PAREIDOLIC: Concerning the perception of a specific, often meaningful image, in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.

 

DANTE: If you’ve opened this and started to read about a peculiar way to contemplate a 700-year-old poem, then you are probably familiar with Dante’s tumultuous times and his imagined travels through an alternative universe designed to accommodate divine judgments. In his afterworlds, souls are responsible for their experiences, but do not create them. Unlike today’s iconic lost souls in fictional hells, Dante’s damned are not self-imprisoned captives of existential despair over their lack of consequence. Instead, an Omnipotence is aware of every detail of their darkest deeds and punishes the worst of these with a customized consequence. Sinners are thrust, burning or freezing, into just what they deserve. Forever. Photographs seem particularly appropriate illustrations of the rock-hard reality of Dante’s Infernal landscapes.

TOMBSTONES:  Grave markers, in a Dantean sense, are the commas separating lives of trial and eternal sentences. Whether you believe they sit atop an open or closed door, they are an environment for photogenic Southern fauna and flora. And lingering sentimentality and old customs make the graveyards of Georgia, North-Florida, and Louisiana particularly poignant.

 

PHOTO MANIPULATION: The charm of pareidolic shapes is unexpectedly finding design in the absence of a designer. With that in mind, I have not staged any combinations of things. For examples, the fly acting as the pupil of a glutton’s eye landed there for its own reasons, and gravity and wind put a bit of tongue-like debris in the “mouth” of a cocoon-serpent. I never moved a figure to a different background, merged exposures or added a color (except for a faint red tint around the head of a running-black-demon, Picture 2: Canto XXI, that calls attention to his interesting, but easily overlooked, face).

   That said, the temptation to make things just a bit “better” has been overwhelming. Every picture has been cropped. Changes in exposures, contrasts, clarity, and sharpness are ubiquitous, and while the addition of shadow here or a touch of light there has been kept to a minimum, they are still relatively common. A distracting object occasionally disappeared for the greater good. In the end, I have not presented a figure I didn’t originally see, and left the organisms (lichens, mosses, and lizards) identifiable to a naturalist.

 

PUZZLES: Much of the fun of pareidolic pictures is searching for figures. Some seem obvious (The first centaur in Canto XII). Most are more abstract (e.g., the second centaur), and some are nearly evocative abstractions. A few are apparently only obvious to me (the perfect profile-portrait of Dante in Picture 1: Canto IV). One picture I particularly like requires special knowledge to appreciate. In front of the flatterer’s mouth (Canto XVIII) there is a tricolored moth-cocoon that has been attacked by a family of parasitic wasps. After eating the pupa inside, they’ve escaped through the many little holes. What better representation of the poisonous beauty of a word of false praise. And keep in mind, you are likely to find something I hadn’t intended; the man, women, rabbit, toad, dragon, cooking-fire, Cain-with-horns, and the name Ali are all in the moon.

 

TRANSLATION: Excerpts of the “Inferno” are from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s still highly regarded 1867 translation. At first, the language might seem difficult and antique, but it soon takes on a classic majesty. Serendipitously, the choice of translator freed me from anxieties about copywrite-infringements that could have damned me to floundering endlessly in a drop of hot ink.