Purgando la caligine del mondo
“Those shades went beneath their burden . . . making their weary round on the first terrace, purging away the fog of the world.” Dante, Canto XI; Transl. John D. Sinclair
“I am finished with the blueness of cheese.”
It is nobody’s business if you want to dream. Hasselbacher in “Our Man In Havanna” admits that it was only a dream, once it is over. The bubble has been burst by opponents to dreams (the Cuban Corrupt); his laboratory has been ransacked and he is unlikely to reinstall his experimental equipment again.
Burl Ives and Alec Guiness in the destroyed laboratory of Dr. Hasslebacher (on the left); “Our Man In Havanna”, 1959
Below: Carol Reed, film director (of said film), UK, 30-12-1906 - 25-4- 1976. They don’t make faces like these anymore. Or faces like these don’t take portraits like these anymore?
Thus the tenderly lapping flames of quite interest and mild enthusiasm are extinguished by malevolence or mal-intent, or just browbeaters and blunderbusses.
Hasselbacher, whose life is far from clean, knows he lacks the inspiration to discover something by accident (how penicillin was discovered by Alexander Flemming in 1928). This and his solitariness makes him a tragic character with not enough to lose in life. He has a superior intelligence with which to comprehend himself, and accept his flaws, yet, without his dream he has no purpose in life. It seems to me it is less his work he lost and more the love he never found that makes him board the slow boat to death, with no power to affect fate.
Sometimes there simply is no changing fate - by yourself or for yourself. Then, you might as well sit it out in Havanna.
Music please, Maestro!
MAMBO N°8 - DAMASO PEREZ PRADO (1916-1989) Prado Perez is the bandleader, the guy who is dressed to the nines and pulls the muscians together by doing a dance. Clearly you can only play the mambo by moving your instrument around vigorously. This also helps in counting out loud (1:34)
One day the game will be up for all of us - one at a time we hope. That seems to make the difference. We pass the baton of life on to those we leave behind. Where is the finish-line?
Where do we go?
Do we suddenly become very lonely?
Nuns in convents spend a considerable amount of time praying for the deceased - for they have not ceased to be at all. More faiths declare souls need the solace and guidance of our prayers all the way to…? Reincarnation? God’s right hand?...
In such a rememberance, top of the role-call prayer list, were the nuns themselves. Favoritism? The more deserving? The more needful!? It is how it maybe should go: through our nearest and dearest to expand into the wider world.
What do these prayers serve? Were thh nuns not safe and sound? Were they not supposed to “dwelling now in light yet ever near”and find themselves redeemed? Was that not the point of being a good nun? Perhaps, one might still get lost in Limbo before arriving? No Heaven without Purgatory. This is also an Anthroposophic idea borrowed from the Vedic Kama Loka, the Astral World of the dead. There seems to be quite a journey ahead through the planetary spheres, stripping you of all that is not pure consciousness. And then what? First things first.
How to get into the After-Life?
This after-care of prayer will only work, however, if preceded by the period of transition, which takes, in general, three days (the life-body extricates itself from the physical body and its surroundings). A natural, spiritual death takes quite some planning and commitment from those who stay behind (wake-like situation). Variations exist world-wide, per religion, per denomination. What is the best way to be dead? What happens when you don’t get that amount of time (squished under a ten ton rock)? No wonder, in our times of equal rights, we have become doubtful about a heaven, at all.
Etching for Dante’s “Purgatory” by Gustave Doré, 1867, Canto XI: I am hinder’d by the rock, wherewith / This arrogant neck is tam’d, whence needs I stoop / My visage to the ground. Transl. Rev. H.F. Cary. (At least they’re fit…)
Heaven or Hell? Why not try Purgatory?
If this etheric body of yours is corrupt you go to purgatory (hell is a state of corruption). But what is understood by corruption? In Dante’s hell you find great philosophers and dramaturgs merely for not being Christian. Even his guide Virgil is to be found only within this infernal realm, with the special permission however to travel freely though all its levels. This special status may well lie in that he seems to have foreboded the coming of the Christ child in one of his chapters of the Aeneid (if you care to interpret it as such, as a pious Medieval man would).
Dante, apparently, does struggle to see his inspirations stuck in hell on the mere fault of having been born too early (before year nihil). He does his best to incorporate their world view into his own writing as something not worth tossing into the flames altogether. (Mind, these ancient Greeks are put on the lowest (mildest) tier of Hell. Might we not also draw some useful imagery from this: how a life from the head has its limitations when it comes to eternal bliss? May we also remain confused in our system-analysis of this: did the Christ not harrow hell on the Saturday after Good Friday? (Release the sinners.) Is Dante a kind of Dr. Who travelling back in time as well as in spatial dimension?
Blackboard drawing, Rudolf Steiner. "Entsprechung von Pflanzenwurzel und das menschlichem Kopf"; Rudolf Steiner Press, 2003
No guarantees here
I can’t guarantee an after-life, because it does not belong to my personal experience. There are bits and pieces I see which do not form a consistent enough whole for me to develop my own guide to the other (or Higher) worlds. I am therefore, naturally, both wary of those who claim otherwise and interested to test their authority. This is the attitude I took to studying the works of Rudolf Steiner - who would say of himself that his greatest work was regards the topic of karma and reincarnation (Christian style, to make it even more confusing).
The day of reckoning
May you who know me recognise, by now, I cloak much in irony. But this reckoning (like the Tarot card Judgement, XX) can be very pivotal and yet subtle and on-going for a larger episode in your life.
The time has come for me to be critical, and lo and behold, I seem to be getting a break, thanks to advanced youth (thankyou #adamo for my new term). That which is foreign has fallen from my mind like waste. With the fragile mesh of my memory I retain only that which I relate to personally. I need now only criticise myself. But this I must do with care, for I bruise very easily, and we are tired, me, my shadow and I of bringing out the balm of lullabyes and sweet dreams. The time has come to face reality and nothing but reality - which is of course as subjective as it comes and therefore totally new to me.
My research path has been long and treacherous, full of snake-pits along the way. My starting point has never been scepticism nor a quest for proof (only truth). I have collected a substantial library of Anthroposophical works which I find worth bearing in mind when trying to understand where we have come from and where we are going to and how to live our life in the meantime. Useful for when you struggle to trust your own experience.
I am free-lance Anthroposophist on an experimental basis. My laboratory has been ransacked many times.
Questions anyone?
Give us our daily bread...
