Cato of Utica

I'm a big fan of Dante. To the modern day poet, accustomed to the open-ended and provisional in both form and content, his powers of systematic exposition and integration are...humbling. Mind you, he had certain advantages: his universe was finite, heierarchical, and comprehensively mapped out by Scholastic Theology, especially by that of St Thomas Aquinas. I take holidays in Dante, extended periods of reading that are like visiting a foreign country [I also take yearly a holiday to Moby Dick, but that's for another post]. Once, while unemployed and living in Belfast, and during a particularly intense period of reading the Divine Comedy, I dreamed that I was led backwards through the Inferno, in fast reverse, and abandoned in the limbo that is the antechamber to Hell. The limbo, that is, for the indecisive. I wrote about it, as below:

Canto III

The damned are not those shades embedded within the stratified torments of Hell itself, but those excluded from it’s schema:

The indecisive disintegrating into prose.

I had, I know, intended to say something about the sea, about how the moon and the sea, their anxious metals tangling, achieve
A glorification

But it was a deux ex machina of the language that did not, for some reason, sound justified.

A diferent metaphor could have been found to describe that sudden escalation of brightness.

Some other poet, not me, could have been walking the shore of Belfast Lough when the cloud cover parted.

....

But that's an aside. What I want to write about is the figure of Cato of Utica, who appears in Canto 1 of Purgatory, as something of an allegorical figure. What is done to him is troubling: a loss, a small erasing of love which I find difficult to accept. A tiny part of Cato has been blanked out, lobotimised.

“Marcia”, said he, “when I lived over there,
So pleased the eyes of me, that whatsoever
She asked me, that I did, and did not spare.

Now that she dwells beyond the evil river
She may not move me, by the edict made
When I was taken thence – not now, nor ever.

He remembers, but is anaethetised to his former feelings. Cato at the foot of Mount Purgatory is no less excluded and tortureless than Cato in the first circle of Hell, he is no closer to admittance to God, never will be admitted to God, and, worse, is rendered companionless and emptied to a degree of his former personality. He is depersonalised by the machinary of Allegory. It might have been my mental state at the time, but his inability even to feel loneliness, when he had been so thoroughly robbed, left unable to emotionally register his loss, prompted me to dissent. Whoa......! Craig Coyle dissents from Dante! Pass the Lithium.

1.

He spoke, and then hesitated, as if
something about what he had just said troubled him…

I sneaked a quick drag on my spliff,
coughed, and looked round at the other two, Slim

Shady and his idealistic sidekick,
Amazingly neither of whom

seemed moved to interject.
So I voiced an inquiry and dogma of my own.

Is it right of God to alter or to reject
the loves of a creature simply to fulfill a function?

Rather be damned and retain love
than, what, brought to the slopes of purgation,

anaethetised, and left unsaved?……!!



2.

If a creature sins finitely, within the span of it’s lifetime and the limited scope of it’s powers
Why is it damned for eternity?

He constructed an experiment: an act,
And it’s lightbulb.

Then flicked the switch and marvelled at the shadows: dendrites magnified big as spidercrabs!
Infitesimal maneouvres, absurd:

Archimedes, knitting with stilts,
Or the planetary regress of small acts of kindness.

He who lives by the Aubergine dies by the sword…..

Will Cato of Utica be returned
To the First Circle on the Final Day,

His love restored?