Maybe if he’d been an abstract painter, rather than a narrative poet, Dante might’ve attempted to render the supernatural realms in a less paradoxical way, for abstraction releases an artist from the rules of mimesis to which narrative art is often bound. How it does this can be explained, I think, in at least two ways. First, it liberates both the artist and the audience from the conception of time as linear. Think of a painting by Rothko, or by Agnes Martin. You do not try to follow the ‘story’ that their paintings depict, because there is no story, but rather you see the painting ‘all at once,’ almost as if it is a feeling you are experiencing rather than a sight you are comprehending. In other words, abstraction does not originate from the premise that time is the basis for every kind of experience available to the human person. Not that an abstract painting is so superficial a thing that you need not spend some time with it, or linger in front of it, to experience its effect, for often that is necessary; but my point is that it can introduce you to a ‘condition,’ or a ‘state,’ into which you enter, rather than reveal to you a ‘happening,’ or an ‘occurrence,’ that must be processed chronologically.