BLZ Bub - paradise lost & found

pending almost half his life in exile, Dante Alighieri wrote his celebrated political satire, "La Divina Commedia". He crafted an allegorical map of heaven and hell, populated with his contemporaries. His use of religious domains as a metaphor to construct a personal reflection of life makes this a coded journal, a personal bible. Perhaps it is the nature of exhile that permitted him to create outside the mainstream and thus contruct something untainted by the cohersion of acceptance. His popularity came after his death.

he battle Dante waged was one of trying to reconcile the power struggles between the heads of the religious and the royal states, one might say a battle between heaven and earth. But if we look below the surface, it was not so simple, because within the Roman Catholic state, from one pope to the next the politics and the alliances changed. Dante tried to remain true to all sides and bring them together, but success did not come in his lifetime. Soon after, his writings became the most popularly distributed of it's time, second only to the bible.

t is a persistent problem of society
that the leaders of the people often alienate themselves from their constituents who are "held hostage". Even today a President can go off to war against a country with little excuse, based unconsciously on a sense of familial duties, and whole nations get caught up in the battle, thousands of families destroyed, and the peacemakers in exile.

Merrill Aldighieri,
Nov. 29, 2005