Reading Rilke

by William H. Gass

  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 wh
ich 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.

  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.3 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 illustrati
ons, 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.