Going Everywhere But Going Nowhere: Eliot and Dante

One often-cited passage from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Four Quartets" is:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

One of Eliot's most important influences was Dante's "Comedia,"or "The Divine Comedy" as it came to be known.

Very early in his set of Yale University lectures entitled "Reading Dante," professor Giuseppe Mazzotta depicts "Comedia" as encyclopedic in nature, which he says means "a circle of knowledge" as originally conceived by Marcus Vitruvius, a Roman architect and engineer. 

Vitruvius most famously wrote a book known as De Architectura that was a lot more than the title might suggest. "Much more than a book on buildings and machines, the contents of De Architectura reveal the ancients' much wider concept of what exactly is 'architecture' and it describes such topics as science, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, astrology, medicine, meteorology, philosophy, and the importance of the effects of architecture, both aesthetic and practical, on the everyday life of citizens." That's from "The Ancient History Encyclopedia."

Picking up on that notion and applying it to "Comedia," Mazzota says:"

This idea of circularity is crucial, in the sense that to know something you have to have a point of departure, from which you will pass through all the various disciplines of the liberal arts, only to arrive right back where you started. The beginning and the ending in a liberal education must coincide, but you will find out things along the way that allow you to see with a different viewpoint or perspective."

The arts in question are called "liberal" for a couple of different reasons, Mazotta explains. First, to distinguish them from knowledge known in medieval times as mechanical arts. But far more importantly, knowledge gives mankind important freedoms. 

That could be a topic for another day.  The point of this posting is simply to illustrate some important linkage between Dante and Eliot.

More On The Topic of Art and Clarity

In my previous post, I talked about how clarity can be the enemy of art, or perhaps more accurately the enemy of those who desire to be viewed as important artists.

This is not a new idea. Sorting through some old clippings, I came across a "Bookends" feature from the Aug. 30, 2015 issue of the New York Times weekly book review section.

Gbessa, or "She Would Be King," by Wayétu Moore

Myths, some more religious than others, appear to be essential to human existence. They serve to explain the origin of various societies and often are the source of values and behavioral norms. Most have important supernatural elements that elevate such stories above the commonplace and render them seemingly timeless.

Artists, seeking to give their work and thus themselves a transcendent quality, often anchor their efforts in myth. One thinks, for instance, of Richard Wagner basing what he considered his masterpiece – the Ring Cycle operas – in Norse legend. And James Joyce appropriating Homer’s epic to give “Ulysses” a framework and a name that serves to place the book in a more universal context than early 20^th century Dublin.

Then there’s T.S. Eliot who identified Tiresias, a leading prophet in Greek mythology, as the most important voice in his poem “The Waste Land.”

All of which brings me to contemporary American author Wayétu Moore, who has apparently decided that Liberia, her distant homeland, needs a foundation myth that she provides in her debut novel, “She Would Be King.” Scheduled for released in hardcover in September 2018. Moore, in interviews, has described it as “a novel of African magical realism.”

Eliot & Barnes: Why The Past Belongs In What's New

In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot famously argued that great poets are distinguished not by the degree to which their work differs from the past, but rather by the manner in which they incorporate and acknowledge prior achievements.

It is a prejudice of critics that they search for those aspects of a poet’s work that least resembles the work of other writers, and pretend to find therein the essence of the poet and that which readers can most enjoy, Eliot said. “Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously,” he continued.

Death of a Shapeshifter: David Bowie

David Bowie, identified first and foremost in his New York Times obituary as "infinitely changeable" died on Sunday, Jan. 10, 2016. He was 69 years old.

"In concerts and videos, Mr. Bowie’s costumes and imagery traversed styles, eras and continents, from German Expressionism to commedia dell’arte to Japanese kimonos to space suits," the newspaper said. It called him "a constantly morphing persona" and "a person of relentless reinvention."

Why mention this is a bog about fiction?