Dante and the Yellow Submarine

2250 words, 10 minute read

“In the middle of life’s journey I discovered myself in a dark wood, the straightway lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of that wood, savage and harsh and dense…So bitter is it that death is hardly more.” (Dante, Inferno) 

“Liverpool can be a lonely place on a Saturday night… and this is only Thursday morning.” (Ringo Starr, Yellow Submarine) 

650 years after Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, a rock and roll band from England retraced the poet’s journey. In 1968, they released a modern, ostensibly secular version of Dante’s epic. Yellow Submarine (YS) did for the Divine Comedy (DC) what West Side Story did for Romeo & Juliet…but I very much doubt the Beatles had any idea what they’d accomplished! 

Still, the resonance between these two works is unmistakable. Dante lived in the theocratic Middle Ages while the Beatles rose to prominence in the hyper-secular ‘60’s. Apparently, “the fundamental things (do) apply as time goes by” (Casablanca). 

Fittingly, YS opens with a Beatles favorite, Eleanor Rigby. It is hard to imagine a song better suited to accompany Dante’s evening in the woods, or Ringo’s morning in Liverpool, or the Beatles’ outline for Yellow Submarine:

“Father McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear. No one comes near… Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name. Nobody came…No one was saved.” Clearly, we are not to expect a full throated defense of Judeo-Christianity.

But Eleanor Rigby does prepare us for what’s ahead. As we shall see, it describes the actual World, not only as it is but as it must be…if ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG), and if it’s all you get, i.e. if the World has no transcendent dimension. 

As children of the Enlightenment, we are required to believe that the Universe contains all the information necessary to understand it. Prior to 1500 CE, folks would have found such a claim ludicrous – nothing happens without the guidance or intervention of God or gods - but we are not allowed even a snicker.

Dante, for example, described the entire Universe in terms of three ‘transcendent’ realities: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. If someone wrote Divine Comedy today, they wouldn’t be able to find a publisher. Even the Christian press would shy away. We just don’t talk or think this way anymore. So the Beatles, intentionally or not, set out to retell Dante’s story without the ‘religious baggage’. The happy result is Yellow Submarine.

Dante’s journey begins when he meets the Roman poet Virgil who offers to be his guide through Hell: “Thou must take another road if thou wouldst escape from this savage place.” Meanwhile, back in Liverpool, Ringo meets his own ‘spirit guide’, Young Fred. Virgil takes Dante, not through Tuscany but on a path perpendicular to spacetime itself – a path normally traveled only by the dearly departed. Fred does the same for Ringo and his pals.

We are familiar with the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead, the Jewish Kadish and the Christian Last Rites. These are texts read aloud at the time of a person’s death. The purpose is to facilitate the transition from mortality to eternity, to orient the pilgrim on a path perpendicular to spacetime. 

While neither recited nor screened bed side, DC and YS should both be considered part of our multicultural funerary tradition. Like their forebears, both offer detailed images of the stages connecting the angst of Liverpool/Florence with the joys of Pepperland/Paradise. 

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” reads the sign posted above Hell’s Gate. The souls in Hell no longer have the capacity for change. They cannot repent and they cannot influence events in the spatiotemporal world. They are defined now by their sins, and they are compelled to live out those sins eternally. Where there’s life there’s hope (Ecclesiastes 9: 3 - 5) and here there is neither.

Dante’s Hell is a spiral; all roads, all rungs, lead to Satan. It is a perverse version of Robert Frost’s Two Roads. As Dante and Virgil descend lower and lower in a narrowing gyre, Hell starts to ‘freeze over’, quite literally. At bottom, they encounter Satan, encased in ice; here is the nadir of all being, a metaphor for Absolute Zero, a foretaste of the cosmic ‘heat death’ that awaits us all at the end of time.

Back in England (1968), the Beatles are preparing to embark on their own magically mystical tour. Pepperland has succumbed to an invasion of “Blue Meanies”. Its idyllic tranquility shattered, its population “bonked” into a zombie-like state of suspended animation, Pepperland itself is laid waste. The once rainbow infested countryside has turned monochrome gray (as in the Grail legend, The Waste Land – Eliot).

Just as Paradise was lost but later regained (per Dante & Milton), so Pepperland has been captured and must now be liberated. To that end, Young Fred, recently appointed Lord Admiral of the Pepperland Fleet (which consists of a single mothballed sub), has just escaped and is on his way to Liverpool in search of HELP! And who’d have guessed? He finds the Fab Four.

The path to Pepperland runs through a series of “seas” (or branes) that challenge every preconception our travelers have regarding the nature of reality. The first three seas deconstruct the phenomenal world into its basic elements: Time, Space, and ‘Stuff’ (i.e. Matter/Energy/Life). 

Each of these Seas in turn undergoes its own particular deconstruction. First, the Sea of Time. Our time, Liverpool time, appears to flow only one way (from past to future) and at a steady rate (c). But our time is merely an abstraction. It is one slice off a loaf. Liverpool time is a vector (a ray); real time, Pepper time, is a spiral.

Real time flows at a variable rate and backwards as well as forwards. But as the Beatles soon discover, real time is problematic. If time is reversible, then whatever exists can be erased, retroactively. And if any World can self-annihilate, it must self-annihilate, it will self-annihilate, and it already has self-annihilated, ab initio. Being and not-being are incompatible; it either is or it is not! (Parmenides).

To sustain its existence, i.e. to exist, a world must be anchored to some objective, transcendent reference point. The universe is recursive and, as we shall see (below) will inevitably consume itself unless tethered. So Yellow Submarine begins as a wholly secular ontology but ultimately proves that no such ontology is workable.

The second sea, the Sea of Science, does for space what its predecessor did for time. As with time (clocks), human representations of space (Cartesian grids, Platonic solids) determine what space is. Here we learn that dimensionality itself is optional and flexible - not essential and substructural.

The third sea, the Sea of Monsters, deconstructs the material world including the phenomenon of life itself. It shows that what we consider ‘variety’ in our world is, in fact, a very limited and highly selective subset of all the structures and qualities that spacetime could support…and, according to the Beatles, does support. YS anticipates Stephen Gould’s Wonderful Life.

In the Sea of Monsters, all possible ‘life’ forms flourish: “Let 1,000 flowers bloom” (Mao). Shape, so sharp in the Sea of Science, is now indefinitely mutable, and boundaries separating the organic from the mechanical have dissolved.

This third sea is aptly named. All the creatures are ‘monsters’, not because of how they look or how they are made but because of how they behave (like some children I’ve known – not mine of course…or yours). Without exception, like souls in Dante’s Hell, they are continuously involved in activities that are destructive to themselves and to others. Their natures are hard-wired, and (unlike AI) they lack the capacity to overcome their programming. They are outside the ‘state of grace’. 

Among the various monsters in this sea, one stands out: the Vacuum Monster (VM), the mother of all monsters. Its nature is to suck into oblivion whatever it encounters. In the ‘monstrous sea’ humanoid creatures threaten other creatures, but VM threatens everything, including the universe itself. It is the personification of recursion, and…

VM is the personification of entropy: the ‘Evil One’ in the Lord’s Prayer (Deliver us from Evil). First, it annihilates ‘the other’, i.e. it sucks up all the other monsters. Then, seeing that there are no more monsters to suck, it sucks up spacetime, and then, at last, itself, tail first, like an ouroboros, “into oblivion…or even further”. Etre (being) + VM = Neant (nothing).

YS proves that such ‘being’ is impossible: “It is not!” (Parmenides) But Descartes gets in the way with his famous, “Ergo sum!” I am, and therefore not-being is not possible. YS is a reductio ad absurdum for the secular model of onology.

The eschatology of the Sea of Monsters, and of Dante’s Inferno, is the eschatology of St. Paul, turned upside down: “Then comes the end when he (Christ) hands over the kingdom to God the Father…so that God may be all in all.” (1 Cor. 15: 20 – 28) VM hands the kingdom over to ‘Satan’ so that everything may be nothing at all.

(Pause for a moment of silent reflection.)

Yes, our lads have reached the nadir of being, an empty state which the Beatles appropriately call, “Nowhere Land”. This would seem to be the end, but do not despair: as it turns out, “my end is my beginning.” (Mary Tudor)

But first we have one last loose end. The Beatles have dealt with Space and Time, Matter and Energy, and Life itself; and now…Mind! Welcome to the Foothills of the Headlands, the land of disembodied thoughts. Its inhabitants want to help the Beatles on their journey, but they can’t. Shorn of physicality (above), their ideas persist but have no agency, no force. “Wishing doesn’t make it so!”

But I promised you a new beginning! Ok, put on some coffee because here’s where things get interesting! Our next stop is the legendary Sea of Holes, the realm of ‘negative space’. Here, the usual relation of figure/ground is reversed. The holes are now the figure.

Just as something has become nothing (Nowhere Land), now nothing becomes something, something so concrete that Ringo is able to ‘pick up a hole’, put it in his pocket, and save it for a rainy day, which, I assure you, is coming. 

The topology of the Sea of Holes is non-orientable. There is no consistent sense of direction, no spatial ordering. It’s like an Escher staircase. But if the Sea of Holes (or any brane) is non-orientable, then the entire universe in which it is embedded, including Liverpool and Pepperland, must also be non-orientable, albeit less obviously so. (Earth is round, everywhere, and yet it appears flat from most perspectives.)

Dante had his experience of non-orientability on the threshold of Purgatory. “I raised my eyes to see Lucifer as I had left him; but I saw him with his legs pointed upward.” Just as Dante and Virgil turn to leave Hell, Dante looks back and is surprised to see Satan upside down. Without realizing it, our pilgrims have undergone a reversal of orientation…which is a trademark of non-orientable space (Mobius Strips) and the premise of all eschatology.

The Sea of Holes leads to Pepperland…but not so fast! You may only enter across an infinitely thin membrane (an event horizon) called the “Sea of Green”… and only one of the holes in the Sea of Holes connects to the Sea of Green…and there are innumerable holes. Fortunately, our Argonauts do find the Sea and so enter Pepperland (Dante’s Paradiso).

There’s a lot to unpack here. First, the Sea of Green is a Markov Blanket. It ‘converts’ Liverpudlian into Pepperish(and vice versa). Second, the topology of Pepperland, and therefore of the Universe, is non-Archimedean as well as non-orientable. Liverpool and Pepperland never touch. They are disjoint…until they’re not.

The Beatles do not ‘cross the Sea of Green’. Upon reaching it, they find themselves immediately and wholly in Pepperland. Green is not a slice of spacetime; it is a 90° rotation of spacetime, revealing its eternal aspect.

Once arrived, the lads quickly “unbonk” the Lord Mayor with “a snatch of a tune” and “ready the land to rebellion”. Now they notice their “uncanny” resemblance to four of Pepperland’s permanent residents, the members of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Gradually, they come to realize that they are the Sergeant Pepper Band and Ringo reunites them using the ‘hole in his pocket’ (as I promised) to dissolve the artificial barrier (snow globe) separating the two worlds. The lads are Beatles in spacetime, but Sergeant Pepper in eternity.

It is only now that they come to realize that they have been living in Pepperland all along. Their journey was indeed perpendicular to spacetime. They never left Liverpool Pier and it’s still Thursday morning, just as Dorothy never left Kansas and Alice never left her river bank. We all live, and always have all lived, in Paradise: “The glory of him who moves all things… the Love that moves the sun and the other stars…permeates the universe.” (Dante, Paradiso)

David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com.

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