Happy Halloween (From Bruce Springsteen and Dante)
Happy Halloween everyone. I recently attended a talk at Krannert by W.S. Merwin, Richard Powers, & Robert Pinsky. They are all well regarded authors and poets. Powers has an interesting biography that includes the University of Illinois and being a computer programmer “until an encounter with the 1914 photograph “Young Farmers” by August Sander, at the Museum of Fine Arts, inspired him to quit his job and spend the next two years writing his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which was published in 1985.” They discussed the vivid and dark imagination of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation, Dante’s first canto describes feverishly wandering through his dark forest.
Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
His first canto has always haunted me. I remember the classroom and the professor that taught it to me.
It amazes me how reading any sparking author will influence what I write thereafter. This morning I wrote a song/poem that explores a variation on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in which I am taken captive by hooded men on my way down from the summit. Here is what I suspect to be a Dante influenced excerpt from that song:
Every morning they chopped a chunk of my body
And in the evening fed it back to me
Disguised in thin soup
Before I attended the Dante talk, I wrote a song about the epic war between good and evil. Looking back, perhaps Dante subconsciously breathed on my brain. The song begins:
Running through the woods of Wisconsin
I stumbled upon seven sad grins
Dining on the carcass of an angel
Her wings spread across the table
A smile of calm widens her faceThe faces of lonely saints
The faces of lonely saints
The faces of lonely saints
Connecting disparate characters, Bruce Springsteen released a dark Halloween song & video today. Bruce frequents a rock n’ roll gospel style. He considers rock n’ roll to be a church with him as the pastor. This video shows him as a sinister minister:
