Incontinence

Limbo first, which is nobody’s punishment and everybody’s waiting room, and then the four circles where the sin is appetite: the storm of the lustful, the mud and Cerberus, the rolling weights of the misers, the Styx. They are one scene because you climb back up through them on foot, and what opens a lock down here is always in a circle you thought you had finished with.

You start unconscious: «E caddi come l’uom cui sonno piglia» (Inf. III 136). You come to on the bank with nothing in your hands, and until halfway through the chapter the lamp is all you have; the bow and the Miserere are fished back up later on.

Every circle asks for a different verb, and the storm of the lustful is not weather but the lock on the circle: «La bufera infernal, che mai non resta» (Inf. V 31). The cut is not ours, it is the poem’s: at canto XI Virgil puts incontinence on one side and what lies below the Styx on the other, and below the Styx stands the city of Dis.