Oh woe!

Wednesday night I was reading Dante before I went to sleep (not advisable considering there are some seriously disturbing images the further you progress into the Inferno) and I read in Canto XXVIII lines 121-123 "And by its hair he held his severed head swinging in his hand as if it were a lantern. The head stared at us and said: 'Oh, woe!'" You must understand that it was a little after midnight- that time of night when everything is funnier than it really is- but  I laughed so hard I almost fell off my bed. All of these horrendous punishments and awful things happening around Dante, and he sees this guy swinging his head- a talking head that says "oh woe." This guy is in with the schismatics because he helped Prince Henry plot against his own father. Something striking about this particular character (Bertran) is that he acknowledges in line 142, "In me you may observe fit punishment." He recognizes that because he helped stir enmity between son and father, and so severed the familial relationship, it is fitting that he is carrying his head around disconnected from his body. Many of the people Dante meet try to lash out or bring him grief, they are unrepentant and seem to think little beyond the pain... but Bertran realizes the contrapasso and justice in his punishment. It makes me wonder how many of the others have contemplated the full implications of their personalized, specific levels of hell. How fitting that the head (intellect) that allowed him the ability to instigate thoughts of rebellion is what is severed from his body. This level of hell was full of people being chopped to pieces, those wounds healing, then being cut up again. But the cuts are different based on the person and the crime.... How did a God of love create this? Besides it being a distortion of good... yeah I'm still working through that.
P.S. Commented on Tyler's "The Snowball Effect"