The Writing of Dante
Below is the brief story of the trials and tribulations which have accompanied the writing of my Dante book from its incipience right through to its being prepared for publication at present. I wish I could hurry. It is the 700th anniversary of Dante's death and the book should now be out and in the hands of the great public. As I argue, Dante wrote with a public - and practical - intent. I have a good argument and superb materials; I just need to ensure by good editing that the book is accessible.
I have promoted the outlines to this book several times now on social media, to be met with some interest here and there, but mostly indifference. I think many people are now bored with the promotion and want to see the book that has been long promised. There are reasons for the delay, and this article presents them. Then there is the indifference and the criticism. I'm not sure which is worse. Many people know as much as they want to know and will use any opportunity I provide to express their non-opinions to me. I have written more than one million words on Dante, and such people, reading no deeper than outlines, don’t wait for the published version, simply give me the benefit of their pre-existing views, totally ignoring what I have done in establishing the pertinence of Dante to current problems.
I don’t care for such people and don’t need to be in their company. They are dull and predictable. From the moment they open their mouths I know exactly what they are going to say. I have exchanged views with them in time-wasting episodes that peter away along predictable lines. I should ignore them and, in the main, do. But when they insist on coming into my electronic space - such is social media - I cannot but react. I am struck by their determination to drag us all into their despair. I think this is worthy of comment. Such people tend to be godless and hopeless, asserting the meaninglessness and purposelessness of existence. If so, why do they cry and, most importantly, to whom do they cry? God? There is no God, as they repeat insistently. I have news for them, neither I nor anyone else can be their god. I care as little for their plight as the indifferent Nature they often extoll. I have a feeling that they worship with cold, uncaring Nature because it relieves them of the need to think and act as moral agents. They just submit to hopelessness. They are in their own hells and refuse all the invitations that people like me issue to come out, since it demands something of them, in a way that being mired in misery does not. I have never understood why it is considered 'courageous' or 'realistic' to choose despair over hope. I would have thought it far more courageous to live in hope, not least given the tough problems that life and its living constantly throws in our direction. I've been dealing with some of the toughest of life's problems in recent years (indeed my entire life), and have never succumbed to despair. I've had reason to. But it's the lazy way out, the coward's part. I don't care for it. And I don’t need to be forever in the company of those who time and again refuse the invitation to hope, forever answering their charges, knowing that in their negativity they are Happy in Hell. Many people wallow in the shallows and, because the conclusions they draw are invariably bleak, think themselves plunging the depths. They are not. They are face down in the mud. I've seen the bleakness of existence. I'm not impressed. And I'm not going that way.
At its worst - and I spare many, perhaps the bulk of people here - social media can be like a bucket of crabs. There are people on there who are merely recycling their misery on a daily basis. That's social media as a neurotic hell. I may be making too much of this complaint, but from the first I have noticed the existence of a substantial number of people with a bleak, nihilistic, godless worldview, often damning humanity in sweeping terms, once they have finished insisting that there is no God. I can't prove that there is a God, and certainly don't want to waste time and energy in the attempt. But I can affirm the basic goodness of human beings, and relate that to having been created in the image of God. But, as one critic told me in 'debate,' 'human beings are generally despicable.' I struggle to see what people gain by that view. If true, there is no hope, and all your cries are in vain. And I don't believe it to be remotely true. And I don't see the people mired in their misanthropy as having suffered as greatly as they think they have. And since they most certainly do not possess the monopoly on suffering, they are not entitled to wield it as a weapon against those - such as I - who affirm a life of endlessly surprising possibilities. I've faced some pretty big problems over the years. As a survivor of the Hillsborough Disaster of 1989, where 96 people lost their lives, I have seen death and destruction. But I shall stick to recent years for this article. The people on social media with whom I have sought to interact and advance my views haven’t got the first idea of the problems and pressures I have been dealing with since 2016. I refer generally to ‘events.’ Even here, I shall only give the briefest of outlines, lest I write another, and even more harrowing, book.
My Dante book, frankly, should have been out months ago. I had a deadline of May 1st and worked at a furious pace in the attempt to reach it. But the die was already cast. I had lost too much time in the previous years to be able to catch up. I had begun writing this book in 2017, knowing fine well that the 700th anniversary was approaching. I felt I had time. I write very quickly, and so thought I would be first in the queue when it came to the many publications competing for attention in 2021.
The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry …
Things actually went very well at first. Indeed, I felt I had written the book I had planned by mid-2017. I had noticed a lot of musical references in Dante’s Comedy, but struggled to find much comment on this in the secondary literature. I took music as my theme and traced what I called ‘the musical model’ throughout Dante’s Comedy, titling my book Dante’s Sweet Symphony of Paradise. I took as my theme the journey from the disconnection and disharmony which characterises Hell through reconnection in Purgatory to, finally, harmony as attunement in Heaven. I carefully gathered every reference Dante made to music and musical instruments in The Comedy to take readers on a musical journey to Paradise.
It was a simple enough theme for me, and I soon completed the first draft. Alas, it soon turned out that my critical literature search had been none too critical and nowhere near as extensive as it should have been. I discovered Francesco Ciabattoni’s book Dante’s Journey to Polyphony, published in 2010. I ordered the book, took notes from it, and noted that the journey from the anti-music of Hell to the monophony of Purgatory and the Polyphony of Heaven was precisely the same journey as the one I had recorded. Of course it was! It is Dante’s journey. My work was not as original as I thought it was. Had I published it, Dante scholars would have seen it as a rehash, with some original features, of Ciabattoni’s book. I was crestfallen. At the same time, I was rather proud of the fact that, despite this not being my area of expertise, I had got most of the calls right, and very little wrong. The only significant argument that stood in need of revision was my claim that there is no music in Hell. It is more accurate to write that there is a musical structure underlying the entire Comedy, with Hell being an infernal realm of anti-music, a realm of diabolic inversion. I had noted that inversion, even perversion, but had made the mistake of arguing that Hell lacks music, when in truth it is a realm of anti-music.
I was encouraged by the fact that I had got plenty right, but disappointed to find that much the same ground had already been covered in depth in Ciabattoni’s book. I couldn’t publish my book on Dante and music in the form it existed; it lacked originality. I needed to rethink and revise, which essentially meant write a new book. I had ignored my intensive research training to push immediately to my great idea. And it cost me.
I have excuses for committing that fatal research error. The fact is, I was writing for reasons of physical and mental health, as part of my recovery from a massive and near fatal heart attack in December 2016. I knew Dante well, having already written a book on him in 2013. In a sense, I have been writing my current Dante book since then. I was unhappy with the 2013 publication and vowed to return to do full justice to the man and his work. Events got in the way of that vow, but I was thinking on Dante all through them. It seemed to be time to write the Dante book I had promised to write in 2013.
With respect to cardiac rehabilitation, Dante’s message of hope helped pulled me through a desperate time. The changes in exercise and diet and the great nurses and trainers aiding and advising along the way also had something to do with it. But don’t ever underestimate the message of hope in the midst of despair that Dante brings to life. And I had reason aplenty to despair. I had not only suffered a near fatal heart attack, my condition was deemed so precarious that heart surgery was ruled out as too dangerous. I had spent three days in agony rather than calling an ambulance, with the result that there had been permanent damage to the heart - one third of my heart is now dead. It has been a hard road back from the brink, but I made it. I worked with 'can-do' people in making that journey, including Dante, my unfailing guide in restoration. Hence I have zero patience with the 'can't do' people who continue to show up to tell me that Dante is wrong and there is no God and no hope. I have many arguments I could make against them, but would prefer to make my case positively through Dante. All I would ask is this - do you find such people great role models? Do they sound like people who have their lives sorted? Do they sound happy? Content? Balanced? People you would follow? People who have something to offer? Inspirations in word and deed. Frankly, no. They are resigned to the hopelessness of their godlessness. Let me explain how this works, lest people baulk at that claim.
In 2000, T.C. Boyle published A Friend of the Earth, a novel set in 2025 in a California recently devastated by ecological collapse, where numerous animals have become extinct and rain falls heavily for the majority of the year. ‘Looking back’ he says ‘I should have probably moved the date forward to 2015. We live in a very different world to the one that 19C novelists lived in. It’s a godless world, without hope’. We live in a very different moral and metaphysical universe to Dante's thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Boyle is gloomy in the extreme. ‘It’s all over. This planet is doomed. In a very short time, we’re probably not even going to have culture or art. We’re going to be living like we’re in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’. '
And there are many who agree with him. I hear them all the time. So that’s where progress has brought us? This is how it ends. The loss of culture and art, a pervasive meaninglessness and hopelessness, the fall of civilisation, the destruction of nature, the end of life itself. Look at all these things and ask with John Ruskin: ‘Are they not what your machine gods have produced for you?' (John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, vol. I p 270).
I’ve never been remotely tempted, let alone persuaded by, proclamations of doom and invitations to despair. I see them as a continuation, at extremes, of the same self-obsession and self-centredness without God that has brought the world to the brink of catastrophe. That is the curving in on ourselves that happens with the 'death of God.' Those without God see only the failures of progress and a world without hope. But I do agree that a godless world is, ultimately, a world without hope. Because Nature is only half a god, which is to say not a god at all – the realm of physical processes that unfold in complete indifference to human concerns and desires. Extinction is built into the DNA of this half-god/non-god, and all the human crying and lamentation in the world avails nothing.
Without food man can survive for barely thirty days; without water for little more than three days; without air hardly for more than three minutes: but without hope he might destroy himself in an even shorter time.
Mumford 1952: 30
Dante argues for hope. It's the easiest thing in the world to despair. Dante’s Hell and Purgatory is full of those who foreclosed the ending out of despair. It’s so easy to pursue desire, to mistake the immediacy revealed by the senses to be the one and only possible world, and hence become absorbed in physical matter. It takes real moral and intellectual courage to Hope and to act out of Hope. And the bravest and most terrifying act in all the world is to give your heart. Dante takes us right to the moral ecology that lies at the heart of the world.
Dante is intellectually stimulating and morally challenging, provocative and calming in equal measure, and an unfailing guide through the trials of life. Whatever it is that you are going through in life, Dante seems to have been there, seen it, even done it, and survived and returned having learned from the experience. He tells you that you can survive too. Dante's philosophy of good and evil helped Mumford to find his way out of the ‘rough and stubborn wood’ into which he had stumbled in his life, and it can do the same for others. ‘Dante’s vision of good and evil was of more use to me than Freud’s psychoanalytic insight’ (Lewis Mumford, My Works and Days 1979: 298-99). The Comedy is a universal work in that all life and all people are written into its psychic fabric.
I know exactly of the qualities of Dante to which Lewis Mumford is referring, although my problems have been a combination of both the physical and the psychological. I have two chronic conditions which I believe to have been brought on by a life of constant anxiety grace of an undiagnosed condition of AS.
I began this book in the aftermath of a near fatal heart attack. I didn’t quite realize at the time how close I had come to departing this mortal coil and was, in the words of the doctor who called the ambulance, ‘grace under pressure.’ She couldn’t quite believe how I continued to joke as I was being carted away. She couldn’t believe, either, that my greatest concern seemed to be to rescue my wonderful $250 coat I bought for $6-50 in California. To have lost my beautiful long black coat would have been tragedy indeed. I was in intensive care for a while. Three days in, having been got out of bed for tests, I keeled over and was helped back on the bed by a nurse half my size. I woke up with concerned faces all around me, being revived. I heard a nurse explaining to the doctor that my eyes had been rolling to the back of my head. It seems I was nearly a gonner. But I came back. ‘You all look very worried,’ I said, before a nurse, very seriously, explained what had happened to me. Which did make me realize the extent to which my life was in the balance.
That’s why I don’t suffer doom and hopelessness. It’s easy to despair. It is the coward's way out. Dante’s Hell is full of those who foreclosed on the future out of despair. Dante told us that there is a way out. Even, and especially, beyond death. Death holds no terrors for me. I don’t despair at either death or extinction. It’s entirely the wrong orientation, more of a psychological preparation for an inevitable end than an uplifting message inspiring action. Alarm bells that are constantly being rung go unheard.
The story of the writing of this book is therefore a story in itself. In the next year of rehab, Dante’s message of hope kept me focused on the future. Not for the first time in my life, Dante proved my unfailing guide. And things went very well throughout 2017. I got mentally and physically fit. It was tough. First of all, I attended the rehab classes and learned all about diet and exercise. I have no idea what the nurses had been told about my case, but at certain points they took the dumbbells off me during the circuits we were doing. It was somewhat galling and even more worrying to see rather elderly gentlemen being allowed to carry on, whilst I was being pulled out of the exercises. It is possible that I was getting carried away and being terribly competitive, causing the nurses to worry and slam the brakes on. I know very well that I have no brakes. I'll put that down too to an as yet to be diagnosed condition of AS. Much worse were the medications and the changes they wrought in the chemistry of my body. I had violent reactions and was reduced to collapsing in agonising pain on my hands on knees on several occasions. I remember feeling that the next wave of attacks might kill me, and welcoming it as a relief. But I survived. And I became lean physically and focused intellectually. Under advice, I devised a great health and fitness regime. And, so I thought, I finished my Dante book.
‘Events,’ however, had other ideas and kept on coming my way, relentlessly, without a pause for breath.
It all started half way through 2017.
First we had the controversy surrounding Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Accord. I was then a member of Green Party, and had been out campaigning for the party throughout this period, health problems notwithstanding. I felt the need to intervene on the controversy of Trump’s decision and proceeded to write a lengthy document critical of the decision, indicating pathways forwards. That was a lot of work, work I had promised not to undertake again.
The Climate Commitment: The Need for Common Agreement and Climate Action: Comments on the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord (2017)
(references to work cited in the bibliography below)
I also wrote – in a three week period no less – a book on the moral ecology of J.R.R. Tolkien: Tolkien and the Fellowship of all Living Things: The Politics of Proximity, Person, and Place (2017). The book was more than 400 pages long. That's more hard work, that's more consumption of energy.
I was then approached with a plan to write a book on Lewis Mumford. I had already written at length on Mumford, full-length books as well as articles, and these had impressed certain folk who offered to finance a new publication, with them paying for an editor. It was an impressive offer, but I was reluctant. I had determined to avoid writing commitments. A sedentary lifestyle sat at a computer had, I believed, been instrumental to giving me diabetes type-2. (I now also hold that constant anxiety has plenty more to do with it, but it is difficult to say). I explained, too, that I was busy writing my Dante book. But the editor was insistent and most persuasive, arguing that there would be no pressure on me and that I would be allowed to focus on my Dante book. I was feeling good, feeling fully recovered and healthy, and so agreed. A friend had gone public declaring herself a witness to the fact that I wrote the Tolkien book in just three weeks, so I have a feeling that this editor felt that I could dredge up text on demand. That’s not the way my creative daemon works. Force and pressure, and the daemon goes away to play elsewhere. There would be no Mumford in three weeks, and I soon began to feel pressured by constant messages asking for updates on the current stage of writing. It's not the way I write. I felt as though I was caged in a factory.
Then in early 2018 I was approached to write on István Mészáros, the Hungarian Marxist philosopher, and possibly the most important Marxist philosopher of recent decades and something of a mentor to me. Mészáros had recently died (October 2017), and it was felt that a wider appreciation of his work was in order. I was in a position to oblige here. Mészáros was a profound influence on my own work and, in my time in research in Manchester, there was an idea that I should to visit and stay with Mészáros down at Sussex University. (I think he had retired that year, 1995, with the publication of Beyond Capital). I was nervous of the idea, was conscious of financial constraints, and worried about the academic setting, and so didn't follow it up. The opportunity passed. Which was a shame. I knew Mészáros and his work well, and so welcomed the opportunity to pay tribute. So in January I set to work on an introduction to the work of István Mészáros. Given the complexity of the man’s arguments and sophistication of his theoretical apparatus, this was no small undertaking.
2018 was also the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. Marx had been the subject of my PhD thesis, so I felt the need, some two decades on, to show the extent to which Marx remained not merely relevant but essential. I was soon immersed in Marx. The work issued in three substantial volumes of writing. I produced one ‘straight’ presentation of the main lines of Marx’s critical and emancipatory project of social restitution, a deeper philosophical analysis of the normative essentialism that I hold to underlie Marx’s argument, and then a third critique written from a religious perspective. The three volume study is an immense piece of work, combining breadth and depth.
And still the written work in 2018 wasn’t finished. I set to work on establishing the normative and philosophical foundations of my Lewis Mumford study, taking in a thorough examination of the faultlines of modernity as established in the work of the pioneer sociologists as well as the philosophers – Comte, Tocqueville, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Tonnies, Simmel, Heidegger. That study extended to 200,000 words plus. Unfortunately, in the middle of writing this study, and as I sought to bring some kind of order to it, the editor started to bombard me with messages demanding to be kept informed of the state of progress. I felt that the creative space had been suffocated. I was not being allowed to focus. I started to feel shoulder and chest pains, and the fingers on my left hand were also curling and freezing. I was awake all night with pain. This had happened before. I had to use my GTR spray, twice. These were symptoms of a heart attack. I had been taught to be aware, to be alert, and to raise the alarm. I called an ambulance and was taken to hospital.
This was November 2018. I was tested thoroughly, and booked in for extensive tests over a period of months. The tests began in January 2019, ending with a physical endurance test in the April. I have to say, I felt good. I put aside the writing and got fit again. I would hike long distances. I invested in an exercise bike and cycled 30 minutes a day at 30km per hour. With one in five minutes being cycled at a greater intensity to get the heart pumping, 35kmph and more, I got fit. Not wishing to sound too vain, when the nurses asked me to remove my shirt and start to walk, then trot, on the treadmill, I couldn't wait. I was confident. I looked good and I felt good. I declared that I had been hiking miles and may be on the machine forever. They declared it unlikely, and sure enough the speed kept going up by the minute. But I lasted a long while. And I could have gone on. They explained that they had the results they needed. I was told that few had gone as long on the machine as I had done. I was fit. I looked on this as an examination, and I passed with flying colours.
My results were ‘extremely reassuring’: there had been no deterioration from 2016. I was in good shape. Or as good a shape as someone with a damaged heart could be expected to be.
But so much time had been lost. Or productively used in other ventures.
So I feel entitled to sing my own praises. Physically, I felt good and looked good. I rather enjoyed getting my shirt off. I had nothing to hide. Vain maybe, but after the flabbiness of the pre-heart attack period, I think I am entitled to boast. I had come back from the brink.
And I had other reasons to be proud.
My Tolkien book has proven to be incredibly popular and has garnered much praise. One person, Dr Michael Bradburn-Ruster, describes it as “your fine Tolkien book.” He writes: “Thank you, Dr Critchley, for your lovely Fellowship of All Living Things. I would like to have students read part of it (pp. 123-49) for my Environmental Ethics class at Prescott College in Arizona … your work is lovely, and a much-needed corrective to many students’ confusion about the Tradition.”
I have received other similar messages of praise. One wrote, “I really enjoyed the theme and how you portray how Tolkien’s deep respect for nature can help the environmental movement. Though I wish the book was better edited.”
I don’t edit. I write in one continuous flow and then move to the next project and inspiration. I wrote the Tolkien book in just three weeks. Rightly, I should have then rewritten it and then edited to make it more readable. Personally, I think it reads rather well. And when I have to go back I can get stuck (as in my Dante book).
My work on Marx was described as significant and meticulous by Barbara Harriss-White in The Socialist Register. It is, actually. And it deserves to be read.
Barbara Harriss-White, Making the World a Better Place: Restitution and Restoration in Greg Albo, Leo Panitch ed, Beyond Market Dystopia: New Ways of Living: Socialist Register 2020
The work of 2018 came to the attention of John Bellamy Foster, who then had a look at my other work, as much as anyone could read that, given that I have written more than four million words. John went to the areas of his own special interest and was most impressed. He wrote: “I think your writings, or those I have had a chance to look at, are all extraordinarily good.” “Mostly I have read huge changes (sic) of your Marx book, as well as your book on Meszaros, and your work on Morris. These are all areas I know well, and I am surprised by the power of your analysis. I would like to see if there are ways that we could make your work more available.”
He particularly loved my work on Istvan Meszaros, which pleased me immensely.
“Your book on Meszaros is quite amazing. In that case I would like to run it past the MR Press Committee. It is excellent and there is nothing like it. I think it might be publishable as a print book with some revisions and extension. We would like Meszaros’s work to be taken more seriously of course, and this might be a way to get people interested. But of course there is not a ready market for it so we would have to see if there is way to make it feasible. That being said, there is nothing like your treatment of his ideas at present.” He also loved my work on William Morris: “It is important that more people know about your ideas. I have a book in press coming out in a few months that has three chapters on Morris. I was surprised that you got into his work so deeply, used so many sources, and understood his work on art and its relation to Carlyle and Ruskin. This is really good work.”
This was his second letter to me, proposing that we work towards getting this material published. In his first letter to me he declared himself “stunned” by my work.
What was I to do? I was desperate to get back to Dante. And yet here was a marvellous opportunity to be working with a thinker whose work I greatly admire. A year later, and I was asked to write a review of John Bellamy Foster’s excellent and deeply researched new book, The Return of Nature. I worked hard on the review, and overwrote (as usual). I ended up having to cut 150 pages down to around 4 … The thinking and writing comes easily to me, the editing is an immensely difficult slog. I had to hand the editing over, because the strain was too much. But it was published, November 2020.
On the day the review was published, it was announced that The Return of Nature has won this year’s Deutscher Memorial Prize, awarded annually to “a book which exemplifies the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition.” And I felt I had played a little part in advancing an important argument.
So I was part of something worthwhile, and hardly wasting my time. But it was all time away from Dante. In the meantime, my world was turned upside down. As I pondered John Bellamy Foster’s proposals for publication, my father died. He had had chronic lung condition since the early 1990s, and much more besides. I had been looking after him (and he had been keeping an eye on me too, it was he who brought me home from hospital after Christmas 2016, as he had from an operation two years earlier). Any thoughts of work, even with a promise of publication, were off. I now had to think about my housing and income plans. The family home now passed to my brother and I. I now only had half a house. I needed to move. This was problem enough. Then Covid hit. With two chronic health conditions I was in the at risk category. I continued my distribution job, working in the neighbourhood. The locals appreciated seeing a familiar and friendly face, leaving messages on their doors, waving from the windows, shouting words of encouragement and, in time, putting on not one but two little parties for me. With Covid restrictions, that meant me sitting on the front wall of houses and being served with food and drink – chocolate cake, cherry almond cake, fruit, juice, cans of lager. Very nice. I couldn’t eat it all and so filled my trolley up. It felt impolite to leave empty plates.
But the stress of trying to find a new place to live was unbearable. The local authorities and agencies I approached were simply awful, utterly hopeless. I was told that I was a ‘low priority,’ to which I replied ‘you mean no priority.’ There was no response. I had zero time to work on Dante. I was facing a situation which seemed to have no way out.
I decided to clear the decks when it came to the writing, publishing book after book of my research notes on Academia. One of these books contained the notes to my Mumford studies: The Quest for Belonging, Meaning, and Morality: Morality and Modernity (2020). It is poorly organised and edited not at all. At the same time, the argument anticipates Eugene McCarraher’s superb The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, published December 2019, mine was written the end of 2018). We both challenge the conventional of capitalism as a force for disenchantment, showing how capital became a new god and new religion. I claim zero originality on that argument, Marx had said precisely that in his critical analysis of commodity, money, and capital fetishism. I do claim originality in setting that argument in a wider moral frame, particularly in the inversion of religion, something which I argue applies also to Marx.
So there are reasons why my beautiful Dante book has remained unfinished, despite having been started in January 2017. Life and other impossibilities and achievements. Some of my blog writings started to come to the attention of certain people and organisations. I am honoured to be associated with The Workers' Memorial in St Helens, my words in tribute on 'Revaluing Labour' having a page on the memorial's website. Revaluing Labour: Reflections on the St Helens Workers' Memorial
I should also share the message that the brilliant environmental philosopher Arran Gare sent to me in praise of my work: “Dear Peter Critchley, I have recently realized that we have very similar interests and concerns, and your work will save me from having to do it. Best, Arran Gare.”
I shared this message on FB, only to have people singing the praises of Arran Gare. It was so incredibly frustrating. I am without position, income, and even reputation, and was soliciting for at least some recognition and interest. I felt like halting the conversations and asking people to read the message - Arran Gare, as undeniably brilliant as he is, was saying that my work had saved him the trouble of having to do it. If Gare is as good as people were saying - he is - then I am in good company. And it is worth pointing out that the praise I have received from esteemed thinkers like Gare, Foster, and others refers only to a fragment of my overall work.
So I have been busy, productive, and putting my time and talents to some useful purpose.
But it has all meant time away from working on Dante, my very best work.
Dealing with the grief at the loss of my father in Lockdown, whilst also being constantly reminded of the need to move to a new house, imposed a hideous and impossible strain. I twice completed the Patient Health Questionnaire at my medical centre, both times recording ‘severe depression.’ Is it any wonder? I discussed this with the doctor. She was concerned; she was also bound to check the nature of the problem. I feel content in myself. The discontent I feel is directed against objective conditions. I am a realist when it comes to diagnosing problems, and my external situation looked almost irredeemably bleak. In myself, I am happy with who I am. I'm not bad at all.
But here is the hard lesson to learn, learn quickly, and never forget: with a chronic illness the race to fitness is never over. I got myself fit for the various tests I was given in 2019. But those tests, no matter how important, and no matter how well I met them, merely monitor your health on life's journey, they are never the end of that journey. In April 2019, I was as fit as I had ever been, and just six pounds or more heavier than I had been in my mid-twenties. (Fair enough I had always been a fat so-and-so ... (I hadn't, but I couldn't resist a joke as obvious as that)). But things began to slip as a result of events and the pressures these brought to bear upon me. Worst of all, Covid cut me off from reporting back to – and impressing – others. I am very vain when it comes to health, and need an audience to show off to. Or authorities to report back to. Problems of grief, income, and housing as well as health combined to have me seeking comfort in food and drink. I started to consume a lot of pies and pastries again, and cake and sweet stuff. I went hell-for-leather at Christmas, with Christmas cakes, mince pies, double cream, trifles, chocolate logs, the lot. Exceptional treats became the norm. I constantly felt tired, and so sought rest and so stopped exercising as much as I had. I promised to return to my exercises another day, when I felt less tired and run-down. I had forgotten the key lessons on how exercise give you energy and make you feel good. I promised to eat better another day. In a year, I had started to lose the shape I had earned. I was still OK as 2020 drew to a close. But the good habits and standards had been lost. That’s when you need to pick yourself up and get back in the race.
And here is where Dante proves his worth. Nil desperandum. Despair is the easy way out. No situation is ever so bad as to be hopeless. Dante brings us to the redemptive possibilities in every situation. People are free to reject them. That is a matter of the free will which Dante describes as God’s ‘greatest gift’ to humanity. People are free to reject free will as a delusion. They are free to enter Hell of their own accord and are free to remain there. There is agency and choice in all of these decisions. And since Love is eternal, there is always Hope:
'By such a curse as theirs none is so lost
that the eternal Love cannot return
as long as hope maintains a thread of green.
Purgatorio 3: 133-135
Dante writes of that guidance which inspires hope and shows the light. (Purgatorio 4: 29/30). This is precisely the guidance that Dante has consistently offered me in dark times, and offers us in the crisis-torn world - di viva speme, 'the living hope’ (Paradiso 20: 109), ‘on which is based our hope to rise above’ (Paradiso 24: 74).
Dante gives us poetry with psychological depth and philosophical and practical significance.
I was told some time after Christmas 2020, January 2021 that my Dante book was to be published. The news came entirely out of the blue. I hadn’t been able to work on Dante for a long time. I had been concentrating on surviving in Lockdown, entertaining and amusing myself in the old family home as best I could, alone with my memories of good times past and seemingly increasingly remote fantasies of good times to come.
I was given the deadline of 1st May. I didn’t think that what I had already written was nearly good enough, even though that amounted to 600,000 words. I had read them in an attempt to edit during Lockdown and had been most disappointed. The work was not as inspiring in the reading as it was in its thinking in my head. So I set to work at a furious pace. I wrote 300,000 words plus in two months. My eyes turned red and stayed red for weeks. I looked like Dracula. By the end, I was writing with one eye closed. It took me ages to get an eye appointment. I have been diagnosed with retinopathy, with yet another warning to be careful and do all I can in monitoring my health. I have always lived in fear of damaging my eyesight through being addicted to words and writing.
So now I need to be cautious and sensible when it comes to health whilst also needing to read closely when it comes to editing. Once more, I am charged with doing the impossible. I have done it before, several times. But one day, your powers will start to fail you and you will have no choice but to accept the fading of the fire.
And still the events continue to keep piling on. I have had to deal with the stresses of getting the house ready for sale, clearing and boxing endless masses of ‘stuff’ and organising a move to Llandudno. And having made the move, I am now enjoying my beautiful new home. I must have walked 100 miles in two or three weeks. I’ve lost the work ethic when it comes to reading and writing and need to get it back.
But now past events are catching up with me. After being taken to hospital by ambulance with a suspected heart attack in 2018 I determined once and for all to eliminate physical causes. I was as fit as I have ever been for my tests and wowed the nurses in the physical endurance test (or at least I wowed them in my imagination, I certainly impressed myself, I was very good). The tests cleared me. So why on Earth was I constantly feeling chest and shoulder pain, on one occasion extending to neck and jaw, curling my fingers up? It is stress, it is anxiety, it is something more - it is these things at extremes. I went to the doctor complaining of ‘social anxiety.’ She listened carefully, and sent me on a Stress Less course. I came back a few months later and told her that the course was good, but didn’t touch the root of the problem. She probed further, listened to my responses, and suggested, seemingly in passing but not, Aspergers. We’d cracked it. We knew there and then, although I was sent away to research further and report back to her. There was no hesitation on her part in sending me for a referral when I came back. That was July 2019. Then my dad died – I never told him of this. And then Covid hit. And I spent a seeming eternity on a waiting list. I received notification of my first appointment on August 16th. Unfortunately, I had moved to Llandudno in July 27th, meaning that I was outside of the Merseyside health authority. I was discharged. There was a promise to send my details to the Welsh authorities, but those authorities never responded. I was looking at going back to the bottom of another waiting list. I pushed, a dear friend pushed – this really was and remains critically important. And I received an appointment. For which I am grateful, having been through the Hell of a seemingly endless waiting list during Lockdown.
I am now in the middle of an ASC assessment. It seems more than likely that I have Asperger Syndrome. The image accompanying this document is a screen shot of a page from my Dante book. I write in colours, different coloured text, background, and highlighting indicating the nature and content of the argument and its sources and placing. I can look at the colours and immediately know the significance of the text, before reading the words. I do this all the time when I write extensive pieces. I use words to paint on a broad canvas. And I like to see the world in colour. Just as I can only write with music in my ears. It is aesthetically pleasing. I do hold that beauty and truth are inextricably related, whatever the liveliest minds of the age say about their separation in the disintegration of the good. We are living in their world now, a world of disenchantment inciting a revanchism of surrogates. And it is not a good world, as the endless wailing and crying indicates. To whom do people cry? An indifferent Nature could care less. And, as said lively minds constantly assert (as if to persuade themselves), there is no God.
From the tests that have been done, I seem to be an extreme case, with the undiagnosed condition – the dissipation of energy, the sensory overload, and the cross purposes it involves – causing the health problems I have. Physically, I can do 15kmph in 30 mins on the exercise bike, hike the mountains, walk miles, and lift heavy weights in my distribution job. I have stamina and power, and yet I have diabetes and a chronic heart condition. How on Earth is that possible? It’s an average diet (not bad, but not the best) but most of all the constant stress turning into anxiety. I see everything as interconnected and have absolutely no filters.
I have been going through some searching and often uncomfortable and painful interviews in recent weeks. I will be having further interviews to discuss the report that is now in the process of being written. In all this time, the Dante book has been edited down by a dear friend. But now I have to take it on again. I have over one million words to wade through with bad eyes.
Frankly, the book is worth the effort, because the content is magnificent and the argument cogent and compelling. But it has to be made readable and publishable. People don’t read much and, in the case of Dante, whose moral and metaphysical universe seems so alien to ours, don’t read at all. People read to confirm their prejudices, not challenge them. Their thought processes are stuck in grooves. It is somewhat galling to go on social media and see this immense work written against the odds meet with either indifference, dismissal, or abuse. I post on Dante and am immediately met with tired old claims that there is 'no proof' and 'no evidence,' that you don't don't have to believe in God to be good, along with assertions of 'rights' etc. Upon what are those rights based? If there is no God, then they can only be based on convention, and such a thing is contingent upon social and historical circumstances - power relations. I see such people asserting the dignity of each person and all persons. I can support that claim with the belief in God; without that God, its ontological grounds are unstable and uncertain. The claim that all persons are created equal is a theological truth, not a biological one and not a social and political one. Or, if it is a social and political truth, it is so only in the sense of convention and contingency, one that is always revocable in the power struggles that characterise human society. The left, liberal, or 'progressive' view requires God in order to establish its normative claims and secure its emancipatory commitments. I have written at length on this and shall say no more here. I’m mired in issues and mini-crises and desperate to get to work again.
I am grateful to the publisher for the contract and for the patience in giving me more time than other publishers would have done. But I have to deliver in the next couple of months. I fear the moment has already been missed. It’s the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death today, and I’ve missed it, which makes me sad. The general indifference of large sections of the public makes me sadder still. I can tell the indifferent, I’ve read them all and Dante is the best, the most challenging, the most profound, and the most endlessly inspiring writer there has ever been or is ever likely to be. That is a large claim that I will have to work hard to prove. That is why I need to see this work through to publication. It is poorly constructed at the moment, with a lot of repetition, and not readable, certainly not by those who lack the patience to read anything that confronts their prejudices and intellectual laziness. The desperate prefer to stay mired in their swamps. But I’d rather it be written properly than just thrown out to catch the current wave. I want this out before Christmas. My editor friend, who sees the longueurs, says some time in 2022.
I’ll wrap this up here. People haven’t got a clue about the problems and pressures I’ve been contending with these past few years. It’s a miracle that this book has even been written, let alone published. The publisher must love it for me to have been allowed all this time fighting against the odds. So when I say that this Dante guy has the goods, people can be sure that I am right. It’s all in the ‘turning’ in that final passage of The Comedy, the way that Dante takes us to the motivational economy and goes straight to the ecology of the human heart. Without that, knowledge and technique lacks motivational and subjective force. Knowledge and technique can give us the ability to act, but not the will to act. Inspiring people want to act – that ‘turning’ – is what Dante is all about.
It will be a major achievement on my part to bring this to publication, because events seem to have conspired at every turn to bring me down. I am grateful to the publisher, who has given me the licence to carry on, despite missing deadline after deadline. Having said that, and if I may say so myself, my work on Dante contains brilliance. It just needs to be polished and made to shine in publishable form. But it will be finished and it will be published. It is my masterwork. Dante makes the other stuff I have written look like child’s play.
As for the diagnosis of AS, I await the report due some time soon. I vehemently reject the indolent view of the neurotypicals who celebrate the power of neurodiversity, on account of having suffered from the incomprehension of others and the cruel isolation it brings. I don’t feel like I possess any ‘superpower’ either. The truth or otherwise of one’s views has squat to do with one’s identity and I reject any suggestion that it does as thoroughly reactionary. I also avoid the clichés of misery that many are inclined to wallow in, although misery there has been, often deep and long-lasting. Despair there has been, and plenty of it. Words like depression don’t begin to capture a life of constant, chronic anxiety, threatening always to turn up to ruin every occasion and relationship to others.
But there have been occasional, and much more profound and enduring joys along the way. And it is in that spirit that I affirm Dante as the greatest messenger of the heart and soul of the good world that has ever existed.
Inspirational writings on life and health from me:
Bibliography
This contains the works cited above plus other works I have written between 2017 and 2021
I calculated the number of words I have written and published on Academia at 2,328, 638
To be clear, that is two million, three hundred and twenty eight thousand, six hundred and thirty eight words.
In addition to that work there are the hundreds of thousands more I have written on my Being and Place website. (I’ll not mention the very many more words on my Everything Elvis site.)
On Dante, I broke the million word bar some time in February.
Dante: From the Dark Wood to the Eternal Rose with the Heart of Gold (2021) 9,898 words
Rational Freedom, Transcendent Standards, and the Quest for the Good Life (2020) 261 pages, 77,500 words
FOR TRANSCENDENT STANDARDS AND A SUBSTANTIVE ETHIC OF THE GOOD (2020) 313 126,748
The Return of Materialist Dialectics: Review of The Return of Nature by John Bellamy Foster (2020) 142 55,895
The Ecology of Good (2020) 435 162,890
The Quest for Belonging, Meaning, and Morality: Morality and Modernity (2020) 701 248,302
Bruce Springsteen as a Catholic Troubadour: The Catholic Imagination in the Songs of Bruce Springsteen (2019) 103 34,780
Notes on Montesquieu (2019)
Being and Place: The Dialectics of Catastrophe and Hope: Restoration and Restorying (2019) 415 145,730
The Ecological Comedy: The Case for an Existential Literary Ecology (2019) 264 86, 198
The Economics of Flourishing (2019) 221 75,549
Climate Rebellion and System Change: Rebellion or Revolution? (2019) 706 264, 821
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE THOUGHT OF ISTVÁN MÉSZÁROS (2018) 197 65,006
Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx (2018) 618 211, 678
Ethics, Essence and Immanence: Marx's Normative Essentialism (2018) 460 160,478
A Home and a Resting Place Homo Religiosus: The Reality of Religious Truth and Experience (2018) 484 171,487
The Climate Commitment: The Need for Common Agreement and Climate Action: Comments on the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord (2017) 444 148,313
Tolkien and the Fellowship of all Living Things: The Politics of Proximity, Person, and Place (2017) 374 128,671
Material I issued in 2020, but which derives from 2016 and was being held back for editing.
Ecological Humanism (2016)
As for my poor neglected Dante, the breakdown in May 2021 was thus:
Music and Metaphysics 665 pages, 202,209 words
Politics and Ethics 523 177,059
The Comedy 1,100 319,575
Dante’s Dream of Rational Freedom 658 229,466
Walking and Talking with Dante - Endless Love on the Unending Road 227 74,460
3,173 pages 1,002,769 words
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More praise of my work
You don't agree with my views? I would suggest you keep reading until you do. You are trying to get out of a dead-end by the very modes of thought and practice that brought you there in the first place.