Dante was told to make HellWritten by Robert Bruce Baird
DANTE: - Dante Alighieri is tour guide of Hell. In fact you could say he is creator of Hell if you did not understand he was directed and encouraged as others were being forced to write and create all manner of graven images and religious icons or treatises to support Hell, Satan and whole dogma of ‘sins and demons’. The Church owned all creative work because such creative things came from God and they were representatives of this God. Nice scam if you can make it work – eh? Here is a little academic insight into how he also was tasked to diminish perception of prior seers and wise people. “Inferno XX falls into four narrative segments. Lines 1-30 present sin of divination in general terms; lines 31-57 introduce famous diviners of antiquity, each of whom figures in and represents a major classical text: Amphiaraus from Statius' Thebaid, Tiresias from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Arruns from Lucan's Pharsalia, and Manto from Vergil's Aeneid; lines 58-99 encompass digression on Mantova; lines 100-130 contain Dante's query regarding further diviners, and Vergil's response, in which he names Eurypylus from Aeneid and various contemporary practitioners. We note canto's symmetry; general opening and closing sections, each of thirty lines, frame more particularized interior sequences. The seemingly extraneous section on Mantova is thus entirely surrounded and informed by commanding issue of prophecy, an issue which is directly related to canto's highlighting of poets and poetry, to its evocation of classical auctores and to arresting behavior of Vergil. For prophecy is in fact a textual issue; a profeta for Dante is one who foretells, who reads in «magno volume» of God's mind (Par. XV, 50), and deciphers book of future. Because prophecy is therefore essentially a matter of correct and incorrect reading, canto's emphasis on textuality is insistent: from initial terzina, which proclaims in deliberately technical language author's need to make verse and give form to his twentieth canto, to equally technical reference to Aeneid as an «alta tragedìa» in line 113; if this is only locus in poem in which Dante affixes a numerical tag to a canto, it is also a unique definition of Vergil's poem as a text belonging to a specific genre. Moreover, textual awareness of canto's opening lines __ «Di nova pena mi conven far versi / e dar matera al ventesimo canto / de la prima canzon» __ is shared by its final verse: «Sì mi parlava, e andavamo introcque». Here presence of a word, introcque, whose use by Florentines is caricatured in De Vulgari Eloquentia, raises a host of questions about writing and genre, and serves to close canto on same textual key with which it began.
| | DREAM ABOUT A NEW PRAYER FOR AMERICAWritten by Irvin L. Rozier
A DREAM OF A NEW PRAYER FOR AMERICAI dreamed this early this morning, 25 May 05. In first dream I was talking to four American veterans of Iraqi conflict. I was telling them I was a combat wounded veteran and I had spent two years in Iraq fighting for a great cause. These men were listening intently to me and believing everything I was telling them. I then gathered all four around me, looked them in eyes, and told them truth. I said I had fabricated my whole story, and reasons for war had been falsified. I saw wounded look of betrayal in their eyes and on their faces. I then told them purpose for my false story. I said,"You see, leaders in high places can tell you anything just to get you to follow them. Just like blind leading blind, both will fall in ditch." I then dreamed this dream. I had parked my red Ford Crew Cab truck in a parking lot by a large city park. I walked away and when I returned to my truck, a saw that a thief had stolen my left(driver's) door, both left wheels and tires, and my radio was hanging by a few wires. I looked up and saw several other people who also had their vehicles vandalized by a thief. I then saw thief surrounded by some of his stolen goods, in a small grove of trees in a city park. Other people, including police, politicians, and religious leaders began to chase thief. The thief was too strong for
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