Reading Rilke (23 page)

Orpheus did not fare well at their hands—hands which tore him to pieces. So unless the women are both young and dead, the poet will not praise—he’ll blame.

Why is the description of women as death-bringers acceptable here? Is it because women are the bearers of life, and therefore make death possible? Is it because of the little death
we are alleged to suffer in sexual transports? Is it because women, domestically inclined, hold men back from their greatest triumphs, tethering them to the earth and to day-to-day existence? Or is it because, in front of them and the lure of their flesh, men are disarmed, confronted with their own infantile yearnings? the poet at the breast? Or is it because, in failing to perform, some men realize a divided attraction? If you mistrust mothers, must you mistrust all the others?

Women are carriers of Christianity. Enslaved by the system, women represent the system. Women, barred from all the business of the world, have learned how to manipulate the men who manipulate it. These thoughts could be from a speech Nietzsche might have made.

Just ahead of the composition, in 1915, of “The Fourth Elegy,” Rilke wrote seven so-called phallic poems. Their inadequacies are sufficient to form a parade. The vagina is variously a garden, a grove, a heaven, a soft night into which the poet will fire his “womb-dazzling rocket,” and it is a tomb, too, in which his cock, now a stiff corpse, will be buried. Of course it will rise again, this stiff corpse, but it will be death rising, death alive at last, to die once more. “Already your unwitting command raises the column in my genital-woodsite,” John Mood was apparently not embarrassed to write when he translated these really wretched pieces for his collection
Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties
.
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The penis is a tree, a column, a tower, a rocket, a stiff corpse, a rising god, a Hermean pillar. The poet here is much the forthrightly demanding male, but sometimes, when he “grasps suddenly the full bud of his vitality,” “the gentle garden within her shrinks.” As the reader does.

Irony might have saved these poems, but Rilke is rarely ironic. A dash of skepticism, a dollop of sarcasm, could have
helped refresh a few of these euphemistic clichés; however—again—Rilke can be angry or contemptuous, but not sarcastic.

If poetry permits the poet to express his feelings and formulate his problems, it can also, quite literally, paper over them: it can toss conflicts into the den of metaphor, where, impossibly, Daniel and the lions mate to produce well-adjusted cubkids.

In Rilke I think women are condemned because women can become mothers. In a Freudian vein (and Rilke learned his Freud from Lou Salomé), Rilke believes the womb to be an ideal place and the world we enter, when we are expelled from it, a foreign and unfriendly realm. In the extraordinary “Eighth Elegy,” Rilke produces another one of his continua.

And yet upon the warm and watchful animal

there lies the weight and care of an immense sadness.

Because what often overwhelms us clings to him, too:

the remembrance that what we reach for now,

we were once tenderly tethered to. Here all is

disparity and distance, there it was heartbeat and breath.

After the first home, our second seems uncertain and cold.

Oh the bliss of those so small they can remain in the place where they came to be;

Oh the pleasure the midge must know, who will dance

even its wedding dance in the same world in which it was conceived.

Observe the less certain bird, from birth

almost aware of both, like one of those Etruscan

souls who has flown the corpse which was its nest,

yet where its hovering figure still forms the coffin’s lid.

How confused the bat must be: to come from a womb,

yet be called upon to fly. As if in flight from itself,

it zigzags through the air like a crack through a cup.

In the same way its wing, at dusk, crazes the porcelain surface of the sky.

At the high end of this continuum of self-consciousness is the interior state of Rilke’s Angels, creatures who have completed their inwarding and know no change, since in them every change remains. At the low but equally favored end is the insect, who is born, who lives, who dies, in the same world, and knows no wrench. Somewhat worse off is the bird, because, breaking from the egg, which itself needs a nest, it senses, even while it flies, the ultimate difference. Then, in what Theodore Ziolkowski calls Rilke’s “weird zoology,”
⁴
the bat appears, confused because it comes from a womb but is called upon to fly. There are further stages developed in the
Elegies
which Professor Ziolkowski expertly lists: young children, whose self-consciousness is not yet fully realized, and unrequited lovers, whose tender attention to the world has not been narrowed by a beckoning promise, as well as heroes, never sufficiently dipped, and consequently destined to die young.

The poet is just another middle-ager, as alienated, as blinded by interpretation and theory, as every other person—as self-interested and preoccupied as a tradesman—until he takes hold of his self and transforms it into the seer I’ve spoken of before. Then he becomes (not unlike Our Savior) a mediator between the world which is in constant flight from itself and the glorious, complete, and indifferent Angels.

If we could tell Angels anything, what would we tell them? Is there anything they don’t know?

Praise this world to the Angel, not the unutterable one.

You cannot impress him with the splendor you’ve felt,

for in the heaven of heavens, where he feels so sublimely,

you’re but a beginner. Show him some simple thing, then,

that’s been changed in its passage through human ages

till it lives in our hands, in the shine of our eyes, as a part

of ourselves. Tell him
things
. He’ll stand more astonished,

as you stood by the roper in Rome or the potter in Egypt.

Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours;

how even Sorrow, in the midst of lamenting, is determined to alter,

to serve as a thing, or fade in a thing—to escape

into beauty beyond violining.

A billfold. Show the Angel a billfold that has ridden in a rear pocket on someone’s rump, the creases it now contains, where money and credit cards once slid in and out, as oiled and stained as a fielder’s glove; or a boy’s pocketknife, worn short and thin from all those days he’s whittled away; or a mohair sofa, shiny where the man wearing that billfold sat, or the cat curled, or love was made.

Could there be a continuum of continua? In any case, here is the beginning of another. At the low end of the scale (and they have no redeeming feature) are the glassine drinking cup, swatches of Kleenex, maybe Band-Aids, objects whose every intention is to disappear into their function; and furthermore, while functioning, to resist becoming in any sense prized or worthy of attention or reuse. Not interesting to any Angel. Next are useful things, such as wrenches, purses, flagons, and so on; which sustain nicks and soils and cracks, stand idle, rust, become as brittle as old bones, break, film with dust; which stay around until they start to show an “expression,” and therefore begin to bear, like a stretch of sand, the footprint of a consciousness. Next we arrive at objects created to caress and fondle; to
help out our memories: money, of course, silks and satins, dance cards, pillows, a skull, relics and souvenirs, but dolls mostly—the German word is
Puppen
. Things we animate with our feelings. Objects of sentiment, mirrors for our moods. Finally, we reach those items which express an awareness, though they be practical implements, such as newspapers and journals, medical illustrations, cartoons, band music, and those thingamajigs, in addition, which are made merely for amusement: the performances of marionette theaters, for example—puppets, enlivened by the puppeteer’s actions, who impose their purely behavioristic life upon their purely passive audience. At last, there are works of art, indicative of the presence of a totally individuated yet universal consciousness concerned solely with ends, and achieving that status for themselves.

In what was to become a notorious essay on dolls that Rilke wrote in the pivotal year of 1914, he differentiates between the doll proper and the marionette (the word in German bears both meanings, as well as a fertile third, “pupa”). The doll’s face is fixed, its motion limited, its gaze aimed always in the same way—it is a face of one hardened feeling—nor does it return the hugs or kisses it is given, nor is there resentment if it’s tossed. When it functions properly as a doll, it becomes the receptacle for a girlchild’s affection, and a player in her daydreams, accompanying her mistress on her trips into imaginary realms. The doll is likely to be treated like a child by the child regardless of the nominally real figure which it represents. The feelings which, like a magnet, the doll attracts hang around it like ghosts, like spiritual frocks, long after it has been set down for the last time and left to live what’s left of its leftover life.

The puppet fascinated Rilke. The marionette—stuffed, stringed, hand-worked, mute—is nothing but external appearance, nothing but toddle and mime, a thing among things. The puppet is neither easy nor anxious about being a puppet. The
puppet is the hinge between two worlds: that of the puppet master, in whose hands the puppet literally is, and that of the audience it faces; for if the puppet “comes to life” only in performance, it never sees the strings, the moving fingers, or its master’s omnipresent eyes. The puppet’s success depends upon the illusion of life it generates in its audience. The puppet, with materials as dead as any bolt of cloth or cleverly shaped papier-mâché, and usually shrunken as well, down to dollsize, must mimic the manners (however grotesquely burlesqued) of the audience that watches. They also dance and sing and swing their swords, but they do so because they are alive. The thespian, the hypocrite, the liar, is a feigner, too, but no clever-fingered master makes him act the way he does, or pretend that what is not … is, or deny or alter the truth; no, his “acting” is sincere, even if what it pretends to show is not; his desire to deceive comes from inside, it is as meant as cement. One self, removed and hidden, has created another, the self which the world is allowed to see—the idol, the star, the fairy prince.

In a remarkable poem written in Paris in 1907 which its author chose to cut from his first collection of
New Poems
, Rilke displays not only his ambivalence about puppets, but his disapproval of his own psychological makeup. It was an excision for which he never gave a reason, but one which W. L. Graff examines expertly in his
Rainer Maria Rilke: Creative Anguish of a Modern Poet
.
⁵
It is Graff’s opinion that Rilke omitted the poem because it was too revelatory. “Marionettentheater” promptly fell through criticism’s cracks, although there was enough evidence elsewhere (in “The Fourth Elegy,” in the autobiographical fiction,
Ewald Tragy
, and in the essay on dolls) to suggest the same secret: that Rainer Maria Rilke was Napoleonic, not seraphic.

The poem was occasioned, as Graff points out, by a penitential
parade that Rilke witnessed in Furnes, West Flanders. It is a Catholic custom on certain sacred days to carry large statues of saints through the streets (clumsily, in my experience), often in order to reach a pilgrim-like destination, where they’ll be ritually placed in order to be properly revered before being returned to base. A robe-end will be made available to be fondled, or kisses will be placed on the back of an indifferently extended plaster hand. Patient queues of the faithful, like the lines at Lenin’s tomb, ratchet forward toward the kissing spot, which is wiped after each offering, as loo ladies do, though here by solemn children wielding a rag. But Rilke saw, he thought, two sets of puppets, the statues being carried, and the carriers who were being conned by their faith and manipulated by their priests. This scene became the source of an allegorical poem that refers to more personal matters than he at first realized.

I’ve made my translation a little freer than elsewhere, partly for clarity’s sake, and partly because the poem rhymes (though with reason) relentlessly.

Behind bars, like beasts,

they pile up their behavior;

their voice is not theirs,

though they swing

their arms and swords

with great variety

as if catching an outcry

to copy while on the wing.

Their limbs have no joints,

and hang awkwardly

in their rig of wires,

which doesn’t prevent them

from killing or dancing,