some quick thoughts on the Times article-spurred Ballerina Farm Discourse, Francesca by Hozier, and of course Dante.
If Hannah Neeleman, Ballerina Farm, doesn’t make it to Heaven, perhaps she’ll float in the second circle with Francesca and Paulo. Daniel won’t be there; his sins are deeper. Souls find themselves in the great whirlwind of The Carnal, this second circle, having allowed a certain other whirlwind to sweep them away in life. “Their sin was to abandon themselves…”1
The fuller passage reads:
The Poets leave Limbo and enter the SECOND CIRCLE. Here begin the torments of Hell proper, and here, blocking the way, sits MINOS, the dread and semi-bestial judge of the damned who assigns to each soul its eternal torment. He orders the Poets back; but Virgil silences him as he earlier silenced Charon, and the Poets move on.
They find themselves on a dark ledge swept by a great whirlwind, which spins within it the souls of the CARNAL, those who betrayed reason to their appetites. Their sin was to abandon themselves to the tempest of their passions: so they are swept for forever in the tempest of Hell, forever denied the light or reason and of God.”2
Francesca and her lover, Paulo, swirl in this Circle. In life, they were married to others but had an affair with one another. In death, Dante writes them enduring eternal punishment for their adultery, together. Their affair was abandonment of reason in favor of passion. When Francesca describes the events that landed her in this Circle, she describes being “seized” by love, that “Love led us [Francesca and Paulo] to one death.”3 She portrays herself with the passive voice; she negates her own agency.
I don’t particularly subscribe to the same marital sanctity standards as the Christian tradition on which Inferno is based, so I actually have quite a bit of sympathy for Francesca and Paulo whose love was sinful because it went against the Church-sanctioned marriages that they were in (politically-arranged ones, if historical records hold any truth). Dante Alighieri seems to have sympathy for the pair, too, in his depiction. His implicit critique is not that the sin was in extramarital love, but rather in denial of ones own agency. That is, abandoning oneself to the tempest of one’s passions is perhaps not the sin as much as is abandoning oneself, full stop. Abandoning yourself, perhaps, goes deeper; It is not against God directly, but against yourself.
If you’re into the God thing, then abandoning yourself, God’s creation, is to abandon God. If you’re not into the God thing, the point stands.
It’s not Hannah’s fault, purely. Powerful forces of manipulation went to work, against which she had little chance. But she’s found herself abandoned by her own self, and is in a whirlwind here on earth. The rest of us watch her, as Dante and Virgil did Francesca, from the dark ledge, a bit of glass and some pixels separating us from where she floats, spinning and swirling like the stormwinds, spinning and swirling like a ballerina, cuffed to the spirals by the wind.
“Now that it’s done
There’s not one thing that I would change.
My life was a storm since I was born
How could I fear any hurricane?
If someone asked me at the end
I’d tell them, ‘Put me back in it,’ darlin’
I would do it again.”4
Hozier’s response is in the active voice.
Would hers be?
Would she do it again?
Four Point Font 