A sea shanty

I dreamed I was at a bar down the Shore in Point Pleasant. It was an overcast night. My family and a number of other people had invested in the bar, which had a maritime feel to it. All the many owners were on site for some kind of party. The barkeep, who besides being an owner was also the face of the franchise, was an engaging old gentleman who reminded one of a kind of short Gandalf with a heavy brogue. He was slinging beers behind the bar and singing Irish-like tunes. My sister-in-law was in attendance with a cadre of very tall hipster gentlemen from Jersey City, all in black, who were the other side of the business: they were wine snobs, and helped cultivate an extensive wine list for the joint. It was part high brown, part low brow, and part no brow. Everybody seemed like they were having a good time.

The owners then piled into cars to go off to another party somewhere else. My family and I were in another car, while my sister-in-law and I followed behind, winding along a dark and starless road. We had a large, old camera-like device in the back seat, clearly something of great value. Why were we bringing it with us? Don't worry about it, my sister-in-law said. We can just leave it in the car. I was skeptical—my mind immediately went to bad guys breaking into my car and stealing the thing. I told her I would stash it back at my mother's house, and dropped her off with the rest of the folks at the party scene. I told the wife I'd be right back.

I drove over to my mom's house and hauled the giant device, still unclear about its function, and lodged it in a back room of the home. My dad, amazingly, was there. They had brought him back from the dead, somehow, although his face was blue and hollow, and his body pock-marked with a number of holes, apparently places where they had installed ports into his body for the resurrective process. He smiled wanly.

I told him: "Mi dispiace che rumpo i coglioni sempre. Ti voglio molto bene." We embraced, and then I went on my way, back into the night.

On drawing down life from the heavens

An interesting through line from the Paradiso back to Plato's Timaeus: In his address to the reader in Canto XXII, Dante invokes the stars from which his genius flows, and this calls to mind the action of the Demiurge, who sows the myriad human souls in their respective stars. It is left for the "younger" gods to create the bodies these souls will inhabit, and then, if after living a life of appropriate virtue, those souls will return to these happy stars once again after their bodily death (else they will undergo a process of reincarnation, giving them additional chances to get things right).

Back to the Paradiso, Dante subsequently turns to survey the planets below, using explicitly mythological language to characterize them. It is in this correspondence, perhaps, that we find another clue to Dante's syncretism: In Dante's association of the Almighty with the "Demiurge" (whether this is accurate or not), there remains space, as it were, for a layer of additional celestial gods that correspond to the planets and to nature. This is a hierarchal view, of course, that may not comport with some "hard polytheist" Neoplatonic readings. Whatever we think of such a synthesis, it may be the philosophical grounding that allows Dante to more or less comfortably nest classical myths, for which he has a clear affinity, within the Christian worldview.

Indeed, earlier, in Canto IV, Beatrice specifically refers to the Timaeus, qualifying however that the sense of returning to a particular star contradicts what Dante is observing as he passes through the heavens. She goes on to indicate, though, that the Platonic conception may be closer to the truth if not taken literally.

To clarify, I'm no Dante scholar by any means, and not trying to say Dante read Plato directly, but rather that certain Platonic ideas may have filtered down into the work. As a reference, an interesting 1911 article on the philosophical aspects of Dante by Roger Theodore Lafferty.