Page 15 - GALIET EXILE: Dante IV+

Galiet & Galiet
Exile, Essilio, Exilio as the salubrious sister of Pilgrimage, both journeying, hand in hand, towards the beauty of their relentless other: home. Journey as capaciousness. Home as the dwelling of language, meaning and poetry, as the abode of ultimate reality and truth, away from false, mundane and quotidian perceptions. Not just as political punishment, but the agonizing condition of man’s banishment outside the walls of Paradise and the Promised Land eternally journeying towards his New Jerusalem. Just as Adam and Eve and the Israelites were denied the milky bliss of their gates, a resentful Dante stands outside his sweet city walls after his fall, as if he were Florence’s Jeremiah, Florence’s salus noster. Dante, like them, must toil and become a wanderer and pilgrim in the metaphoric deserts of being
3⁄4 Sinai 3⁄4
before his spiritual rebirth and return.
The three gates of Florence, Inferno and Purgatorio shall mirror each other on this Dantean journey of reconciliation through exile’s labyrinth, and in turn, they shall mirror our own modern labyrinths found ‘within’ our pristine self-made iron gates. Dante, the pilgrim, shall guide us through our own encephalograms and catastrophic ‘selvas oscuras’ just as Virgil and Beatrice guided him one day beginning in Easter in 1301 towards divine love and oneness. Yet, Dante’s double nature as maker-creator-father-guide and sandal shoon pilgrim-son-follower will unfold progressively and prophetically. As such, Dante becomes a textual, inter-textual and virtual pilgrim. Guided by Beatrice and the mercy of philosophy and theology (Par 29, 37-38), he ponders on the many forms and tensions of his unjust exile and negated existence. Dante, hurled from his idyllic Paradise to a world that is regionally, nationally and
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