Drawing in My Feet

"Faced with that truth which seems a lie, a man
should always close his lips as long as he can –
to tell it shames him, even though he’s blameless;
But here I can’t be still; and by the lines
of this my Comedy, reader, I swear –
and may my verse find favor for long years –
that through the dense and darkened air I saw
a figure swimming, rising up, enough
to bring amazement to the firmest heart,
like one returning from the waves where he
went down to loose an anchor snagged upon
a reef or something else hid in the sea,
who stretches upward and draws in his feet."
Dante, The Divine Comedy (Inf. XVI, 124-136)

I’m intrigued by “a truth which seems a lie”. It’s true that Spring is here, but it feels outside my door like late summer - when the moisture is so wrung out of the air that you get thirsty just smelling flowers. But I think Dante had something more mundane in mind. He was talking about deceitful people, con artists, defrauders, liars.

Having avoiding looking at the balance in my tax-sheltered annuities these past few months, I have no idea what the greed of others has cost me in terms of money. I’m pretty comfortable with my material goods inventory, so I don’t worry about losing my home, my health, or my life’s work. But others do, and that sucks.

Dante says he can’t be silent in the face of such lies. He then promptly swears on the very poem we’re reading that he saw what he saw. Sounds a bit like my financial adviser telling me late last autumn to look at the market as a long term investment, and not worry about short-term losses and gains. I’m now feeling like I’m stuck on a reef in a stormy sea, stretching up and drawing in my feet to avoid being lost in the deluge. Greedy sons of bitches, those financial people. And like Dante, it shames me that I believed them. Not only was I naive, I was greedy in wanting something for nothing.

Reap What You Sow

"O how abundant is the harvest heaped
In those rich storage-bins of souls who were,
While down on earth, the sowers of good seed!"
- Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXIII, Verse 130

This is the season of the vivid, the lurid, the clashes between colors, and I don’t just mean the seemingly endless presidential campaign as covered by American media.

I mean in my garden, where things are out of control. Clashing colors careen madly together, plants have outgrown their pots and become promiscuously entwined with each other, and planting beds are overrun armies of volunteers. The garden exceeds the gardener’s most inspired visions this month. The garden has taken upon the autonomous power to redesign and propagate itself.

Prosaic gardens may be pretty. My garden is not your uninspired cottage garden, dainty in it’s gently nodding cheerleader pastels. My garden is neither prosaic nor pretty. My garden a dirty girl, grown plump and looking older than her years in the glare of the harsh summer sun. The plants have outgrown their beds, in places looking like a fat girl in a prom dress two sizes too small – sweaty folds of skin spilling voluptuously out of desperately stretched fabric.

Despite being slightly slutty, my garden is sublime in it’s profligate boisterous life, enchanting in it’s effect. The sunflowers are few but noisy. The lab-lab (purple hyacinth bean) clashing next to the garish orange and brown wildflowers (who knows their name, they’ve returned in different places in the yard for years).

My pending harvest will be small – tomatoes are shriveling in the dry heat and eggplants never even bothered to hold onto their flowers, let alone fruit. But so, what if I won’t reap an abundant harvest to fill rich storage bins? The best part about being a gardener in this season (before the heat parks just outside the window and stares me down inside) is having no regrets. Whatever didn’t grow, despite desperate coaxing or profane cursing is barely missed. What is growing is no longer my problem. I’m just sitting back, enjoying it all more than ever this year.

My garden of delights proves there are other, more hopeful, meanings to the caution that we reap what we sow.

The Koi Pond Murders, Part 1

“And the Guide said to me: ‘He wakes no more
This side the sound of the angelic trumpet;
When shall approach the hostile Potentate,

Each one shall find again his dismal tomb,
Shall reassume his flesh and his own figure,
Shall hear what through eternity re-echoes’."

Dante, Divine Comedy, Inferno: Canto VI
Source:

Narrative Voiceover:
Our mystery begins early one recent sweet morning, when Spring was holding her brightest smile still for the camera. The peace of the morning is suddenly shattered by a sudden cry! Startled birds spread the alarum! With a shriek rivaling a vintage 1940-something stunningly beautiful woman in peril, The Gardener does a (ladylike) spit-take of her morning iced coffee, fragrent with cardamom. Strolling through the outdoor patio to say good morning to the fishies, The Gardener is stunned to see a floater: a dead fish bloated and lounging sideways at the surface of the pond. There! Among the water lily leaves, algae blooms and torn netting. Not one. Not two. Three! Their blind eyes staring up into the deep blue morning of their Judgment Day.

“Tech Support Guy,” wails The Gardener, flinging aside her vintage collectible Dopey™ coffee mug, “There’s been a fish disaster!”

(Camera focuses on animated picture of Homo Simpsonien, falling to his knees, throwing his arms outstretched, beseeching the sky in an eternal reverberation. “NOOOOOoooooooo…” and continues to pan out from a crane shot, morphing through mapquest, to google, to google earth, to the universe, past Planet Express Ship, and vanishing into the infinite.)

The Tech Support Guy, in a deep voice, dripping with wisdom and speaking slowly with resignation and zen-like acceptance: Hell is the place where we remain on the earth that we created while we lived – only for eternity. The cries of those from within the inferno may echo eternally, but the lament of the living, when sending off the spirits of the dead, don't last all that long.

Narrator, in a country preacher chant of a voice: Our fallen heroes wake no more this side of the angelic trumpet. Who perpetrated this act of terror?

(Cut from animated universe to real picture of TH, swooning in TSG’s arms. Pan gently to a slowly waving American flag at half mast, reflected in the silent pond. Fade to black.)

(fin)