Letters to a Young Poet (8 page)

For that spirit which people will have us believe is the authentic Christian one is not embodied in the cathedrals either. I could imagine that beneath some of them there rests the dislodged statue of a Greek goddess; so great a flowering, so much existence has shot up in them, even if, in a fear that first arose
in that age
, they strove away from that hidden body into the heavens, which the sound of their great bells was intended constantly to hold open.

After my return from Avignon I often went into churches, in the evenings and on Sundays, alone at first … then later …

I have a lover, almost a child still; she works at home, which when there is not much work often means that she finds herself in an awkward situation. She is skilful, she'd easily get a job in a factory, but she fears having
a
patron
. Her conception of freedom is limitless. It will not surprise you that she also thinks of God as a kind of
patron
, even as the ‘
arch-patron
' as she told me, laughing, but with such fright in her eyes. It took a long time before she agreed to come with me one evening to
St Eustache
where I liked going for the music of
the May devotions
. Once we got as far as
Maux
together and had a look at gravestones in the church there. Gradually she noticed that God leaves you in peace in churches, that he demands nothing; you could think he wasn't there at all,
n'est-ce pas
, but then in the moment you are about to say something of the sort, said
Marthe
, that even in a church he doesn't exist, something holds you back. Perhaps only what over so many centuries people themselves have borne into this high, peculiarly fortified air. Or perhaps it is only that the resonance of the sweet and powerful music can never escape completely: yes, it must have penetrated into the stones long ago, and the stones must be strangely moved, these pillars and vaultings,
and though stone is hard and difficult of access, even it is shaken in the end by the perpetual singing and these assaults from the organ, these onslaughts, these storms of hymns, every Sunday, these hurricanes on the great feast-days. The calm after a storm. That's what truly reigns in these old churches. I said so to Marthe. Windless calm. We listened, she got it at once, she has a wonderfully receptive nature. After that we sometimes went in, here and there, when we heard singing, and stood there, close together. Best of all was when we could see a stained-glass window, one of those old ones with many subjects and compartments, each one crammed with figures, big people and little towers and all sorts of goings-on. Nothing was thought to be unfit or too strange; there are castles and battles and a hunt, and the lovely white hart appears again and again amid the warm red and the burning blue. I was once given very old wine to drink. With these windows it is the same for the eyes, except that the wine was only dark red in my mouth – but here the same thing happens in blue and in violet and in green.
Everything
can be found in the old churches; there is no fear of anything, unlike in the new ones, where so to speak only good examples are present. Here there is also the bad and
the wicked, the terrifying; the crippled, the destitute, what is ugly and unjust – and it is as if somehow it were all loved for God's sake.
Here is the angel, who does not exist
, and the devil, who does not exist; and man, who does exist, is in between them and, I cannot help it, their unreality makes him more real for me. In these places I can gather my thoughts and feelings about what it is to be human better than in the street, among people who have absolutely nothing recognizable about them. But that is a difficult thing to say. And what I now want to say is harder still to express. As far as the ‘
patron
', as far as power is concerned (this also gradually became clear to me in church, when we were completely taken up by the music), there is only
one
remedy against it: to go further than it does. Here is what I mean by this: in every power which claims some right over us we should always try to see all power, absolute power, power as such, the power of God. We should say to ourselves, there is only
one
, and understand power that is lesser, false, defective, as if it were that which takes hold of us legitimately. Would it not thus become harmless? If we always saw in every form of power, including the harmful and malicious, power itself – I mean that which
ultimately has the right to be powerful – wouldn't we then overcome, intact as it were, the illegitimate and the arbitrary? Isn't our relationship to all the great unknown forces exactly like this? We experience none of them in their purity. We begin by accepting each with its shortcomings, which are perhaps commensurate with our own. – But isn't it the case with all scholars, explorers and inventors that the assumption that they were dealing with great forces suddenly led to the greatest of all? I am young, and there is much rebelliousness in me; – I cannot be certain that I act in accordance with my judgement in every case, where impatience and bitterness get the better of me; in my innermost being though, I know that subjection leads further than revolt. Subjection puts to shame any kind of usurpation, and in indescribable ways it contributes to the glorification of righteous power. The rebel strains to escape the attraction of a centre of power, and perhaps he will succeed in leaving this force-field; but once outside it he is in a void and has to look around for a new gravitation that will include him. And this usually has even less legitimacy than the first. So why not see at once, in the gravitation we find ourselves in, the supreme power, undeterred
by its weaknesses and its fluctuations? Somewhere the arbitrary will come up against the law of its own accord, and we save energy if we leave it to convert itself. Admittedly this belongs to the lengthy, slow processes that stand in utter contradiction with the strange precipitations of our age. But alongside the most rapid movements there will always be slow ones, some indeed of such extreme slowness that we cannot sense their progress at all. But then that is what humanity is here for, is it not, to wait for what extends beyond the individual life. – From that perspective, the slow is often the most rapid of all, that is, it turns out that we only called it slow because is was something we could not measure.

And there exists, it seems to me, something utterly measureless, which people never tire of laying their hands on by means of standards, surveys, and institutions.

And it's here, in the love which, with their intolerable mixture of contempt, concupiscence and curiosity, they call ‘sensual', that no doubt the worst effects of that debasement are to be sought which Christianity has seen fit to inflict on the earthly. Here everything is disfigurement and repression, although in fact we proceed from this most profound event
and in turn possess in it the mid-point of our ecstasies. It is, if I may say so, harder and harder for me to comprehend how a doctrine which puts us in the wrong in the point where the whole of creation enjoys its most blessed right can with such steadfastness, if not actually prove its validity, nevertheless affirm it in all quarters.

Here too I am thinking of the intense conversations with my dead friend, vouchsafed me in the meadows of the
Ile de la Barthelasse
in the spring and later. On the very night before his death (he died the following afternoon shortly after five o'clock) he opened for me perspectives of such purity into a region of the blindest suffering that my life seemed to begin again in a thousand places and my voice, when I wanted to answer, deserted me. I did not know that there was such a thing as tears of joy. I wept my first, like a novice, into the hands of Pierre, who would be dead tomorrow, and felt the tide of life rise once more in him and overflow as these warm drops were added to it. Am I being excessive? What I am talking about
is
an excess, a too-muchness.

Let me ask you, Mr V., why, if they want to help us, we who are so often helpless, why do they fail us here, at the root of all experience? Whoever stood
by us
there
could be assured that we would demand nothing further of him. For the succour he gave us there would grow of its own accord and would become greater and stronger at the same time as our life. And would never run out. Why are we not set at the heart of the most secret thing we have? Why do we have to creep around outside it and get in eventually like burglars and thieves, into our own beautiful sexuality, where we stray around and stumble and bump into one another and then rush out again, like people caught red-handed, into the shadowy light of Christianity? Why, if it is true that guilt and sin, because of the inner tension of our soul, had to be invented, why were they not fixed to another part of our bodies; why were they dropped in to wait until they dissolved in our pure well, poisoning and muddying it? Why has our sexuality been made homeless, instead of locating in it the celebration of our true abode?

Yes, I will admit that it is not right that it should belong to us, who are not capable of assuming and administering such an inexhaustible source of benediction. But why do we not belong to God from
this
point?

Church people would remind me that there is such
a thing as marriage, though they would not be unaware of how matters stand with that institution. And it's no good moving the will to reproduction into the light of God's grace, my sexuality is not only directed towards my descendants, it is the mystery of my own life, and only because it cannot, as it seems, occupy a position at the centre of it have so many people pushed it to the edges of themselves and in doing so lost their equilibrium. What's to be done? The terrible untruth and uncertainty of our times has its cause in the inability to admit the happiness of sex, in this peculiarly misplaced culpability which is increasing all the time and divides us from the whole of the rest of nature and even from the child, although, as I learnt in that unforgettable night, the child's innocence does not at all consist as it were in being ignorant of sex – ‘But', so Pierre said in an almost inaudible voice, ‘that incomprehensible happiness which awakes in us in
one
place in the middle of the fruit-flesh of a close embrace is, in the child, still distributed anonymously over the whole body.' In order to describe the singular situation of our sensuality, one would have to be able to say: once we were children
everywhere
, now we only are in one place. – But if
there is even a single person among us who is certain of this and capable of providing the evidence to show it, why do we look on while generation after generation comes to its senses and begins to stir under the rubble of Christian prejudices like someone left for dead in the dark, confined on all sides by sheer denial?

Mr V., I can't stop writing. I've been at it almost the whole night. I must sum up my thoughts. – Did I say that I am employed in a factory? I work in the office; sometimes I'm also needed on the machines. Before that I once studied for a short while. Now, I just want to say what's on my mind. What I want, you see, is to be usable for God just as I am; what I do here, my work, I want to continue to do in his direction without my ray of light being refracted, if I may put it like that, not even in Christ, who was once the water for many. I cannot for example explain my machine to him, he cannot contain it. I know that you won't laugh if I put it so simply; it's best that way. God, on the other hand, I have the feeling that I can bring it to him, my machine and its first products, or even all my work; it goes into him without difficulty. As in the old days it was easy for shepherds to bring the gods of their
lives a lamb or the fruits of the earth, the finest grapes.

You can see, Mr V., I have been able to write this long letter without once needing to use the word ‘faith'. For that I think is an involved and difficult matter, and not for me. I will not let myself be worsened for Christ's sake, but want to be good for God. I do not want to be called a sinner from the outset, for perhaps I am not. I have mornings of such purity! I could talk with God, I need no one to help me draft letters to him.

Your poems I only know from that reading the other evening; I possess only a handful of books which mostly have to do with my job. I do have a few about art, and oddments of history, just what I was able to get hold of. – But your poems, you will have to accept this, have brought forth this commotion in me. My friend said once:
Give us teachers who praise the Here and Now
. You are such a one.

This edition presents the
Letters
as they were originally published in 1929, with Kappus's Preface. Franz Xaver Kappus, born in 1883 in Timişoara, died in Berlin in 1966. He was thus only eight years younger than Rilke.

Wiener Neustadt
: A small town south of Vienna. Its Military Academy was the first of its kind in the world, founded in 1752 by Empress Maria Theresa.

Horaček
: Rilke was taught by him from 1886 to 1890. As Kappus explains, Horaček was at that time chaplain in Sankt Pölten.

Sankt Pölten
: The main city in Lower Austria.

Mährisch-Weisskirchen
: The German name for the town of Hranice, in Moravia in the Czech Republic. It was then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Rilke was at the Military Academy there in 1890–91.

To Celebrate Myself
:
Mir zur Feier
, a volume of poems, appeared in December 1899. It was Rilke's fifth published collection.

Rilke had been in Paris since the previous autumn. He had gone there to write a short book on the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), which he did very quickly (
Auguste Rodin
, finished in December 1902 and published in March 1903). Influenced by Rodin's working methods and personality, he had probably written ‘The Panther', the earliest of the poems in the
Neue Gedichte
(
New Poems
), in November. There is not much trace of this new schooling in the sentiments of the letter.