Reading Rilke Page 4

  Love and death: a Germanic theme indeed. Just as going and coming are one, just as beginnings and endings overlap, so are loving and ceasing to love, living and ceasing to live, reciprocals, and as we mature our death matures, too, the way one wave rolls up the beach while another wave recedes, and each roar of the surf is succeeded by a quiet hiss.

  6

  O Lord, grant each of us our own ripe death,

  the dying fall that goes through life—

  its love, significance, and need—like breath.

  7

  For we are nothing but the bark and burrs.

  The great death we bear within ourselves

  is the fruit which every growing serves.

  For its sake young girls grow their charms,

  as if a tree-like music issued from a lyre;

  for its sake small boys long to shoulder arms,

  and women lean on them to listen and inspire

  these not yet men to share their heart’s alarms.

  For its sake all that’s seen is seen sustained

  by change itself, as if the frozen were the fire;

  and the work of every artisan maintained

  this myth and made a world out of this fruit,

  brought frost to it, wind, sunlight, rain.

  And into it life’s warmth has followed suit,

  heart’s heat absorbed, the fever of the brain:

  Yet when the angels swoop to pick us clean,

  they shall find that all our fruits are green.12

  Rilke proclaimed the poet’s saintly need to accept reality in all its aspects, meanwhile welcoming only those parts of the world for which he could compose an ennobling description. He was venomous about organized religion, yet there are more Virgin Marys, saints, and angels in his work than in many cathedrals. And he hid inside The Poet he eventually became, both secure there and scared, empty and fulfilled; the inspired author of the Duino Elegies, sensitive, insightful, gifted nearly beyond compare; a man with many devoted and distant friends, many extraordinary though frequently fatuous enthusiasms, but still a lonely unloving homeless boy as well, with fears words couldn’t wave away, enjoying a self-pity there were rarely buckets enough to contain; yet with a persistence in the pursuit of his goals, a courage, which overcame weakness and worry and made them into poems … no … into lyrics that love, however pure or passionate or sacrificial, could never have achieved by itself … lines only frailty, terror, emotional duplicity even, could accomplish—the consequence of an honesty bitter about the weaknesses from which it took its strength.

  When he, whose profession was Waiting, stayed in strange towns, the hotel’s

  bemused and preoccupied bedroom

  morosely contained him, and in the avoided mirror

  the room presided again,

  and, later, in the tormenting bed,

  yet again—

  where this adjudicating air,

  in a manner beyond understanding,

  passed judgment upon his heart—whose beating could barely be felt

  through its painful burial in his body—

  and pronounced this hardly felt heart

  to be lacking in love.13

  Rilke’s life, Rilke’s poetry, Rilke’s alleged ideas, have exerted an amazing attraction for many minds. It’s not been just the highborn women who have sewed a skirt about him, or written him loving letters, or offered him castle space, eager ears, and ceaseless devotion; who came to him as though they were soup-less and he a kitchen. Biographers have lined up to check out the contents of his life; studies have multiplied as if they had been introduced into a scholar-empty Australia; and dozens of translators have blunted their skills against his obdurate, complex, and compacted poems, poems displaying an orator’s theatrical power, while remaining as suited to a chamber and its music as a harpsichord: made of plucked tough sounds, yet as rapid and light and fragile as fountain water.

  Rilke was, like most men and women, many men … and women. How to describe this crude and jostling crowd of parvenus and office seekers without becoming fascinated or especially repelled by one or other of them, turning into a sycophant or hanging judge, as Rilke’s spiritual mumbo jumbo charms, or his presumably snobby politics jars? He is passion’s spokesman. He’s a cold and calculating egotist, covering his selfishness with the royal robes of art. He’s a poseur, a courtier, a migrant, a loner. He hates the United States for reactionary reasons: because he hates machines and commerce, and equality too. He is charming and sensitive and given to shows of concern that melt the heart. His soul is a knot of childhood resentments. He is a trifler. He is too continuously serious—he thinks of himself as a creature of myth. He has all the moth-eaten arrogance of the self-taught, and sports a learning, both quirky and full of holes, which he is as proud of as a pup just trained to paper. Put on airs? An Eskimo has not so many layers of fuss and show. A priest of the poet’s art, he takes the European lyric to new levels of achievement—forming, with Valéry and Yeats perhaps, a true triune god—and creates the texts of a worthy religion at last, one which we may wholeheartedly admire, in part because we are not required to believe in it or pay it tithes.

  Doctor Serafico, the princess von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe called him. More appropriately, Doctor Dodge … Doctor Ricochet … as we follow this summary full of repetitions of repetition:

  In Linz, it is Olga, in Prague, it is Vally who helps him publish; then Rilke meets Lou, his lover/mother, in Munich, follows her to Berlin, accompanies her to Danzig, St. Petersburg, and back to Berlin again; he vacations in Viareggio, where he meets Elena; enjoys the company of Paula and Clara at Worpswede; marries Clara when bounced by Lou, although he does so against Lou’s good advice, and rolls to Westerwede, where there is a charming little cottage soon too full of child cries and other obnoxious duties; consequently he’s shortly off to Paris, where Rodin (and not a woman) is the lure, but it is no fun being poor in Paris, even if the parks are pretty; so with Clara (who has parked the kid with her parents), Rilke escapes to Rome, then volleys north to visit Ellen Key in Scandinavia, where he’s handsomely taken care of by her friends, until it is time to return to Bremen, Göttingen (one of Lou Salomé’s haunts), and Berlin again; but not for long, because it’s Rilke’s luck to enjoy a few more elegant estates—the Countess von Schwerin’s, the Baron von der Heydt’s, the beginning of a pleasant habit—before trudging back to Paris and a crankier Rodin.

  Such summations are forms of exaggeration, yet so are maps and travel tables and those figures in the carpet.

  It is a life of packing and unpacking, of smiling at new friends, looking out of different windows, sitting in trains, trying to write at odd and irregular hours, signing books and behaving like a literary lion, having ideas, getting used to strange dark halls, guest beds, always cadging and scrounging, eating poorly, keeping your pants pressed, and most of all, falling ill, the flu a favorite, sneezing into a pillow, dozing while wrapped up in a chair: life time which gets little report, for what is there to say about a sore throat or a coughing fit? the fumble to find a chamber pot beneath strangely squeaking springs? a scheme to put one’s ear out of range of the sleep-inducing bore who’s been seated at your left?

  It is a life of loneliness, of brooding, self-absorption, moods the world seems to mirror, because all the hours most of us spend making a living in office or schoolroom or farm or factory, Rilke has on his hands. Hence all those letters, of course, a prodigious output of prose, prose which rehearsed his life so it might play as a poem.

  The leaves are falling, falling from far away,

  as though a distant garden died above us;

  they fall, fall with denial in their wave.

  And through the night the hard earth falls

  farther than the stars in solitude.

  We all are falling. Here, this hand falls.

  And see—there goes another. It’s in us all.

  And yet there’s One whose gently holding hands

  let this
falling fall and never land.14

  Later in that same September of 1902, he feels autumn on him once again.

  Lord, it is time. The summer was too long.

  Lay your shadow on the sundials now,

  and through the meadows let the winds throng.

  Ask the last fruits to ripen on the vine;

  give them further two more summer days

  to bring about perfection and to raise

  the final sweetness in the heavy wine.

  Whoever has no house now will establish none,

  whoever lives alone now will live on long alone,

  will waken, read, and write long letters,

  wander up and down the barren paths

  the parks expose when leaves are blown.15

  It is a life of taking in: landscapes and atmospheres, both rundown rooms and lush islands, portrait galleries in this Schloss and that lodge, books by forgotten Scandinavians, but sometimes by equals like Valéry, Flaubert, or Proust, paintings by Cézanne, sculpture by Rodin: training his eye not to flinch, to see the thing seen and not to be the wadded ball of feeling his young heart flung at things; to absorb sensation as if it were food, and live on its sustenance, even in hibernation. Regarde! The result of his labor is to be found in the merciless exactness of Malte Laurids Brigge: “At last I am learning to see.”

  Most important, Rilke’s life is the life of a great writer, a poet who trained on prose, who made his weaknesses into warriors. It is therefore a life which is built of those great moments when, at white heat, he creates whole populations of poems and stories: the entire Book of Monkish Life from September 20 to October 14 in 1899, followed by The Stories of God from November 10 to 21; then thirty poems of The Book of Pilgrimage from September 18 to 25 in 1901, the thirty-four poems of The Book of Hours from April 13 to 20 in 1903, the stanzas which make up The Life of Mary between January 15 and 22 of 1912, the sudden announcement in Duino of the Elegies on the same month’s 21st, or, of course, the greatest inspirational storm, perhaps, in poetry’s history, the Elegies’ surprising completion in Muzot when, as if a tap had been left running, a sequence of sonnets he would dedicate to Orpheus appeared in the space of three days, from February 2 to 5 in 1922, priming the pump, as it were, to draw forth “The Sixth Elegy,” compose the “Seventh,” then the “Eighth” and “Ninth,” as his pen entered the second week of that sacred month, with the main body of the “Tenth” to arrive on the 11th like a flourish of trumpets. The cycle is not complete just yet. A “Fifth Elegy” is replaced by another on the 14th. The hinge of the set is the last one written, perhaps the most bitter elegy of all, a bitterness which sounds in the final notes of his triumph.

  These explosions of poetry were regularly accompanied by prose—such was the pattern of the past—and it was no different this time: Rilke writes The Young Workman’s Letter, summing up his attitudes toward art, Christianity, and sexuality, in his most important prose piece since The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. As if he is hitched to a runaway, the second section of the Sonnets to Orpheus rushes into being in eight more February days. There are now fifty-five of these dense yet crystalline poems. And Rilke still has the energy to write numerous triumphant letters. What had been wrung from him was more than wine.

  It caps a life, and Rilke feels, in a way, that he has been concluded like a symphony. Yet, as Edward Snow points out in Uncollected Poems, Rainer Maria Rilke,16 his alleged dry spells, his troughs, are dotted, as a dry creek by nuggets, with remarkable poems (as occasional as lit matches in a crowd) which Rilke simply does not bother to collect, his focus elsewhere, or his health a painful preoccupation.

  Raum. If there were one word it would be Raum. The space of things. The space of outer space. The space of night which comes through porous windows to feed on our faces. The mystical carpet where lovers wrestle. The womb of the mother. Weltraum. Not just the room in which the furniture of the world rests, but the space of the things themselves. The space made by Being’s breathing. Then Innerweltraum. (The German language, the German spirit, can and must compound.) Not just the space we call consciousness, but the space where we retire in order to avoid a feeling, the touch of a lover, the plea of a friend, the threat of intimacy. Distance. Darkness dotted by stars. These spaces are always palpable, as though space were smoke, or the mountains of the heart where the last hamlet of feeling may be discerned. The various distances of death. Time itself is a spaceline. For when we are dead we journey on through what we once believed was past. Cathedral spaces. The spaces made by music. Innerweltraum. The slopes shaped by the word in the countrysides of poetry.

  Music: breathing of statues. Possibly:

  stillness in pictures. Speech where speech

  ends. Time upright and poised

  upon the coastline of our passions.

  Feelings for whom? You are the transformation

  of all feeling into—what?… audible landscape.

  You stranger: music. Heart’s space

  that’s outgrown us. Innermost us

  which it’s scaled, surmounted, gone beyond

  into holiest absence:

  where what’s within surrounds us

  the way the most skillful horizon does,

  or the other side of the air,

  pure,

  immense,

  no longer lived in.17

  Similarly, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge are not to be moved through like so many passing minutes. Isn’t any book of hours, because it is a book, a thing? and if it is a thing, it is a space—two spaces, really, the space it makes and the space it’s in—and if it is a space, it exists all at once, not bit by bit or leaf by leaf or line by line. The scenes in the novel which fasten the two notebooks together depict the famous unicorn tapestries in Paris’ Cluny Museum. And the whole of Malte is built, is painted, is woven, like those calm and gracious images, symbols for each of the senses. They are there all at once, traveled over by the eye, made of threads, but they are not thin, lengthy, or line-like like threads, these flowered places where solemn creatures hover like symbols hung about a hidden neck.

  Every line which Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in early life is there in later life: an Offering to the Lares and the Sonnets to Orpheus may stand beside one another like two parked bikes, and I in fact did read the so-called later poems before I read their many predecessors. So the poet’s development is drawn now on a lifemap held flat on a tabletop. I may, if I wish, travel back or go forth or leap ahead—into books in which Rilke is only subject matter—where words about him are the only words.

  Everything passes, there is nowhere we can rest, even if it is on a flight to Egypt; yet what did Proust prove? That the world can be taken out of time and given a place. A place in permanence. Because rühmen dass ist. The most modest object—a bit of lace, perhaps—can provide proof.

  And if one day all we do and suffer done

  should seem suddenly trivial and strange,

  as though it were no longer clear

  why we should have kicked off our childhood shoes

  for such things—would not this length

  of yellowed lace, this densely woven swatch

  of linen flowers, be enough to hold us here?

  See: this much was accomplished.

  A life, perhaps, was made too little of, who knows?

  a happiness in hand let slip; yet despite this,

  for each loss there appeared in its place

  this spun-out thing, no lighter than life,

  and yet perfect, and so beautiful that all our so-be-its

  are no longer too early, smiled at, and held in abeyance.18

  This much was accomplished. But when Rilke reached Paris on August 28, 1902, to study and write on Rodin, he was still a young man in his twenties, given to depressions and hysterical highs, to enthusiasms which overmatched their causes, and to the habit of seeking in the world convenient containers for his copious but volatile and uneducated feelings. He needed to be reformed and foc
used, and he was: by Paris, by the example of Rodin, by the poetry of Baudelaire, which so suited its site and Rilke’s moods, by the fictions of Flaubert, and maybe most of all by the paintings of Cézanne.

  Not the dots but the distance between them that creates the line; not the lines which turn into contours, but the planes between; not simply the planes but the surfaces they define; not the surfaces alone but the light with which they combine to bring every point upon them vibrantly to life: these were some of the things he learned. He learned that in one’s art an elbow may flow into a thigh, a chin disappear into a palm, a walker walk more purely without the distraction of arms; he learned how a figure might emerge from a chunk of marble like a plant from the ground; he learned that “there are tears which pour from all pores” because everything has an expression, a face where a smile alone lives; that there is stone that can be set in motion, or a motion held like a pose; that every accident should be made necessary, and every necessity look like a towel thrown over the back of a chair—these were a few of the lessons he took to heart: that the poet’s eye needs to be so candid that even a decaying vulva, full of flies, must be fearlessly reported, following Baudelaire’s example; that exactitude is prerequisite to achievement, so that whatever is full should be fully shown, but rendered spare when sparse, and empty when empty; above all, that art is actually the opposite of nature, and that the creation of being—the breathing of statues—is what counts; not the imitation of nature but its transformation is the artist’s aim: these were some of the things he learned, they began his Wendung, his moment of “turning.” Finally, Rilke learned what seeing is, and then he learned to see.

  “To see” means to taste and thereby to “dance the orange,” to touch and feel at one’s finger end a little eternity, to smell ourselves cloud like steam from a warm cup, to hear voices, to listen so intensely you rise straight from the ground.