III - Follow your own star

Poetry is made of words in a certain language. There is nothing more than this but we can give it a special meaning based on a code and interpretation or association. Some people shoot at other people because someone else tells them. It even happens in our society when we send out the military. One could say the code of soldiers taking orders from staff personnel imposes its implications easily when we talk about friendly fire.

Dante stood at the basis of humanistic reasoning and the emancipation of the individual. The Belacua episode of the poem about (not) being seen, observation and astronomical knowledge, 'he hardly raised his head' and 'have you clearly seen now' can be seen as a pre humanistic approach to knowledge and faith.

Belacqua is convinced of his destiny on Purgatory Hill ('I just have to wait here') and he is hardly noticed himself at first; with his head between his knees he is hard to tell apart from the scenery. More than once we read about him as being lazy and hardly moving and he does not believe he'll ever go faster up to the martyrs unless good people living mention him in their prayers. There is also nothing said about his prayers so this personage is more or less opposite to the monks and their motto ora et labora. Indeed [quote] Dante is a bit amused by the knowledge and intimacy [quote] of Belacqua, although he 'looked sad'.

The humanist tradition can be seen as opposed to superstition and faith in the idea of icons as being or having (the power of) the Saint of worship. This opposition suits the notion described above of the meaning of a word being the word itself or it's represented idea of a higher level. But icons can still be seen in western culture as the value given to, say, the event of a match of FC Barcelona, or events in the life of one's children. Learned from an American election you can say the outcome of the match isn't determined by a group of individuals but by each and every vote. I'll now show you how Dante reflected on this idea of the individual and ME culture, the value of a friend vs. one's own individual poetical creation.

Is there one soul for a group of people who are with a singing and dancing act in a concert hall? Dante did not have this belief of an early 20th century poet.[quote] In fact he stood at the beginning of the popular belief of one’s souls intimate relation with it’s particular star. One can still see this in the political rhetoric that I picked from Twitter the other day in which a political career is thought of as a star: Fratello Silvio, la tua stella si è ormai oscurata / Brother Silvio, your star has died now. The origin of this idea is not so much platonic or christian but it was styled originally by Dante, the Florentine.

Dante, living the last years of his live as a political exile, was nothing like the many hermits in ME society and, as a meeting with Beatrice in Paradise can illustrate, he knew the human soul flourishes by love in between few people : [];

But on the other hand and as has been discussed many times Dante values his poetical career over friendship with his fellow poet, coming from the same city and of more importance to poetry by then, Guido Cavalcanti. []

Dante presents a logical world view in his magum opus. Homosexual love is seen as having a good cause, but because of it’s infertility it is valued less compared to heterosexual relations and the possibility of having children. For this construction the poet used the events of the lives of people as material for his poem. In this way the meaning of the episodes of meeting other people in Hell (and the inevitable question of why they are convicted) is an effect of a choice in an individuals life trying to form destiny. But choice implies being chosen. Or having a lottery.

Belacqua, with his popular believe in destiny [quote], is very close to the substance the poetry of the Dolce Stil Novo is made out of: the lives of the common people. The Dolce Stil Novo poets wrote in the language of the common people and they wrote about love in an abstract way to avoid the daily events in order to improve morally. The Commedia shares this moral aspect of forming the soul by poetry and uses language to form meaning in the human soul as love uses a particular heart to live in. Language can have more than one meaning in order to sharpen the individual mind and it can be used to have a certain meaning only for few people. Dante almost derived a communication theory from the Dolce Stil Novo.

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Dante's Aristotelian world view may very well have led him to know he was the first mover in the sense of knowing to be the first author of a book in history for an variety of readers. With a maritime code turning the meaning of sun into star in the intimacy of a question to the author-as-personage he intended to be understood by few (and that is not many [quote]). With modern realism [quote] and in various styles [quote] Dante an icon in western literature when he created the Comedy by showing it's readers the individual nature of their acts and destiny and how it could be. He knew the power of the prayer images was not their intrinsic value but the choice by an individual of one out of so many saints was: Follow your own star.