"my lady is desired in highest heaven"

Reading Vita Nuova hot on the heels of Naked Lunch brightens Dante's colors a little, maybe.

For the first 15 chapters I tried to read Beatrice purely as an allegory of some perhaps spiritual mode or desire (Harold Bloom says The Divine Comedy is the true Third Testament... heh). So many spiritual traditions emphasize the fe/male relationship as such an allegory, after all. But after continuous reading, the ado about losing his faculties in her presence doesn't seem a capable container for anything but intense romantic love. Which idea initially made me uncomfortable. But he's writing wide outside the romantic tradition; complication, intriguing as a mystery.

What could restrain me dies out of my mind
 when I stand in your presence, my heart's bliss;
 when I am near you Love is there to warn:
 'Run, run the other way if you fear death.'
 My blanching face reveals my fainting heart,
 which growing fainter looks for some support,
 and as I tremble in this drunken state
 it seems that every stone is shouting 'Die!'
He sins who witnesses my desperate state
 and does not try to comfort my torn heart,
 though it were but the slightest show of grief,
 for pity's sake, that by your mocking dies,
 once brought to life within my dying face,
 whose yearning eyes call death to take me now.

(from XV)

"Surely, the purpose of such love must be strange indeed."

Dante's oscillations and swooning aside, his object in exploring the role of love is stated in XX: "Love and the gracious heart are but one thing." So then, Beatrice is a fleshy-real person (mortal, certainly); it is Dante's own love for her that concerns him. Something beyond the common conceptions of eros and agape, and which clearly matures & develops throughout the work.

So for anyone desiring a penetrating meditation on poetry and love in all its forms, from biochemical to abstract and well beyond the scope of Hallmark, I recommend yon book. Good springtime reading, anyhow. 5 tentacles of five.

music: Andras Schiff playing bk I of WTC