Limbo Culture
I have occasionally been asked over the years why I chose Limbo as the defining theme of this website. It seems quite self-evident to me, because the notion of Limbo — and I take my notes on this concept primarily from Dante Alighieri — encapsulates so much about me, on so many levels.
I belong among the in-between people: the unsaved who are nevertheless not irredeemable sinners in the ordinary sense; the ones whose backwards-leaning search for natural causes and antecedents tends to disqualify them from any comfortable place of acceptance in the present; those who have lost faith in their homeland, but can never fully embrace any other, so that they feel most at home in a state of permanent and universal exile of one sort or another; those who live among the pious, as we all must, and who carry on with daily life in the external manner of the pious, as we all do, but who as a matter of constitution and spiritual compulsion can never quite live as pious; those who do their duty to social conventions, but only their duty — whose primary injunction in matters of external expectations, practical goals, and the like, is always “commit oneself only as far as is required for being permitted to continue living here”; those who live in the most essential sense without a tribe, or, if you like, whose “tribe” is the tribeless.
From Canto IV of Dante’s Inferno, the precise stanzas which gave this website its framing concept, as Virgil explains Hell’s first circle to our narrator:
We heard no loud complaint, no crying there,
No sound of grief except the sound of sighing
Quivering for ever through the eternal air;
Grief, not for torment, but for loss undying,
By women, men, and children sighed for so,
Sorrowers thick-thronged, their sorrows multiplying.
Then my good guide: “Thou dost not ask me who
These spirits are,” said he, “whom thou perceivest?
Ere going further, I would have thee know
They sinned not; yet their merit lacked its chiefest
Fulfilment, lacking baptism, which is
The gateway to the faith which thou believest;
Or, living before Christendom, their knees
Paid not aright those tributes that belong
To God; and I myself am one of these.
For such defects alone — no other wrong —
We are lost; yet only by this grief offended:
That, without hope, we ever live, and long.”1Canto IV, 25-42, Dorothy Sayers translation
And further along in the same canto, the lines which called out to my nature, urging me to make this self-condemning choice of self-identification the motif of my online home:
Higher I raised my brows and further scanned,
And saw the Master of the men who know
Seated amid the philosophic band;
All do him honour and deep reverence show;
Socrates, Plato, in the nearest room
To him; Diogenes, Thales and Zeno,
Democritus, who held that all things come
By chance; Empedocles, Anaxagoras wise,
And Heraclitus, him that wept for doom;
Dioscorides, who named the qualities,
Tully and Orpheus, Linus, and thereby
Good Seneca, well-skilled to moralise;
Euclid the geometrician, Ptolemy,
Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicen,
Averrhoës who made the commentary —2Ibid., 130-144
This website was born in 2016, which was a Limbo time in my life in various ways, most obvious of which was the public circumstance that gave me the necessary push to finally build a personal online home for my writing, namely the rise of Trumpism, which killed the spirit of American conservatism that had given my writing a semi-natural and largely welcoming home base for several years, but could do so no longer. In hindsight, it seems that Trumpism did not so much kill American conservatism as merely expose its extraordinarily weak legs, its lack of fundamental will. In any case, the then-blooming right-wing populist faction in America had no place for me (or I for it), but became at least as harshly unwelcoming as the left-wing progressive faction would have been (and mutually so). In those conditions, Limbo was even on the practical level the spiritual theme best suited to this website and its proprietor. I was guilty of political impiety, or at least of unpardonable paganism.
Philosophical investigation worthy of the name demands political non-allegiance and non-partisanship, which is not the same as non-involvement, but clearly involves a detachment and lack of hope regarding realistic outcomes. Philosophy demands doubt in the face of all certainties, irony in the face of all public causes, and the natural winnowing of one’s contemporaries in search (usually futile, immediately or ultimately) of any rare complementary, beneficial souls one may find to share in one’s journey, the kind of open-minded but clear-headed sorting-and-identifying process that, we may assume, led Aristotle, “the Master of the men who know,” the man who wrote history’s greatest treatise on friendship, also to declare one day, “O my friends, there is no friend.”
Apropos of all this, I discover this morning, leafing through my old copy of the “Collected Shorter Poems” of W. H. Auden,3Faber and Faber, 1966, pp. 312-313 the following treasure:
Limbo Culture
The tribes of Limbo, travellers report,
On first encounter seem to live as we do;
They keep their houses practically clean,
Their watches round about a standard time,
They serve you almost appetizing meals:
But no one says he saw a Limbo child.
The language spoken by the tribes of Limbo
Has many words far subtler than our own
To indicate how much, how little, something
Is pretty-closely or not-quite the case,
But none you could translate by Yes or No,
Nor do its pronouns distinguish between persons.
In tales related by the tribes of Limbo
Dragon and Knight set to with fang and sword
But miss their targets always by a hairsbreadth,
Old Crone and Stripling pass a crucial point,
She seconds early and He seconds late,
A magic purse mistakes the legal tender:
‘And so,’ runs their concluding formula,
‘Prince and Princess are nearly married still.’
Why this concern, so marked in Limbo culture,
This love for inexactness? Could it be
A Limbo tribesman only loves himself?
For that, we know, cannot be done exactly.
Amusingly, I also find, in a Prospect article on Auden from 2013, a quotation from the American critic Randall Jarrell, who described Auden as a man “turned into a rhetoric mill, grinding away at the bottom of Limbo.” I do not know for sure whether Jarrell was thinking of the above poem when he wrote that critique, or whether Auden was thinking of Jarrell’s words when he wrote the poem, although I believe the latter is more likely. But in any case, history comes down firmly on the side of Auden, if only for the unforgivable “inexactness” of Jarrell’s phrase, “at the bottom of Limbo.” Does Limbo have a bottom of any significance? Where, and why? Perhaps, we might surmise, never having been there himself, Jarrell was unqualified to understand the worth of all that grinding he thought he was hearing from Auden’s Limbo — Auden, who, after all, disappointed all the best people, including his earlier admirers (such as Jarrell), by living and writing, during his mature years, from the perspective of his renewed Christian faith.
Though appreciating the charming and sometimes cutting irony in Auden’s remarks on the various “almosts” and “missed targets” of his Limbo dwellers, who are trapped in the inexactness of a world without firm Yeses and Noes, are forever a few seconds early or late for the crux of things, and may perhaps love only themselves (though not exactly), I confess to bearing both a likeness to and a sympathy with the “tribe” he is outlining. For do these verses not also, seen from a certain angle, describe the philosopher, who though not able to come down firmly on final truths, nor to find easy and comforting victories in the battles between his dragons and his knights, does come within a hairsbreadth at times? Which at least implies an awareness of what he is aiming at, if not a satisfyingly certain way of achieving the goal. Which, after all, may be at least as much as the man who is sure he has the answer will actually accomplish, aside from the soothing of his own heart — which though all well and good, can never be a substitute for wisdom, at least in the mind of a Limbo dweller.
