I do love the phrase executive dysfunction bc the image it conjures is of a bunch of people wearing business suits around a long oval conference table arguing with each other to the point where they’re getting into physical fights, but in the background there’s just a big empty whiteboard with a To Do list with one item on it and that item is “take shower”
God, Dante’s Paradise is just as nightmarish as his Hell.
It’s the Catholicism and the sexism. But still.
There is a lower layer of Heaven in Paradiso, that is occupied by “those who broke holy oaths”
….it seems to mostly be populated by nuns who were forcibly taken out of convents and into political marriages that killed them
……..
Listen if your heaven has tiers I already do not trust you, but this is disgusting beyond that
I’m going to need to read some Wodehouse or Animorphs or something next to get the bad taste out of my mouth
Okay Dante clearly has Beef ™ with this concept, he’s spending multiple cantos trying to work out how something so fucking unjust can be part of God’s Divine Love
He’s too medieval to accept that maybe God could be unjust, so he’s pretzelling himself trying to make it work with what his (VERY LARGE AND INTENSE) conscience dictates
The problem is that Dante’s God, being Medieval!Catholic!God, is genuinely an abusive bastard. There is no squaring this circle. But Dante’s got to try, or be an heretic.
I find it tragic but endearing. Like watching a three-legged cat trying to climb a flight of stairs. You feel sorry for the poor beastie, but you high key wish someone would lift it to the top before it hurts itself.
I know I’m anti-Christian as all get out, but there is something genuinely tragic about Paradiso that just permeates everything
The juxtaposition of sublime bliss and justification for suffering feels like listening to someone talking about their abusive loved one
It’s absolutely gorgeous poetry. It’s lush and Sublime. But it’s full of Dante’s simmering anger at injustice, and his desperate attempts to reckon with that injustice coming from Divine Love itself
I can’t read this and not think of Brunetto Latini. In the 15th canto of the Inferno, Dante and Virgil are walking along the rocky rim of the burning desert in which a rain of fire torments blasphemers, usurers, and, fatally, sodomites. A disfigured shadow draws closer and starts jogging along with them – being damned for sodomy, he’s forbidden to ever stop running, on pain of being sunken into the scorching sand like the blasphemers – and Dante recognizes, just barely, his old teacher.
And he’s heartbroken. People who say that Inferno is no more than petty score-setting (and there is a lot of that, to be sure) always forget about this scene. Dante meets a man he loved as a father, a man he looked up to almost as much as Virgil, and sees him being tortured, eternally, without rest, for his sins against God’s “natural order”.
And he can’t even really feel sorry for him, because Latini is a damned soul in Hell, God put him there, and God is always right. Compassion for the damned is blasphemy, because it means thinking that God’s judgment was less than perfectly just.
Of course God did not put Brunetto Latini in Hell, Dante did, as he wrote the poem. And he clearly suffered as he did; but this was not a time for theological shenanigans like making up a rule to place Frate Alberigo among the traitors even though he was still alive; Latini had sinned, and died unredeemed, and placing him in Heaven would be an offense to God. So Dante, to his own horror, condemned his beloved old teacher to running forever on burning sand under a hail of fire, because he had probably had sexual relations with other men, and probably didn’t repent of it before dying, and such a person, inevitably, inescapably, necessarily, belongs in Hell.
… I was recognized by one, who grabbed me by my robe, and cried: “How wonderful!”
Reblogging this for Dantedì, 25th March (anniversary of the supposed beginning of Dante’s voyage through the afterlife).
I love those memes about Dante being a petty bitch who puts everyone he dislikes in hell – and he does that! Plenty! – but, as always, It’s More Complicated Than That
Following horny people and opening tumblr in public is the path to true strength. Scrolling quickly through porn trains your [Warrior’s Reflexes], and calmly moving past it trains your [Warrior’s Resolve].
I didn’t realise this until adulthood but handmade birthday piñatas are the apex of parental devotion. I spent the week cooking for my ravenous teenage cousins and felt a bit crestfallen at times that I was spending so long making something that was going to disappear within minutes—but with piñatas it’s so much worse, they exist to be savagely maimed. Year after year my father asked his kids what shape they wanted this year’s piñatas to be and he spent weeks painstakingly making them in the basement after work, only to watch a bunch of oversugared bat-wielding kids gleefully destroy them in less than 10 minutes.
I mentioned this to him and he said he remembered researching tarantula anatomy for the giant spider piñata I asked for when I was 4, trying to make the fangs the right shape and to cut the crepe paper into very thin ribbons so the thing would look appropriately fuzzy, and I was like “and I don’t even remember it because I was four!! spending so long building a beautiful object only so your kids will have fun destroying it, knowing they won’t even remember it, is such a selfless endeavour” and he said “my other motivation was that you said you wanted the spider to look real & scary so the kids at your birthday party would be terrified of it and you’d get to scoop up all the candy and I wanted to support your slyness & ambition”
worst genre of lovecraft story is “and the dtfgykugxjyfugkgy beheld igtdutdjdygi, for once there was dtfykyymhmvchjv, but now yjf,fyyvfyfykjf has taken gtdyydtddjhvkyjyf, many eons ago….”
Imagine my shock as a neurodivergent teen when I first realized that using large vocabulary and eloquent speech doesn’t make you less likely to be misinterpreted, rather it adds an entirely new layer of misinterpretation I had never even realized existed in the form of people thinking you’re being snobbish or condescending when you’re just trying to be specific
controversial take but i think discussions about guilt tripping for reblogs should extend to art and writing. i know from personal experience how bad it stings when you pour your heart and soul into something and nobody seems to care about it the way that you do, but that’s also, like, part of making art? building the resilience you need to keep going even when your stuff isn’t getting a ton of attention is part of becoming a better artist, and i can’t think of a safer place to learn that skill than in fandom spaces where it’s hard to monetize anything we make and the feedback culture is generally encouraging
like you can complain about it, absolutely, grousing about your favorite works being underappreciated is a time-honored tradition! just don’t put your insecurities over your art on other people
