Dante and the Nine Rings

by Hap Rocketto

For a good school teacher learning never ends, be it the subject matter one teaches or how to manage a room full of hormone driven adolescents. To that end a teacher’s life outside of the classroom is filled with self selected course work and the dreaded, administratively inflicted, “professional development” activities. Much like British sailors during the Napoleonic Wars teachers are impressed into professional development by those deemed unsuitable for the classroom and, therefore, promoted to administrative positions in an attempt to blunt any negative impact they might have on young and impressionable minds.

To paraphrase The Bard these mind numbing activities are usually tales told by an idiot, full of jargon and buzzwords, signifying nothing. To give you an idea of how these are viewed by teachers there is an old chestnut that tells of a retired teacher who died and quickly found himself in Heaven. Saint Peter conducted him to a special subdivision of beautiful houses reserved for deserving teachers. When the recently departed asked where his neighbors might be the archangel glanced at his watch, noted it was three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and replied that they must all still be in Hell at professional development.

This brings me to a course that I took in lieu of professional development. Some years ago I studied Chaucer, a subject of an earlier essay, and last summer it was a seminar on Dante Alighieri’s the Commedia, more popularly known as The Devine Comedy. Dante’s one hundred cantos of hendecasyllabic lines and closely linked rhymes is an allegory of human life, in the form of a vision of the world beyond the grave. By the way, I teach science and took these unrelated courses for my own pleasure. Most school administrators in my experience care only about being able to correctly fill out forms provided by Central Office. That the courses had no relevance to my teaching assignment was of no concern to them, the paper work’s “eyes were dotted” and “tees were crossed” and that was all that mattered.

Soon after the summer session had ended I departed, along with my shooting companions Shawn Carpenter, Jack Santo, Charlie Adams, and my brother for Camp Perry and the National Smallbore Rifle Championships. During a particularly trying 50 meter match certain aspects of Dante’s work kept cropping up in my mind. The Meter Match, as it is known, is the great stumbling block that trips up many a shooter on the way to greatness. The target is the old International target from the early 1950s that has since been replaced several times in international competition, but hangs on in that most hidebound of shooting sports, conventional prone. The target and the distance at which it is shot is such that one usually shoots either a lot of Xs or a lot of nines, with only an occasional ten to break the monotony of success or failure. It is a psychological minefield.

Dante created nine rings of Hell in the Commedia and your particular depravity in life would determine in which ring you would spend eternity. There are few activities in this earthly world that approximate the torment of one of Dante’s rings more than being trussed up in a leather coat on a 90 degree day in 90% humidity, bound to a dead weight of iron and wood by a leather tourniquet, staring into a murky mirage, and shooting nines.

Such was my situation when I realized that the Commedia was not fiction. I was being punished by the shooting gods for my sins of omission and commission committed in the sport that I love. Who among us have not leaned against the bench at least once in off hand, or used our thumb and forefinger to squeeze a bullet hole shut in hopes that the plug would be forced close enough to the ten ring to just be tangent, or cross fired and not gotten caught, or badgered a scorer enough so they just gave up the point? As I am guilty of such heinous crimes I must presume that there must be others who are also culpable, to a greater or lesser degree.

But my punishment was not the heat, or the humidity, or the searing pain in my left elbow, or even the humiliation of the pathetic score. It was more ironic than that for I began to understand that, just as there were nine rings in Dante’s view of Hell, there were only nine rings in my particular version. I was convinced that the gods of shooting had erased the inner most ring, the tenth ring of my target. It was apparent that no matter how hard I tried or how many dollars I placed in the hands of the faceless, and probably heartless, specter hidden behind the dark screen of the challenge window I was doomed to shoot only nines.

A sharp blow on my shoulder startled me. It was my brother’s not to subtle way of telling me that I had dozed off between relays and it was time to post the Meter match targets. My time in Hell had just been a dream but my past sins were fact. I wondered if I had been given a divine reprieve in order to redeem myself before I took to the line. I dearly hoped so because I didn’t want to end up like Tomlinson in Rudyard Kipling’s poem of the same name, knowing that “the sin ye do two and two ye must pay for one by one.”

The answer would come soon enough as I handed my target and backer to my point partner and dragged my mat to the line.