Speaking of the Devil...

Dante's Divine Comedy is one of those classics I've been meaning to read for years and just haven't gotten around to. Likening the mild stickiness of the London tube to the allegorical cosmology of Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy, led me to look up the infamous nine circles that comprise that cosmology, and as it turns out, the London Underground is far worse than the first circle of hell! So is London, for that matter.


Botticelli's map of Dante's Inferno.

Here are descriptions of the nine circles, based on this tour of Dante's hell (with an assist from Wikipedia).

First Circle. Aka Limbo. The realm of non-sinners who don't get their Heaven ticket punched on account of being non-Christians. Includes green meadows and a nice castle - a sort of eternal retirement home for many of history's greatest poets and philosophers including Avicenna, Horace, Ovid, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Virgil and Homer. Sounds way, way cooler than Heaven itself.

Second Circle. Realm of the lustful - the "carnal sinners who subordinate reason to desire." Violent storms whip sinners' souls here to and fro. Some famous romantics ended up here, including Cleopatra, Dido, Achilles, and Helen.

Third Circle. A punishment for gluttons. Snowballs actually have a pretty decent chance here, as its inhabitants are forced to lie in a slushy mix of snow, hail, and freezing rain. Guarded by a three-headed dog.

Fourth Cirlce. Destination for the avaricious (though certain Christians might not realize their souls are headed here). Medievals saw this sin as "most offensive to the spirit of love." Actually, for Dante both the free-spenders and the tight-fisted would end up here, where they could annoy each other for all eternity.

Fifth Circle. A swampy place, and the realm of the angry, who take two forms: the wrathful (who express their anger), and the sullen (who repress it); the former spend eternity picking fights with each other, and the latter grumble and gurgle in a muddy bog. Beyond the fifth circle, the really heavy-duty hells begin, as the punished sins become more serious.

Sixth Circle. This hell reserved for heretics, who Dante defines as those who deny the immortality of the soul. They included epicureans, who saw the soul as mortal and enjoyed the boozin' and the feastin'. This circle also would seem to be more fun than Heaven, if not for the flaming tombs...

Seventh Circle. Getting into some serious damnation now... the seventh circle is for violent sinners - murderers, suiciders, blasphemers, userers, and sodomites. Those who commit violence against others are punished in a river of blood; those who do violence against themselves (suicides and "squanderers") are condemned to a horrid forest; a third region - a barren desert, torched by "flakes of fire" - is for those who commite violence against God.

Eighth Circle. Land of the fraudsters, including thieves, falsifiers, and specialists in fraudulent rhetoric, including "divisive individuals who sow scandal and discord." Presumably where Glenn Beck will find himself after the sad day he passes on. Punishments include being licked by flame and getting turned into a lizard.

Ninth Circle. The helliest hell of all and the realm of the worst of the worst: traitors. Like the third circle, it's a cold place, as the sinners in the ninth circle are entombed in ice at least up to their necks. Certain folks here like to gnaw on each other's heads. Satan is at the very center of this circle, waist-deep in ice, perpetually weeping, and munching on traitors (Brutus and Cassius in particular - one for each of his mouths).

Here's another map of Dante's hell - not quite as artful as Botticelli's version, but sort of mappier.

Jasper Johns' 'Map'

This is Map, a 1961 painting by Jasper Johns, the artist who's probably best known for his iconic representations of the American flag.

I'm not really a big Johns fan, usually, but I like this painting more than most of his stuff. For one thing: it's a map. But besides that, there are a lot of tensions in this work that make it interesting. Like, for instance, the map he's chosen to represent is both iconic and very banal. It's your standard grade-school "These United States" 50-state map that we all resented having to stare at as kids (or that some of us only got interested in when we noticed that there were fascinating little inset maps of population density or what have you in the corner, and which impelled us to go searching out what other interesting sorts of information about the world could be conveyed in maps, which would eventually lead us to start a blog on that very arcane topic some decades later). But of course he's completely slathered over that banality with these really dramatic abstract expressionist gestures, some really bold colors and a lot of dynamic tension between those elements that is, in a word, fun (though also strongly ambivalent: some of those painterly gestures seem almost sneering, even angry). The effect, in my opinion, is that Johns' Map does something that a conventional 50-state map cannot, namely: it says something about our relation to the represented object. That is, our country, and the emotional relationship we have to our country (and of course this goes for citizens of any country in the world) is a huge, messy, incomprehensible thing, which inspires all manner of conflicting passions. That's something that the cold geometry of a conventional map can't capture. But this map, which is especially vibrant, even by expressionist standards, reveals something of that complex web of feelings.

Think of it this way: I think most of us, when we hold an abstract concept in our minds like "America" or "my country," have a visual image of something like a map of the US; but the sort of maps we're used to seeing convey nothing of the emotional content of those abstract concepts, which are indeed among the most potent concepts we have, right up there with "family" and "god." Johns' map is, I think, an attempt to evoke something of that emotional content, to give us a mental image that's commesurate with the concept's punumbra of feeling. It is actually, if you think about it, a rather patriotic thing to do.