Dante’s Inferno and My Cancer Biopsy

Thursday

Because I had a biopsy yesterday to test for prostate cancer, I’m feeling rather groggy at the moment. As a result, you’re receiving a shorter than normal post, this one about the character Dante and his guide Virgil in The Divine Comedy.

An explanation here requires some delicacy so here’s my effort to spare you. First of all, to gain samples, my urologist had to (as we used to say as kids) “put it where the sun don’t shine.” Thankfully, unlike the first time the procedure was performed, I was anesthetized. (Don’t ask me about that first time!)

The good news is that, although I won’t get test results for another week, the doctor didn’t find anything obvious. In order to reassure me, however, he had to venture first into a dark wood.

Which brings me to Divine Comedy. Satan presides over the ninth circle of Inferno, which is to say the level furthest from God. Dante has long since discovered that, to deal with his crisis of faith, he must first acknowledge/journey through the darkest features of humanity. In Inferno’s last canto, there is a literal 180-degree turn as he and Virgil climb through Satan to get to Purgatory.

“Through” is the operative preposition. The center of hell is the devil’s rear end, and the winds that buffet the travelers are clearly flatulence (as are the winds that blow in the infernal regions of Milton’s Paradise Lost). In a brief intermission between gusts, Dante and Virgil begin their journey down Satan’s thighbone, which scholars like Norman O. Brown see as a euphemism for the anus:

Then, as he [Virgil] bade, about his neck I curled
My arms and clasped him. And he spied the time
And place; and when the wings were wide unfurled

Set him upon the shaggy flanks to climb
And thus from shag to shag descended
‘Twixt matted hair and crusts of frozen rime.

And when we had come to where the huge thighbone
Rides in its socket at the haunch’s swell,
My guide, with labor and great exertion,

Turned head to where the feet had been, and fell
To hoisting himself up upon the hair,
So that I thought us mounting back to Hell.

Given that the earth is a globe, however, they are not mounting back up to hell but rather away from it. Dante concludes Inferno with encouraging words:

He first, I following; till my straining sense
Glimpsed the bright burden of the heavenly cars
Through a round hole; by this we climbed, and thence

Came forth, to look once more upon the stars.

So there you have it: my courageous doctor climbed through my round hole so that I can (hopefully for many more years) gaze upon the stars.

Okay, that’s enough.

More on Scatological Dante
In a past post I shared a delightful doggerel version Divine Comedy, written by my father, making clear the symbolism connected with Satan. You can read the whole thing here but here’s a sampling:

[Dante] put his dream in poetry
And gave it to the press
And it sold a million copies
And a million more I guess
And everybody read it
And began to look around
For the
Tower of Jesus the
Flower of Mary and
Satan the hole in the ground.