I teach a seminar for graduate students called Divine Comedies. My students and I trace Dante’s influence through the ages. After a close friend — like me, a medievalist — died by suicide last year, I found the passage of the “Inferno” where Dante describes a grove of suicides almost intolerable. The poet relegates the souls of those who have died by their own hand to trees in a withered forest in the seventh circle of hell. During the Last Judgment, we are told, they will not reoccupy their bodies like everyone else, but will remain trees, with their skins hanging from the branches, in penalty for casting their bodily garments aside during life. The poet snaps a twig from one tree. It bleeds.
After my friend’s suicide, I found myself surprised by the depth and complexity of my grief. To cope, I turned not to the consolation of poetry, but to the gym. I started weight lifting.
I had to process anew Dante’s condemnation of suicides. How to read the “Inferno” when my friend was now to be counted, in Dante’s eyes, among those who could not find peace? Many centuries after Dante, the American poet W.S. Merwin imagined emerging from this life, casting off his skin: “I will no longer / Find myself in life as in a strange garment / Surprised at the earth.” But life had never felt like a mere garment to me. My body was clunky, squishy, heavy. Turning to weight lifting was a method of control. It also made palpable the grief I was carrying.
Around that time, I thought often about a conversation I had with another friend, a music professor. He told me that his family questioned the amount of time he spent with his music, noodling with synthesizers. “We’re all going to die,” he said. “And while I’m here I want to learn a bit of what it means to be alive.”
Before this, I had only rarely attempted weight lifting — and usually experienced frustration and injury when I did. Still, those words resonated with me. I had been a writer, an academic and a musician. But after my friend’s death changed my life, the thing that gave me the urge to live while there was still time was strengthening my body, challenging my body, surprising myself in the process. Seeing how I might transform, given time, just for the fun of it.
I thought of Dante once more, in the land of the dead and newly attuned to his own physical heft. There’s a moment in the poet’s tour of the afterlife, stopping on the shores of Mount Purgatory, when the spirits notice that Dante is alive, an interloper. They “had spotted by my breathing,” he writes. The spirits “were so astonished / that they all turned pale.” (I have used the poet Bernard O’Donoghue’s translation.) From the perspective of death, the living body must be a wonder and a shock. All sinews and hairs and fat and muscle and bone. Wet eyes. The necessary breathing. The way your shadow claims its spot of earth.
Growing up, I saw intense exercise as the sole purview of the jock. There wasn’t space for me there. I mimed my way through sports practice. Exercise in those days seemed to have little to do with mental health or self-regard. There were those who were good at sports and those who weren’t. Now I was increasingly meeting friends who had grown up with a similar distaste for the gym, for jocks, but who lived for CrossFit or ultramarathons or the triumvirate of dead lift, squat, press. We claimed that space.
When I turned 41 this year, I surprised my wife by asking only for personal training sessions at our gym. I said I cared about longevity — staying healthy, mentally and physically — but I was also open about being curious. I wanted to see how my body might change, and my mind along with it.
Slowly, change came. I slept better. I quit drinking. I became more patient and made more friends outside the bubble of academia. The same energy I’d used to research obscure texts was now refocused on finding the best protein powder and lifting strategies. And I found my intellectual life renewed, too.
As an etymologist, I like the names I’ve lately encountered so often: the goblet squat, dead lift, hex bar, preacher curls. The farmer’s walk. There’s a poetry in the way that a mixed-grip dead lift requires your left hand to grip the bar backward, your right hand to grip it forward. Is it a metaphor? Why not? Sometimes the way to steady yourself, to lessen your pain and increase your strength, is by working your inner opposites against each other. Intellectual and athlete. Introvert and extrovert. There’s momentum to be found in marrying contraries.
At the gym, strange synergies emerged. My relationship with my trainer echoed the Old English elegy “The Wanderer.” The poem’s narrator recalls the warmth and camaraderie of a mead hall. He remembers the admiration and respect he held for the lord of the hall. When my trainer told me I was strong, I felt the blush of an immemorial pride bestowed upon the novice by the old hand. At first you don’t believe it. And then you do.
The rituals of strength, pain and depletion felt necessary now — finding productive ways of expelling the anxious energy that comes with being an academic. To deplete oneself, almost ritualistically, so that what remains is sometimes nothing. And you wear your nothing home.
After the spirits spot that Dante is alive at the foot of Mount Purgatory, they gather around him. In awe at the novelty of life. A body. Then Dante’s dear departed friend, Casella, rushes to the front to embrace Dante. “Ah shadows, with substance only on the surface!” Dante says. “Three times my arms closed up behind him, / and passed straight through him, back on to my chest.” The love is there, but the physical humanity is gone.
It’s an apt illustration of what Dante did throughout his “Divine Comedy” — and of what I’m doing when I miss my friend. We reach out to departed loved ones, feeling their presence fleetingly, and then we are faced with our own bodies, our own realities. And we are asked a question: How best to spend our remaining days?
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
Sebastian Langdell is an associate professor of English at Baylor University. He is the author of “Thomas Hoccleve: Religious Reform, Transnational Poetics, and the Invention of Chaucer” and the editor of “Thomas Hoccleve’s Collected Shorter Poems.” He is working on a new book, “Dante in America.”
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