Page 14 - GALIET EXILE: Dante IV+

Galiet & Galiet
Adam to a redeeming Christ, from a fallen Florence to a New Jerusalem.
In turn, the pilgrim reader journeys the journey of the Commedia in a state of blissful always-ness, presence-ness, as if she were marching through the beauty of Genesis’s Creation, its iniquities, torturous exiles and its redeeming end, walking at once from the alpha to the omega and returning from the omega to the alpha, an ongoing journey without beginnings or ends.
Dante’s deserts and pastures of being encompass classicism and Christianity, the limits of reason and the bliss of faith, the part and its whole, as if the three Canticas became a transparent and phosphorescent mirror of the Word; mother and father of the very manifestation of his words made song. These are the words that the pilgrim reader will behold in her nostalgic and tragic odyssey, fraught with earthly and sublime tensions, from Dante’s ‘Genesis’ to Dante’s ‘Revelations,’ so as to dance, once again, in ecstasy, towards its beginning, drunk with a twice-told tale of human folly and wisdom mimicking the exile of the Israelites in the Old Testament and of Christian pilgrims in the New Testament. These thorns and songs will bring back recollections too of the markings God placed on Cain to protect him from revenge for the murder of his brother Abel. The Tau mark in Exodus, Ezekiel and Revelation protects its bearers on their pilgrimages. These signs were branded or cut with a sword point upon the shoulder or forehead. Dante in Purgatorio 9 (112-114) receives such seven inscriptions at sword point upon his brow, each to be expiated and removed in the penitential terraces of Purgatorio as he progresses home from his exile.
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