No.25 - The dogs of Dante's Inferno

Dante and Virgil watched Dog-face and fellow devils harassing the sinners of Hell.

In preparation for an Honours course, I am re-reading Dante Alighieri’s astounding epic poem, the Commedia Divina, in which Dante depicts himself visiting Hell (Inferno), and eventually Purgatory and Paradise – the archetypal religious journey.  I’ve taught Inferno before, but it feels like a new piece every time.  Partly that’s because it’s so complex and layered that I forget a lot of it, and partly because I keep reading new translations, each of which feels quite different. 

The edition I’ve set this time is a wonderful compilation of various poets’ versions, including such luminaries as the late Seamus Heaney, Sharon Olds, W S Merwin, Amy Clampitt, and others, edited by Daniel Halperin.  So every couple of cantos, or chapters, you encounter a subtly different way of dealing with the compact resonances of Dante’s fourteenth-century Tuscan.  Some try to follow the tight interlocking rhymes of the original; others adopt more free-flowing ways of capturing the vivid drama rather than a more literal rendition.

Because I’ve lately become more attuned to animal presences in all kinds of literature, I started noting the quite numerous animal references in the Inferno.  There is lion and leopard, elephant and whale, donkey and horse, frog and mouse – even a falcon losing touch with its falconer (the source of the image in W B Yeats’s famous poem “The Second Coming”).  There are real animals and allegorical animals and wholly invented monsters like the dragon-ish Geryon, who grudgingly carries the pilgrim Dante and his guide Virgil down the cliffs of Hell’s seventh circle.

And quite a lot of dogs.

What are they doing there?  What can we make of Dante’s underlying attitudes towards animals in general, and towards dogs in particular?  Apart from certain specific instances which every critic comments on, the question doesn’t seem to have been thoroughly studied since  Richard Thayer Holbrook wrote his book Dante and the Animal Kingdom – in 1902!   Though he feels a little dated, Holbrook is richly informative.  In his view, by the 1300s in Europe

the few approaches of Aristotle and some other great minds of antiquity to a true knowledge of the animals were almost forgotten, or converted slowly into fabulous shapes by fantasies unchecked by observation, by a credulity without bounds.

Hence Dante had a long history of fantasy on which to base his monstrous creatures in Inferno.  This was intensified by a theology that denied animals souls, intentions, capacity for abstraction or reason – that which distinguished humans from ‘lower orders’ and gave them access to God.  As for the animals themselves, Holbrook says,

their existence interests him only in so far as it furnishes him with imagery to make us comprehend the actions of men, of devils, and of angels, or in so far as the animals furnish lessons for the guidance of man.  He neither loves nor portrays them wholly for their own sake.

Dante, like our own Shakespeare, had small fondness for dogs.  The great intelligence they often possess, their loyalty even to a bad master, their obvious delight in kindness, their gratitude, their histrionic qualities, their wistful interest in human affairs – not one of these qualities appealed to Dante.

Almost all the associations are negative.  The first canid the pilgrim Dante (he is the main character in his own fiction) encounters is a she-wolf which, along with a lion and a leopard, harries him to the edge of Hell itself, where the ghost of the Roman poet Virgil begins his role as guide.  The wolf is usually interpreted as representing the carnal appetites: she is “so thin she looked/ as if all her appetites were gnawing at her”.  Virgil explains:

Because this animal you are troubled by

            lets no man pass but harasses him

            until she kills him by her savagery,

And she is so consumed by viciousness

            that nothing fills her, and so insatiable

            that feeding only makes her ravenous.

There are many animals she couples with

            and there will be more of them, until the Hound

            shall come and grind her in the jaws of death. (I. trans. Heaney)

One canid overcome by another: in the Christian narrative, unbridled carnality will be eventually banished by the apocalypse and the Final Judgement.  This “Hound” is usually read as the “Hound of Heaven”, a precursor of the Second Coming.  Dante’s word is veltro, which is a boar-hound, something between a greyhound and a Great Dane, used by the aristocracy for hunting.  While Dante may have had the real veltro in the back of his mind, this Hound is, as Holbrook says, “denatured by excessive allegory”.

This kind of divinely vengeful hunting-dog motif is repeated in Canto XIII, where Dante finds himself in a forest, whose branches are actually the transformed bits of human suicides.  Weird!  It’s also a good venue for hunting, and sure enough along come hurtling two misbegotten souls with a “roar ,/ Such as the hunter hears when he keeps his stand,/ hearing the wild boar and the chase itself” and “Behind their backs, the wood was growing full/ of black she-dogs, as eager and as swift as greyhounds just unfastened from their chains” (trans. Charles Wright).  The dogs tear the miscreants apart and carry off their dismembered limbs.

So in this phantasmagoric terror-scape the dog images are derived from real life but are given religious symbolic meaning, too.  Dante had also obviously taken note of dogs in the streets of his native Florence and other towns he was exiled to.  Some people kept guard dogs, so at one point Dante describes the pursuit of a guarding devil: “never was a dog set loose/ in such a hurry to catch a thief” (XXI).  Indeed, a couple of these rather comical devils are compared to guard-dogs, being named “Dog-Face” and “Dog-Scratcher” (or “Dog-Grabber”). 

William Blake's illustration of Cerberus

This echoes the earlier depiction of Cerberus, the guardian of the third circle of Hell: this three-headed monster out of Greek mythology barks dog-like from his three throats, presiding over tortured souls who themselves “howl like dogs” (caninamente, in Dante’s coinage).  Virgil distracts the monster by flinging gobbets of mud into its gullets: “Just as a dog which yelps when it craves/ becomes quiet when snapping up its food,/ straining and battling to devour it” (VI), Cerberus is momentarily subdued.

 Unlike the hunters’ hounds or aristocratic pets, most mediaeval Italian dogs probably lived unrestrained, impoverished, vicious and scavenging lives.  So sinners suffering the punishment of being buried in burning sands, Dante compares to

                                    dogs in summer

            afflicted at the muzzle and the paws

            by gnats and fleas, the gadfly’s bitterness. (trans. Stanley Plumly)

The nasty voraciousness of this dog-life Dante also uses when he describes some souls condemned to tear each other to pieces.  One of them, Ugolino, ceases speaking to the pilgrims and bites into the head of a sinful Archbishop: he “sank his teeth into that wretched skull/ And held on, as strong as a dog on a bone” (XXXIII, trans. Robert Hass).

Animals being regarded fundamentally as inferior to humans on the “Great Chain of Being”, Dante often reduces punished sinners to a bestial level.  For example, the pilgrim Dante comes across the souls of Greek mythological characters (whom he treats equally as real and un-Christian as actual humans), amongst them Hecuba who “began to bark as though she were a dog,/ her mind undone by sufferings she had borne” (XXX, trans. Alfred Corn).

But as Holbrook points out, Dante in the end has little compassion for the suffering sinners, and none at all for the suffering of dogs.  He may have closely observed them, but did not feel for them.  Since animals had neither souls nor reason, they certainly did not enter Heaven.  I haven’t yet sought animals in the next two books of the Commedia, but I suspect that dogs will fade from sight through Purgatorio into Paradiso, except as opportunistic metaphors.

Artistically magnificent though the poem is, I confess I struggle with the more vicious dimensions of a world-view so condemnatory and ignorant of animal lives.

No.24 - The moss on the tractor tyre

I can imagine the scene.  The boss is away in town, his young son is momentarily in charge of the workshop perched on the side of the hill.  He and the equally boyish workers combine in an unusual  spasm of communal hilarity.  It takes four of them to hoist the massive tractor tyre, nearly five feet across, upright, and to roll it slowly through the double doors at the back of the building.  For a moment it teeters on the edge of the concrete ledge; they give it a last concerted heave, and it bounces down a short slope, across the grassy terrace, and disappears over the bank.  The boys whoop as they listen to it crashing down and down through the forest, smashing yellowwoods and draesena palms, sending robins and louries startling into the air, setting even the baboons on the next ridge barking in alarm.  Then silence.

The lads high-five triumphantly and turn back inside the oily booming barn that houses Ocean View Motors, to decide what to do with the rest of the tractor.  Most likely, once they’ve stripped it of useful parts, they’ll shove the wreck into the bush somewhere, too, as with other carcasses of worn-out Holdens and Morrises and Mercs.

           

I imagine this all happened the same day as I was born, a thousand miles to the north.  It’s at least possible, since the lid of the dustbin I inherited from the workshop and still use today is stamped with the year of my birth.

           

And the tyre is still there, a hundred yards down the hill from my flatlet attached to that same, now empty, workshop.

“The abandoned car body rotting quietly in the landscape is alive with the activity of corrosion, it’s become a habitat, it looks perfectly at home, it’s both organic and machinic.  The shifting and contingent meanings for waste, the innumerable ways in which it can be produced, reveal it as not essentially bad but as subject to relations.  What is rubbish in one context is perfectly useful in another ... disenchantment stories deny the complexity of waste...”

That’s from Gay Hawkins’s provocative book, The Ethics of Waste.  One of our Master’s students is also working on a literary angle to waste, focusing on American novelist Don DeLillo’s gargantuan, sprawling, bewitching work, Underworld.  This teeming, Dickensian novel is largely populated by characters who work in the USA’s massive waste-disposal industry: a landfill designer at Fresh Kills, New York; a painter turning discarded B-52 bombers in the Arizona desert into artworks; a restaurant owner dumping excess food.  Nuclear waste seethes in secretive silos; a freighter loaded with toxic sludge wanders the world, rebuffed by every port.  All this, in DeLillo’s depiction, constitutes the underworld of our modern, shiny, capitalist enterprise, our adoration of machinery and bling – junk everywhere, threatening to overwhelm us.

One of DeLillo’s waste-disposal characters is Nick Shay, who deals with, amongst other stuff, radioactive waste.  Of burying nuclear waste in a Mesozoic salt-bed in Texas he says:

We were waste handlers, waste traders, cosmologists of waste. ... It was a religious conviction that these deposits of rock salt would not leak radiation.  Waste is a religious thing.  We entomb contaminated waste with a sense of reverence and dread.  It is necessary to respect what we discard.

No respectful religious fervour amongst my imaginary tractor-tyre boys, I warrant.  But DeLillo seems to be saying that if we don’t learn to re-value our waste, we will likely be buried by it.  Many creative people turn waste into art these days  And of course the poor have always valued and re-valued waste.  Most of ‘my’ car-wrecks have been hacked up and carried away on donkey-carts to be sold on into the Far East’s scrap industry.

But – along with the bits of rubber door-linings, the broken glass, the twisted shards of chromium fenders left behind – that tyre is still there.  With its robust metal hub, it probably weighs half a ton.  One would have to carve a whole road through the forest with a front-end loader, uproot a hundred trees, to get it out again.  It is destined, in short, to remain there forever.

With Hawkins and DeLillo in my mind, I look at it again.  I sit and just watch the sun-dapples shift across it as the day rotates above the thirty-foot treetops.  It may not look “perfectly at home”, in Hawkins’ phrase, but it has certainly become a habitat.  Half a dozen different species of plant have taken root inside its hub, each with its differently-shaped leaves.  Some have the tiniest mauve flowers, around which flit a couple of interested butterflies, nondescript brown until sunlight sparks a royal purple sheen off their forewings.  Tiny reddish ants, translucent in sun, are journeying purposefully back and forth along the stem of a creeper with trifoliate leaves that hugs the tyre’s edge.  On rhoicissus leaves nestled against its side, caterpillars are designing new Le Mans racing circuits with their jaws.  And in the two-inch wide chasms of the tyre’s treads, miniscule spiders have engineered their webs and snares; one has already wrapped in silk some unidentifiable prey, probably an embalmed larder for its eggs.

Brown-and-white droppings mark the tyre as a staging-post for certain birds.  And it’s a handy perch for a fastidious cat.

And there are still more subtle inhabitants.  Multiple species of mould breed in the slushy leaf-litter, vital fungi that will serve to transport fluid from earth to roots.  Even on the orange paint of the hub, algae have established tiny unexplored continents of green.  Little rosettes of blue-grey lichen fleck the rubber surfaces.  And some kind of moss has found congenial the miniature pits in the rubber, frosting almost the complete tyre with a patina of luxurious green.  Were it not for the unnatural symmetries of the treads, the thing would look almost like it belonged.

Another odd thought occurs.  Unlike other loose tyres I’ve found in the forest, this one’s still locked to its hub, and so cannot harbour rainwater, breeding-ground for mosquitoes and sundry other creatures.  Perhaps it’s still full of air.  Perhaps that air is as old as I am: fossilised breath.  Stashed in the hub are some old bottles, green beer-dumpies – and also a small pharmaceutical phial.  It’s slightly distorted, as if it had been blown by hand; there’s a smudge of russet residue of the original contents in the bottom; and its screwtop is still solidly sealed.  Maybe it, too, contains air from the year of my birth.  What would happen if I opened these decades-old vessels, and gulped their contents?  Release into the world some lethal toxin we are not ready to fight?  Or might I regain the youthfulness of my own first breaths?

The tyre’s foreignness still bulks ineradicably in my mind.  There is no embossed writing on it to identify its maker, but it could be, say, Massey-Ferguson, or Dunlop.  I wonder, then, about the origins of its components: steel from Pittsburgh for the hub; rubber from Brazil; chrome oxide in the yellow paint mined in the Congo; lead from Canada.  My forest has been internationalised – but is also re-wilding and re-valuing the invader.  Nothing will be quite the same as it was before, but the natural processes also move on, enveloping it, just being themselves.

We can no longer be complacent about the effects of the waste we daily generate.  I am suspicious of the retort that “Nature will eventually take care of it” – that’s an ethical cop-out.  But in this case?  Nothing to be done, really.  I call the cat, and we head for home.