The Week in Meep: Spring Poem, Dante, and a Stigmatic in American Catholic History
Light into Dark and back again
It’s warm, it’s cold, it’s windy, it’s rainy, it’s sunny, it’s cloudy.
It’s spring.
a spring poet and poem
Spring has sprung! (the grass has riz… )
My favorite poet for spring is e. e. cummings, who seems to evoke the spirit of spring best.
But rather than the goat-footed balloonman whistling
far
and
wee
Let’s consider this one instead:
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
Maybe this is more of an Easter poem, but I associate spring with clear, blue skies. The trees may not be green yet, but they have a spirit of green.
I’ve always loved this poem.
It’s been set to music a few times. I prefer this setting by Eric Whitacre:
Dante Comics!
Excuse me, GRAPHIC NOVEL.
As noted last week, I got Seymour Chwast’s adaptation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
As you can imagine, a graphic novel version of the Commedia reads much faster than Dante (indeed, I have an English translation published in three separate volumes, for study purposes.)
I think some of the reviews on this book are unfair, given what graphic novels can accomplish versus the original epic poem. There are complaints of so much of the material missing.
As it has to be - there is no way Chwast can fit it all in.
I was unhappy that all the examples on the book’s Amazon page were from Inferno, especially since so many of the modernizations of the Commedia treat only the Inferno, and not the other two parts. Chwast deals with all three.
Let me give you one example from Purgatory:
[yes, there’s a misspelling on the page]
One example from Paradise:
The art has set up the story as if it were a 1930s noir-ish mafia setting, in that it works somewhat for the frequent comments the main character (Dante) makes about the corruption in both the Church and the Italian city-states.
There is a lot of explanation omitted, and that makes some amount of sense.
Many of the historical characters would be unknown to the modern audience. What may be useful is whether the character was personally known to Dante (that’s made clear in some cases), and whether on “his side” in the political conflict that got him exiled from Florence or an enemy.
Chwast published his book in 2010, the age of Wikipedia and Google, so he just drops character names, such as Marco Lombardo in Canto XVI of Purgatorio as above. If you want to know who he was, you can just search online:
Marco Lombardo (fl. c. 1275) was a courtier from medieval Lombardy.[1] His date of birth and true identity are unknown, but he is thought to have lived during the second half of the thirteenth century. He is also believed to have served many courts and possibly those of Gherardo III da Camino and Ugolino della Gherardesca.[1][2] Some historians – e.g. Emilio Orioli and Francesco Filippini – identified him with Marco da Saliceto. He was widely known in medieval Italy and appeared as a character of anecdotes and short stories even before Dante's creation of the Divine Comedy.[2]
Marco was commonly regarded as a very courteous and well-learned man, but disdainful and choleric. He appears as a character in Canto 16 of Purgatorio, the second canticle of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, to discuss morality and corruption. Marco asks Dante the pilgrim to pray for his soul.
It can get frustrating to see so many characters pass by and not know who they are… but you’ll also find if you read an unannotated edition of the Divine Comedy, that same thing will happen.
You would still have to look up so many people, which I had to do the first time I read Dante — I had no Google or Wikipedia back then (just regular encyclopedias) — and it was quite the slog. The only thing I was happy about was that Dante made it easy to know who was his friend, and who was his enemy, by his reaction to them.
I was a snotty teen when I first read Dante, but when I returned in college to re-read Dante to do a comparison to Niven & Pournelle’s sci-fi take, I got a lot more out of it then. As the years have rolled by, I have gotten even more.
For regular ole Dante, Purgatorio was my favorite part, but for Chwast’s graphic adaptation, Paradise was my favorite bit, because I loved how he interpreted Beatrice and Dante “floating” in space, though it wasn’t quite like that. It was more of a mystical experience at that point.
I like Chwast’s spare approach, as the art is not only in the actual drawings, and layout, but the selections he makes. There is a structure to the entire Commedia, and he touches on all the Cantos (which are SONGS) - he draws the structures of Hell (Inferno), Purgatory, and Paradise — and I wanted to show the page with Aquinas, because I looooove Aquinas.
Chwast shows the architecture of Dante’s work, so that can help people navigate it.
He also has some interesting visuals for certain scenes, but I think many of us can visualize what was described in Inferno and Purgatorio because they’re concrete. Inferno is visceral, many times literally, with the damned souls having their guts spilled out and then crammed back in again. Chwast is not that nasty, so some may be disappointed that his Inferno seems underwhelming.
For example, Ugolino is one of the most shocking examples from the Inferno.
Dante comes upon Ugolino in the lowest circle of Hell, where people are frozen in ice. Ugolino and another sinner are frozen together, and Ugolino is chewing on the brain of the other:
I saw two shades frozen in a single hole
packed so close, one head hooded the other one;
the way the starving devour their bread, the soul
above had clenched the other with his teeth
where the brain meets the nape.
Chwast does not depict this so explicitly.
Purgatorio is a step up, as you see the souls being put through the process of being purged of the damage of their sins, and that they still bear the stains and pains from their earthly shortcomings. There is a balance in Purgatorio, with both good and bad examples to consider.
But I found his depiction of Paradiso to work even better, with the mystic visions to be inspiring.
And now I need to read the Dante again (my three-volume set, that is… with Chwast, Blake, Dali, and more to consider…)
A 20th Century Stigmatic in Peekskill
I forget why I picked up this book, but that this woman was based out of a convent in Peekskill got my attention:
Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America
Description:
One day in 1917, while cooking dinner at home in Manhattan, Margaret Reilly (1884-1937) felt a sharp pain over her heart and claimed to see a crucifix emerging in blood on her skin. Four years later, Reilly entered the convent of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Peekskill, New York, where, known as Sister Mary of the Crown of Thorns, she spent most of her life gravely ill and possibly exhibiting Christ's wounds. In this portrait of Sister Thorn, Paula M. Kane scrutinizes the responses to this American stigmatic's experiences and illustrates the surprising presence of mystical phenomena in twentieth-century American Catholicism.
Drawing on accounts by clerical authorities, ordinary Catholics, doctors, and journalists--as well as on medicine, anthropology, and gender studies--Kane explores American Catholic mysticism, setting it in the context of life after World War I and showing the war's impact on American Christianity. Sister Thorn's life, she reveals, marks the beginning of a transition among Catholics from a devotional, Old World piety to a newly confident role in American society.
Peekskill is not very far from where I live, so that was some of my interest.
What is very interesting about this book is that the author does take on multiple dimensions of the story, so one gets a feel for the changes in American Catholicism in the early 20th century, and how this affected reactions to Margaret Reilly’s claims.
I didn’t agree with many of the author’s opinions, specifically:
look, the Church was not against Spiritualism due to misogyny. It was because it was bullshit.
similarly, Freud was bullshit.
I hope we’re clear on this. The spiritualists post-WWI were primarily women, sure, but whether they were women or men, they were frauds.
Freud, on the other hand, may have believed what he wrote. But his framework was not scientific.
There were other things re: feminism that show up in the work, but she doesn’t spend a lot of time on them. It isn’t appropriate given the timing of Margaret Reilly.
What was most useful in the book to me was giving context and information of what had been going on in American Catholicism, culturally, about 1890 - 1940. I am unfamiliar with that period in cultural history, as it doesn’t get a lot of focus, and having the local aspect (to me) was interesting. I know all the locations the author is referring to, so that was fun.
I do agree with the author that the stigmata of Margaret Reilly were likely faked, as were many of the stigmatics of the time. Similarly to how “poltergeists” were a popular fakery at various times.
It was good to have the author quote primary sources in her book so often, so that even if she thought those sources were not-quite-accurate, we can see how people wrote things down… even if they were lying or if they were themselves deceived.
The very interesting thing was the contrast between Margaret Reilly and the people who did become the first official U.S. saints (in canonization dates) — Frances Xavier Cabrini (an Italian immigrant nun who helped other immigrants in the U.S.), Elizabeth Ann Seton (a widowed convert who founded religious orders and schools), and John Neumann (a Bohemian immigrant priest to the U.S.)
Margaret Reilly, who became Sister Mary of the Crown of Thorns, was a mystic stigmatic who made badges of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in her convent in Peekskill. The others were more active in the U.S., building schools, churches, and religious orders in the expanding country. We’re not big on mystics here. We are big on getting stuff done.