond that.

~

I was going to town assembling a bagel-Danish combo platter, pounding my second cup, when the Great Author pulled up on me. Like Just here for the food, huh, nabbing a half-sammie.

“Ha. You know.”

I felt I knew the Great Author personally, from pods. From hearing him on the Comedian’s. From way back, when I listened religiously to the Comedian’s.

The Comedian’s pod what got me podcasting in the first place, first I started podcasting.

What made me podcast about my walk, when I walked, Philly to Colorado, five springs ago.

This Comedian-inspired impulse to podcast about my walk what pushed me to walk at all. To keep walking. Since I was podcasting about walking—the two justified each other.

“I know you from the Comedian’s podcast,” I said. “That y’all are pals.”

“Ah. Yup,” he said. “The Comedian’s great.”

Discovering The Comedian’s podcast that final undergrad semester, late-2013, pre-walk, while laying up trying to finish my Bolaño thesis, what made me no longer able to write my Bolaño thesis. That aspect of spoken storytelling, of telling stories literally in your own voice, suddenly making everything I’d been reading, the voice I’d been writing in, sound absurd.

Absurdly disconnected from the voice I spoke in, in the World.

~

The Great Author had been surrounded by a half moon of eager admits, moments earlier, before I’d gone in for round two at the snack table. I’d overheard them asking the most stock questions, answers to which were obviously available on a FAQ page online. And for a split second, the formality of the setting made me think I had to ask similarly obvious Qs.

But then I didn’t.

I asked him what he’d been working on, told him what had me hype. We talked podcasts, publishing today, and how essential/overlooked humor was in literature. For a good 10, 15. Till I was stuffed full of pastries ranting.

He didn’t even trip when I asked him what he was working on and he said Well I just released a novel, and I, who’d been acting like I knew everything he’d ever written, went Word? exposing myself for not having known.

But then I just acted according to that information he now knew.

He wasn’t trippin about it, so I wasn’t.

We talked other things, unrelated to his most recent book he now knew I hadn’t read.

I spoke to him in my voice. With all my Fuckin lit’s and my Fuckin hell ya’s and my Oh word that’s fuckin hype bro’s.

He didn’t bat a fuckin eye.

Once the gathering dispersed, I went back down the elevator. To meet the editor out front.

Sitting on a bench texting, cute sundress on. Hair still wet from a shower.

“Long time,” I said, hand-visoring my eyes. Squinting.

She smiled in a wistful, slightly apologetic way, for all the ghosting, that reminded me of the smile she gave me when, after meeting her in Mountain View right before R and I moved to Oakland, right after my actual last undergrad semester, so summer ’15, while kitty-sitting at R’s while R was outta town, unbeknownst to R—this fact, that I’d come to meet the editor directly from R’s, also unbeknownst to the editor—and after a couple beers driving her in my box van to where her brother was staying in Los Gatos, that whole ride charged energy like we were a recently linked couple virgin road-tripping together, she saying her dad drove a truck growing up and that my box reminded her of her dad’s, me saying all sorts of wild shit, everything hot and amplified, till finally we arrived where her brother was meeting her, at like a gas station, and me all erect going Wait don’t go, she leaning over and kissing me, touching me, going I wanna but can’t, I gotta go, before giving me that same apologetic look and turning to leave, only my passenger-side door is a bitch to open from the inside, you gotta roll down the window in order to, although the window handle is sticky, you had to jimmy it, and then once you got it down you had to reach out and crank it open from the outside, only that move a lotta people couldn’t manage, it was an awkward wrist thing, so I leaned over and opened it for her.

But that same look. On this day.

Only lasted a moment.

She immediately reverted to the cold impassivity of editor mode.

Went, So. Shall we?

Led me along 125th, away from whence I’d come.

Under this sweet, rusted bridge thing—where the 1 is elevated, I’d later learn.

Riverward.

Energy just different here, in NYC. Because all the trains, I thought.

At any point able to eject oneself from street level and transport oneself elsewhere.

This wasn’t the case in Philly. Or it was, in parts. But the unanimousness of this mobility what distinguished Here.

She said she’d had a boy but ended it because, while she liked him, he obviously wasn’t the one.

“And why waste time with someone who obviously isn’t the one?”

We turned left where 125th met the waterside running/biking path. Walking languidly along, eye out for runners/bikers.

“What about you?”

I told her my thing was messing with a person for a sec, then pushing them away. Hating myself and so hating them for liking me. Telling them to be with other people. Wanting them to!

Feeling like we were cultivating some teenage dream, unabashedly sharing with each other our deepest selves.

Suddenly wanting so badly to come to the program. So I could be near her.

She told me she’d had a brutal winter health-wise. That she just got back from her cousin who’d killed himself’s funeral.

I told her I’d had a brutal winter health-wise also. That it was a miracle I was even functional now. That, had it not been for my hospitalization, my new meds, I’d have still been dead probably. Had almost killed myself holding on to all that breakup rage. On some level maybe trying to almost, how I’d been abusing stimulants / never sleeping.

“Had been addied up that whole time we’d been working on the walk book! Blew through the $5K my uncle threw me buying my plug’s entire XR 30 prescription, monthly.”

This admission. Felt courageous.

I was on the path of honesty now.

Honesty was the way to love.

I kept cajoling her into deep dives on what she sought in a relationship, if she even wanted one, and, if so, what that might look like.

Left things on that hopeful note.

Friday, March 7 (cont.)

At noon I finish my maiden reading of Book IX of Paradise Lost and head down to the house to take Lila to the reservoir and give her a long walk. This is part of my groundskeeper yurt duties, you can’t have a savage uncivilized man lurked up in the woods with no duties, no woman around to civilize him. I bring my water jugs down to the house and fill them up, at the communal perennial spring of Eric’s kitchen tap, I’ve got to make sure I’ve got enough water to make it though the night.

The Golden Bough is so damn long I had to go back to the beginning to re-remember how the book started. To see what got its author, JG Frazier, hunting down these old myths in the first place.

It all started because one of the sacred rites in Roman mythology didn’t seem to cohere with all the rest. It seemed too savage, and to harken back to earlier traditions, wedged into Ovid and Homer and Hesiod out of place. This is the ritual of the goddess Diana at Nemi, a lake south of Rome, in her sacred grove, where Diana, or Artemis (or, recalling Vico, Persephone herself), the goddess of hunting and fertility and sometimes the countryside, in short, birth and growth, is characterized by some strange practices that Frazier wants to understand.

Diana of the Wood is accompanied by two minor deities, Aegeria, a nymph of clear, healing water, or the sacred spring that flows into the Lake of Nemi; and Virbius, or Hippolytus, who is Diana’s mortal male companion, is and in Ovid’s myth goes like so: Virbius spurned the love of all women, including Aphrodite, which leads her, scorned, to inspire his mother Ephedra to fall in love with him, but when he turns her away as well, she slanders him to his father, Theseus, and the slander is believed, and Theseus has Poseidon send a bull out of the sea to scare the horses of Virbius’s chariot, leading them to drag him to death. He’s Diana’s favorite though, so she brings him back to life and hides him deep in the woods, in a secret grove, where he reigns, hidden from Jupiter’s wrath, as king.

Here we have the mortal man loving the divine goddess, being killed and brought back to life (like Adonis is with Persephone and Aphrodite). Like the Troubadour love poet tradition Dante resuscitates is, or mere mortal man ascending the heavens, led by his divine beloved (the divine goddess, Beatrice)—though not, notably, as common Christianity is, Eve is not deified, she’s still held accountable for original sin.

But that’s the myth.

The ritual practice of the same story that JG Frazier is shocked by and seeks to dig deeper into the archaic practices it came from, is how, in the tree grove at Nemi, the Virbius corollary, The King of the Wood, is a position of priesthood that involves guarding the sacred tree from which no branch may be broken, and whoever holds this position remains priest-king till he is killed, allowing a bough to be broken off the tree, and then is replaced—the position is held by whoever holds it, until he is killed and replaced—and what’s more this bough that’s broken off the tree is the basis, so common knowledge goes, of the Golden Bough Aeneas breaks off to enter the underworld in book six of Virgil’s Aeneid (the basis of Dante’s Inferno).

This rite seems connected to the myth of Virbius’s premature death and resurrection, or vice versa, but JG Frazier senses this comes from older practices, the ritual regicide, the priest king of the Wood, the guarding of the sacred tree, the goddess of the sacred spring, and another characteristic I didn’t mention, of the eternal fire tended to by vestal virgins—these practices are found in various cultures throughout history, and JG Frazier finds all these examples of variations of it.

But most importantly it’s what it has to say about the Fall, and Christ’s killing and resurrection, and mortal man loving a goddess, and the challenge of marriage and fertility and death and renewal…

Milton, as we have seen compares Eve to not only Persephone but also Delia, or Diana, and even to her wood nymphs, who turn into the trees they tend to like Pound’s tree-girls, and but as Vico says, Persephone is simply the agricultural, underground iteration of Diana, the goddess of springs, or the original underworld, while Artemis is the Diana of the woods, or of hunting (Diana is in the heavens).

And, too, we have Satan, like the serial regicides of the priest-king of the wood, as the usurper of Adam, who plucks from the forbidden tree—the apple and the golden bough, respectively.

The difference is, with the Fall of Man, as interpreted in common Christianity, Eve doesn’t resurrect come spring like Persephone does for the sin of eating the forbidden pomegranate fruit; she causes humans for all time to live in a fallen state (till Christ resurrects to redeem Adam, though Eve remains to blame—outside of the apocryphal version of the story which includes Christ’s forgiveness of Mary Magdalene, a tradition Dante continues by deifying Beatrice, that Joyce and Faulkner continue in forgiving and redeeming cheating Molly Bloom and incestuous love child of Caddy girl-Quentin, who like Mary Magdalene is turning tricks with men sneaking into her window, till she escapes, or resurrects, on Easter Sunday morning)… But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Diana, according to Vico, is the third major deity the theological poets invented, as man stopped their wandering and began practicing the sacred rites of marriage and burial. The first was Jupiter, or thunder and lightning. The second, Vico says, was the eagle, the bird of prey associated with Jupiter, who led pious strong men to “lands on mountain heights, where the air is breezy and salubrious,” to “lands near perennial springs, which are most commonly found in the mountains.”1

“Near such springs, birds of prey make their nests, and hunters set their nets. … why the ancient Romans called any bird of prey Aquila, eagle, from aquilega, water seeker” (aquilex means a diviner or bearer of water)…

The first people, when they’d get terrified and humbled by Jupiter’s thunder and lightning, would then look to the sky, “and when they followed the eagle’s flight, they discovered perennial springs.” And so they venerated eagles as the second major deity.

And once they found water, they’d deify the goddess of springs, the underground deity from whence the water sprung. “At this point, people imagined the third major deity, which is Diana. She represents the primary need for water, which the giants get once they had settled on certain lands and united in marriage with certain women” (222).

And from here you have marriage, burial, family, communities—indicated by those who share water together.

Marriages were celebrated by water and fire, “aqua et igni, because the first marriages were naturally contracted between men and women who shared common water and fire.” (221)

Diana, who naturally was Jupiter’s daughter, was the first goddess of the springs, or the underworld, since primeval humans needed to settle near a spring to stop their wandering, needed water and fire to convince a woman to marry them, and so prayed and sacrificed to the goddess they invented who represented the continuation of their access to water.

Not the full answer, but germane to JG Frazier’s question of the strange rites of Diana at Nemi, the goddess of the spring, the serial regicide (or serial sacrifice previously) of the priest king of the wood who guards the sacred tree, looked upon by the goddess of the perennial spring, the vestal virgins who tend the eternal sacred fire.

*

And so off they go, “the dire snake, into fraud / Led Eve our credulous mother, to the tree / Of prohibition, root of all our woe,”2 and Eve is scared, but Satan convinces her, “ye shall not die: / How should ye? by the fruit? it gives you life / To knowledge” (686-7), and anyway god made you, he’s not gonna kill you, he says, “ye shall be as gods, / Knowing both good and evil as they know,” Satan says, “Goddess humane, reach then, and freely taste” (pause), he says.

And “into her heart too easy entrance won” (IX, 734), and noon draws near, and Eve must return to Adam soon, and she reasons, well the serpent didn’t die, he was irrational till he ate, and “So saying, she rash hand in evil hour / Forth reaching” she plucks and eats, and “Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat / Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe, / That all was lost” (780-5), like when Aeneas first copulates with Dido in Carthage on his way home to found Rome, and lightning flashed and the earth shook, and that was the first day of death, the first cause of woe,” since Dido is betraying her dead husband Sycheous, smitten by Aeneas, and will plunge to her own death once Aeneas leaves and she realizes what she’s done (like too Anna Karenina plunges to her own death once she realizes), and just like that Satan the Serpent slithers away and disappears, and Eve is euphoric as if drunk, and after a time she debates whether she will tell Adam, she wonders if god will punish her with death and if Adam will replace her, she thinks he’ll be “wedded to another Eve, / Shall live with her enjoying, I extinct.” But then she also thinks “I love him, that with him all deaths / I could endure, without him live no life” (IX, 833).

And there Adam waits at high noon, Adam who while waiting “had wove / Of choicest flow’rs a garland to adorn / Her tresses, and her rural labors crown, / As reapers oft are wont their harvest queen,” the most explicit if indirect Persephone reference, and not only Persephone but the corn maiden rituals the story of Persephone mythologizes, preparing Persephone the harvest queen’s flower garland, Adam like the harvesters awaiting Persephone’s return from Hades come spring, Persephone who is Diana, goddess of springs but also of countryside, of fertility—her rural labors.

And Adam immediately senses something is off, and “in her hand / A bough of fairest fruit that downy smiled, / New gathered, and ambrosial smell diffused,” like Aeneas plucks the bough to enter and return from the underworld, Eve does the same, returning from doing whatever she got up to with Satan down there, and she tries to apologize, she tells him how much she missed him, she tells him the tree is not dangerous, it opens your eyes, to see what god sees, you must try it.

And Adam, “amazed, / Astonied stood and blank, while horror chill / Ran through his veins, and all his joints relaxed; / From his slack hand the garland wreathed for Eve / Down dropped” —unlike Persephone and the corn maiden who is celebrated and crowned upon her return from Hades, Adam drops the garland he made for her, he’s speechless, “How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost / Defaced, deflow’red, and now to death devote?” For she is not simply the pagan symbol of fecundity, she herself is the fairer flower, and she has been deflowered, and so man has fallen.

And Adam considers what will happen, whether he’ll have to give up another rib to create another Eve, Eve says trust me, the fruit isn’t bad, have some, and she presents the bough of the forbidden tree with fruit on it, and Adam resists, “he scrupled not to eat / Against his better judgement, not deceived, / But fondly overcome with female charm,” gets you every time, that female charm, and “Earth trembled from her entrails, as again / In pangs, Nature gave a second groan,” again like when Dido’s impending doom is sealed, when she betrays Sycheous and lays with Aeneas (Book IV), and the sky thunders, and having given into their mutual wrongness, “As with new wine intoxicated both / They swim in mirth … Carnal desire inflaming; he on Eve / Began to cast lascivious eyes … in lust they burn” (IX, 1008-1015).

And so they fuck, and everything is amazing.

And then they come down, and discover they are naked, full of shame.

And they find the fig tree and pick big leaves and cover themselves.

And then they fight—“not only tears / Rained at their eyes, but high winds worse within / Began to rise, high passions, anger, hate, / Mistrust, suspicion, discord, and shook sore / Their inward state of mind, calm region once / And full of peace, now tossed and turbulent.” (IX, 1121-1126)

And Adam says if only you listened to me, did as I told you, instead of giving in to this “will of wand’ring” this morning, like the beasts of the plains wander, rather than stay put and await the harvest come spring,

And Eve says what am I, still your rib? I can never leave your side? If so, “why didst not thou the head / Command me absolutely not to go… Hadst thou been firm and fixed in thy dissent, / Neither had I transgressed, nor thou with me” (1155-1161), recalling how Anna insists, despite Vroksy’s warnings, on going to the concert, though surely she will get shamed and humiliated if she does (for being an adulterer), and then she does get shamed and humiliated and it’s terrible and when she returns she tells Vronksy, Why didn’t force me not to go?

And Adam says I warned you, I foretold what would happen, “and perhaps / I also erred in overmuch admiring / What seemed in thee so perfect… I rue / That error now, which is become my crime, / And thou th’ accuser” (IX, 1177-1182).

And “Thus in mutual accusation spent / The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning, / And of their vain contest appeared no end”—both stuck in stubborn pride, blaming each other, neither able to accept that they did any wrong—like everyone in Dante’s Inferno is, unable to admit that they sinned, making excuses, blaming others, a living Hell.

*

But maybe this is the true beginning, the start of humanity, of the work, the arduous ascent up Purgatory, of having and losing everything, being crowned the king of the wood then usurped and killed and eaten, scapegoated, scourged ritualistically by the Group, this is the seasonal process, the serial regicide Theophagy—

On Saturday and Sunday I get up and do my tasks walk Lila perform my ablutions refill my water from the sacred spring, fill my barrow full of wood, return to the woods, maintain my eternal fire—

And on Monday it gets a bit warmer, and on Tuesday it’s like this, like spring,

And where else could we end but with Dante.

For Dante, too, has been regicided, exiled, he humbles himself beneath Virgil, he sets out on embarks underground on Good Friday morning, through the gate of Dis, in the year 1300, like Orpheus like Heracles like Odysseus sent by Circe to go see Persephone, he harrows hell for twenty four hours over 34 cantos till he descends into Hell’s final circle, Judas’s circle, where he encounters Satan himself,

And then like Christ like Persephone he pops up at the base of Mount Purgatory Easter Sunday morning, and Virgil leads him up the seven sin-tiers, pride envy wrath sloth greed gluttony lust, only the occupants here, over these 33 cantos, know they’ve sinned, are repenting their sins, and only then, finally, can he encounter his Beatrice, his divine beloved, returned from the dead like he ascended from hell.

And where else would this sacred meeting happen, there at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, but in The Garden of Eden itself.

And this is the point when Virgil leaves him, right as he’s about to enter the Garden, he says I’ve taught you all I can, he says “That sweet fruit which mortals seek / and strive to find on many boughs / today shall satisfy your cravings.”3

“Look at the sun shining before you, / look at the fresh grasses, flowers, and trees / which here the earth produces itself” (XXVII. 133-5) …

And Dante, himself like the self-seeding plants in the Garden can move alone now, his will has been strengthened by his long journey through Hell,

And he enters the sacred Garden and the plants are in bloom and fragrant and the clearest spring flows through it, and there like in a dream he sees “a lady, who went here and there alone, singing / and picking flowers from among the blossoms / that were painted all along her way,” (XXVIII. 40-42), and of course he like me like you just thought thinks who could this be, “You make me remember where and what / Proserpina was, there when her mother / lost her and she lost the spring” (XXVIII. 49-51), he thinks he’s Pluto and she’s Persephone, and that this is about lust, the circle of purgatory they’ve just exited, he thinks this is sexual, that she wants him to pluck from her, but no it’s not sexual, the lady simply turns in his direction, “lowering her modest eyes, as does a virgin,” (57),

She is pre-fallen Eve, she does not give into temptation, she stays tending the earth like god told her to,

And he’s not sure where he is exactly, and this prefallen Eve tells him,

Those who in ancient times called up in verse

the age of gold and sang its happy state

dreamed on Parnassus of perhaps this very place.

Here the root of humankind was innocent,

here it is always spring, with every fruit in seasons.

This is the nectar of which the ancients tell. (XXVIII, 139-144)

So it’s both the field where Pluto found Persephone and the garden of Eden that they find themselves in...

But Dante, unlike Satan, like Pluto, forestalls his lust, he doesn’t pluck the bough the apple the flower, he listens to this maiden, this pre-fallenEve, who leads him to Beatrice, the woman who died ten years prior to the poem has reemerged from the dead, joined by a procession of divine entities,

And they move, in a procession, through the garden

And they arrive at “a vaulting forest / emptied through fault of her who trusted in the snake” (XXXII, 31-32)

They come upon the tree of knowledge, barren and bare now, because of Eve’s sin

And Christ is there in the form of a griffin—half eagle, half lion, to represent his half divine, half human incarnated quality,

And then Beatrice descends from the Chariot driven by griffin-Christ, and “all of them murmuring ‘Adam’ / … they circled a tree stopped of its leaves / and any other flowering on its branches” (XXXII, 36-39)

And Christ is commended by all those gathered in the garden for restraining himself, for not plucking from the tree,

‘Blessed are you, griffin, for not plundering

with your beak this tree’s sweet-tasting fruit

that later wrenches bellies with its pain.’

Thus did those around the mighty tree cry out,

and the double-natured animal replied:

‘This is how the seed of justice is preserved.’

Christ being ‘the double-natured animal,’ speaks this final line, the only line he speaks in the whole poem—This, not plucking from the tree, is how the seed of justice is preserved.

And Christ then takes the staff or rod or cross or stick (bough) he’d been driving the chariot with, and ties it back onto the tree—

Turning to the shaft that he had pulled,

he drew it to the foot of the widowed trunk

and left it bound to the tree from which it came (XXXII, 49-51)

and this causes the tree to come back into bloom,

As our plants, when the great light falls on them,

Mingled with the light that shines

In the rays that follow the celestial carp [as when we go from Pisces (sign of the ‘celestial carp,’ the 12th of 12 signs), to Aries each year, the shift that marks the spring equinox, each time spring returns…]

Begging to swell their buds and are renewed,

Each on its proper color, before the sun

Hitches his steeds to other stars,

So, taking on a hue less red than roses

Yet deeper than violets, the tree renewed itself

Where its branches just before had been so bare

By tying himself to the tree—allowing himself to be crucified on the cross, rather than plucking from the tree—Christ redeems Adam

And this is the first step, binding oneself to the mast,

It used to be plunging underground and plucking from the tree brought gold to the lands and widespread acclaim for the hero,

Till Christ created a new type of heroism, of tying oneself to the tree, of accepting being scourged regicided reviled, of this having a regenerative humanizing quality to all—being a new type of Gold

And though this redeems Adam, of course Eve still remains at fault, and this is the apocryphal aspect, the thing that’s ongoing and still being asked, not simply how to redeem Adam but to forgive Eve, what Joyce attempts with Molly Bloom, what Faulkner does with little Quentin’s escape, what 2666 is about, a series of 300-plus unsolved rape murders no one cares to solve or stop, the ramifications of a society that never forgave Eve, that plucks and plucks from the tree till there’s nothing whatsoever left.

And it’s incredible what Dante has done, he’s suffused Christianity with its missing aspect, the archaic goddess worship, he’s expanded the idea of Christian incarnation, he’s deifying this woman, Beatrice, ten years deceased, who died premature, and looking at the eternal light of her smile like the first primeval men looked at Diana as the source of the perennial springs.

And he follows Beatrice up to the light into Paradise, up to the stars.

But it begs the question: is he forgiving fallen Eve, or rather reincarnating prefallen Eve—Beatrice is perfect, she died so young, she can’t talk back except on the page he’s writing,

Because where is his actual wife in all this—of course, she and her family exiled him, he’s exiled because of her, ain’t no way he’s forgiving her

Because forgiving fallen Eve means wading into the muck of the day to day with Eve, Can you do this,

And because this is not the same as foolishly brutishly spinning out in that hell-like cul-de-sac of Circe’s island that we’re talking about, it’s following Persephone to the light (although maybe it’s being nice to Circe).

But it’s now Thursday again, and like I was saying, I just wanted to prepare myself to read the Cantos, I think I’m ready to read Pound’s Cantos now.

Friday, March 7

I went to sleep thinking I’d post this today but I wake up and realize I’ve got more digging to do. I go straight back to Paradise Lost. To find Eve’s connection to Persephone, explicitly. I ran back books six, seven and eight over the last two days of work, listening then rereading them on paper after. There was a great war between Satan and God and God called upon Christ for reinforcements and God wins and Satan falls like lightning back to Hell. Book Nine finds Adam and Eve in the garden, set to go about their daily gardening tasks. Satan, unbeknownst to them, sneaks up from Hell and lurks in the shadows.

This isn’t the first time he’s lurked up on Eve in her garden. Back in Book IV, he did his initial stake out—before the great battle.

Again, this is the first couple, the first making and breaking of the sacred bond, the story we told ourselves to keep each other in check, to make it through the winter, to hold out till the return of spring. And Persephone, as fecundity personified, is the young virgin maiden seed that, if all goes well, if the proper ceremonies are observed, will return come spring in the form of grain-gold, since ears of corn were the first gold, and in fact “early people called ears of grain ‘golden apples’” (Vico).¹

The early iteration of this symbol involves the plucking of self-seeding fruit (the apples they gathered), whereas the later iteration involves plucking a golden bough, or ear of grain (which was planted then harvested).

But this all is before the fall, this is still the golden age, where, like for Persephone in the field near Enna, in Sicily, it is eternal spring. Satan describes the garden:

…murmuring waters fall

Down the slope hills, dispersed, or in a lake…

…vernal airs,

Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune

The trembling leaves, while universal Pan

Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance

Led on th’ eternal spring. Not that fair field

Of Enna, where Prosérpine gath’ring flow’rs

Herself a fairer flow’r by gloomy Dis

Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world; …

but wide remote

From [that] garden, where the Fiend

Saw undelighted all delight, all kind

Of living creatures new to sight and strange:

Two of far nobler shape erect and tall,

Godlike erect, with native honour clad

In naked majesty.1

We have the explicit Persephone (Proserpine) reference, a retelling of her story; we have the “eternal spring,” what the world was before Persephone’s abduction by Pluto; and we have Satan as “the Fiend,” as impatient Pluto who, in Ovid, spying Perspehone “happily plucking bunches of violets or pure white lilies, / filling the folds of her dress or her basket in girlish excitement, … —when Pluto espied her, / no sooner espied than he loved her and swept her away, so impatient / is passion. … Her dress had been torn at the top, / and all the flowers she had picked fell out of her loosened tunic”2— though despite dropping all her flowers, which she laments the loss of her whole way down to Hades, she herself was the fairer flow’r (as John Leonard’s notes indicate, my copy of Ovid seems to have clipped or alternately translated this line, simply saying, poor innocent girl!).

It’s Vronksy eying Anna, Judas jealous of Mary Magdalene’s gratitude for Christ forgiving her, and look how beautiful Adam and Eve’s relationship looks pre-Fall. It’s not completely unreasonable, Satan’s envy. Look at Adam,

His fair large front and eye sublime declared

Absolute rule; and hyacinth locks

Round from his parted forelock manly hung …

She as a veil down to the slender waist

Her unadorned golden tresses wore

Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved

As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied

Subjection, but required with gentle sway,

And by her yielded, by him best received,

Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,

And sweet reluctant amorous delay. (IV, 300-311)

I mean… this is an attractive dynamic (for Satan, from Satan’s perspective, NOT mine).

They’re reclining together, eating fruits naked, no shame, which sends Satan spiraling. “O Hell!” he yells. He plots his abduction. He must have her—take her. To Eve, in his head, he says,

Though I unpitied: league with you I seek,

And mutual amity so strait, so close,

That I with you must dwell, or you with me

Henceforth; my dwelling haply may not please

Like this fair Paradise, your sense, yet such

Accept your Maker’s work; he gave it to me,

Which I as freely give; … there will be room,

Not like these narrow limits, to receive

Your numerous offspring (IV, 375-385)

And here we have our second explicit Persephone reference. Satan’s saying, I must have you, and though my dwelling, Hell, might not be as good as this Paradise you’re in, God did make it (Hell), he gave it to me, so you should accept it. There will be room for you, for me to impregnate you many times over, he says, echoing how Pluto tries to console Persephone on her way down to Hades, telling her that “Hades is spacious.”

*

Reading these sections of Eve getting tempted by Satan, it’s easy to read them simply through the marital—or extramarital—lens. Milton, we know, in 1642, at age 33, “unwisely married Mary Powell, a woman half his age. The marriage was unhappy and Mary returned to her parents’ house after only a few weeks” (and wouldn’t reconcile with him for three years). We also know that, ten years later, Milton lost her, in childbirth, a few weeks after he went blind. Only to lose his infant son John six weeks after that. Then in 1656, when he was 47, Milton married his second wife, only to lose her just over a year later, and then also his five-month-old daughter shortly after that. He’d marry a third wife, but this strained his relations with his three daughters. He published Paradise Lost, which he dictated to his daughters aloud, in 1667, at almost fifty.

And this reading of the Adam-Eve-Satan drama as the arc of a relationship, the challenges of marriage, or even the process of aging, fits into the Vicovian vision of things: Marriage was a difficult rite to uphold for early man, and this story captures the pitfalls and challenges.

But in JG Frazier’s The Golden Bough (1922), which I’ve been listening to on audiobook for months now, and which sorts through the various archaic religious practices of primitive peoples that all seem to involve agricultural rites, priest-kings tied to weather or crops or fire, often some form of tree worship, sacrifices or scapegoats or most significantly theophagy, the ritual killing and often eating of the king—all which shed light on the scourging and crucifixion and resurrection of Christ—the Persephone-Demeter myth is addressed explicitly. In fact, I’m upstairs ram-boarding the room yesterday when I suddenly hit on the Persephone-Demeter chapter, chapter 44 of 69.

The way the primitive agricultural rites work is through personification. That is, the paragon of whatever boon they seek the return of, to overcome war or famine or winter, is sacrificed or ritually killed or in some cases eaten in order for the people to commune with and receive its power. Most initial religious practices are strictly agricultural, fasts late in winter pre-harvest to await the ceremony, often involving some sacrifice or form theophagy—the killing of the corn king, which was sometimes a literal person, the leader, sometimes an effigy, or an animal, or a stranger who happened to pass by, or the last person to scythe the last ear of the harvest, to welcome the return of spring. Persephone, then, mirrors earlier corn goddesses, who are killed, sent to the underworld and left there to germinate until they can sprout up again like the seeds sprout up come spring. It’s no coincidence that Good Friday, the day Christ is ritually killed and sent underground (into his tomb), to harrow hell, and then sprout back up like the seeds sprout occurs in spring—in traditional Christian knowledge, Good Friday is specifically March 25, three days after the spring solstice, mirroring the December 25th winter solstice of his birth, making this same-day spring equinox date also the day of his annunciation (9 months before December 25), and also, astonishingly, of the Fall of Adam and Eve (as Hollander explains in the notes to Dante’s Inferno, since Dante sets his personal harrowing of hell through Inferno and back up onto the mountain of purgatory on the classic Good Friday day, three days after the spring equinox, March 25, of the year 1300).

But the breaking of the marriage rites of Eve’s betrayal, and the personification of the return of the harvest in Persephone, are connected. It’s because of Pluto’s abduction of Persephone that the crops don’t grow half the year; we must restrain ourselves from being like Satan, like Eve, eventually like Adam and giving into our immediate desires. If we are to reap a harvest for ourselves, we must sacrifice something, give something up (no mindless phone use!!), if we are to make it through winter, back up out of hell, back into spring.

And this is no moralistic point, this is just the stories that were told and the messages disseminated that led to today’s current society, where the notion of harvest is mostly gone, due to overabundance, such that no one knows where anything comes from.

And I had this thought recently about the notion of the underworld, or hell. On the one hand it’s where we’re banished to for sin, or where we go when we die if we’ve sinned. But in another, it’s that dank dark place seeds dwell in and sit and gestate in, in order to sprout. Eve and Persephone’s underworlds, respectively.

Vico says: the first “underworld” was the source of a spring. Humans gathered near natural springs, that was how they were able to stop wandering, and it was thought that the source of a perennial was “the underworld.” The first deity of springs “was Diana, who is described … as having three forms: Diana in heaven; the huntress Cynthia on earth, with her brother Apollo; and Proserpine in the underworld.”² Persephone, as the idea of eternal fecundity, then, is the goddess of the springs–the underworld—applied agriculturally.

The second notion of the underworld that emerged, according to Vico, was extended to include graves. “This underworld is no deeper than a ditch, like that where Homer’s Ulysses sees the underworld and the souls of deceased heroes. In this underworld, they imagine the Elysian Fields, where through burial the souls of the dead enjoy eternal peace.” In Homer’s Hymn to Demeter, it’s only once Persephone returns that the Elysian fields go from barren to covered in corn. Vico then describes Aeneas’s descent into the underworld, on which he breaks off the golden bough to enter, “as a Virgilian invention continuing the heroic metaphor of golden apples, which were ears of grain.”

And then finally, the underworld was extended to include “the plains and valleys, in contrast to the heavenly heights of the mountains,” where “impious peoples lived dispersed in their abominable promiscuity” (lol). This is the underworld of Erebus, the son of Chaos—“that is, the confusion of the human seed … the underworld guarded by Cerebus, who shows doglike immodesty by copulating shamelessly in public.”3 This aspect of the underworld is where Phlegathon and Acheron, the rivers of despair, flow—that Dante traverses in the Inferno.

The Persephone myth for Vico is quite simple: “Theseus” (who founded Athens) “descends to the underworld to bring back Proserpine, meaning Ceres” (they’re the same for Vico). “In other words, he descends to bring back sown seed as ripened grain.” Dis, or Pluto, is “the god of heroic weath, meaning poetic gold or the grain” (325)—which is why he holds Persephone, the goddess of the grain.

Frazier in the Golden Bough says that corn goddesses in archaic spring rituals were sometimes young maidens, sometimes old women. Persephone and Demeter, he says, are, like in the archaic rituals, personifications of the year’s coming crop and last years crop, respectively—since, as Vico writes, “When the golden bough is torn from the tree, another grows in its place, because there can be no second harvest until the first has been gathered” (325).

*

It’s technically Adam’s fault for letting Eve get tempted by Satan—for letting her out of his sight. The day Satan shows up to the garden, Eve proposes splitting up for the day. If they break up their tasks, she proposes, they’ll get more gardening done, and god told them to tend to their garden. She’s trying to be an efficient worker. Not to mention, if they’re working near each other, they’ll make eyes at each other, flirt—“For while so near each other thus all day / Our task we choose, what wonder if so near / Looks intervene and smiles, or object new / Casual discourse draw on, which intermits / Our days work…4

Adam has his doubts. He goes, but what about this “malicious Foe / Envying our happiness” we’ve been warned is out here lurking, “somewhere right at hand.”

Eve gets upset by this and says, you’re saying you don’t trust me?

He says, I’m saying I don’t trust the Foe.

But she argues more and finally he says, well if you’re gonna have a bad attitude, you go on: “Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more.” Just meet me back here at noon, he says.

And so off Eve goes to the groves “like a wood-nymph light / Oreae or Dryad, or of Delia’s train,” and Delia, is Diana, Vico’s first goddess of the springs, or the fertility goddess of the wood (also Artemis), or according to Vico also Persephone, and Oreae and Dryads the wood nymphs of her sacred grove.

And Satan slithers up to her and sees her,

Veiled in a cloud of fragrance, where she stood,

Half spied, so thick the roses bushing round

About her glowed, oft stooping to support

Each flow’r of slender stalk, whose head though gay

Carnation, purple, azure, or speckled with gold,

Hung drooping unsustained; them she upstays

Gently with myrtle band, mindless the while,

Herself, though fairest unsupported flow’r,

From her best prop so far, and storm so nigh. (IX, 425-433)

Again alluding to Persephone who, like Eve trying to support the drooping flowers, drops the flowers she picks in Enna, both flowers standing in for themselves, the fairer flow’r

And Satan approaches the grove, a “Spot more delicious than those gardens feigned / Or of revived Adonis,” another mythical mortal, the lover of Persephone and Aphrodite (Venus) who, when he’s killed by a boar, is revived back to life by Jupiter (or Persephone), on the request of Venus, and spends half his the years with Persephone and half Venus…

And Satan leers at beautiful Eve but Eve doesn’t notice, “she busied heard the sound / of rustling leaves, but minded not, as used / To such disport before her through the field, / From every beast, more duteous at her call, / Than at Circean call the herd disguised.” (IX. 518-522) She doesn’t notice because Satan is diguised as a snake, he’s turned into a beast and Eve is used to the beasts of the garden responding to her like the men Circe turns to beasts, filled with unthinking lust and gluttony, respond to Circe’s every move—Eve, to Satan, who “Fawning, and licked the ground wherein she trod,” with “gentle dumb expression,” is Circe; and Satan, the shipwrecked man turned beast.

And Satan makes his case, he appeals to her vanity, he tells her she’s the most beautiful thing god has made, every living creature can see that, and isn’t it unfortunate that only one man gets to experience you, to appreciate you, “one man except, / Who sees thee? (and what is one?) who shouldst be seen / A goddess among gods, adored and served / By angels numberless, thy daily train.”

Saying, in other words, you should be… on Instagram!

She should be experienced and appreciated by Ev’ryone! That’s how beautiful you are.

“So glozed the Tempter,” and who doesn’t like to be complimented, “Into the heart of Eve his words made way,” but mostly Eve goes, how are you, as a snake, talking right now? I thought animals couldn’t talk. To which Satan goes, we’ll see I used to be a mere beast, but one day I came across a place, “Beyond a row of Myrtle’s, on a flat, / Fast by a fountain, on small thicket past,” where I found this tree I ate from. You should come eat from it. I can show you where.

“Lead then, said Eve.” (IX, 631)