Purgatory: Canto 25, It’s In The Blood
We climbed steadily for an hour or more. As we did the sun seemed to stay with us. The hill was pitched so steeply that we nearly kept pace with the sun as it descended. Julia was with us again and every now and then she left a bag behind.
So we climbed a narrow stoney path, nearly as steep as an attic staircase, single file and close together. I breathed a little heavy with exertion but was so eager to continue, I kept the pace. Still, there was something on my mind and half a dozen times I thought to mention it and then changed decided to keep silent.
She stopped and looked hard into my face. “What is it?” she said, “I can hear you thinking from two paces away, just ask.” “I didn’t ask because I thought I should figure it out but I don’t know.” I said, “So” she said, “ask.”
“Those people were learning about gluttony, right? They were learning about keeping food in its place and not putting too much importance on eating the best or a lot of the best or anything like that.”
“Yes.” My Guide replied. “We go through the seven traditional sins here, they still have a lot to teach. If your own life’s narrative were rooted in another tradition maybe they’d be a little different but at their root, all of the faiths teach the same things, that plateau was gluttony.” Julia had stopped too and was listening to us both.
“Shall we go?” she said. “No, wait, that wasn’t my question.” I said, “My question is this; since we are no longer in Hell, and these bodies have no form, no physical weight, then why are the souls in that place losing weight?” I didn’t want to embarrass our new companion but she embodied the very proof of my question. “Like you, Julia” I said, “You weren’t ever huge but you had meat on your bones, you were fleshed out and now the skin just hangs — not to be rude but you must have noticed.” I asked my Guide again, “Why is that?”
Now that I had asked, I felt shame rising in my cheeks. It was a stupid question, of course there had to be some connection to the body in that realm, after all, the sin was visited on body and mind alike. It was an obvious metaphor but for some reason it didn’t seem to make sense to me that this lesson should be learned through the body when so many of the others, equally corporeal in their motivations, were only learned through heart and mind.
“Julia can answer you.” She turned to Julia and said, “If you will. You have just lived through this, do you want to tell the story of it all?”
“That would be very good.” She said. “Think about a mirror. When you see yourself before the glass, your actions look different than they feel, don’t they?” I nodded, “or remember the exercise your professor gave in First-year art history, do you remember how silly you thought it was to go into a museum and spend an hour drawing, in detail, an object you intended to research?”
I knew better than to ask how she knew about that, this was my life, my dream, if it was a dream, and of course they all knew a lot more than I did. Maybe they were me, parts of me extended into this other place.
She went on, “As you drew or tried to draw, you began to see the things you had missed when you were only looking. Remember?” I nodded. “Remember how surprised you were and how, ultimately, it changed the way you saw the piece. A spirit catcher wasn’t it? Made of shell and bone?” I nodded again, “Seeing is important. Knowing and feeling, those are important things too — without one aspect the others are weaker.”
“Your body is part of your soul and your mind, part of your body. I never have settled on whether or not those people who say we form reality with our beliefs are right, I suspect not but they are aware of something important; how you think about things matters and how you physically enact things — that matters too, in many ways they are the same thing.”
“Now let’s talk about blood and guts. Always a problem for you, isn’t it?” “A little” I answered, thinking of the many times I had come close to exsanguination merely in the course of my monthly cycle.
“Blood is life. That gets thrown around a lot as though it were a mystery but it’s not. Blood is what keeps your body functioning, it is the messenger for everything you do in the world. Eat a steak, the fat and the minerals flow through your blood and into your heart, they fuel your mind and allow you to keep functioning. Blood delivers fuel to the fires of the body, the spirit and the mind and blood supplies the means for your body to massage the bulk of the meat you eat through your digestive tract and back out, changed, into the world again. Blood knows to make room for more.”
This bothered me. I did not want to think about the idea that my personal curse may have been an expression of something other than blind chance. I thought of it as a mistake a persistent mistake my animal body made month after month that proved to me how mechanical, how thick and unthinking my body, my life was.”
“That’s right. “ she said, as though she was answering me. “That was a message from you to you. And blood is not random, it is not a by-product, it is not easily produced and wasted, it is the wasting of your essence. Blood carries energy and energy is the soul.”
“Perfect blood, moves through the body, circulates through the brain and witnesses every thought every scent and memory. Blood knows every taste, it knows the flash of vision and the clatter of sound, hard in the ears. Blood knows a lover’s touch, it knows music, sensation, originality — as it flows, so do you.”
“In the bottom of your heart there is a still, small pool of blood. That pool is ballast. Like the air that sits in the bottom of your lungs, were it ever to be removed, you would probably die. It would require deep intervention to save you. That blood moves with the universe, it does not change its orientation, it does not become turbulent. It is your core.”
“When we meet another and love, when we join ourselves to the other, the blood quickens. Children are conceived, that is the mixing of two streams of blood into a new stream. It is the act of creation, spiritual and physical and sacred. You can love, truly, without this mixing, this commingling but this is primal love. To join in that act is to show your love of life itself. Later in life, when you love without it, the awareness of it is present and then you must learn to love another in their whole form, flesh, blood, mind, body — all of it, not so easily slipped into, maybe more important but that is not what you asked.”
“My flesh reflected my appetites to me. When I drew my hand across my withered belly, I understood how much my blood had carried and how I had not given it the chance to carry other things, things that may have lifted me and changed me. It’s not a terrible thing, but it was a lesson I needed to learn. I needed to know what I grew on and how to learn to let it go. I had to know my own currents and understand the flow.”
“I waste it in private. I let too much leave me in secret. I spend too much of it but I spend it on nothing.” I said, “Maybe.” My Guide said, “Maybe you could learn that too.”
We had resumed our climb as Julia talked. Now the road widened again and there were people, suntanning, at sunset, spread out on the grass, each one more beautiful than the last.