Inferno 1 — Getting lost
Let's get into hell
Subscribe to get three e-mails per week with a portion of a canto each, to inspire your journey as a feminist and an artist FROM (CREATIVE) HELL TO PARADISE.
With each extract, you'll get a brief explanation and a journaling prompt, to help you reflect and take the next action in your creative and personal journey of growth, transformation and of stepping into your light.
Hello and welcome to the first issue of Dante’s Divine Comedy for Artists and Feminists!
Let’s get right to it.
Thus opens the Divine Comedy in the English Longfellow edition:
MIDWAY upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way.But after I had reached a mountain’s foot,
At that point where the valley terminated,
Which had with consternation pierced my heart,Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders
Vested already with that planet’s rays
Which leadeth others right by every road.Then was the fear a little quieted
That in my heart’s lake had endured throughout
The night, which I had passed so piteously
The opening of The Divine Comedy is common knowledge in my home country of Italy, and especially the opening “MIDWAY upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark…” is the kind of sentence that’s easily thrown around.
Because, who has not, at one point or another, felt like they had “lost the straightforward pathway” and found themselves in the dark? Who does not wonder if, somewhere, somewhen, they missed a crossroad, or should have known to take a left?
And yet, Dante suggests, or seems to suggest, that straying from the path is a precondition, a necessary “evil” (perhaps?) on the way to Hell. Which is, as Dante points out, the way to Heaven.
We’ll get deeper into this, but unlike what most Christians believe, Heaven and Hell (and thus Good and Evil) are not two separate, completely opposite places. In Dante’s cosmology, one descends into Hell in order to climb up to Purgatory, and on to Heaven.
And the dark forest might be the vestibule to the journey.
Talking about the creative process, Jessica Abel, in her podcast series “Out on The Wire,” says of the dark forest:
When you get lost in those deep, dark woods, you think that you’re crazy. You think that no one has ever felt this before. And the fact that you’re feeling that it means that you aren’t any good at it and you can’t do it.
And let’s face it, the dark forest is a place we, mostly, try to avoid.
I remember a long period of time, between 2017 and 2019, where I longed to write, and to create, and yet, I just felt like I couldn’t stray. Could I really just leave my job on a whim and call myself a writer? Yes, I could. I had savings, no mortgage, no kids. But I feared the mere act of straying, and even more, I feared the dark forest. I wanted to hop straight to the bit of the movie of my life where there would be light, fun, and accolades, and skip the whole horrendous bit which involved me trying to paste two lines together and realize I didn’t really know what I was doing.
But especially when we are artists and feminists, when we are artists who are feminist, or feminists who want to create art, we must allow ourselves to stray. The path, let us not forget, was created, if not by a white cis man, by a culture who has forgotten the Great Mother, the value of the darkness, of the seasons, of the straying.
And Dante Alighieri’s Masterpiece includes much of the Great Mother’s wisdom.
In fact, he writes (prose mine), “I don’t know how I entered, but once I reached the mountain’s foot, after passing through the dark forest which so pierced my heart, I looked up towards the mountain, and saw it dressed in light, and felt that I was less afraid.”
When in the dark forest, look up!
The dark forest is our avenue to transformation, creativity, self-awareness, and, eventually (though we all wish at times that “eventually” could come somewhat faster) to light. But to get there, what’s required, Dante says, is a change in perspective: a willingness to see things from above.
Journaling Prompt:
Is there an area of your life, a relationship or a project, in which you feel you’ve strayed or gotten lost? If you were to look at that situation from a different perspective, from further up, what might you see that you’re not seeing now?
Dante’s Divine Comedy for Artists and Feminists is a project by Stefania Montagna (not a literature expert, but a writer and life coach with an interest in psychology and spirituality).
Subscribe to get three e-mails per week with a portion of a canto each, to inspire your journey as a feminist and an artist FROM (CREATIVE) HELL TO PARADISE.
With each extract, you'll get a brief explanation and a journaling prompt, to help you reflect and take the next action in your creative and personal journey of growth, transformation and of stepping into your light.