Dante's Execution

How It Happened That the Poet Got His

Dante’s execution: Yes. The poet was hunted down in the streets of Ravenna like a dog, most people don’t know, it’s like they don’t care anymore to learn the New of the Old, plus, they could not tell you the difference between a Guelph and a Ghibelline, between Florence and Naples, between a Cavalcanti and a Cavalcade, but he, Dante, was hunted down like a rabid dog—it wasn’t at all that he “died of Malaria” —a dog taking a bleeding raw leg of turkey from the table of a lord, clattering his goblets like the the wind clatters a row of skeletons on the gibbets⸻and they hunted him down after they found that he was writing another book of sonnets (always penning, but penning it up about?...) about a certain woman who, though historians believed previously that (1) Dante had seen her possibly only once, Laura-/Petrarch-style, or maybe a mere handful of times, and (2) that this certain woman had died young, making Dante into a kind of chivalrous pining yearner in the light of purity shining, as if down on him, from the paradisiac visage of that very dead girl up thence. BEATRICE. But new discoveries, new historical discoveries, have all but proved to us (imagine if we could prove that Marlowe didn’t die in that bar fight! it would be kind of like that—regaining the stabbed-out eyeball of history) that Dante’s girl lived and—fatally—that he saw her many, many times. Indeed, you should see all these newfound historical incunabula… veritable wonders of printed record-keeping… Dante himself stalked this poor girl throughout her life, made easier for the old hyena by the fact of her being “lame in the head” (rough translation). He wouldn’t leave the poor girl alone and the whole town had to hear about it on a daily basis (for Dante was also deeply, irrevocably in his cups, and, while taking breaks from penning in his rooms, he would loiter about the streets gabbing it everywhichway about “his girl” —yeah—to anyone he could bend toward listening). Beatrice, Dante’s Gerty MacDowell of the Mind, Dante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso and Nausicaa. In short, Ravenna decided—whether spontaneously or through organizational processes we cannot know, for the records do not say—to no longer tolerate this leering pervert of a poet in its midst, creeping around on its poor indisposed maiden/s, wielding his literary-philosophic sublimations, no matter how beautiful the subject! and Sweet Hell did Beatrice have it going on… nobody with eyes to see was going to deny that… But the good people of Ravenna gathered up their broom handles and sheared off the useful ends into pikes, broke their shears in half to make knives (x 2), and one man, a kind of pseudo-Archimedes, smashed up a hodgepodge of mirrors and windowglass and forced them mosaically into a wicker basket with which to “barn‘im weer ee stood” (pseudo-Archimedes lived in the same house as Gerty “Beatrice” MacDowell), and they all hunted Dante down, mid-sonnet. (“Ahh, too bad we’ll never see these last sonnets!” That’s what you’d think and say, but we do have them, they came down to us along with the new historical evidence, every last one of them, of which there are 80: and none of them are any good. Not one. And the booby doodles in the margins are about as adept, but a good deal fuller, I should say, more carefully constructed.) They caught him at the ninth line (oh, we—that is, us historians—are sure that that detail, had D. been counting, would’ve really got his rocks off: one last time!), the knocking at the door grew into a bashing-down of the door and Dante fled through his glassless bedroom windowhole. His robes fluttered darkly from the opening. The scoundrel flees! Was it only twilight? Or already earliest morning? The mob flooded into the room and peeked, all of their heads crowding in like a Goya, through the window. There! His robed form poetically running down Strada Guardone⸻and after much careening and cornering and fleeing and doubling back, like a good lock-stitch, they “got’im and barned him.” They strung him up in the town square and the pseudo-Archimedes, friend of Beatrice, got his pseudo death-ray running. Wasn’t enough to light any of Dante’s robes afire, but it blinded him maybe, annoyed him certainly, while Ravenna’s revenge was taken (this is actually the source of the term “ravenous,” not at all the Latin ravineus which is nothing but a false friend), in Beatrice’s name. Dante was executed variously, according to the sources. And then basically all of Ravenna died of Malaria. Only Beatrice and pseudo-Archimedes lived, the Malaria spared them, and they reigned happily as Prince and Princess of all Ravenna and the surrounding forests for the rest of their days, living off the alms and tolls taken from passersthrough and goodhearted highwaymen.

THE END