Reading Rilke (13 page)

If the ground is there, we can begin to till it. The elements of the medium must be internalized. The principles of their manipulation must be mastered. Again, we must not confuse learning a language with the training necessary for its poetic use, precisely because the poetic use is a radical reversal of its function in ordinary life. Paradoxically, our budding poet must be “trained” to “play.” If both rules and elements are few in number (as, relatively, they are in music, mathematics, and the formalized genres of poetry, and as they are definitely not in fiction, history, anthropology, or philosophy), then useful results may be possible, even expected, by youthful efforts in these fields.

The training does not conclude with the internalization of elements and rules. The practice of other mathematicians, or poets, or composers, must be studied, heard, consumed. This listening, this reading, must be of the analytical kind I have called (in the case of language) transreading. For what is crucial to creativity is the repeated experience, by our young practitioner, of quality of the highest kind. Really gifted people know
that values are as “out there” as cows in a field. And a sense for such significant combinations must be developed. Creativity concerns correct choice. I should say that the whole nature of a culture can be seen in its patterns of selection. The entire history of both art and science supports the view that some choices are better than others.

What does one learn? To ask the right question. As I noted in the section on transreading, Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason in effect asks it: namely, why is a thing what it is, and not some other thing; or, why was this word chosen rather than some other? It may be that the nature of the universe does not provide answers of such completeness, so that we are left with half an explanation (what a thing is, not why it could not be otherwise), but works of art are supposed to bear more justification for their existence than you or I, a fox or flower or blade of grass, have to. There could be causes for the cosmos, but no reasons, or all of IT and the whole of WE could be accidents. The artist must do a better job than God has, although, having internalized the reasons for his choices, he may not be easily able to articulate them. Nevertheless, they’ll be there.

What proper reading confers upon the right reader is not merely an expanded vocabulary or its subtle understanding, or the ready use of forms and strategies, but also a sympathetic awareness of traditional attitudes and opinions, feelings and desires. The young composer, the young poet, can, in this way, appear far wiser than his or her years. Alexander Pope says that he wrote the following poem at the age of twelve, and it scarcely matters to my point if he’s cheating by a few years.

ODE ON SOLITUDE

Happy the man, whose wish and care

A few paternal acres bound,

Content to breathe his native air,

                                         In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,

Whose flocks supply him with attire,

Whose trees in summer yield him shade,

                                                In winter fire.

Blest! who can unconcern’dly find

Hours, days, and years slide soft away,

In health of body, peace of mind,

                                                 Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease

Together mix’d; sweet recreation,

And innocence, which most does please,

                                           With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;

Thus unlamented let me dye;

Steal from the world, and not a stone

                                              Tell where I lye.
¹

Does the kid really want to steal unsung, unpraised, and unheroic from the world? His attitudes are as borrowed as his forms and phrases. “Happy the man” indeed. But poems don’t have to be sincere. They only need to be good.

After training (and Pope imitates the Earl of Rochester, Waller, Cowley, Spenser, Dorset; he translates Ovid and paraphrases
Thomas à Kempis), after an education, comes practice. Intense. Extended. Mindful. Careful. While continuing to read, to imitate if necessary, to learn. Rilke’s easy way with words led him astray, and he was late in his mastery of Goethe, Hölderlin, and many others. Rilke’s salad days were followed by arid stretches, by doubts, difficulties of all kinds, and these were painful for him, but no doubt necessary. Meanwhile, he was trying to understand his own conflicted nature. It is important to remember that the body fuels the mind. And that character controls both. The creative life of the mathematician is usually over by age forty. Perhaps the emotional problems the scholar is fleeing, by working in a world of total abstraction, no longer exert the same fearful pressures. Rilke needed his neuroses, he thought, and he refused, for that reason, to undergo psychoanalysis, although it was suggested to him.

Once one has become a mathematician, a physicist, a poet, then what one knows, what one feels and thinks, can be focused upon a particular problem. “For fifteen days,” Poincaré tells us, “I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions.” Despite his own denials, a sleepless night full of colliding ideas allowed him to establish the existence of such a class. Next, he wished to represent these new functions through the quotient of two series. This was a conscious choice. And the choice was made by an analogy with solutions achieved in other areas. Meanwhile, Poincaré had agreed to go by bus on a geologic excursion. Mathematical issues were far from his thoughts. “At the moment when I put my foot on the step [of the bus] the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.”

As in Rilke’s case, the ultimate solution to this complex problem was achieved in stages. Work. Blockage. Insight. Verification. Followed by the orderly development of the new idea.

Poincaré then turned his attention to what appeared to be quite a different set of problems in arithmetic, but he had a signal lack of success. Giving up in disgust, he took a few days off to visit the seaside. Then, for him, the Rilke-like moment arrived: “One morning, walking on the bluff, the idea came to me, with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness and immediate certainty, that the arithmetic transformations of indeterminate ternary quadratic forms were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.” Further verifications follow. That is to say: proofs. “Naturally I set myself to form all these functions. I made a systematic attack upon them and carried all the outworks, one after another. There was one however that still held out, whose fall would involve that of the whole place.” One more blockage. Now he has to leave his work to go through military service (Poincaré is no exception to the rule of youth). While he was walking down the street one seemingly ordinary day, “the solution of the difficulty which had stopped me suddenly appeared to me.” He had to delay writing down this solution for some time, but time was no longer a factor. Eventually, he did it with dispatch.

In each stage of Poincaré’s amazing discovery, there are the same factors: initial talent, life preparation, focus, failure, distraction, revelation. In Rilke’s case, we can be considerably more detailed in our description. And the delays are sometimes years rather than weeks or days. Not only is the inspirational moment preceded by a lifetime of practice, but its environmental conditions must be fully met—in effect, the gun must be loaded and cocked before the trigger is pulled. However, since
one is never sure what all these conditions are, they are realized by luck as much as plan.

Rilke has been reading Hölderlin again, and studying with admiration Goethe’s
Roman Elegies
, soaking his soul in the distich, the poetry of the flute, rather than that of the lyre. His own practice will be irregular and free, but the rhythm is nevertheless fundamentally there: a foot which always falls, the dactyl (
), and a pair of lines which does the same, dropping from six feet to five. Rilke’s
Elegies
will end when happiness falls. The human faculty the
Elegies
invoke is memory, since their subject is loss, but this gives them distance, makes them meditative. The problems the
Elegies
address are not removable. Their mood is one of quiet mourning, of sober lamentation, then, because they are concerned to sing a sorrow no longer immediate and sharp, but one full of conciliation, acceptance, and repose.

Rilke’s
Elegies
do not weep for Adonais, and nature is too indifferent to mankind’s plight to make mountains frown or the sky shed tears. The “I” of the
Duino Elegies
is the “I” we all are: not mankind en masse, but “we” one after the other. Although some of the poetic personae of the
Elegies
are present in “Lament,” written in Paris just before the fatal August of 1914—“heart,” “lament,” “tree,” “angels,” and not excluding the important condition of invisibility—the poem is about no one else than its author. It is a grim summing up, and hardly elegiac.

Who will you complain to, my heart? Your forsaken path

struggles on through the insensible mass of mankind.

All the more futile, perhaps, for maintaining its aim,

pushing on toward a future already lost.

Once before. You lamented? What was it for? A fallen unripe

berry of celebration. But now the entire tree is being broken,

by the storm it is shaken, my slowly grown tree of celebration.

Loveliest in my invisible

landscape, you that made me better known

to the also invisible angels.
²

For the fully fledged elegy we need a mountain at whose peak we shall look down upon the world and try to find our place in it, though we stand atiptop while we do. And a tutelary spirit of feminine gender will also be required to attend us while we philosophize. The German name for this sort of thing is
Bildung
, and perhaps the most famous example is Schiller’s “Der Spaziergang,” an elegy sometimes felt to initiate the genre. In the tenth of the
Duino Elegies
we shall get our tutelary spirit and our mountain, too, however the metaphysical bent of the
Elegies
involves a far more general point of view than
Bildung
does.

Nevertheless (and this is I think a real oddity), the
Elegies
, because they resemble a revelation, are so utterly identified with the moment of their initial onset that the Duino cliffs and the bora which is cleansing the battlements are a part of the poem, are where the voice is heard, are where we are when we read and hear them. Mouth them, actually, for these poems are the most oral I know; they are meant not only to be listened to as one listens to, say, Wallace Stevens, but they must be spoken—not merely by but for yourself, as if you were the one who wondered whether you had anyone you could call to, anything you could, in your condition, make use of. This demand—that the reader become the poem—is there, even in translation, in any decent version, for the voice-making
quality of these lines goes beyond their music. They are an utterance.

To sharpen my point: James Joyce’s various Anna Livia Plurabelles are certainly as musical as prose gets, literally lilting on all the time, and they, too, ask to be performed, as most great prose and all great poetry does. But we perform them in order to
hear
them. We perform the
Elegies
in order to
say
them. To make their words ours.

Nor does the wanderer bring down a handful of earth

from his high mountain slope to the valley (for earth, too, is mute),

but a word he has plucked from the climbing: the yellow and blue

gentian. Are we, perhaps,
here
just to utter: house,