Dante's "Inferno": War, Inertia, and the Prayerful Imagination (1)

For my first post, I want to begin with the word "inertia." The English word "inertia" derives from the French inars through the Latin inert/inertia, meaning, roughly, "idle," "idleness," or "without art, work, or power." Inertia--absolute zero ice--is at the center of Dante's Hell. When General William T. Sherman bluntly stated, "War is Hell," he had in mind Milton's Hell of burning sulphur and "darkness visible" and not Dante's with its cold, heartless inertia. Sadly, it seems to me that inertia in thinking and its corollary, reaction, lead to the torture and destruction Sherman attempted to describe. James Hillman in his recent thoughtful and imaginative book, A Terrible Love of War, writes:

If we want war's horror to be abated so that life may go on, it is necessary to understand and imagine. We humans are the species privileged in regard to understanding, Only we have the faculty and scope for comprehending the planet's quandaries. Perhaps that is what we are here for: to bring appreciative understanding to the phenomena that have no need to understand themselves. It may even be a moral obligation to try to comprehend war. That famous phrase of William James, "the moral equivalent of war," with which he meant the mobilization of moral effort, today means the effort of the imagination . . . . Is it war's fault that we have not grasped its meanings? (5)

Loreena McKennitt's haunting music combines a Russian Orthodox Easter hymn with her own music and imaginative lyrics about a prayer Dante might have uttered after he and Virgil had left Hell's icy center and were journeying close to the threshold between Hell and Purgatory. I have placed just above this post a creation combining her song and a video about American soldiers in the Iraqi war--it is a creation within my creation (this blog) which is located within a creation we call cyberspace. Listen and watch. Read the lyrics as she sings them. The melody and the words melt frozen inertia and transform the vision of war, thus moving us across a threshold to an active, engaged imagination. Words and music separately and together move us, give us new life after frozen death, altering our suffering and memory. When we cross a threshold, we are changed.

How have you responded to this cyber creation? How have you crossed a threshold? Has some of your inertia melted? How have you changed? I invite you to tell your story.