Eunoe: The sweet draught that ne'er would satiate me

Don Eddy, Eunoe, 1993, mezzotint, 19 x 12 inches

But Eunoe behold, that yonder rises;
Lead him to it, and, as thou art accustomed,
Revive again the half-dead virtue in him."

Like gentle soul, that maketh no excuse,
But makes its own will of another's will
As soon as by a sign it is disclosed,

Even so, when she had taken hold of me,
The beautiful lady moved, and unto Statius
Said, in her womanly manner, "Come with him."

If, Reader, I possessed a longer space
For writing it, I yet would sing in part
Of the sweet draught that ne'er would satiate me.

Dante, The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio: Canto XXXIII

***

Eunoe is a feature of Dante's Commedia created by Dante as a sixth river of the dead. Penitents reaching the Garden of Eden at the top of Mount Purgatory are first washed in the waters of the river Lethe in order to forget the memories of their mortal sins. They then pass through Eunoe to have the memories of their good deeds in life strengthened.

The word "eunoe" is one of Dante's many neologisms presumably derived from Greek "eu-," meaning "good" and "noe," meaning "mind."

- From Wikipedia: Eunoe

O Happy Dead!

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"O happy dead! O spirits elect already!"
Virgilius made beginning, "by that peace
Which I believe is waiting for you all,

Tell us upon what side the mountain slopes,
So that the going up be possible,
For to lose time irks him most who most knows."

Dante, The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio: Canto III

Mind Parasites: The Creature Appears Troubled and Confused

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Screen Cap From the BBC's Planet Earth Series

On occasion, while thus foraging, one of these ants will become infected by inhaling the microscopic spore of a fungus from the genus Tomentella, millions of which rain down upon the forest floor from somewhere in the canopy above. Upon being inhaled, the spore lodges itself inside the ant’s tiny brain and immediately begins to grow, quickly fomenting bizarre behavioral changes in its ant host. The creature appears troubled and confused, and presently, for the first time in its life, it leaves the forest floor and begins an arduous climb up the stalks of vines and ferns.

Driven on and on by the still-growing fungus, the ant finally achieves a seemingly prescribed height whereupon, utterly spent, it impales the plant with its mandibles and, thus affixed, waits to die. Ants that have met their doom in this fashion are quite a common sight in certain sections of the rain forest.

The fungus, for its part, lives on. It continues to consume the brain, moving on through the rest of the nervous system and, eventually, through all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks, a spikelike protrusion erupts from out of what had once been the ant’s head. Growing to a length of about an inch and a half, the spike features a bright orange tip, heavy-laden with spores, which now begin to rain down onto the forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale.

- From Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder:
Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast,
and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology by Lawrence Weschler

"Showing some worrying symptoms..."

"Those afflicted, if discovered by the workers,
are quickly taken away and dumped far away from the colony."

"Like something out of science fiction,
the fruiting body of the Cordyceps erupts from the ant's head."

"And it's not just ants that fall victim to this killer....
There are literally thousands of Cordyceps fungi...."

❂

It was at this point in history, just as the human mind had taken this tremendous evolutionary leap forward - evolution always proceeds by leaps, like an electron jumping from one orbit to another - the the mind parasites struck in force. Their campaign was cunning and far sighted. They proceeded to manipulate the key minds of our planet. Tolstoy glimpsed this truth in War and Peace, when he declared that individuals play little part in history, that it moves mechanically. For all of the protagonists of that Napoleonic war were moving mechanically - mere chess men in the hands of the mind parasites. Scientists were encouraged to be dogmatic and materialistic. How? By giving them a deep feeling of psychological insecurity that made them grasp eagerly at the idea of science as 'purely objective' knowledge - just as the parasites had trid to divert Weismann's mind into mathematical problems and chess. The artists and writers were also cunningly undermined. The parasites probably looked with horror upon giants like Beethoven, Goethe, Shelley, realizing that a few dozen of these would set man firmly on the next stage of evolution. So Schumann and Holderlin were driven mad; Hoffmann was driven to drink, Coleridge and De Quincy to drugs. Men of genius were ruthlessly destroyed like flies. No wonder the great artists of the nineteenth century felt that the world was against them. No wonder Nietzsche's brave effort to sound a trumpet call of optimism was dealt with so swiftly - by a lightning-stroke of madness. I shall not go into this matter at length now - Lord Leicester's books on the subject documents it exhaustively.

Now, as I have said, the moment we recognized the existence of the mind parasites, we escaped their cunningly laid trap. For it was nothing less than a history trap. History itself was their chief weapon. They 'fixed' history. And in two centuries, human history became a parable of the weakness of human beings, the indifference of nature, the helplessness of man confronting Necessity. Well, the moment we knew that history had been 'fixed', it ceased to take us in. We looked back on Mozart and Beethoven and Goethe and Shelley, and thought: Yes, great men would have been two a penny if it hadn't been for the parasites. We saw that it is nonsense to talk about human weakness. Human beings have enormous strength when it is not being sucked away every night by these vampire bats of the soul.

- From The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson

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"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."

- Dante Alighieri

Thanks to Jeff G. for re-minding me about THEM.

Cf:
Mind Control by Parasites By Bill Christensen

Remote Control Device 'Controls' Humans by Yuri Kageyama

CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY: MEGOLAPONERA FOETENS: STINK ANT OF THE CAMEROON OF WEST CENTRAL AFRICA

BoingBoing on Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology by Lawrence Weschler

New Scientist: Parasites brainwash grasshoppers into death dive

And, I really, really wanted to just post the linked image below under the title HUMAN SKULL WORMS but even I have my limits.... You know, brain worm parasites in a moose skull are acceptable but a cancerous human brain covered in maggots crosses the line. (But O how I loved writing that sentence.)

Caveat videor:

Skull Worms: Intensely Graphic Images of Maggots Living on a Cancerous Brain

The Soothsayings of the Sibyl Lost

Image Source

Dante was a man of great learning but little intellect; he ignored vast treasures of ancient culture rediscovered prior to the Renaissance. He was hopelessly behind his own time in philosophy and religion; he was a serious adherent to dogmas and doctrines that many people were abandoning in his own day. No poem contains more versified hopeless speculation than the Paradiso. Much of this section is no longer considered of any aesthetic import and is studied by commentators who wish to know the beliefs entertained by the poet. From the very first canto where the universe is vaguely described as something like unto God, to the last where the poet actually tells us that he caught a glimpse of God Himself, we marvel as we read that his intellect was so limited. His power as a poet is corroded by his weakness as a thinker.

In the Divine Comedy we having [sic] living before us again all the bigotry and fatuity of the medieval ages; we have a summing up of all the speculation which rational men to-day reject; all the superstition, darkness and intolerance of a millennium are crystallized in this poem.

From the Appendix: Adverse Views on Dante:

Goethe registered this opinion in his Italian Travels: "The hell was to me altogether horrible, the purgatory neither one thing nor another, and the paradise dreadfully slow."

Leigh Hunt says: "Such a vision as that of his poem (in a theological point of view) seems no better than the dream of a hypochondriacal savage and his nutshell a rottenness to be spit out of the mouth."

To Nietzsche Dante was "the hyena poetising in the tombs."

- Dante and other Waning Classics by Albert Mordell, 1915

❂

When you read Dante or Shakespeare, you experience the limits of art, and then you discover that the limits are extended or broken. Dante breaks through all limitations far more personally than Shakespeare does, and if he is more of a supernaturalist than Shakespeare, his transcending of nature remains as much his own as Shakespeare's unique and idiosyncratic naturalism.

- The Western Canon by Harold Bloom

❂

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god. That Dante professed an idolatrous adoration of Beatrice is a truth that does not bear contradicting; that she once ridiculed him and another time rebuffed him are facts recorded by the Vita nuova. Some maintain that those facts are symbolic of others. If that were true, it would strengthen even more our certainty of an unhappy and superstitious love. Dante, when Beatrice was dead, when Beatrice was lost forever, played with the idea of finding her, to mitigate his sorrow. I believe that he erected the triple architecture of his poem simply to insert that encounter. Then what usually happens in dreams happened to him. In adversity we dream of good fortune, and the intimate awareness that we cannot attain it is enough to corrupt our dream, clouding it with sad restraints. That was the case with Dante. Refused forever by Beatrice, he dreamed of Beatrice, but he dreamed her very austere, but he dreamed her inaccessible, but he dreamed her in a chariot drawn by a lion that was a bird and was all bird or all lion when reflected in her eyes (Purgatorio, XXXI, 121). Those facts can be the prefiguration of a nightmare, which is set forth and described in the following canto. Beatrice disappears; an eagle, a vixen, and a dragon attach the chariot; the wheels and the pole are covered with feathers; then the chariot ejects seven heads (Transformato cosi'l dificio santo Mise fuor teste); a giant and a harlot usurp Beatrice's place.

Infinitely Beatrice existed for Dante; Dante existed very little, perhaps not at all, for Beatrice.

- Other Inquisitions by Jorge Luis Borges

❂

It is in the spirit and intellect of Dante, more closely than in that of any other western presence of whom we have certain record, that the three semantic fields of 'creation' and 'creativity' - the theological, the philosophical and the poetic - are organically made one. Dante is our meridian. To turn to him is neither academic philology, nor literary criticism nor simple delight, legitimate and fertile as these are. It is to measure with the greatest possible precision the distance from the center, the length of our current afternoon shadows - though, assuredly, these shadows announce a new and different day, what Dante himself would have called a vita nuova. To repeat about Dante what others may have said already, and said better, but in the context of my argument, is a necessity. His 'triplicity' informs that argument. For he organizes, makes irreducibly vital, the reciprocities of religious, metaphysical and aesthetic codes in respect of being and of generation. Dante's apprehension of theology is schooled and profound. No faith is more innervated by thought. He engages with philosophical issues at the highest level of general perception and technicality. (Dante was a logician of the intuitive.) There is - banality - no greater poet, none in whom the summa of knowledge, of imagining, of formal construction is made to reveal itself in language more commensurate to its purpose. Thus any reflection on the intersecting spheres of creation in the religious, metaphysical and aesthetic senses, is, at one level, a rereading of Dante.

- Grammars of Creation by George Steiner

❂

Così la neve al sol si disigilla;
così al vento ne le foglie levi
si perdea la sentenza di Sibilla.

Even thus the snow is in the sun unsealed,
Even thus upon the wind in the light leaves
Were the soothsayings of the Sibyl lost.

- Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, Longfellow Translation

Cf: Dante Digital Project