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chubsonthemoon · 27 days ago

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Coda: On Dante’s Inferno, Hozier’s Psychopomp (Abstract), and Jayvik

Okay!!! So at the beginning of the month I was listening to Hozier’s Psychopomp (Abstract) late at night, as I am wont to do. Unreal Unearth is one of my favorite albums ever, with some of my favorite songs ever, so I’ve listened to it many times. HOWEVER, as one often does with art they love, I discovered something new. When I got to the bridge of Abstract (Psychopomp), I heard a specific line that went through me like a fucking bullet. I immediately thought wait a fucking second, rewound the track, and re-listened to it with my jayvik goggles on.

Plagued by these visions, I then proceeded to feverishly construct an AMV entirely in my mind as I lay there, facing my shadowed ceiling, feeling like I was receiving divine revelation. I’m talking—exact shots, beat for beat transitions, word for word scene associations. I woke up the next morning, downloaded Davinci Resolve, and over the course of a few sleepless nights, painstakingly transferred my Visions to video. Now, even after posting, I STILL have thoughts. Many of them actually came after I’d watched the thing on YouTube, pretending it was something I was seeing for the first time instead of something I’d stared at so long I got eyestrain.

So here we are. Welcome to the kind of essay I wished I could've written in college, complete with swearing and emojis and links to Reddit posts. Buckle up; I have no idea if this is going to cohere, but by God am I going to try (I still feel like I’m possessed, btw.)

(CW: animal death; discussions of death, depression, and suicidal ideation; brief mention of torture)

(also on ao3!)

Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, and Hozier’s 2023 album Unreal Unearth

I wanna preface this by saying I am by no means a Dante scholar—I just read the Divine Comedy in undergrad and thought, generally, that it was neat and cool and I wrote a few essays on it and then moved on. HOWEVER. When Hozier released his Inferno concept album Unreal Unearth in 2023, good golly was I glad to have actually read it, because then I could understand. I had nerd street cred! I too could say, with full confidence, that I understood what Mr. Hozier meant when he sung about love and loss feeling like undergoing a soul-transforming journey through hell itself. Me too, Andrew, me too. (Jokes aside though, the album really is amazing—it deals not only with love, but loss, genocide, cycles of abuse, isolation, death, and other such topics. I highly recommend it, and even though I’m using this one specific song to talk about my blorbos, the album, and Hozier’s entire body of work, encompasses much, much more than what I’m going to touch on here, and more than what I think the common conception of his music is, i.e. sad bog man singing about love).

Very very basic premise: the Divine Comedy is, as it is often joked around here (tumblr, popular acafan quotes), Dante’s self-insert epic poem, wherein he takes a grand tour of the Christian afterlife: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Inferno always was and continues to be my favorite, mostly because Dante will specifically take the time to put mfs he hates in specific circles of hell, and also because I think the punishments he comes up with for each of the nine circles and their corresponding sins are super interesting and morbid. What I’m going focus on here is his relationship with Virgil (guy who wrote the Aeneid), who acts as his guide through Hell and Purgatory (ik Beatrice comes up later, but for the purposes of this meta we’re just gonna focus on Virgil’s role), and specifically the eighth circle, also called Malebolge. This circle punishes the fraudulent and is divided into ten…pockets? That’s what my translation calls them, anyway. (For reference for anyone interested: all quotes I pull are from Anthony Esolen’s translation!) Each of these pockets punishes a specific kind of fraud (I honestly did not know there were so many until I read Inferno, haha).

Abstract (Psychopomp) (from here on out I will just call the track A/P) is listed as correlating with the second half of these pockets, which, in order, punish: 5) bribe takers 6) hypocrites 7) thieves 8) evil counselors (fun fact: Odysseus is here!) 9) schismatics (sowers of discord) and 10) falsifiers. I honestly think that A/P is more of a loose interpretation of the theme of fraud in the eighth circle than anything super granular down to the pocket level (Anything But, the song that precedes it, is basically one big “fuck off/fuck you.” BIG divorce energy), but I still think it’s interesting to think about in this context (also, from an Arcane perspective, “bribe takers/hypocrites/thieves/evil counselors/falsifiers” is a very funny set of words that I think many Zaunites might use to describe the Piltovian leadership, lol.) Notably, I think each subsequent pocket punishes a “worse” kind of fraud than the pocket before, and it’s interesting that A/P is set in the second half with the naughtier frauds (or roughly, I’m assuming—again, I don’t think every song is really a one-to-one comparison, but more in the spirit of what that circle is about/punishes).

With that very shoddy background (you can read the Divine Comedy for free on Project Gutenberg, here), here are the actual lyrics for the song, because I can’t talk about the rest of this without you, dear reader, having read them, heh:

Sometimes it returns like rain that you slept through That washed off the world, the streets looking brand new I will not be great, but I'm grateful to get through The feeling came late, I'm still glad I met you The memory hurts, but does me no harm Your hand in my pocket to keep us both warm The poor thing in the road, its eye still glistening The cold wet of your nose, the earth from a distance See how it shines See how it shines See how it shines See how it shines Sometimes there's a thought, like you choose what you're doing But it comes to naught when I look back through it I remember the view, streetlights in the dark blue The moment I knew I'd no choice but to love you The speed that you moved, the screech of the cars The creature still moving, that slowed in your arms The fear in its eyes, gone out in an instant Your tear caught the light, the earth from a distance See how it shines See how it shines See how it shines See how it shines Darling, there's a part of me I'm afraid will always be Trapped within an abstract from a moment of my life The weeds up through the concrete The traffic picking up speed All my love and terror balanced there between those eyes See how it shines See how it shines

(I find that Hozier’s lyrics are more than strong enough to stand on their own as poems, so I often like to read them without the music. For extra psychic damage, I also really recommend listening to the song while reading along. You can find a recording here!)

Very literally speaking, the song is about the narrator and his lover/loved one getting out of a car to watch an animal die on the side of the road. Whether the narrator/lover were the ones who hit the animal is left ambiguous. Hozier’s gone on record saying that the events of the song are actually based on a handful of memories, one of which is indeed a memory of him as a child watching an animal getting hit by a car. Truly, no one is doing it like him.

There are a few interpretations of this song and about its placement in the eighth circle of hell. Here’s a link to a Reddit thread with some I really like. Of these, one of my favorites is the one of the ones OP mentions, here, which posits that the song says that the fraud being committed is our own existence; our fleeting lives tied inextricably (inextricably bound, anyone?) with the objective reality of our deaths. Before I dive into what this interpretation means for my purposes, though—the reason I love this song, and why it continues to be one of my favorites, both on this album and out of Hozier’s entire discography, really, is because it’s a song with a strong narrative arc. The song is a reflection; the narrator is looking back on an experience, recounting it (Sometimes it returns and The memory hurts/but does me no harm). This is also why I felt like Mr. Hozier, and by extension Dante himself, were reaching directly into my soul that night, because the song maps perfectly onto another narrative that I absolutely love, that of Jayce and Viktor’s. More on that later.

Back to fraud, though: I think the great lie of our lives can be most easily seen just in the moment before death. That’s what See how it shines and Your tear caught the light, the earth from a distance mean to me—it’s an old adage that your life flashes before your eyes right before you’re going to die, but I think this song takes that literally. The flash, the shine, the glimmer of life in this animal’s eyes fading away—all my love and terror balanced there between those eyes. Faced with death like this, high above (the earth from a distance) the curtain is, even for the briefest of moments, ripped away. It’s only here that the great lie is revealed, to the narrator, to us—we are, all of us, going to die, just like this. The brilliance of your whole life against the oblivion of death; we’ve all had that moment a la The Good Place, where Michael contemplates not existing for more than a second and immediately has a mental breakdown. All of this, this revelation, this existential dread, conveyed back to the narrator in a memory, an abstract. An abstract, as in: something intangible, something metaphorical, something standing in for something else, the ‘something else’ being a thing we can’t bear to think about for too long, otherwise how would we go through life? How do you wake up every day with the full knowledge you’re going to die? You, briefly, forget. You lie to yourself. An abstract, as in: a summary at the beginning of an academic paper, telling you the highlights, the key points, the ending. An abstract as in: containing everything we will ever know, but not everything that is, has been, or will be. A brief stand-in for the truth. The truth being, again: We are all going to die. (Fun!)

(I want to add a disclaimer that this is not an argument that everything we do is futile. Rather, I think the song explores that uncomfortable emotional space everyone inevitably finds themselves in at some point in their lives; the confrontation of our own mortality, the near-hilarity of it. I’m very much in the camp of “nothing matters! so you must make it matter yourself.” It’s the move from “we are all going to die.” to “we’re all gonna die 🤠”)

Another thing, related not so much to fraud but to the parenthetical of the song: Psychopomp. In Inferno, Virgil (and eventually Beatrice) are psychopomps for Dante, leading him to and through the afterlife. In A/P, the narrator and his lover are the psychopomps for the dead animal on the side of the road. They are the ones who witness this death; they’re the ones who escort it to its afterlife, in a way. If I ever meet Hozier and only got to ask him one question, it’d be: why did you put “Psychopomp” in parentheses? Did you feel like the abstract—the fleeting nature of that moment—was more important, and should come first? As someone who has witnessed death, perhaps even felt like a psychopomp yourself, did you yourself feel like a parenthetical beside the vast, endless face of oblivion? I would also ask him what kind of conditioner he uses for his hair, and if he’d ever consider cosplaying as Viktor, but I realize that’s more than one question, so perhaps not.

Anyway. That was a lot. What the hell does all of this have to do with Jayvik?

WHAT THE HELL IT HAS TO DO WITH JAYVIK

So, Jayce is the psychopomp. Viktor is the dying creature. Here’s my proof. Written out: Jayce watches Viktor die. The speed that you moved (Jayce running down the hall). The screech of the cars (Jinx’s bomb). The creature still moving (Viktor on the lab table). That slowed in your arms (Jayce’s arms wrenching the Hexcore towards him vs. his arms holding the hammer that will kill Viktor). The fear in its eyes (Viktor looking at him. Asking why?). Gone out in an instant (HE DED). Your tear caught the light (Jayce crying.) The earth from a distance (there were a few contenders for this one, but I eventually went with the establishing shot the camera jumps to right after Jayce shoots him). And so on and so forth. Easy, right?

BUT. And this was my revelation that night: Viktor is actually the psychopomp, too. Actually, I’d argue Viktor is the original psychopomp, Arcane’s first and final. One, because he literally watches the entire world die—multiple worlds, even, as is implied in his in all timelines, in all possibilities spiel. He also, when he’s in the commune, literally gains the power to see people’s entire lives with a single touch—their whole past, absorbed into him, passing through him (The memory hurts, but does me no harm). He’s also the psychopomp because TWO, when he saves baby Jayce, he literally leads him from death into another dimension. But, crucially—and this is where we diverge a bit from the original meaning of the song—Viktor also saves Jayce’s life. For the time being. Once again, the great lie is at work, here: Jayce was always going to die. That feels like a bit of a cop-out to say, since everyone in Arcane is presumably mortal, or at least capable of dying (well, except for Yordles I guess, but I think within the Arcane universe at least, the average non-augmented human being has a fixed lifespan and grows old etc. etc.). So I can prove that Jayce is special here, in my Viktor-as-psychopomp interpretation; that Viktor was lying to himself, that he was just prolonging the inevitable, that he saw the entirety of Jayce's life spread out before him, past, present future, and that Jayce is also the dying-soon-to-be-dead animal on the side of the road—I mean, c’mon:

What if the psychopomp didn’t want you to die? What if they weren’t just a passive observer to your death—what if they said, No. What if they told themselves the worst, most egregious lie of all—that they could save you? What if they did terrible things in the name of that lie? What if they destroyed entire worlds just to prove that they could? What circle of hell would befit them, then?

So maybe they’re both the psychopomp and the dying animal. Maybe they’re both sinners. But I think there’s actually one true psychopomp; one true narrator looking down at the earth from a distance, recalling the streetlights in the dark blue, remembering the moment knew he had no choice but to love the person he loves. Which leads me to my second divine revelation, the one that hit me when I listened to the bridge that fateful night:

Abstract (Psychopomp) is a song about Mage!Viktor, specifically.

Here are the lines that went through me like a fucking bullet:

Darling, there's a part of me I'm afraid will always be Trapped within an abstract from a moment of my life

Psychopomp Mage!Viktor trapped within an abstract (Abstract) from a moment of his life. Over and over again, that moment. Over and over again—baby Jayce, the blizzard, the field. Over and over and over again, handing him a rune, hoping one day Jayce will give it back and save them all. The memory hurts but does me no harm—buddy, what if the memory did hurt and did do you harm? What if it hurt because you kept literally returning to it? What if it was your own fault it hurt? What if you kept trying anyway? What if you lived the same moment over and over again in the hope that this time, this iteration, this timeline, things would end differently?

We arrive, once more, to the time loop. Ah, yes, I have written about her before, in my interactive time loop fic! But consider: the time loop as a coping mechanism; the lie Viktor tells himself. His sin of fraud; he’s selling something he doesn’t have to get something he wants. He can save him. He will save him. There is no other way this story will end. He won’t allow it. He’s played God before and he’ll do it again. (I wrote another fic about this here). Tragedy enjoyers rise; you know the drill. Which brings me to:

Sometimes there's a thought, like you choose what you're doing But it comes to naught when I look back through it I remember the view, streetlights in the dark blue The moment I knew I'd no choice but to love you

“There is always a choice” vs. “choice is false.” Viktor says both at different points in the series/his transformation. So which is true? Well: Arcane starts with Jayce’s encounter with the mage which instills in him a lifelong love for magic. He meets Viktor. Together, they invent Hextech. It goes wrong. Viktor gets necromanced and leaves; Jayce gets yeeted to Mage!Viktor’s timeline and spends a few months eating lizards. Jayce sees the future. Jayce learns Viktor was the mage. Mage!Viktor knows Jayce is the only one who can stop himself, so he sends him back to finish the job. Does Jayce succeed? Depends. I personally subscribe to the interpretation (or at least a version of it) that all the Jayces that fan out while he’s shooting Viktor in the chest are “failed” timelines where he either didn’t take the shot or missed, thus dooming the world and himself to an unlife of Glorious Evolution, etc. etc. Presumably while all of this is happening, Mage!Viktor is still fiddling with the timelines, testing which rune combinations might fix everything. Every time, Jayce falls in love with magic. Every time, Viktor gets his Arcane powers because Jayce does necromancy on him, which Jayce is only able to do because they invented Hextech, which they’re only able to do because Jayce believed he could recreate magic, which he only believed because Viktor also saved Jayce’s life when he was a kid, which Viktor is only able to do because he has Arcane powers, which he only has because Jayce did necromancy on him. The circle is complete. In other words, Jayce falls in love with magic because of Viktor, who fell in love with Jayce because of their shared dream for magic, and it’s their love for each other/magic (I’d argue that by the end they’re the same thing anyway*) that both destroys and/or saves the world, depending on where you’re standing in the loop. Rinse and repeat. Doomed yaoi. You know the drill. (A lot of this is informed by this fantastic meta by @fuckyeahisawthat; genuinely one of my favorite Viktor interpretations ever, and much more coherently written than this!)

(*There’s another meta here about jayvik potentially being the ideal Platonic Good of friendship according to Aristotle, true friends of virtue in that they are both in shared pursuit of the Good, but this is already getting long enough as it is, so! Maybe another time. Also lowkey I think they work better as toxic codependent “I’m doing this for you, not the good of the world,” rather than the more idealistic kind of friendship Aristotle writes about in Nicomachean Ethics, but anyway.)

So that’s the loop. Choice or not-choice; which is true? Maybe both at once, honestly. But on another level, I think the paradox of choice speaks to something very real that many of us experience at some point in our lives (esp if you’ve suffered from depression and/or suicidal ideation the way I think both Jayce and Viktor do at different parts of the story). I think when you get stuck in a loop like that—both a literal time loop and also a loop of destructive, self-immolating thinking, the line between choice and not-choice does feel blurred. Sometimes it does feel like you don’t have a choice—that you have to do this, that you have to be here, that you deserve this. Because the alternative is unimaginable. Call it what you will—fate, destiny (a horse) (the final, glorious evolution?)—but the question of choice and not-choice is one of the oldest questions we’ve ever asked. “There is always a choice” / “Choice is false” – I ask again; which is the truth? I confess I’m a bit biased towards the choice end of the spectrum; I think people are sometimes just offered only bad choices. I think Viktor and Jayce make a lot of bad choices, yes. I think there were also simply no good ones to make in the moment. But still, they chose to make them, and still, they have to live with the consequences.

Still, when you mess so badly with reality that you and your partner’s timelines start to look less like two separate lines intersecting and more like an ouroboros, I think you earn the right to be able to have two conflicting things be true at once. I think you get to commit a little fraud, as a treat.

This is also why I chose the quote from Canto 20 as the opening quote for my lil movie! I’ve copy/pasted it here:

Here pity lives the best when it is dead. Who is more wicked than the man who lons To make God’s judgment yield to human force? (20.28-30)

Right before this, Dante is basically looking around at all the poor bastards in this particular pocket and crying his eyes out, because holy shit. This pocket’s punishment really sucks, even by hell’s standards—the sinners have their heads twisted on backwards and are crying tears down their back and into their asses. It’s. Rough. This is not the first time Dante cries about how much everyone is suffering, either. And every time before this, and now here again, Virgil says: Hey. None of that now. These people deserve to be here, because they tried to play God. They thought they knew better.

Which is grim! However. I don’t think this necessarily means jayvik deserve to be punished for being insane and codependent and doing nonconsensual necromancy/timeline-altering theatrics on each other, etc. I think we should cry for them. I think it’s natural and right to feel empathy for their situations. But what really gets me about this quote is that it’s a reminder that, even though Hell sucks absolutely donkey balls for everyone getting punished—the lesson that Virgil is trying to teach Dante is that Hell, too, is fundamentally good. It’s literally written on the front door (right before the line everyone knows, ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE):

JUSTICE CAUSED MY HIGH ARCHITECT TO MOVE: DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE CREATED ME, THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE. (3.4-6)

Dante, through Virgil, is saying: Hell is a place created out of love. YMMV on the real-world implications this line has had on…well, a lot of human history, but for the purposes of this analysis, I think it’s fitting to view hell this way—perhaps the time loop is Mage!Viktor’s own personal hell. Hell is a place that never changes. It’s stagnant, it’s eternal, everyone is suffering all the time, and its their own fault. Even so, despite everything, Hell was still created out of divine love. Viktor is in hell, a hell he helped create, because he is a man in love. Hozier says: what if falling in love felt like ascending through hell? What if you cried, feeling the weight of it? What if falling in love wasn’t a choice at all? Dante says: You shouldn’t cry. They did this to themselves. They made their choice.

And maybe jayvik do deserve to die; I’m not really interested in that line of questioning, though. I’m interested in why still we cry, for them, for us—I mean, how could we not? I think we cry because Jayce and Viktor’s ending is, ultimately, a release. That’s why those final few scenes are so satisfying, from both a narrative and an emotional perspective—in those last moments, they finally escape the loop. They leave hell; they ascend. They break free from their abstracts, from their ever-looping series of moments that constitute the lives they’ve both tried to lead, and the lives of one another that they’ve directly, literally pulled from the brink of death, several times, both verbally and physically, and in various moral shadings. The truth is revealed, the lie stripped away; their eyes opened. A dazzling brightness consumes them. They both finally face the truth of it, the light of their lives being—always having been—the love they carry for one another, together (Together!).

And it’s brilliant; it’s blinding; it’s divine. You can still see it, even now, glistening; something tear-shaped, a tear, catching the light. See how it shines.

youtube

JAYVIK AMV || ABSTRACT (PSYCHOPOMP) EIGHTH CIRCLE OF HELL - MALEBOLGE, OR FRAUD on ao3 | on YouTube | lyrics

#well guys #i'm normal dw #arcane #jayvik #meta #arcane meta #amv...meta?#idk #i'm gonna go listen to this song for the millionth time now asjldkfjs #if you've read this far--thank you so much for reading/watching!#it really means the world <3 #hozier

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