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Not everyone knows what Dante called his famous 1321 epic of catabasis. Later dubbed "La Divina Commedia" by Boccaccio, it was actually called by Dante simply "Comedia" or Comedy. (No "the," no "divine," and not even two m's.) Boccaccio's own 1353 long imaginative work of prose The Decameron, or "100-part Story," which was conceived and took place during the severe 1348 outbreak of bubonic plague, was accordingly yclept "L'Umana Commedia" i.e. "The Human Comedy." A long time later in the mid 19th century the French writer Honoré de Balzac would call his own series of novels about Parisian life and related themes "La Comédie Humaine" in contrast to both Dante and Boccaccio. One might well consider whether some writer or group of writers are today in 2023 writing the next installment, "La Comédie Machinique." This phrase has never before been proposed, but has a certain logic to it. "La Macchinica Commedia" might be something to do with factories, or electronic media, or computer media, or internal combustion engines and the transport systems they drive by combusting fossil energy millions of years old. The subject matter of such an epic might need to be about machines, as Dante's was about divinity (in part) and Balzac's about humanity (as it were), but if the progression holds at all machinity would be not the author per se so much as the spirit of the subject, landscape, and atmosphere. Just machines by themselves as machines are not the comedy but as one might say part stage and part dramatis personae, inspiration, and compositional climate. Such a comedy would of course differ from tragedy, from La Tragédie Machinique. If also catabatic, it would need to incorporate some kind of journey to and return from the land of the non-living. Perhaps all machines would have to be covered by its vision, not just cars and trucks and computers but every machine possible of every sort, and not just the newest kind running and operating today but all the old kinds too and their ghosts like waterwheels, flintlocks, wind-up watches, steamships, and paleolithic looms. Who knows, it might even have to contain machines without moving parts like canoes and hand axes, or information processors without electricity either like carvings, pigmented shapes, drums, and letters on paper. By definition neither the newest machines nor their users would have any greater authorship or import than the oldest or any mid-way counterparts since all are part of the all. +++ Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), written in Middle English, uses the word "experience" 13 times in the sense of both experience and experiment. These are among the first appearances of the word in recorded English literature. It is applied in the context of Dante and Virgil, in The Canon's Yeoman's Tale (refuting the alchemical arts), and in the Somnour's Tale, as well as three times in the Wife of Bath's Tale (including as its first word). +++ This recent science article about art and interoception uses the word "experience" 7 times, as approximately 1.5% of its total word count: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/art-may-be-in-the-body-of-the-beholder/ +++
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