Dendrophobia and La Diritta Via

I have been reading Dante lately, again. The Inferno is a returning point when life speeds up its journey. I have read The Divine Comedy a few times, coincidental with stages of my life. I find it calming in its introspective facility.

The Dark Forest. The Underworld from where Orpheus tried to rescue his dead lover Eurydice. For the Greek, it is also Hades to where Odysseus traveled to learn his fate from Teiresias, the blind prophet. And for the Buddhist, the Underworld is a continuum from Yama, the judging King of the Underworld to Nakara, or hell, during the cycle of life passed through Dante’s Dark Forest.

In the Bible, the forest is neutral. No fear of trees (dendrophobia). No fear, except that which results from new knowledge. Yet that happened when the serpent talked, not the tree.  However we fear the tree because it did not talk. Because it let us learn without being taught. Because we knew already.

Sartre wrote the novel Nausea (La Nauseé) where the roots of a chestnut tree under a bench in the park caused nausea to the main character. The tree was there, just like existence, and it encroached upon man’s freedom.  It was the antithesis of existentialism.  In opposition, when William Blake wrote his Poison Tree, it was in the context of “nature being imagination itself.”  Nature, the forest and trees were the source and embodiment to human imagination, not an encroachment upon his existence as proposed Sartre.

La Diritta Via. The straight, perhaps rightful path.  Was it lost in the forest or we ended up in that dark place because we lost that path? But why does it matter when the Divine Comedy is already written for us? Why pursue a path that takes us away or out of that dark forest when we know that the last act of that comedy is a return to existentialist fervor? When the tree never talks yet we know the story. When Nakara is just a stop in that endless cycle. When a French existentialist would use the roots of a chestnut tree to question his freedom from the environment and nature.

… I will read Dante again. But today, when the sun goes down I will also listen to Hilary Hahn play Paganini’s Caprice 24.

And then I will go for a long walk, in the dark, with my dog.

November 19, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019