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Fléctere si néqueo súperos Acheronta movebo.
- Aeneid VII, Virgil.

***

According to Lacan (eyeroll, no other way to start this, I've tried) and his mirror stage theories, a mirroring relationship forms between Dante and Beatrice, where an individual's sense of Self depends on the positive response of the other. This is easily encountered even in the Bible when Eve and Adam meet - the illusion being that it is possible to create perfect harmony between the Self and the Other, the object of desire.

To accept the impossibility of this basic human desire is to transcend the mirror stage and to find ones place as an Individual in the real world of Language and Order, Lacan describes it as a Journey towards or away from the impossible desire, something that can only happen through obedience to a much higher authority: Philosophy. Cognitive Intelligence. Scholasticism. Enlightenment.

Dante himself admits that the allegory of Beatrice is at least multifold.

To paraphrase Charles Williams off The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante, from Purgatory onwards Beatrice is Dante's way of Knowing and the rule is to "Take stock and observe well!" - she is the attention that is demanded of him and her expositions are the very results of his attention.

"This is the description of the very act of Knowledge, where Dante is the Knower, Scholasticism is the Known and Beatrice is the Knowing."

Her eyes - they are not in the Hells because there is no true knowing in Hell, they are not in Purgatory because that's where Dante is once more learning what he forgot; they are on Earth and in Heaven - this is unsatisfied desire seeing itself in Beatrice satisfied and satisfied desire sees itself in Dante unsatisfied.

Beatrice is indeed his Knowing beyond any actuality, crimson garment or femininity for we are discussing complex concepts surrounding Knowledge that cannot be confided to default romantic love as this is something else entirely.

"Apri li occhi e riguarda qual son io." -Paradiso XXIII 23
(Open your eyes and see who I am)

Lacan speaks of "courtly love" towards Beatrice as a "woman from the beyond" for she represents abstract desire echoed throughout Vita Nuova: the idea of some otherworldly creature - the object of desire - that cannot be touched by impure thought, with the iciness of the "woman from the beyond" that Dante himself crowns his Lady Philosophy of "nobile intelleto" because he now understands that she is his act of Knowing.

Desire metamorphosed into Self Realisation - echoing the Pygmalion myth I dare say it is like loving a statue from the beyond, with better heads having already echoed the same thought:

"I suffer terribly, in body and in the soul, from the feeling of this impossible; � the Thorn Shooter, the Apollo Saurochthonous, the mutilated torso of Diana at rest � the look does not make me drunk � it alters me; […] And then I still suffer to think that they would not sense my caresses." - André Gide

We know it was from Boethius that Dante conceived the idea of representing Philosophy as a "lady full of all sweetness, adorned with virtue wonderful in knowledge and glorious in Free Will".

For Boethius she was a stately Lady consoling the Roman senator, "a woman of a countenance exceedingly venerable who seemed not of our age and time", the "pargoletta bella e nova" (the maiden beautiful and rare) from Rime LXXXVII who is to be wooed in Language and Passion by her lover - and imbued with fresh poetry of Dante's own dolce stil novo, she is transfigured in the glorified Beatrice, the symbol of wisdom revealed to man.

Stepping away from his recognised discorded love, in these Cantos he addresses his readers "donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore" (Ladies who have intelligence of love) or "voi che 'ntendendo il terzo ciel movete" (you who by understanding move the third heaven) that echoes across time all the way to Paradise VIII and it is here in Vita Nuova that he clarifies: “Here is a god stronger than I who comes to rule over me.� - discorded eyes see carnal desire, enlightened eyes see Philosophy - both wearing crimson.

Desire for Beatrice had led Dante to knowing himself. The journey is not neccesarily unique, others will walk in his footsteps up and down the same Mountain path, including dearest Hans Castorp, dragging his own agalma behind him, see Daphne's ring finger part.

For Dante, Purgatory is important as it represents his soul's purification from discorded love as well as the harmonising of all loves with the one supreme love, something that can only occur if one ascends the Magic Mountain of Self-Knowledge.

Where pathological love actively meets its terminus. And the healing process can begin.

In Earthly Paradise, as the Soul attains the knowledge of the Self, it purges out vices and harmonises Love, thus regaining Moral Freedom - the basis of Dante's system of ethics, where Free Will reigns.

The final words of reason to the Soul once the purgatorial process is complete, "per ch'io te sovra te corono e mitrio" (thee o'er thyself I therefore crown and mitre) becomes the literal crown of il poeta "moderno" as the ability to rule himself morally, in complete command of his Free Will and love is purified as the ultimate Empyrean heaven, binding the Universe back into One:

"O grace abounding and allowing me to dare
to fix my gaze on the Eternal Light,
so deep my vision was consumed in it!
I saw how it contains within its depths
all things bound in a single book by love
of which creation is the scattered leaves."

It doesn't get more literal and Dante cannot be more specific:

"Qual è 'l geomètra che tutto s'affige
per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova,
pensando, quel principio ond'elli indige,
tal era io a quella vista nova:
veder voleva come si convenne
l'imago al cerchio e come vi s'indova;
ma non eran da ciò le proprie penne:
se non che la mia mente fu percossa
da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne.
A l'alta fantasia qui mancò possa;
ma già volgeva il mio disio e 'l velle,
sì come rota ch'igualmente è mossa,
l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle."
- Paradiso, Canto XXXIII

(Like a geometer* wholly dedicated
[*surveyor, stock taker, Hans Castorp]
to squaring the circle, but who cannot find,
think as he may, the principle indicated-
so did I study the supernal face.
I yearned to know just how our images merge
into that circle, and how it there finds place;
but mine were not the wings for such a flight.
Yet, as I wished, the truth I wished for came
cleaving my mind in a great flash of light.
Here powers failed my high fantasy
But by now my desire and will were turned,
Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly
By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.)

I bring up Thoreau in Walden comparing the written word to Stars: "There are the stars and they who can read them", emphasising that "to Read The Stars ought be done astronomically, not astrologically" because -

- it's not really about stars and romance, it's about Desire and Will seen through cognizant eyes, steered by Cognitive Intelligence. For Dante, love is guided by Enlightenment from beginning to end, leading him in search of the absolute truth and absolute beauty where even for a few moments, there is Silence in Heaven (brain) - an experience that some might take as romantic, religious or sensuous, but for Dante it is an Intellectual one.

By reading the stars astronomically (i.e intellectually) everything is on equal ground, "all parts of the circumference are equal" when before he was "as the center of the circle to which all parts are equal but with you"- and this is the entire purpose of the Journey, to create the distinction between these two states as now his Desire and his Will are in balanced motion and Dante himself becomes the motion and even Beatrice's eyes can turn with everything in correct motion.

Vita Nuova represents carnal love sublimated into intellectual ecstasy.

It is the bravest act of an Individual that has transcended the mirror stage: a self-autopsy without anaesthetic - the palpable, readable result of Dante embracing Cognitive Intelligence (i.e Philosophy) as his mistress of Beatrician quality through a Journey inspired by his Love in Grief after the death of (discorded desire for) the real Beatrice, as he says himself here, that gave him power by discovering the "language of authors, sciences and books".

A Dante that has indeed Transhumanised (see ) - Dante coronato e mitrato by the Self.

The reality is that I could have written all this as a Commedia review as he himself could have written the entire thing on the title page of La Commedia. They go hand in hand - maybe even a bit too much.

"All manner of things in this life act like mirrors."