La Vita Nuova

For death the churl has laid his leaden sleep
Upon a damsel who was fair of late
Dante Alighieri

Dante wrote these words in La Vita Nuova which tells of his meeting Beatrice, his secret love for her, and the tragedy of her early death. Dante the poet transformed this great love into great literature; Beatrice and Dante immortalized as characters in La Divina Commedia.

Dante has been on my mind because death has been on the nation's. The recent Schiavo case had everyone I know either in a tizzy over having their Living Wills drafted or calling to say that they were making large donations to the ACLU who seem these days to be the last bastion of reason in a benighted political environment. 

The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to reject a petition to reinsert Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube prevented a political attempt to meddle with a judicial decision that was based on what was found by the judicial system to be "clear and convincing evidence" to be the desire of an individual.

With the nation deliberating over a particular case, it seemed that more than anything it made one aware of that elusive thing-the nature of life and death itself. 

As Nabokov put it in his autobiography Speak Memory: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack between the two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred beats an hour)."

Religion has perhaps always been a way of easing this human agitation at the thought of that looming abyss. And every religion has its say on the matter, the afterlife often the predominant preoccupation of some religions. In Buddhism, nirvana is freedom from the cycle of birth, death and rebirth and is literally an "unbinding". Similarly, in Hinduism, moksha is freedom from the wheel to which we are bound by a cycle of life, death and rebirth; this concept is closer to a union with Brahma or the universal soul than with the nothingness that characterizes the nirvana of Buddhism. Shiva with his dance of destruction and Kali with her skulls portray the acceptance of destruction and death in Hinduism as a necessary part of creation. In Christianity, the afterlife in a heaven or hell is seen as a form of punishment or reward for the life one has lived on earth. So also in Islam, where there is a belief in a Day of Judgment and in a life after death. In Judaism the focus is more on the 'now' than on the afterlife, and although death is not believed to be the end, there is much room for personal interpretation of the hereafter.

The books of religion all have their say on the matter but the nature of life and death has also been the territory of writers and poets.

Marvell compared the soul to a drop of dew, that is shed from the skies and restlessly wants to return ("it all about does upward bend") back to the sky and sun. Donne sees death as powerless-a gate, a temporary place, a pathway to eternal peace. Death, be not proud, he admonishes. 

From Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger: "Moments shower away; the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality. Pierre on the field of battle, the Bennet girls at their sewing, Tess on the threshing machine-all these are nailed down for ever on the page and in a million heads."

And so Dante and Beatrice live on, nailed down in La Divina Commedia, Dante's meticulously wrought version of his journey through the afterlife with the unforgettable and apposite punishments of the Inferno where Virgil serves as Dante's guide, and then through Purgatory and on to the reunion with Beatrice who leads him through Paradise. In La Divina Commedia, as Harold Bloom says, "Beatrice, not Christ, is the poem." Or to put it another way, Beatrice, or Love, is the poem.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti who was named for Dante Alighieri and who lived many centuries later in Victorian England, was both poet and painter. Rossetti translated Dante's La Vita Nuova into English and many of his poems and paintings use images from the works and life of Dante. In the painting Beata Beatrix which is a memorial to his muse and wife Eliabeth Siddal, who also died young and tragically, Beatrice is portrayed as if in a spiritual trance. Rossetti fused Dante's life with his own, in the way he did with his poetry and painting, mingling images from one with the other.

Death in art has a long history and there are several well-defined genres-the Dance of Death, the Triumph of Death, and Death and the Maiden. The Dance of Death paintings are usually found on church and cloister walls or on family vaults, often accompanied by verse. Death is often portrayed by a musical instrument, the human protesting but eventually drawn in by the siren, inescapable music. The Triumph of Death paintings are thought to be influenced by the devastation wrought by the plague. Death here is all-powerful, as in Durer's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Brueghel the Elder's The Triumph of Death. In the Death and the Maiden paintings, believed to have perhaps originated in the Persephone and Hades myth, the idea of the Dance of Death is taken a step further and eroticized. These paintings could be interpreted in two possible ways-that life itself is as ephemeral as the beauty of a young woman, or, as in Munch's Death and the Maiden, that the power of Love overcomes Death. In Munch's painting, the woman embraces Death who is reduced to a mere skeleton. Love is now the seducer.

All these attempts at nailing down the nature of death which remains the great enigma-and in the end all we know with certainty is that we do not know what happens to us after we die. Death is that which we know nothing about. All we know is this life. And that each of us holds dominion over his or her own life.

President Bush in his Statement on Terri Schiavo talks about a goal of building a "culture of life". I am with Judge Whittemore and the ACLU on this one-if the only thing certain is that our lives belong to each of us, then we must fight for a "culture of freedom" where every individual has the right to sovereignty over his or her own life and the circumstances of his or her own death. 

15^th April, 2005.

Each quarter, Anita Itty writes on topics of leadership, identity, business & culture for SAWLF. Ms. Itty received an MBA from Columbia University and is the 2003-2004 winner of the First Words South Asian Literary Prize. Ms. Itty lives in New York City where she is currently working on a novel.

To contact Anita Itty, email: aiaddress-sawlf@yahoo.com

Recent contributions from Anita Itty: 

Pattern on Pattern, in Red, September 15, 2005
The Elephant in the Room, January 15, 2005
The Wall and the Books, September 15, 2004
On the Shoulders of Giants, June 15, 2004