The loss of your mother, as I’ve learned, is a life-changing, soul-searching epochal event in life.

It’s been only natural for me to turn to music, literature, and art to try to make sense of the unimaginable — she’s gone.

A word, an ancient neologism, kept coming to mind: trasumanar.

It was coined by Dante in his “Paradiso.” It means to transcend the human, to transhumanate as it were, to pass beyond the state of being human.

In the Paradise, Dante describes his sensation after encountering Beatrice, his earthly love and spiritual guide. He evokes the Greek myth of Glaucus, the human fisherman made immortal.

Trasumanar significar per verba/non si poria, writes Dante, transcending the human cannot be described with words. Look to the example of Glaucus to understand such transformation.

Pasolini used the lemma in the title of his last poetry collection, Transumanar e organizzare (1971), transcend the human and organize.

He juxtaposes transcendence into the divine with the earthly task of political activism. Both are necessary elements of life, one might infer.

I’ve been reading Pasolini’s book. The poems are dense, sometimes surprisingly playful, sometimes overly erudite for some readers; other times they are profound and offer harsh insights into human nature. They are always beautiful, always subversive.

For readers who don’t speak Italian, I highly recommend my friend Stephen Sartarelli’s Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini (University of Chicago).

See also this review of Stephen’s book in the Nation. It gives an overview of Pasolini’s life and work, warts and all.

There are also a number of recent translations of Dante’s Paradiso.

The book in the photo above is a first edition that I recently obtained (another story in itself).

I’ve sought to express in words how I perceive, how I feel my mother’s passing. Alas, transcending the human is not something that can be described in words. But I will continue reading and writing as I search, however endlessly and hopelessly, for meaning in her death.

Thanks for being here and letting me share my grief.