The Big Picture: Via Blake on Dante’s “Inferno,” Canto 2 (God Image: “The Mission of Virgil”)

The Angry God of  This World & His Throne in Purgatory Fog day, give us the sun. But the particulate hangover from Stuttgart’s bad days obscures. The weather of modernity. The lady’s tattooed musculature is what comes of getting too close to the angry father. Decode. He’d been left behind. We get on well now. Punk diadem, scales unjust, iced and fired, messianic Virgil and the golden aspiration for one wandering around in diaphanous red, the zoo escapees looking on hungrily but nervously. And a little bit curious. Even at the height of Coondle heat when I rose before dawn to catch the sun’s origins I realized I was looking into the core of purgatory. The house would stretch and crack with heat but then, as the sun played its games with the horizon, the curve of the hill, the house was at its coolest and retracted so a glass pane shattered into the corridor. The conspiracy of good and bad. Who is to choose? I don’t mind the walk, negotiating rough ground, but when jerks are taking potshots at you, it makes it impossible. I don’t use a GPS. A bit of bush knowledge, a lot of common sense. But this is Tübingen and we’re nearing our time: the songbird insurgence and weather vanes and swans, the bare branches and killed trees, the welcome and hatred of refugees, questions of which fruit will ripen or mature or fall or offer seed when its time comes. I study Hölderlin manuscripts with a friend and we will rewrite “Half of Life” upside down. The inversions of travel and temporariness and permanence. Tracy speaks to me from across the old town. It hasn’t rained today but the Ammer River is still swift outside this window. Classic. Stock epithet burnout. Behind the glissade of faces the goings home. Vengeance lurks therein. Such beautiful youth. Floating on Friday night promise. This brutal God watching on. In store. Adorning places of worship. I apologize for the distractions. Wondering while I write.