Canto XIII/1 The only other wood in the Inferno besides the Selva Oscura of the Opening Canto is this dismal and distorted echo, where we find the suicides, now turned into twisted trees and fed upon by Harpies. Perhaps Dante meant to indicate that one apparent, though of course illusory, way out of the 'Dark Wood' of life's crises is to kill oneself, and thus he makes the suicide perpetuate in his own person the tangle of the wood's confusion. This I have tried to show by remaking the original wood of words in reverse, darkened further by the colours of dead and decaying trees. Above it fly the Harpies represented by the crows painted by Van Gogh shortly before his own suicide; the birds he seemed to see as black harbingers of death. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.