I have been away a long time but there has not been one word to write and hardly a word to utter. I have been unable to think of a solitary thing that I would like to share and that is probably all on account of me not trying.
I did have an interesting conversation with an old friend last night about a lot of things in general and nothing at all in specific.
In general she informed me that she has recently converted to anarchism but she couldn’t specifically tell me how or why.
In general we talked about our personal weather. Neither of us could specifically say anything meaningful about ourselves. It had been a long time and I felt friction every time we nudged too close, static in the most meaningless sense.
It feels the same coming back on here. So much has happened but so little has changed, a lot of water under the bridge is still, nonetheless, only water.
The similarities don’t end there. Last night I was accused of that worst sin – apathy! And lord how it is true. I have turned apathetic and I shall, no doubt, suffer in that vestibule of hell that Dante reserved for the Futile,
“And he replied: the dismal company
Of wretched spirits thus find their guerdon due
Whose lives knew neither praise nor infamy
They’re mingled with that caitiff angel-crew
Who against God rebelled not, nor to him
Were faithful, but to self alone were true…”
This passage came to me during the conversation but not in the rhythm of its words and not accompanied by the name of its exiled and long forgotten writer. It came to me as a notion but like many notions I realised that it was borrowed and not my own. It could only be a nobler spirit and perhaps a nobler time that could express such an idea that could render it more than a notion or fancy. It was this anachronism of the notion that made me pick up Dante after I had hung up the phone and find the words as they should be spoken.
In this circle of Dante’s inferno, which is not rightfully a true circle but a vestibule, reside the shades that both hell and heaven despise. Dante calls the punishment of the damned their “contrapasso”. It does not exactly translate into “suffering”, but marginally more accurately as counter-suffering. Do not let it fool you. It does not mean that it counters suffering. It is more like payment in kind. In hell we become aware of the suffering that our sins cause, our damnation is not a new infliction but a curing of the blindness that allowed us to carry on ignorant of our own destitution. It is our own sins that torment us, not the dumb and mute Lucifer that occupies the very centre of hell.
In the vestibule of the Futile the damned are tormented by whirlwinds of sand and the stinging of hornets and wasps. They cry out and moan, a never ceasing drone and a useless clapping of hands. What a fitting punishment for those that possessed no direction in life and embraced the cold comfort of indecision. They are forever tossed and turned by forces that are both intangible and insubstantial, plagued by torments that, by themselves, are ignoble and childish. They scream at wind and the sting of an insect.
It is telling that the damned in this area of Dante’s hell are so vocal. Apathy has very little to do with how little you have said, it is more about how little you have done. You can say a great deal and still be the paragon of apathy. That stream of words can be the tell tale sign of a truly apathetic soul. People usually speak before they decide, before they act. We discuss and weigh and make sense with words and thoughts and all the things that moan and shriek. Last night I spent a lot of time talking and discussing, defending positions that were not positions at all, nothing that could be located or pointed out, I defended words and their relation to other words. More than once I was accused of academic hair splitting and the accusation was justified. I was reduced to hair splitting because I just could not decide. The accuser might have been wrong but she held a conviction and that was more than I could say, she believed in what she said while I did not, I just reacted to whatever she had said last. We do not always have to wait for our damnation before we inhabit the whirlwind.
That is not to say that there are no words that can act or act as prime causes. There can be a very physical momentum provided by words. Some of the greatest speeches have been the seed of great deeds and sweeping changes, but these great speeches have always been the result of steadfast decisions, of a willingness to stand opposed to elements that have seemed stronger and destined to prevail.
I have been vocal in the way Dante’s neutrals are. A useless flapping and a chasing of one’s own tail, stung by the pettiness of indecision, flung about by this very indecision, everything about me the whirlwind that disorientates and obscures because I cannot bear to choose, because, often, I do not want to choose.
I find it important that Dante has both heaven and hell despise the Neutrals, that neither would have them. Apathy is not about morality or ethics. It is ultimately a rejection of the moral universe, a refusal to partake in morality or ethics, and in fact Dante refers to the sin punished in this part of hell as “the great refusal”.
Those who choose to commit neither right or wrong are punished most of all.
Now. How does this relate in any way, shape or form to my recent absence from JU. Well it has been apathy more than anything else that has kept me away. A lack of conviction, a refusal on my part to partake, to participate, and reap the reward or punishment that participation would reap. I have not been able to decide what to write because I have been weak enough to fear the consequence of that decision. Will it be good enough, or relevant or up to standard (my own or someone else’s?). Why this was not the case before is beyond me at this time in the morning.
It might not matter to any of you but it matters a lot to me and when it comes to damnation either in this world or the next that makes all the difference.
Punishment or reward there can only ever be one recipient and each suffers it or enjoys it in isolation.
Reading this again I have discovered that, yes, it is as bad as it sounds. I had no intention of making this sound like a religious tract but obviously my intention had very little effect. Dante's poem was an allegory and as allegory it makes great use of symbolism. This is not to say that Dante did not believe in the hell or heaven he wrote of, only that his imagiative architecture could substitute for a mutliplicity of things.
What interested me most was his notion of the contrapasso and with it the implication that such a punishment need not wait for death and judgement to take effect. We suffer our own contrapassos daily and banaly. Many would call it the conscience or karma, cause and effect or meritocracy, summed up in that age old adage "you reap what you sow".
I have suffered in my own minor way within the dillusional confines of my belief that what i should and should not write here be determined but what others would think of it or how disappointed i would become in having written something i am not pleased with. I have recently retracted my participation in an attempt to escape the infallible and inescapable rules of cause and effect, the seeds of the future contained in the decisions of the present. I could not fail or suffer because i had not acted, had withheld cause. How wrong i have been. I have suffered anyway.