There are days that seem like hell.
Then I remember that there is a purpose to Dante's journey to hell: to understand the depths of degradation to which we can sink.
Beatriz wants to expose him to his horrors so that he will be eager to return to goodness and love.
The dark jungle in which he is lost without knowing what to do symbolizes the political and moral confusion in his life and to understand and purge evil it is necessary to know hell.
Upon entering he is asked to abandon all hope, being able to continue only by his faith not in the church but in Virgil: the papacy was one of the main dissolving factors at that time and Dante felt horror at the dislocation of the system of ideals of his spirit. .
That same horror would be revealed some time later in Shakespeare's great tragedies that would reflect the decadence and political corruption of the court.
Hamlet had revealed that something was rotten and his desperation emerged from a lack of faith in language and himself, hence his inability to act.
Having seen the essence of things, his nausea inhibited him from an action that would change nothing.
How can we ask ourselves to fix a broken world?
Knowledge kills the action that requires the veils of illusion and, as an intellectual, it dies.
The awareness of the spiritual catastrophe of the world becomes intolerable for a sensitive soul that, later in romantic times, will be subjected to stormy upheavals with Goethe's Werther unable to adapt to the world around him or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein learning about criminal society in which he found himself, feeling excluded from it and also ending up seeking his own death.
Already in the 20th century, although in Latin America the nightmares of violence and restlessness of men who were victims of the plague of power were wonderfully portrayed by Borges, Arlt or Vargas Llosa among others, I would like to remember here today the infrequently remembered Lezama Lima who He pointed out the political potential of poetry as a kingdom acting against the corrosion of the times, founding imaginary eras against a vulgar history.
According to Lezama (as Camus would also do in France in a different way), it was necessary to promote the intercourse of history and poetry and recover "humanist plenitude in the face of nameless powers, inferior organisms, cold chaos": it was about protect a pre-commercial world in which dialogue between men survives.
For this, poetry was the only integrating fact where no crack was possible.
Here politics was not war but rather a spiritual encounter, which is why Lezama dreamed that his story in poetry could begin on his island thanks to a “refined and mysterious” life.
Faced with the pessimism of lost nature, the invincible joy in a reconstructed image of the human being.
We will not be able to recover what was lost without a politically and poetically liberating and dreaming consciousness in times of darkness.
Tormented by daily sterility, a good life will only reappear by recreating language and the world with new expressions that allow us a way out (at least but perhaps not only imaginary, given the creative power of poetry) from those days that seem infernal to us. and its painful entropy.