Pastourelle -a poem where a knight falls in love with a sheperdess
Chthonic - subterranean, infernal, having to do with the underworld
Epideictic - verbal display, type of speech designed for rhetorical effect
Aren't they great? They also sound like what they mean; pastourelle sounds like a country dance, epideictic sounds stilted, and chthonic sounds like a reverberating boom in a cavern under a mountain.
Dante-I am studying for my Major Authors exam and had a few brainwaves while reading over the Inferno with a friend
- Death in Dante is a function of location, not of life. The shades are still alive, but what changes their ontology is their physical location. Extraordinarily, setting or scenery determines ontology - you are what you are surrounded by. If you are surrounded by flesh and the world, you are alive, but if you are not, you are dead-but the you is constant. Sinners retain their identities in Dante, making the notion of 'losing your soul' when you go to Hell completely upside-down. They don't lose their souls, their souls are forced to inhabit the environments they willed into Creation...
- A wonderful trio- the neutrals, the suicides, and the possessed. The neutrals never were alive, even in life-extending life to mean spiritual life over physical life. The suicides were in bodies but rejected physical life, committed physical suicide, and now are living spirits in lifeless bodies;trees. The possessed committed spiritual suicides, and now there spirits are evicted from their living bodies and inhabit hell, while strangers walk in their flesh on earth. These three images create and incredibly play on distinctions between what is life and what is death, whether some forms of life are higher than others, and the unity and relative reality between body and soul.
On to baser things--day 2
Brekky-apple and french vanilla and water
Lunch-chicken and soup and naan bread
Dinner-m and ms
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