ERIC'S BIT or STYX AND STONES
Mary and I have managed to keep our noses above the snow and ice these past few months, just barely. It's been a rough winter in the northeast especially out here in the sticks. Or should I say Styx?
Although it feels like we've been living a tale of the Yukon by Jack London, in fact, during the last cold snap, I was reading Dante's Inferno. As I followed the two old poets down into the ninth circle, temperatures during the day struggled to reach fifty and that was in the house. Outside, overnight, it was well below zero. I could empathize with those wretched souls encased up to their necks in the icy Cocytus lake. At least they deserved their fate. And they don't need to pay our propane bills either.
The worst part is how do they wipe their noses? The cold must make them run. When I have to trundle the trash down to the road around dawn on pickup day my nose and eyes stream the moment the cold hits them.
It was more pleasant warming myself over the boiling pitch in the eighth circle. I reached that level about the time Chris Christie's machinations were being exposed and I couldn't help imagining the devils plying their pitchforks to push him back down like a big dumpling into the bubbling stew of corrupt politicians.
One of my favorite cantos was the one where Dante and Virgil were double-crossed and pursued by the Malebranche ("Evil claws" -- what a great name for devils) who patrol the pitch lake. Plot twists, action, danger!
Here's a confession. Whereas many readers approach every book as if it were a literary novel, alert for symbols and psychological insights, I read classics as if they were genre novels. I grew up on genre fiction -- science fiction and fantasy and then mysteries -- and I never did outgrow those kinds of stories.
So to me the horror at the end of Heart of Darkness is worthy of Stephen King. Conan the Barbarian would have been right in his element hacking away in the middle of the bloody chaos in The Red Badge of Courage. The dark, perverse romantic triangle described by Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter might have served as a noir plot device for Cornell Woolrich. And what is Crime and Punishment except a long example of the "inverted detective story" for which R. Austin Freeman is famous amongst mystery aficionados?
I know I should be paying more attention to Dante's allusions to the classics rather than being entranced by the amazing fantasy world he created. Yes, I am studying the footnotes. But how many people today are familiar enough with ancient Roman poets, classical mythology, and the Bible -- not to mention thirteenth and fourteenth century Italian artists and public figures -- to read The Inferno as Dante intended? How much of the population of Dante's time was educated enough to read it as he intended, or to read it at all?
What an author purposely puts into words is only a part -- and probably a small part -- of what readers experience. We all bring our own learning and memories, our own approaches to literature. Different people will look for different things from the same book and find them. To the surprise of the author who had no idea he'd written any such things.
Maybe I'm just trying to excuse my reading Dante's Inferno as if it were Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. Be that as it may, when Dante describes the shades fully covered by ice but visible as wisps of straw in glass, I can feel the unbearable cold stinging my soles, can see below my feet ghostly distorted forms, suspended at all angles and different depths, exactly like the goldfish invariably trapped and frozen in the pond where I ice skated as a kid.
I am out of the Inferno now, and halfway through Purgatorio which is not nearly as exciting. Still plenty of cliffs but no cliffhangers. On the first terrace the proud are bent over by the weights of huge stones on their backs. I know how they feel. Every morning it feels like I have to push off a boulder along with the covers, in order to get out of our warm bed and face another freezing day. Luckily we are not condemned to suffer winter for much longer. Soon I will start on Paradiso and hope for spring.
AND FINALLY
While we're all waiting for this purgatorious winter to end, a reminder that the next Orphan Scrivener will spring into your in-box on April 15th, tax return day of doom.
See you then!
Mary R and Eric
who invite you to visit our home page, hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://home.earthlink.net/~maywrite/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, our bibliography, the Doom Cat interactive game written by Eric, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/ or visit our shadow identity M. E. Mayer's blog at http://memayer.blogspot.com/ And just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in some time!
