The epic

The first canto where the topic is truly controversial, and I did have some trouble trying to get the tone right. Sexuality in general tends to be a sensitive subject. Who is being judged, and who has the right to judge? I have not revealed why exactly the people in the Underworld have ended up there. It’s more important to describe the inner condition of the person rather than someone else’s morality.

Here the idea is not that sex would be bad. Rather, I decided to explore the idea that when certain acts are taken as signifiers of freedom, therein lies the danger that someone is taken advantage of. Freedom is not proved by one particular action in all possible circumstances, but when people believe it is, that may mean becoming subject to manipulation. Thus the topic is not really sexuality but rather our notions of freedom, and how they too may become a shackle. Kant’s categorical imperative is wrong because one action cannot be made into a universal law, as there are no universal circumstances.

The sorrow described thus does not come from the things she has done, and she vehemently opposes the idea. It’s about being taken advantage of, the sadness and self-reproach involved that people may be stuck in, bitterness and the desire to lay blame somewhere. The narrator is an observer staying quite detached in the situation. It’s not so much about what is right, but about how fluid our assessments of reality are.

I’m still not sure whether I got the point across, because this topic is such a minefield to navigate. And ultimately this canto, like so many others, is about loneliness, the lack of connection to other people and to one’s own feelings and desires.

The word “comedy” in the title does not mean that the book is meant to be funny. Rather, like Dante’s comedy, it’s referring to classical categories of plays. Bad things may happen in the book, yet the reader should be aware that it’s not a tragedy, i.e. not everybody dies by the end of the book. However, there are glimpses of comedy here and there, and while the passages here aren’t exactly joyful, I’m somewhat amused by the idea of Poe’s macabre rambling continuing in afterlife. Hence the parody of his style. The poems alluded to are The Raven, Annabel Lee, and The Sleeper.

The Underworld, even if it is equivalent of a hell part, does not describe a place of punishment set by any particular deity. There may be demons and punishers, but the main idea is that the work is firstly about the flimsiness of judgment, and how those who start judging others may end up becoming monsters themselves, and secondly it’s about guilt. In most cases it’s the victims who are judging themselves, somehow thinking that they deserve the treatment they get.

So even though I’m addressing all kinds of things which may be considered evil, it wasn’t my intention to define morals. Rather, I’m exploring the feelings that people have when they regret something they’ve done, and in the narrator’s viewpoint, the consequences of judging others. I also tried to write the narrative in a way that suggests the narrator is judging himself, that this is just as much about him facing his shortcomings, and he keeps projecting his own inadequacy and transgressions into whatever he sees.

He sees misery and identifies with it because he already has seeds of such guilt inside him, and maybe he recognizes some transgressions as universal, even if he hasn’t committed the same exact things. The potential for dark deeds exists in every human being, and so does the potential for self-reproach or even self torture. And of course the potential for love, but that is not the topic of the first part.

No comment today, since I’ve been too busy writing a new work lately.

An undated note from the time I was writing the book:

There is a danger that the author of a philosophical poem produces a work that is too philosophical to be good poetry and too poetic to count as philosophy, because it is difficult to keep a balance between abstract concepts and concrete images. Philosophers and poets both tend to make sweeping generalisations, but for a poet it is more acceptable merely to imply there is reasoning behind a statement.

To clarify:
A philosopher may ask: is this true? On what grounds? How is the truth constituted, is it a specifically human truth, or are all ontologies inevitably based on the viewpoint of humanity?

A poet may also ask what is true and wonder about its foundation, yet there is usually an attempt to state what is true in more definite and concrete terms, concreteness serving as the basis of metaphor. Even if that definite truth expressed is that everything is indefinite.

A poet’s truth is always shifting between different viewpoints, even if the poem is naive self-expression; regardless of the intention, it is the nature of language to be undecidable, each expression hovering in the air between different interpretations, big and small variations depending on the readers’ experiences, e.g. what kind of spruces they’ve known and what they’re able to imagine when a poet writes “spruce”.

For a philosopher this kind of ambiguity is generally not seen as a virtue. Philosophers may use obscure language, yet there is an ambition of clarity, if not of language then at least of understanding. It’s just that philosophers may feel that clear understanding requires overcoming the categories and ambiguities of language. And of course Derrida even made a point of using ambiguities. But he has a lot of detractors too, people criticizing him just as much for his style as what they think he said about the relationship between the language and the world.

Poets may aim at the root of being as well, but the primary concern or the method is not the same. Rather, it’s the whirlpool, the flux in which language and reality become muddled until you do not know where the subjective ends and the objective begins. Hence, for example, it is possible for a poet, or any author of fiction, to dive deep into subjectivity in the hope of finding something universal. Or also, as in the case of this work of mine, to embrace fiction, the false reality of my narrative, so completely that it becomes possible to examine truths that are too horrifying to face in a real setting. Namely the dark side of humanity.

On Prosody

Some of the technical aspects may be obvious, but I thought I’d clarify them a bit for the casual reader.

The rhyme scheme is the same as what Dante used, terza rima, in which the first and third lines of a tercet rhyme with the second line of the previous. Each canto has 48 tercets + an extra line to complete the last rhyme. In other words, they’re all 145 lines long. In The Divine Comedy the cantos are of varying lengths, but my impression is that their lengths on average are something similar. I found that having a precise number as an aim made it easier to write, because I had a goal by which I’d have to express what I had to say on the topic.

Also, having a precise number was necessary because I didn’t write the cantos in order in the first draft. I mentioned earlier that I wrote the book in a cycle of 3 days, which made it easier to handle the distressing scenes which are all close to each other. While it may seem like this would make it difficult to make the work coherent, I felt it was the opposite.

At first I wrote around 30 lines of all 100 cantos, and then continued from that. Thus, by the time I got to the end of the canto, I had long since already written how the work would continue in the next one, so I constantly had an aim where to go. Before starting the book I had a general outline of themes, emotions and plot developments, which made this possible.

The book is written in iambic heptameter with regular variation. Iamb is a basic building block of English poetry, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, and heptameter means that there are seven of those in a line. Usually there’s a caesura after the 8th syllable, which means that you might hear a slight pause there in your head.

Regular variation is absolutely necessary in a long work such as this. Sticking to the rhythm strictly will probably make the work monotonous, and besides always using iambs restricts the vocabulary. Introducing more unstressed syllables enables me to use words longer than 3 syllables quite commonly. However, the problem with variation is that it often sounds unintentional, a lapse in the meter. I have solved this problem by placing my variations always in the same spots.

In short, in iambic heptameter each odd syllable is unstressed, each even syllable stressed. My modification is that syllables number 4, 8 or 12 can also be unstressed, just one in a line or all three. This makes the beat feel regular while I can keep changing rhythm just slightly to avoid monotony. Perhaps it also helps the feel of regularity that it’s always the syllables divisible by 4 that get this treatment.

I cannot recall how I came up with this form, it’s not anything I remember seeing anywhere in the English literature. I’m pretty sure it arose as an answer to the problems mentioned above, especially the need to use longer words. I did try early on some other solutions, even using feminine rhymes, but quite early I settled on this form as the best choice for my book. In the end I had to kill some of my darlings for the sake of sticking to the form, for example remove the word “buckminsterfullerene,” which would have been great.

A poem is always a disguise, which is a blessing. Often it is easier to tell the truth by means of fiction, creating distance between the poet and the work. As a writer I am often, but not always, aware of where I end and the narrator begins, and other people much more commonly mistake me for the narrator.

Even as I was recording the poem, after reading some passages of the first part I asked myself: was I really this unhappy when writing? Then I remembered what it was like at the time. The truth is that I was writing all three parts at once, working on each in a cycle of 3 days, and thus all the ecstatic, happy things in part 3 were written on the days before I wrote about unhappiness in part 1. But while writing I lived through the experiences and emotions so intensely that I managed to capture something believable. It doesn’t mean my life was like that. But then again, while I was writing, and partly also when rewriting, my life had little else than this book.

One big difference between the Dante in my book and Dante in The Divine Comedy is character’s arrogance. The narrator of his Comedy is a relatively humble man. Yet Dante the writer is a person who is the judge and the jury, placing people he knew in hell. It is likely Dante didn’t think he’s literally describing heaven and hell, but the effort for such a massive undertaking does require some arrogance. It’s a feature that I’ve found present in many epic poems, particularly when an authorial voice is present, like Ovid’s at the end of Metamorphoses. Arrogance, however, does not mean the absence of humility. People always have conflicting traits.

This is why I have him introduce himself in partly contradictory phrases. One line with which he describes himself is “A victim of malaria, acquainted with disease”. The first part describes how Dante died, but the second part is an allusion to Isaiah 53:3, a verse that Christians often see as a prophecy of Jesus. I am not trying to make Dante a Christ figure here. Partly he may be just unconsciously quoting the scripture because he’s a Christian. But also he would have been aware of the Christ connection, and to descibe himself with the same phrase does turn into a comparison that suggests some degree of pride or arrogance, even if it is concealed. Yet, in this case the reader doesn’t need to recognize the allusion at all. It may change the interpretation slightly, but the line stands on its own even without it.