Page 300 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

300 from Italy to the Canary Islands

traditions - which was like a sort of magic pollen for the purposes of one’s
dissertation.
It is a fact that Dante regarded realism as a veritable North Star, but it is
also as much a fact that he did not abandon the needs of the medieval sense
of wonder, just as if the latter element was what really allowed the poetic
flight to get off the ground. At which point one might say that if the Earthly
Paradise may have been ascertained, Dante’s insight of putting Purgatory
in the same place is due to Virgil and in particular the aeneid.
Therefore, Bible-Aeneid-beliefs/legends-travel accounts is the authen-
tic trajectory of the marvellous prophetic realism that was Dante’s great
insight.
If, through all this sublimeness born in the land of Poetry, we happen to
think of Lanzarotto Malocello’s journey, we will then tend to think in more
normal terms, we might even say “lower”, but only because meditation
and action seem so very distant from each other. It seems that meditation
reveals an Absolute that has its place in works of Art; whereas for action,
the Absolute seems to arise only “at times” and just on the sidelines of a
whole sequence of acts. One might venture that, when engaged in action,
the Absolute is a satisfaction captured at certain moments, in a daily get-
ting back to oneself, in reflection (as time allows). When meditating, and
therefore conceiving one’s work, and in writing it, we can say that the
Absolute never abandons the agent, the poet, in this case. It is due to this
experience (without end) that artists use all the real and fantastic material
they can lay their hands on, never sated with treasures, news, relics, new
fragments of legends, starting from details and nuances to gear up for the
Sublime.
We spoke of Virgil and the aeneid, Canto VI, where Anchises tells of
a sort of pagan Purgatory in the vicinity of the Elysium. And just like Vir-
gil’s Mount Atlas coincides with Aeneas and thus strength and enterprising
determination in founding Rome, in the same way the mountain of the
Earthly Paradise will rise as symbol of enterprise and hard work to purify
one’s soul according to the plan of the Christian kingdom.
Aeneas and Dante are thus both invested with a mission, each in his
own historical field and time, pagan or Christian. Salvation is for both the
very reason for this huge “construction and edification” effort, Rome for
one, Christendom for the other.
There is an inner geographical line to be followed; a path that seems to
have been made certain by Virgil and Orosius: a pagan Earthly Paradise