7th-Circle Redemptions
In a speech — 20 years ago, my god! — to a small group of fellow college students, I remember making a strange comparison. To get the joke right, I had to equate something folks didn’t see as that bad with what we called a “terminal impact.” In debate (not to be confused with speech), we made the joke that an ultimate impact was to argue that something banal would ultimately lead to…well…global-thermo-nuclear war.
Because. How could any opponent find an argument to counter that? I mean: if you made a claim like THIS WILL CAUSE GLOBAL THERMO-NUCLEAR WAR, and your opponent stammers through “Well, I think we should discuss what Congress is doing,” you’d immediately form a rebuttal that began: “WHO CARES ABOUT WHAT CONGRESS IS DOING, THE WORLD WILL LITERALLY EXPLODE?!”
Terminal impacts win debates. But they’re also what’s wrong with debate. When we get to the circus, it’s hard to appreciate the effort it took to get there.
So. Standing in front of my collegiate audience, trying to impress the few *real* adults in the room, I used a joke to impress upon them the terminal impact of my main problem. (That year, my speech was about the normative complacency with bullying in the classroom.)
I compared bullies…to the people trapped in Dante’s seventh circle of Hell.
To me, the situation called for an allusion to the depths of pain and suffering rarely seen outside the great works of 13th-century Italian poetry.
It was a funny speech, though, don’t get me wrong: one in which the goals of persuasion were supposed to be met by humor. So I deigned to compare bullying to the seventh circle because the metaphor seemed so ridiculous that it would illicit a laugh at the same time it provoked sympathy.
But the laughter (and toot-toot my own horn: I got that laughter) wasn’t really what I wanted.
***
In ninth grade, centered in my own Church revival, my English teacher assigned us Dante’s “Inferno.” It was a “gifted” course, so the elevated choice of literature was fine. But it was also in Colorado Springs in 1994 (or the beginning of 1995, depending on who you ask): the years of Personhood laws and Amendment 2 (the thing that would Constitutionally outlaw gayness in my, now, purple-y state).
So I was filtering “Inferno” through a lens of religious chaos. (For the record: my school district housed the headquarters of Focus on the Family and the great tabloid-regular Evangelical churches of the era)
But my English teacher was a Stalwart. She had cowritten the textbook; and she was an academic baller trying to offer nuance to a group of kids used to dichotomies.
Yet…
The book terrified me. Its main characters literally walked through Hell. And the idea of witnessing their journey seemed to unearth some deep irrationalities. I was fearful I’d see an image of myself: a sign, a behavior, a doppelganger, who’d confirm my worst fear. That I belonged there.
My own religious fervency made me feel like I’d be somehow singed by the allegory. That I’d burn in proximity.
I was, of course, in the middle of my own moment of self-discovery. And the way I’d come to understand the nuances of myself, up to that point, had been simple: “Bury that shit deep. Bury it so deep that its resting place won’t be a “tomb,” per se; but it’ll be interred in catacombs of grandiose self-denial.
***
Geez. This story is about NINTH GRADE. Come back from the edge, dude.
So my brilliant teacher (and I mean it, she was the Virgil I wish I knew I needed at the time), Judy Harrington, assigns us Dante’s “Inferno” with a wink: “I could assign you the whole trilogy, but the other parts are, how can I put this? A little…boring.”
Offering sympathy while commanding her first-year high-school students to do something they’d never want to do (i.e., read anything) was bold — she swore she was giving us “the juicy stuff.”
I was adamantine in my “No way.” I refused to read it.
My “holy” quest landed me a bunch of failing grades. I guessed at quizzes, provided faux-philosophical responses in class. And if not for a clerical error (I received an ‘A’ for an assignment I never turned in), I wouldn’t have passed at all.
Dante, I believed at the time, could suck it.
***
But here’s the real rub: rubbing and sucking, in Dante’s evidentiary reporting, would land a dude like me in. Get this? The…seventh. Circle of Hell.
I’m in my forties now. I moved back to Colorado recently, and have been dealing with a bunch of old demons. And because I’m a glutton for punishment (not to be confused with the gluttons who get to hang out in the third circle of Hell) — well, you can probably see where this is going — I picked up Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Cantos XIII-XIV: the poets pass through the top tiers of the seventh circle, where sinners who commit violence against human possessions (burglars, bandits) swim in boiling blood next to those who commit violences against themselves and others (murderers, suicides).
Cantos XV-XVI: they then descend deeper to bear witness to the souls who committed violence against God. This is where the Soddomites hang out. They seem happy enough — running around, never able to stop moving because apparently their need drives them toward a state of constant mobility. Not wrong, necessarily: I’ve often thought that the gays who have an unsustainable workout routine need to be punished.
Buuuut, not cool Dante! To be cast below the murderers and rapists is, well…rough for the ego.
***
Twenty years later and my jokes about bullies and fit-gay men no longer seem funny. I’ve somehow always reached for the number 7 — the joke is always the seventh circle. I’ve realized that I’ve used it since 1994 as an intellectual quip to describe someone else’s foreshortened morality.
And, yet, I’m unsurprised that it was also the number assigned in my adolescent brain to the one thing I was most afraid of accepting. The seventh circle was the gag because it had always been my perceived fate.
***
The thing about “terminal impacts” is that they don’t ever advance the actual stakes of real debate. By hoodwinking an opponent into an unreasonable set of arguments, the situation spears and shanks (not unlike what happens to the sinners in the fourth circle of Hell) people into saying more irrational things.
I’m “re”reading Dante…thirty years later…to remind myself that the world of a 14-year old is contorted by innumerable transient manifestations. The terminal impacts of a 1994-political argument in Colorado Springs demanded that I interpret Dante’s circles as Truth rather than allegory.
And in this moment of re-interpretation, I had a flash — a long-suppressed memory that, when it dawned on me, suddenly spread itself out with a great urgency.
I was reading Cantos XV-XVI tonight: [flash] Ms. Harrington answers a question about what Dante meant. A student has apparently asked for clarification.
In her diplomatic voice (beautiful, I think now, because few voices were diplomatic back then): “Well, the Middle Ages didn’t look kindly on gay people.”
I don’t know if she said “gay” (something she might be fired for in some states these days), but she conveyed the message all right. And in my teenage-addled brain, I read that message as damnation.
Something I’m coming to terms with now by reading Dante for the first time is what Ms. Harrington tried to get me to see all those years ago: Dante expressed a great deal of compassion for people he met along his journey. He often riles against, passes out, cries and, ultimately, questions the logic of Hell for its savagery.
It is a voice I wish I recognized in today’s political climate: an age of rhetoric where everyone seems so quick to savage — to condemn.
I love this book. I only wish I’d read it at 14.
The seventh circle of Hell will no longer be a terminal impact in my life. It’s not where the worst people suffer an immortally intractable Fate of pain and regret. Whether I meant it once as a joke or a moralistic claim, it can no longer be my rhetorical cudgel.
I am still shocked, years and lives later, that allegories of faulty logic continue to lodge in my brain. Perhaps (re)reading, (re)thinking and (re)interpreting will continue to provide an antidote.
Or, at the least, I will continue to realize that the truest hells are often the ones we cast for ourselves. And: the best forms of grace arrive when I recognize that, like Dante, there are guides out there who can walk me out.
