I wanted to say a bit more about the background image of this blog, and by extension, the whole snotty conceit. OK, it's not just "a bit" more, it's really a whole big novel more. Feel free to go play with your iPhone or something.
The idea of the Underworld is not just significant to me because I live in a basement apartment, or because I feel a bit out of touch sometimes (though I do think the mold in this place participates in society more than I do). It all springs from one deceptively simple fact: as many of my Gentle Readers will know, my doctoral dissertation was on despair. Yeah, I know, clearly I'm a sad little emo chick who stays in every night artfully smudging her eyeliner and knitting herself combat boot cozies and re-reading Twilight. (Hm...how exactly would combat boot cozies work? I mean, just the other night I saw a knitted bike-lock cozy that was SO COOL. It had the cutest stripes. I wish I had taken a picture...)
ANYHOW, you can imagine how many stupid remarks I got while pursuing this research topic. Non-academics usually stuck with "Despair? Well, I bet there was plenty of that in the Middle Ages" (WAKKA WAKKA!), or some remark was made about what a cheery girl I was. At least that was better than the most common question I got from the uninitiated earlier in my graduate career, which was, in fact, one of the first things I heard when I entered Canada, ready to start an exciting new life of the mind: "Medieval Studies? What are you gonna do with that?" STICK IT UP YOU ASS, THAT'S WHAT I'MA DO. Except you can't say that to a Canadian border guard and expect them to issue you a student visa.
Even to the scholarly crowd, my situation had a built-in punch line: when I reported my thesis topic to one of my profs, he responded with, "Well, really everyone's thesis is about despair." Unlike the hoi polloi or their academic superiors, my fellow grad students were never the type to admit their ignorance; they usually just made lots of annoying assumptions and then lectured me about how these assumptions were right. The general wisdom holds that someone's dissertation topic tells you a little something about what makes them tick. So the girl who does her thesis about despair must be one fucked-up puppy. Which weren't necessarily so. While I did struggle with clinical depression (like 99% of graduate students you will meet) and yes, I despaired about scary things like finishing, student debt and career prospects, I didn't wrestle with any serious despair until after I graduated.
But no matter how much flack I took for it, or how hard it was to wrest a thesis out of an amorphous, atypical subject matter, I am so grateful that I did it. It taught me some invaluable things about myself and my place in this world, which is really the only reason anybody should learn anything. You see, I wasn't interested in the perennial classic, the "I'm fucked and will soon die" kind of despair, or the exaggerated modern version ("I'm desperate for a crantini"), but a very specific kind that early Christians came up with and medieval theologians ran with. I called it "penitential despair," but it's also called "theological despair" in some of the literature. This type of despair did not just apply to a fucked-up life, but to a fucked-up afterlife as well. Medieval people, at least those with the luxury of thinking about these things, thought that someone was experiencing penitential despair when they felt overwhelmed by their sins, hated how they were living, but didn't think they could stop, or that they could ever make up for what they had already done even if they could stop. They felt like the walking dead, damned no matter what they did. They were wrong, as the Church* saw it. The living always had a remedy for their despair, that being to ask for the unconditional, boundless mercy of God.
This intriguing idea went a bit wonky when they tried to apply it to real lives. Medieval theologians decided that penitential despair was associated with mental illness and ultimately the cause of suicide. The problem with this reasoning is that if someone believed that they were damned no matter what, why on earth would they guarantee that their damnation would start sooner rather than later? Why wouldn't they just stay here in this world and try to eat, drink and be merry while they could? And wouldn't all that contemplation of one's hopeless spiritual state imply some pretty clear-headed thinking? Most of our current research on suicide (read: Alexander Murray from Oxford) shows that people were killing themselves then for pretty much the same reasons they do now: my life is unbearable, I feel horrible and I can't stand this one second longer. None of this high-falutin' theological shit. There were some well-read people who did experience the snotty kind of despair, so I studied them. Because they were well-read, however, they also knew all about the thinking Christian's remedy for despair: Christ himself. It was actually pretty uplifting stuff, and I can credit this research, an overdose of anti-depressants, and the usual supernatural interference with my conversion to Christianity (the non-fundamental, pro-gay kind, thank you very much). That's a long-ass story, though, and fraught with grist for the atheist mill, so best saved for another day.
Back to the blog! My poor Gentle Readers, thank you for bearing with me. The "headquarters" for despair was, of course, Hell, a.k.a. the Underworld. That was where you found the truly desperate, those who had squandered the amazing potential of being alive. Everyone in Hell, including Satan himself, existed in a state of eternal despair. My all-time favorite medieval work, featuring the most enduring depiction of Hell, is Dante's Inferno. If I were a good little scholar, I'd say I loved the whole Commedia, since it is meant to be read and interpreted as a whole, but I am only politely interested in Purgatorio and have just read parts of Paradiso (don't hate, there's no despair there!). Anyhow, the neat thing about the Inferno, and the important thing for the conception of this blog, is that Dante did not just provide the world with a locational representation of despair, but also a nightmarish portrait of insanity. All of the damned in his Hell are punished by means of a contrapasso, a word Dante himself came up with, kinda meaning "suffering opposite-wise" (you quote me on that I KILL YOU). Their suffering is a twisted reflection of their sin and the warped mind-set that caused it. Dante the pilgrim's conversation with each shade quickly reveals that they have learned nothing from their lives or their current fate, and are still in love with all the wrong things. In other words, they meet that often-cited modern criterion for insanity: by choice in life and by compulsion in Hell, they do the same thing over and over and expect a different result.
Me and insanity, we have a passing acquaintance. The stories I will tell you, my children...but not today. I will tell you this much for free: if you visit the Underworld while you are still alive, you have two choices. You can join the living dead like Fra Alberigo and Branca d'Oria, whose souls have earned Early Admission to Hell while their bodies still live on Earth. That's right, my son, Dante had ZOMBIES. OR, and this is a toughy, you can ask for help and start doing something different, like I did and like Dante did (SPOILERS!). So the Underworld can either be the end of the ride, or just the beginning. That's why I like it, and that's why I like despair. Call me crazy; you won't be the first.
The immense cavern city-thing works nicely as a background, and I'm quite happy with it, but it wasn't my first choice. Way too much thought and effort went into trying to make my first choice happen, which is typical of anything I do. You see, Dante's guide in the Commedia was Virgil, and HE went to the Underworld in his poetry too, or at least his character Aeneas did. Aeneas was led by a Sybil. Is this shit ringing a bell? So I wanted the background to be a shot of Lago d' Averno, the legendary entrance to the Underworld referenced by Virgil.
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| The road to Hell: paved with good intentions and surprisingly scenic. |
...which compares well to the scary tunnel leading back to my apartment's front door:
This thing has caused several of my friends to turn sideways in order to make it through, and confuses the hell out of pizza guys. Also, the lake was reputed to have such noxious fumes in the old days that birds flying over it would drop out of the sky, which supposedly started the association between this lake and Deadsville. My apartment has had its share of noxious fumes, lemme tell you. Moreover, and I may be taking a HUGE risk in telling you this, Dear Internet, but we've been talking for a while now and I trust you: my boyfriend is the God of Dead Birds. Seriously. They go out of their way to die in a place where they know he will eventually walk by and bless their filthy little corpses. He can't go anywhere without seeing an astounding number of bird bodies. He has accepted his onerous responsibilities graciously and does what he can to observe the evidence of their passing with benevolence and compassion. Either that or I'm way too intimate with the carrier of an especially fatal bird virus. Lastly, and this has nothing to do with my apartment, I find it incredibly amusing that the mafia recently owned the entrance to the Underworld and used it as a hideout. Of course they did!
SO, the important thing I want to convey in all of this overly intellectual, self-referential wandering, is that the Underworld does not have to be the horrible end; indeed, for Aeneas and Dante and yes, even little ol' me, it was the beginning, without which nothing of consequence could be learned. Aeneas went on to found Rome, considered the height of worldly achievement; Dante went on to scale the heights of Mount Purgatory and was ultimately granted an ineffable vision of the Trinity. And me? Well, we'll just have to see, won't we? (I'd settle for an OHIP card.) The Underworld, the world of insanity, is not really a place to live, but it is certainly a place you must be, at some point in your life, in order to understand the potential of that life.
This concludes my lecture. I'll now get back to complaining about Bike People and worshiping Craig Ferguson.
*You know, "the Church," that evil supranational corporation that brought you mind control (a.k.a. "catechesis") and hocus pocus** (a.k.a. "the Eucharist"). They murdered all those defenseless people and made everyone wear stupid hats. Hateful club. They also fed, clothed and provided medical care for a lot of people, and reinforced the social order in a lot of times and places where it was sorely strained, but they don't ever talk about that on TLC so it DIDN'T HAPPEN.
**"Hocus pocus" probably comes from the part of the Latin mass where they present the wafer and go "Hoc est enim corpus meum", that is, "This is my body." My grad student friends are so over this factoid because they are not spouting it at the moment.
