Reading Rilke (14 page)

bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window—

at most: column, tower … but to
utter
them, remember,

to speak in a way which the named never dreamed

they could be.
³

And to speak in a way we never dreamed we could speak.

We must add, then, to such mental preparation for the final inundation as the reading of Goethe and Hölderlin, Rilke’s installation in the tower of Muzot. Not a castle, though the Germans will call a shoebox a
Schloss
, but a quadrangular tower at least, on a mountain slope, lifting its crenellated roof up into the trees, and boasting a view across a ravine and down toward a tiny town. It contained a lot of dinky rooms, three to each of its three stories, their windows set higgledy-piggledy across Muzot’s face; yet it also possessed a tower … a tower of which Yeats would have been proud. Covered for many months by Swiss snow, at a place not easily reached, in a climate which forced solitude even on its atmosphere, engulfed by a
landscape rich and various, in winter surrounded by white-fingered fruit trees, Muzot provided a security unusual for Rilke, and at long last.

The season is also suitable. January and February are the poet’s best months. The first two
Elegies
entered him at Duino in January, but they were also preceded by the poems which constituted
The Life of Mary
, extending that exclamatory time. To be followed then by anxiety and sadness. Because Desperation is another preparation for inspiration, and Rilke was to have years of desperation: initially in Paris, where he suffered it while in the tolls of his
Notebooks
, and again in the tens of towns and in the scores of borrowed rooms where he dwelled during the decade sombered by the war, a decade which began shortly after the
Elegies
announced themselves.

The Duino outburst had made Rilke at first fancy he was like St. John receiving the
Apocalypse
on Patmos (remembering Hölderlin’s majestic poem as he would a decade later), only to be cast back into a disappointing silence as he was by the grim castle most times in any case. “Near,” Hölderlin begins, “Near and hard to grasp is God.” The revelation had been too partial, perhaps premature, and even when Rilke ran naked along the seashore, his face in the wind as it had been on the parapet, the
Elegies
did not reannounce themselves. Rilke hid in the castle’s large but undisciplined library and considered exploring its rich collection of Venetian material in order, perhaps, to write a biography of Admiral Carlo Zeno, whose great age (eighty-four at his death in 1418) invited a long look back (by a poet who was thirty-eight) … yet at what?… if not at growing old and becoming faintly quaint. His letters multiplied and lengthened, as did his desperations. When you have no daily work to go to, to stabilize your life and make it useful, especially when you are like a ghost caught in daylight; when there is no protective routine with its reassuring tedium to lull the nerves, and no one
about to get on them either; then you go to hell instead; and Rilke found himself in rooms full of his previous pacing, everywhere in front of him volumes he’d pulled from their shelves but part way; and in some corner that he had neglected, unresolved problems were seated like judges in robes; what to do about his divorce from Clara; how to escape his enigmatic lovelife—in Rome entangled with Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin (“Sidie,” a shortening dearly needed), while in Venice beset by Mimi Romanelli—and consequently how to cleanse his consciousness of guilt and distraction; next how to avoid sliding further into the generous hands of the Princess Marie or her closing social circle; moreover, what to do or where to go in order to escape those migraines that troubled one end of him and the hemorrhoids that pained the other; because, if the sirocco and the bora were insufferable at Duino, there was the foehn to make Munich miserable, not to omit most of Switzerland, and his neuroses to ruin the rest.

Rilke’s teeth ached. He had little strength. He woke with stiff joints. According to Freedman, he felt as if lemon juice had been squeezed into his blood. Still, at the suggestion of the princess, he tried to put her library in order, and stood staring at its stacks instead. The princess, discerning his difficulties—and after a period when he ricocheted between Duino and Venice, driven there by ill-formed plans, drawn back by hesitations—generously offered him her
mezzanino
in the Palazzo Valmarana, where Rilke might enjoy its luxurious appointments, its wide views of the Grand Canal, while practicing much-needed economies. Rilke wanted to be Spartan, and refused. Finally, out of sorts and out of sous, he accepted. His head was soon clogged with society like a sinus.

Rilke was as restless as one who hoped to leave his pain in the parlor when he enters the dining room, and his worries in
the bedroom when he comes down for breakfast, only to find them spread over his toast and clouding every view. This condition was common, and appeared to announce another flight, yet before Rilke could flee with his Muse to Spain, he fell into a friendship with Eleonora Duse, whose theatricalized life absorbed Rilke’s attention like a sponge, and allowed him no time to moon about the state of his soul. The Duse, aging, off the boards and out of limelight, was struggling to keep an actor and hopeful impresario, Alexander Moissi, as well as a young playwright, Lina Poletti, in her weakening orbit. Rilke perceived the relation between the young woman and the Duse as one which resembled his own unhappy service with Rodin, and the actress’s plight a forecast for the poet’s aging self. Caught in her storms, he rocked from side to side, only, ultimately, to be marooned. The triangle dissolved, and Rilke fell back into his own.

After a series of séances arranged by the princess (too embarrassing to sane minds to be described here), Rilke’s spirit was beckoned to Spain by the spirit of the
planchette
. Nonetheless, the country the poet sought existed only in the paintings of El Greco, which contained angels worthy of the
Elegies
, nor did Toledo, seen through such a framer as the painter, disappoint. One night, standing on one of the bridges that spans the Tagus, Rilke watched a meteor sear the dark sky, and retained its image for several poems. Were the
Elegies
to arrive in a brightness like the meteor’s, only to burn up in the blaze of their own being?

“The Spanish Trilogy,” three of the finest poems he managed during the Great Ten-Year Drought (which wasn’t so dry after all), were written in the following January at Ronda. The first of these poems is particularly extraordinary because, for all of Rilke’s orality, he rarely imposes on a poem a purely
rhetorical order. He will often adopt a dramatic form, and speak from a particular point of view—a beggar’s, a blind man’s, and so on—but he is only occasionally the orator. This prayer—for that is what it is, a desperate prayer—we listen to, but we cannot, could not, utter. Prayers are too personal. We overhear.

From this cloud—look!—which has so stormily hid

the star that just now shone there—(and from me),

from this dark huddle of hills which holds the night,

the night-winds, for a while—(and from me),

from this valley’s stream which reshines

the tumult of the night sky—(and from me);

from me, and all of this, to make, Lord,

some single thing: from me and the feeling

with which the herd, penned in its stalls,

accepts with a long slow sigh

the darkening departure of the world—

from me and every glimmer of light

amid the dimness of many houses, Lord:

to make one thing; from strangers,

since I know not one, Lord, and from me, from me,

to make
one
thing; from the sleepers,

those bereft old men in the hospice

who, with importance, cough in bed,

from children sleepdrunk on the breasts of strangers,

from so much that’s uncertain, and always from me,

from me alone and all I don’t know,

to make the Thing, Lord Lord Lord, the Thing

that, both earthly and cosmic like a meteor,

takes for its heaviness only the sum of its flight,

to weigh nothing but arrival.
⁴

With the artistic and physical geography in place, with his stand-up desk and a tiled stove delivered, with housewarming Christmas gifts of chandeliers and lamps from friends, Rilke can write a few letters to his lady loves (it is difficult not to become caustic)—to Clara, to his daughter, Ruth, to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, to Lou Salomé, Baladine Klossowska—yes, to his new love called Merline now, or Mouky in private—and almost by the way, to Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, informing her of his daughter’s forthcoming marriage, inasmuch as she and Gertrud Knoop’s daughter Wera had once been friends. Wera, who had hoped to become a dancer, had fallen ill of leukemia and died at 19, two years before. Now Rilke chooses to console the mother, and an exchange of letters ensues, leading to another gift: the diary Wera had kept during her painful months of dying. A dying which her diary will, for Rilke, ironically forecast.

If things constantly come into being only to pass away, patterns nevertheless persist and appear and reappear with remarkable frequency and stubbornness. In 1913, Rilke acknowledges the receipt of a copy of Paula Becker’s diary, sent to him by her brother, informing him of what his “Requiem” for her had already said: that this was the death which had shaken him more than any other.

The death of a beautiful young woman—it was Edgar Allan Poe’s opinion—was the best choice for a great poem’s appropriately poetic subject. Certainly such a death—its tragic yet uplifting meaning—had obsessed Rilke during nearly his entire life. Not only did it seem that a girl had to die to make room in the world for him, but it also seemed that this otherwise sad prematurity preserved the child’s possibilities along with her innocence. Victimized by death, she could not be victimized by life. The stoicism which
made up a great part of Rilke’s moral character also glorified, for him, acts of relinquishment and ascetism. Lovers who loved and lost but who continued more devotedly to love, like Gaspara Stampa (an Italian noblewoman who composed two hundred sonnets to commemorate her unhappy passion) were his sort of saint. These were the sentimental reasons. Rilke’s jilted ladies (and all were left in some sort of lurch) ought to love him the more for his resistance. And they did.

Baladine Klossowska, the painter with whom the poet had conjugated at Muzot for a few weeks before winter’s onset, had thumbtacked a postcard reproduction of Orpheus, sitting under a tree surrounded by tamely attentive wild animals, above Rilke’s writing desk. Furthermore, Rilke had just completed his translation of Michelangelo’s sonnets and was thinking about experimenting with the form. All the requisite elements were assembled. On February 2, he began a few of them, dedicated to the memory of a young woman he had scarcely known (just as earlier he had written a requiem for a poet, Count Wolf von Kalckreuth, whom he had never met). Wera had become a musician by force of fatal circumstance, so that the choice of Orpheus was certainly appropriate. As if he were hearing another voice, there, suddenly, the words were:
Da stieg ein Baum
. And they weighed nothing but arrival. The storm had begun.

“What is the cause that, among the thousand products of our unconscious activity, some are called to pass the threshold, while others remain below?” Poincaré asks. His answer is significant, I think, and sound.

More generally the privileged unconscious phenomena, those susceptible of becoming conscious, are those which,
directly or indirectly, affect most profoundly our emotional sensibility.

We may associate mathematical work solely with the intellect,

but this would be to forget the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true esthetic feeling that all real mathematicians know.

Of course we cannot ignore the differences between mathematical discoveries and poetic connections, because mathematical problems are well-defined and specific (for the most part), whereas poems can seem to pop up like toast from an empty toaster. Moreover, the mathematician is uncovering laws which are already there; they exist in the realm of number, where the pioneer, like a verdant valley, finds them. Making and finding are fundamentally different. Nor should we make light of the gap between the preestablished and formal character of Rilke’s recently practiced sonnet, and the loosely shaped and individual nature of his
Elegies
. Yet in Rilke’s case these differences are diminished. In a sense the
Elegies
were there waiting, too. Whole pieces were present, and fragments suggested the true shapes of the other jars. Rilke had written them over and over already. There is scarcely a line, an image, an idea, that we cannot find, slightly rearranged, in earlier work.

Better than almost any other poet, Rilke understood that relations between elements, not the elements themselves, were at the heart of any art, and that these relations made up its “space,” and were the source of a poem’s “geometry.” “What are the mathematic entities to which we attribute this character of beauty and elegance, and which are capable of developing in us
a sort of esthetic emotion?” Poincaré asks. And answers: “They are those whose elements are harmoniously disposed so that the mind without effort can embrace their totality while realizing the details.”
⁵