Dante's Musical Offering

Murray KANE
Illustrations Melissa BONE

On the way to this musical Inferno, once, I found myself in a dimly lit station in which there was much smoke, but little talking. The town I was leaving was preparing to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the events of the Divine Comedy. Someone with a sense of occasion had painted above the station gate

Through me you go into the city of grief,
Through me you go into the eternal pain,
Through me you go among the lost people.

Justice moved my exalted creator,
The Divine Power made me,
The Supreme Wisdom, and the Primal Love.

Before me all created things were eternal,
And eternal I will last.
Abandon all hope, you who enter here.

It was already late when I first heard the low rumble of an approaching train from a tunnel away to our right. As it emerged from the silence a cold wind bearing disturbing subfrequencies forced those of us waiting on the platform to gather closer together. Knowing that a long journey lay before us, I asked a thin man a long-journey question -- `Who is Dante?´ He replied, `Dante writes the greatest love poem in the West.´ An older man, standing close by said `what do you mean the West? What language different from Dantean carves open the universe like this?´ A woman who had listened to the words of the first two began `Dante is an angelic inquisition. He is the arch-questioner of life-forms´ `And death-forms too´, said the older man. `No love poet ever had Dante's thirst for the difficulties of his subject matter. He is a conjurer of ghosts; a necromancer channelling the philosophic fire into metre and allegory to illuminate the dark abyss of Hell.´ When the train arrived, I asked the ticket-inspector `have we had enough of Dante yet or not?´ He thought about it as he was counting out my change, then announced politically `Dante is a poison that may kill the serpent yet. A siege-engine against the walls of Florence that he so loves to hate. Do you think she has received him back yet?´ He turned to the other passengers. `Have we had enough of Dante?´ this fellow asked. `What? Has the eternal Florentine tragedy of history come to an end without our noticing? Has it my fellow passengers?´ `But you are the ticket-inspector´ said a passenger with an eye for detail. `No, we're all Dante now´ he replied, `but who Beatrice is, now there's the question.´

The train rolled on through the night and I wondered which Dante we all are, Dante lost in the dark forest of a life that is going to ruin, or Dante whose voyage through the vortex of Hell prepares his heart for a reorientation to the light. Were these pilgrims, exiles and lovers around me, or people lost? What did the sign on the front of the train say? I had not thought to look. All night conversations sparked intermittently in the carriages. Two critical lads imagined that Dante's poem was a double critique, `on the one hand´ one said, `exploring the psychological states in which the individual human loses touch with eternity´, `and on the other´ said the other, `of the civilisation, crystallised in the shape of labyrinthine Florence, which mutates the possible shapes of human living-together-in-time into the manifold bolgia of despair, corruption, and stultifying obsession.´ `Yes, the poem is a war against superficiality and pusillanimity as much as it is against conscious evil´ uttered the first with conviction. The second whispered back `a monumental re-creation, nay, the actual invention of the idea of love in the most advanced and chaotic city of medieval Europe, Florence caught in the gateway between antiquity and modernity, a city bloated with hellishness, yet flowering strangely with the anti-toxins of that strange ghost Beatrice.´

All night I wandered the aisles, posing my question to lonely passengers, listening to twos and threes and sometimes fives listening to each other. In the vestibule of the second car I found the ticket-inspector upbraiding a couple for thinking they could enter the first with second-class tickets. `Do you really imagine that Hell is an invention of Catholic theology?´ he said, blocking their way. `The Buddhist, the Animist, the Christian, and the Hindu all have their hells´ he went on as he ushered me past with a slight tilt of his head, `and as for the Pagan and Islamic underworlds  . . . ´ `But we have advanced´, the vestibular couple countered in unison, `beyond the limits of these superstitions  . . .  haven't we?´ The ticket-inspector shut his eyes for a moment and then said, `when a culture has forgotten what Hell is, an unspeakable force has flattened the cosmic architecture. If a people denies itself the power to render itself in myth, then Hell has fled its home in the imagination. It dissolves and re-enters the fissures of the mind discretely and in full view of the scientific eye, only to decompress in madness, violence, and suicide. It rebuilds itself in the prison and the asylum, towering like Babel above a world that cannot understand its own language.´ The ticket-inspector's audience looked to me for support as I passed by, but I had nothing to say, and left them there in the vestibule at the mercy of his tongue.

In the second car people were poring over musical charts and strange looking maps. Instruments lay in fragments and in various states of assembly on the tables. The train had slowed, braking as it wound its way down a steep incline. Realising that I had an opportunity here to discover something more about our destination, I asked, somewhat naively I now think, `So what is it about Dante that attracts the musical eye?´ A bald man who had been amusing himself by filing away at a piece of tubing looked up from his bench. `The Divine Comedy is folded through a complex musical machinery with acoustic co-ordinates and kinetic tendons like to no other in dimension. Paradise and Purgatory are alive with songs of desire, atonement and fulfilment, the harmony of the celestial spheres and the language of a philosophy that turns into music before transcending the range of the human senses.´ I stood wondering about the implications of this when a man shouted out as he closed the toilet door behind him `what about Inferno though? There's not a lot of singing down there´. `That's true´ called back the first, `but there is so much sound. The sound of slapping, tearing and rending, of weeping, groaning and lamenting  . . . ´ `and of farting, spluttering and gargling´ shouted the voice from inside the water closet, from which an obscene odour was beginning to assail us. `Ulysses talks through a cloven flame´ continued the first, `and the wretched Pier delle Vigne, metamorphosed into a tree, struggles to hiss his words through the blood and sap of a broken branch. Then there's the faceless hordes of the money-obsessed clashing against each other in never-ending cycles, while massed banks of Gorgons, Furies and rebel angels scream deafeningly from the flaming towers of Dis. This is a basic material we use for the voicing of our sonic infernos. But as for kinetics, you might have to ask Bruno´ he said, attracting my attention to the gaunt and sallow figure who had emerged from the toilet.

`What do you want to know? he said with a cough. `We've made so many musical force models of Hell on our travels.´ He looked around at his companions. `Jacopo there built a monster. He made everybody suffer -- us, the audience. We had to strain every nerve -- broke our mouths, fingers and instruments getting at those points where the human is twisted and distorted beyond its balance points.´ `And difficult as a bastard to play´ said a woman from the other side of the car. `It was so deeply horrible´, she went on, `that we could only perform it in the full light of day in places consecrated and cleansed of malevolent spirits´. `Aye´ said Bruno `it was dread uncanny, split-toned and faltering. The trick was to find how the secret grace in which the tears are wrapped could be unfolded. So much light it took to illumine that depth. Another time we concentrated on the gravity and metaphysical contradictions of the Hell-system.´ `What contradictions?´ I asked. `Well you see, the lowest part of Hell is the physical centre but the spiritual periphery of the universe. That was something. Each circle was slower than the preceding one, all heading to an ultimate point where time stopped.´ `And as we decelerated´ said Jacopo, `great pulses from Satan's wings breathing hate and ignorance and impotence would pass through us coming up from the bottom. You couldn't tell that the music was slowing for a long time. Every time we went down a circle, we would explore the interstices of shorter and shorter periods of time. The instruments would burst out with resisting detail in ever more isolated attempts to express themselves through the gravitational crush.´ `Sometimes´ added Bruno, `we carried our audience on the wings of a bird high above the scene. But with that one, we wanted them to enter Hell themselves and like Dante and Virgil, push themselves headlong down through the eternal layers and vast static constellations of material. The friction of their journey invoked communication with the ghosts like the sparking of a drill through rock. We gave them eyes like microscopes, and as they were drawn down through the massive pit into the narrowing pressure-fields of the lower Hell they could hear the retarded material of previous levels above them.´ `And then there was the one you made for the improvisers. Do you remember? said Jacopo. `I remember´ replied Bruno `From circle to circle, new rhythmic material emerged around intensively magnified focal points, calibrated to the proportions of the Fibonacci series.´ `The Fibonacci series?´ I echoed. `Yes, the series of numbers which approaches the magical and incommensurable ratio of the golden section the further it extends. But it grew wondrous difficult for our musicians as the series degenerated away from its divine path under the influence of some grotesque equation. It became quite impossible to communicate as an ensemble around the broken bridge at the centre of Malebolge.´ `What was that like?!´ asked Jacopo laughing. `The revelation of incohesion, hypocrisy and fraud at the heart of the hellish community,´ remarked Bruno. `We really got into a stew down there when we ran out of rhythmic material to work from. We were left to improvise with our hearts slowed to one beat a century. The shrill whistle that we started with on the lips of the highest circle wound down to a drone at the bottom with waves bigger than the gaps between planets.´ I turned away in a quandary and made my way up the aisle, aware from the noise behind that the musicians were straight back to their infernal business.

`Where can I learn the language to listen to the sound-hells that they are making?´ I wondered aloud as I made my way along the carriage. Two men huddled over a table looked up at me `Without thinking of discrete scenes´ the darker of the two said, `you might approach the different musical worlds through which you pass as emergences of the massed temperaments of the dead.´ `And if I was thinking  . . . ´ I began to say when he cut me off with the words `are you a geometrician?´ `I don't think so´ I replied a little puzzled. `Make him a map then´ he instructed his paler companion. The pale man began to sketch an inward turning spiral and placing what seemed to be fragments of musical instruments at various points on it. `What is it a map of?´ I ventured. `It is the literal dimension of Hell, a few co-ordinates for you to orient yourself around. It's a only a rough sketch, but you might need it to get started,´ said the dark man. He and his companion then embarked upon a very detailed exposition of which I recount only some points of peculiar interest. `Hell is a conical abyss reaching from the surface of the earth to the very centre, where Satan and the traitors are crushed in icy stasis. Here are the rivers you will cross. Acheron and Cocytus form the beginning and the end, Styx and Phlegethon in between, dividing the whole into three regions.´ `How will I recognise Styx?´ I asked. `Sullen strings choking on the fumes of spite´ he replied matter-of-factly. `And Phlegethon?´ `Phlegethon is a river of boiling blood. You will smell the electricity of violence there. But these images are mere sparks for the ignition of your own imagination. You must memorise the surface of the map.´ I peered closely at it. On the widest arm of the spiral lay a crotale disc. `Limbo´ whispered the pale man, `a silver sigh set around the entire chasm. The air is trembling with the intense thought-arrows of the Greek genius, slow as breath under the eternal exile.´ On the next circle the head of a flute was poked inside the bell of an oboe. `Francesca and Paulo´ said the darker. `Fire-flies caught in the dark restless storm-winds and ever-renewed depletion of love-sickness´ added the paler in tones that made the other smile and shake his head. The chewed and split mouth-piece of a bass clarinet stained the page with a foul juice below this. `Is this Ciacco the glutton?´ I asked. The dark one chuckled, `Ah yes, the split-tongued hedonist, Ciacco the prophet. But concentrate now -- remember to remember his voice for it will guide you again later.´ The other was getting impatient. He lifted up a golden trumpet valve and banged it down on the table, splitting the paper and scratching the wood below. `Fortune thou faceless Power´ he intoned in a strange voice, `thou externalizor of all inwardness, insane dialectic of the value form´. `And there´ concluded the dark one darkly, `is the most chaotic and dynamic node of historical movement.´

The first spiral terminated in a point. `Is that the end of the map´ I said. `Maps don't have ends´ replied the pale man. `They have levels of magnification. Look!´ he said, as he crumpled up the first sheet to reveal another underneath. `A second spiral.´ Upon the page he lay the shaft of a trombone curiously erect with the keys of a saxophone scattered around it. `Farinata and Cavalcanti the heretics, vainly trying to look into time from a place without a present.´ Below this, a knot of red wire and electrical scraps, resistors, transistors and smouldering solder. `Here's your Phlegethon´ he announced. Near the centre of the paper, splinters from the neck of a viola spelt out the word `Non´. `And there the Wood of the Suicides.´ Such was the nature of their talk, and they so crammed full my head with information that I made to rise. The dark-eyed man took hold of my arm. `Don't you want a map of the third region, of the bridges and ditches of Malebolge?´ He unfurled a dark parchment. Its centre was torn away, and around the edges a sparse maze of metallic and wooden shards gave the impression of concealing a hidden shape. `I can't make out anything clearly´ I said, `I don't know if I would know it even if I had the map with me when I got there.´ He released my arm. `Do you really have no ear for geometry then?´

I stumbled against the door of the next carriage as the brakes of the train gripped what must have been a very steep stretch of track. The door offered no resistance, and I'm sure I would have fallen and rolled down the aisle if the ticket-inspector had not caught me in his arms. `Good´ said he. `No, marvellous´ I heard someone respond as I gathered myself together. There were people on either side of us, sitting on facing benches that ran along the walls of the carriage. I sat down between a youth with extraordinarily filthy hair and an older man in a heavy raincoat. They leant forward as if to continue a conversation with a grey-eyed woman whose book lay spine up on her lap. She had paused while I tried to get comfortable near the window, which looked out onto a still starless sky. I could see nothing, but the hollow sound of the floor below indicated that we were passing over a bridge. `If those musicians´ said the woman from the other side `are mad enough to map out Hell and devise musical force fields that parallel the episodes of Dante's journey, they might, if successful, find out that they have the skeleton of something fabulous before them, but they would not have the living creature, nor yet the ghost of it. What do you think stranger?´

I thought I knew my thoughts on this, but I felt unaccountably weak. Where was the ticket-inspector? Had I been abandoned? What could I say? While I sat perplexed, the youth next to me, whose name I now recall was Alessio, raised his face and said `why use the new musical vocabularies and technologies to illustrate a poem long dead?´ In the silence that ensued, I could feel my pulse dropping. `It is reinvention, not illustration´ I said faintly. I dug my fingernails into the palm of my hand, drawing a little blood. `They are re-opening the vents and the veins in the poem.´ Turning a brief frown of concentration upon me Alessio responded, `the global culture has become a teeming jungle of fragments, hybridity and idiosyncracy. This calls for an exploratory music of small things -- a micro-sounding art. What authenticity could there be in music with a dense narrative element?´ Thinking back, I should have said `the authenticity of the hybrid is anchored in terror and beauty´, but my thoughts would not congeal properly in the sluggishness of that fetid atmosphere. `I will not dispute that the great creative dilemma now is how to organise sound cogently given the astounding possibilities at hand´ I found myself saying, `but at a time when new energies are bursting free everywhere, the question is how to gather and focus them in a way that is capable of stirring up forces of real dimension.´ `But to tie a score to a text so closely´ Alessio went on, `this takes us back to the programmatic music of the 19th century.´ `No´ I said, stirred by a languor in his tone, `no-one ever did this before. This is not a backward glancing memorial to the medieval genius, but the conjuring of a polysemous art to unlock the mouths of ghosts past and future. To make music that talks to Dante not only requires a spirit of sustained necromancy, but ears sub-tuned to the outer frequencies of the heart, and a heart tuned to a mind that loves things of dimension. To make the main-springs of the poem quiver and begin their motions again is no task for a dilettante scavenging for interesting fragments.´

The woman across from us laid down her book again, and said `I see the skeleton of a death-journey. Dante's Ulysses is wrecked and drowned in the search for such knowledge.´ Suddenly aware that the train was decelerating and sensing that time was against us, I improvised a rapid argument. `If our friends are bold enough to navigate the sea-lanes between the Scylla of programmatic music and the Charybdis of impressionism, they might search out the channel sailed by Joyce's Ulysses, not the Florentine. Consider how closely and deeply Joyce follows in the fire-tracks of his mythological templates. The chronology and topology, the ordering of scenes, and the appearance of characters are worked out to the highest degree of concordance possible, yet no-one would suggest that Ulysses is so imitative of Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare's Hamlet, or indeed the Divine Comedy itself as to render its art subordinate to its sources. These are works that absorb and suspend form, and because of the size and prismatic nature of the spaces opened within them, the detailed tracking and matching of artistic material from previous epochs allows an instrument to be built that resonates like some great strange Aeolian harp, tuned into the historical forces, the metabolism, and the life-winds of our own age.´

I was weary. I could still hear people talking. No, it was not so much talking now. Fragments of phrases broke the silence in short bursts, as if from far away, and now close by. The ticket-inspector had passed into the next carriage. I could see that the lights had been put out as the door swung shut. A voice greeted me as I entered, thinking of rest. `Let no one without geometry enter here´. ` Has Hell a geometry?´ I asked, my voice oddly disfigured. `Galilleo thought so´ came the reply. `God is an able geometrician then?´ said a second voice. The first answered. `So it seems. For those who can pierce the night of unity with eyes that see angles turn inwards into the different dimensions of space, time, and form, God has carved some very strange things with a compass, and none stranger than the human hells.´ The train was slowing. `If harmonic waves push the perfections of living things into closer and closer helixes approximating the golden sections of the Celestial Rose, then Hell is an anti-geometric labyrinth centring on the peripheralisation of all debris.´ Ever more heavily the carriages ground against the track as if pushing through lead. `A Leviathan drawing life through the filter of a disintegrating Fibonacci series of hate, impotence and ignorance, towards a centre where the pure passivity of consuming Lucifer is crushed into sheer static mass, a collapsed nothing, a dispersed corruption of the properties of unity.´

The train had stopped, for how long I don't know, when I felt a hand shaking me. `Stay awake´ urged the ticket-inspector. `Where is Beatrice?´ I asked. He pointed to the window, through which I could see the stars for the first time that night, and said `Beatrice is ever elsewhere refiguring the damage done in Hell against the sacred geometry.´