Reading Rilke (22 page)

In short, an absolute intimacy is demanded. Then, when this is found to be impossible, the effort to love is redoubled. Love
that’s unrequited, love without any physical involvement, love which will last because it is almost a private unseen state of the soul, becomes the higher obligation. Everything is in flux, therefore we should embrace change. Why?—in order to remain. “Who speaks of victory? To endure is everything.”

And if what’s earthly no longer knows you,

say to the unmoving earth: I flow.

To the rushing water speak: I stay.
¹⁸

The death of a young woman, before her life has really begun, is awful, therefore we shall celebrate it; childhood is misery, so we shall call it wonderful, innocent and open. Heritage is status, so we shall deny our Czech past, refuse to be labeled a German, find that everything Austrian disgusts us, regret that our parents live on like monsters inside us, and, because we believe each man is a multitude—of ogres and urges going back to the primeval slime—we shall require, in its stead, to see Unity … Oneness: Maninkindness, if I may sound German. Using our carefully created higher awareness, we should seek the simple openness of the animal. Aloof from the mob, we nevertheless join it—to cancel the count. Hoping to merge with all things, celebrate distance. Practice makes perfect, but as “The Fifth Elegy” warns, perfection soon shows itself to be empty and sterile. And if we observe our own heart’s curtain lift to display a thoroughly bourgeois performance (as we do in the fourth), shall we boo and catcall?

Hey! I’m waiting. Even if the lights go out;

even if I’m told, “That’s all”; even if absence

drifts toward me like a gray draft from the stage;

even if none of my ancestors will sit silently by me anymore,

nor a woman, nor the boy with the squinting brown eyes:

I’ll stay in my seat. One can always watch.

Over and over again, Rilke takes away with one hand, and gives with another. What he takes away may have been a gift, but what he gives is always a task. Life is not a song, he says, so sing!

In sum: we live only once, and everything that fills this life, we shall have only once—once and no more. And what is this life but our awareness of ourselves and our awareness of the world? Alas, most of this consciousness of ours is narrowed, perverted, and wasted by the burdens of daily life. We can try to save ourselves through love, which turns out only too often to be an attempt to possess someone or something, to hold back the flux (love me forever!), but also to obstruct the loved one’s freedom. If the world awaits our seeing, if our duty is to give consciousness to things, that consciousness will disappear with bitter quickness, for we are the most fragile of all. So what is to be done? Leave that consciousness behind as a quality of our created things; deposit it in the forms and textures we give to objects. But our created things are mostly crushed and tossed away after use like daily newspapers or concert programs. We care only for power, and, having it, do what? Go to war for more, consume the fruits of the earth, make paper cups from which to drink our
Todlos
, “the dark bitter beer so sweet to the addicted, so long as they swallow it while chewing on fresh distractions.” Those few attainments which display the grace of great things, we must take into ourselves and save from an indifferent multitude. Because all our knowledge, even the gift of a pleasant life, comes to nothing if we know more, enjoy more, only to destroy more. “The Seventh Elegy” comes right out with it.

My love, the world exists nowhere but within us.

Withinwarding is everything. The outer world

dwindles, and day fades from day. Where once

a solid house was, soon some invented structure

perversely suggests itself, as at ease among ideas

as if it still stood in the brain.

The Present has amassed vast stores of power,

shapeless as the vibrant energy it has stolen from the earth.

It has forgotten temples. We must save in secret

such lavish expenditures of spirit.

Yes, even where one thing we served, knelt for, and

prayed to survives, it seeks to see itself invisible.

Many have ceased perceiving it, and so will miss

the chance to enlarge it, add pillars and statues, give it

grandeur, within.

These lines could be, and have been, understood as solipsistic, but that is a misreading. Rilke realizes the material world exists apart from him (and indifferently), and he knows that there are other modes of awareness, but it remains true that, for each of us, our consciousness is our only proof we live—we live in it—it is all we are. About this, I believe, Rilke was right. “Doing” that is not “improving” is pointless, and “improving” is illusory if it is not an end in itself.

The reader must retain a head clear enough to realize that Rilke’s inwarding of life depends entirely upon a detachment from it. It is not “living” life he asks for but its contemplation. “Living” paradoxically requires ignoring things, forgetting things, enshrining partiality, obeying interest, changing your situation, not simply observing it change; living is wanting; living is willful, heedless, fearful; living absorbs life; living feeds; living excretes; living is as brutal and indifferent as chewing teeth.

There is a much-quoted passage from a letter Rilke wrote during the early days of the First World War to the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe which I feel obliged to quote again. In a world in which Mammon and Moloch are the real gods worshiped, where are we to find consolation? Ironically, in the inherent capacities of mankind.

It is certain that the divinest consolation is contained in humanity itself—we would not be able to do much with the consolations of a god; only that our eye would have to be a trace more seeing, our ear more receptive, the taste of a fruit would have to penetrate us more completely, we would have to endure more odor, and in touching and being touched be more aware and less forgetful—: in order promptly to absorb out of our immediate experiences consolations that would be more convincing, more preponderant, more true than all the suffering that can ever shake us to our very depths.
¹⁹

“The Seventh Elegy” wonders whether we have anything to show the Angels, anything which will justify our existence, or is it all rape, plunder, murder, and thoughtless, pointless consumption? If we are all alone here, if we are going nowhere else but underground, if we shall never even enter a rose again, then what have we done?
what have we done!
to justify the life of man—our sojourn, our abiding here—for it’s not been our service that offers itself for accounting, but our wasted opportunities, our suicides …

There stands Death, a blue residue

in a cup without a saucer.

An odd spot for a cup:

balanced on the back of a hand.

One can clearly see along its glazed

curve a crack showing where the handle snapped.

Dusty. And
HOPE
on its side in washed-out letters.

The one who was to drink this drink

spelled it out at breakfast long ago.

What sort of specters are these, then,

who have to have a poison push them off?

Otherwise would they remain? Would they gnaw on

this food full of hindrance forever?

One must pull the harsh present

from them like a set of false teeth.

Only then they mumble. Mumble … umble …

umble.………………………………

O shooting star,

seen from a bridge once, a penetrating ray:

Never to forget you. Stay.
²⁰

Never to forget, either … our homicides, our patricides and matricides and fratricides, our infanticides, our genocides, and our incessant gnaw and natter, our ruin of the world—even to its outer edges.

But one tower was great, wasn’t it? O Angel, it was—

even compared to you? Chartres was great—

and music rose even higher, flew far beyond us.

Even a woman in love, alone at night by her window …

didn’t she reach your knee?
²¹

Congratulations are in order. Reaching an Angel’s knee is a stretch.

ERECT NO MEMORIAL STONE

Singing is Being. This is what Rilke knew to the inner marrow of his bones. The paper, the ink, the fingers, moving as in Fitzgerald’s sappy Persian poem. Having writ, they move on to other writing. Knowing that his words cannot be canceled. Because, I believe, Rilke felt himself to be a failure and a fraud except when he was writing. Then he was the writer who he wished was the man he wasn’t. Then he was the lover he hoped could—as we say now—commit. Rilke understood his shortcomings so thoroughly that his knowing was a shortcoming. But on the page, in a poem, the contradictions which were his chief affliction could be reconciled. There he could answer every question with “I praise.”

Tell us, poet, what do you do?

—I praise.

But the dreadful, the monstrous, and their ways,

how do you stand them, suffer it all?

—I praise.

But the anonymous, featureless days,

how, poet, can you ask them to call?

—I praise.

What chance have you, in so many forms,

under each mask, to speak a true phrase?

—I praise.

And that the calm as well as the crazed

know you like star and storm?

—because I praise.
¹

Those dashes read to me like replacements for “nevertheless.” Through gritted teeth. Nor, of course, did this poet always “praise.” Tell us, poet, what do you do? —I lament. The word
klage
clangs to mark each passing hour. The poet laments the life he must lead. He laments the women he writes his love letters to, whose friendship he has formed, whose hearts he has forced to harden. He laments the death they bring … in a poem whose first stanza also dwindles.

“Man must die because he has known them.” Die

of their smile’s evanescent bloom. Die

of their delicate hands. Die

of women.

The word comes to his rescue. As it has in the past. As it will again. Even in a world where the word is imperiled. Why is it breathtaking to be here? How, in a life of suffering, does one painless moment redeem the rest? Are all the disappointments and duties of love worth the exuberant feeling of both power and need in lust’s overswollen opinion of itself?

Let the young man sing of these bringers of death

while they soar through the space of his heart.

From his swelling breast

let him sing to them:

the unattainable! Ah, how far off they are.

Over the peaks

of his passion they glide and pour

a sweetly transfigured darkness

into the forsaken valley of his arms.

The wake of their rising ruffles the leaves of his body.

His streams run sparkling into the distance.

But the grown man

shivers and is silent. He who,

pathless, has wandered through the night

in the rocky ridges of his feelings:

is silent.

As the sailor is silent, the old-timer,

and the terrors he has endured

rattle around inside him as though in shaken cages.
²

Shivering and silence. First it is the layers of the young lover’s body which women ruffle; then it is the shivering of the mature man, who remembers his confused wanderings; finally it is the old sailor, deep in memory too, his terrors trapped inside him. In the familiar interior landscape of “the mountains of the heart,” with its forsaken valleys and last hamlets of feeling, the poet falls silent, because once he has experienced the terrors of love, he will no longer sing of women; they shall not have a letter of his praise.