Reading Rilke (19 page)

Single wave

through the slowly forming sea of me;

among seas the most frugal of all,

conserving such space.

How many of these waves have been

In me already. Some winds

seem my son.

Do you know me now, breeze, made of my breath?

You, who once were the smooth bark

and foliage round my words.
³

Although this was the last of the sonnets to arrive, Rilke decided to let it lead off the second part. He then placed another “breath” poem at the conclusion of the entire series.

Silent friend of many distances, feel

how your breath still enlarges space.

From the dark tower let your bell peal.

Whatever feeds upon your face

grows strong from this offering.

Transform matter into mind.

What is the source of your deepest suffering?

If drinking is bitter, become wine.

In this limitless night, be the magical force

at the intersection of your senses,

the meaning of their intercourse.

And if what’s earthly no longer knows you,

say to the unmoving earth: I flow.

To the rushing water speak: I stay.
⁴

We have already heard Rilke tell lovers to throw the emptiness out of their arms to broaden the spaces we breathe, but now we
know that our own breath broadens it. Likewise, in “The First Elegy,” the poet’s face becomes a pasture. “Oh, then there’s Night, when a wind, made from the space where the world resides, feeds on our faces.”

To breathe, to see, feel, touch, taste, hear, smell, realize the world, widely, without judgment or repudiation: this was the first task—to allow the world in. To inhale all, to swallow all, to become the place observed. For no more reason than its recognition. Such openness permits the initial transformation that the
Elegies
demand; for when we breathe, when we see, feel, touch, taste, hear the world, we alter its materiality profoundly. What was simply an emitted signal, the outcry of a thing to let us know it was there, becomes a quality in consciousness. The object is visible because its messages can be received, but the message itself is invisible; it is nowhere; or, rather, it is now in an inner space, not the space between our ears, but the space between what our ears hear. Rilke called it “innerworldspace.” He liked to imagine that the material world of flux was, with its signaling, beseeching us to become conscious of it, to realize it fully, free it from its grave.

You earthly things—is this not what you want,

to arise invisible in us? Is not your dream

to be one day invisible? Earth!—things!—invisible!

What, if not this deep translation, is your ardent aim?
⁵

Yet Rilke was Mr. Fastidious himself, and that squeamishness, Rilke knew, had to be overcome if he was at last to learn “to see.” Contemplation was possible for him—but it was more likely to occur in front of a Cézanne. Most of the revolutionary “new” poems, supposed to demonstrate this saintly openness to objects, are about animals in zoos and flower beds in parks, photographs
in books, works of art in the shelter of their museums, figures in myth, icons of the church.

Here we encounter more romance. Animals and birds make noises in order to communicate with one another, flowers use their scent to attract pollinating moths and bees. But many of the signals they send are inadvertent. However stealthily the lion slinks through the tall grass, the grass will sway a little, whisper of the predator’s presence. Light falls on unconcerned surfaces and is reflected back to us unsent by any solid, bearing no petition.

As Rilke knew, and knew better than he cared to, normal experience is interested, not contemplative. People don’t perceive an IT, they perceive what that IT means. The poet as a person is no exception.

Yes, the springtimes have needed you. There’ve been stars

to solicit your seeing. In the past, perhaps,

waves rose to greet you, or out an open window,

as you passed, a violin was giving itself

to someone. This was a different commandment.

But could you obey it? Weren’t you always

anxiously peering past them, as though

they announced a sweetheart’s coming? (Where would you

have hidden her, with those heavy foreign thoughts

tramping in and out and often staying overnight?)
⁶

When we perceive fully, and do the work assigned to us, the world becomes glorious. Then “it is breathtaking just to be here.”

However, I feel obliged to say, when we perceive fully, we do ourselves a favor, not the world.

I doubt if Rilke ever read a word of Immanuel Kant’s, but when two “great minds” are right about something, why shouldn’t they seem to say the same thing? The esthetic experience is not mediated by concepts. It displays disinterested interest, and appreciates purposiveness independently of any purpose.

Rilke does not understand how the transformation of matter into mind works, but we should not blame him for that. No one does. After several thousand years of wondering, we still don’t know. Although materialists will be happy to explain to us how the nervous system functions, and hope we shall confuse this explanation, as marvelous and detailed as it is, with an account of the character of consciousness and how consciousness came to be, they are not a step closer to crossing that threshold. We may not know how our awareness got here, but Rilke believes he knows what its purpose is: to make the signals we receive from external things into inner, and hence invisible, manifestations—the invisible visibly invisible, if you like.

When we experience things as we at least sometimes should, the psychological distance between them and ourselves disappears. We are what we perceive, and what we perceive exists nowhere but in us. We touch. Neither of us is any longer lonely. It constitutes what E. F. N. Jephcott calls “the privileged moment” in his excellent study
Proust and Rilke: The Literature of Expanded Consciousness
.
⁷

We should not imagine that such moments involve the cancellation of the self. A union is not a cancellation. What has to be left out of the self is its selfishness, but not its particular quality of mind. Nor could we afford to prolong such states of awareness or increase their frequency even if we could, because living does demand selection, utility, and action.

Nevertheless, this saintly acceptance of life is an obligation laid upon all of us … “a kind of commandment.” In Henry
James’ version the injunction is: try to be someone on whom nothing is lost. James, however, is asking us to be quick, clever, and deep about interpreting social signals; he is advising us not to enjoy the look of haystacks in the rain, but to catch signs of adultery in an eyelid, doubt in a pause. From the Austen/James/Wharton point of view, Rilke lived little in society; he just visited it from time to time.

Rilke’s inwarding does have a level of “interpretation,” however, though it probably wouldn’t satisfy James. If the world awaits realization by an accomplished human mind, then the world should have wants and wishes, which would mean it, too, has an interior, so that the expressions on the faces of things might allow us to read the state of their inwardness,
as if
they too were alive. We habitually infer the contents of another’s innerworldspace from his or her outerworldactions. In a Sherlock Holmesian mood we may also read anger or impatience in the forcibly stubbed cigarette butt, haste in a spill of gravel, weariness in signs of wear and tear, meanness in the root that trips us up, loneliness in the atmosphere of a rented room, willfulness in a twitch or tic.
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
has much animism of this kind throughout its early pages.

Furthermore, the use which clothes receive—and books suffer, and pots and pans undergo, and windowsills and stoops endure—this use wears and soils and pits them, mars and creases and scars them, so that gradually, and over time, these effects will shape a surface that resembles their life, reflecting there all that history has done to them, everything they’ve labored to achieve. Rust destroys, but it creates character more surely than most playwrights. Aging delights in lines.

To observe the brook gurgling happily, to enter a gloomy wood with trepidation, to feel the melancholy of a motel room, to appreciate the sturdy character of a scar-faced loading-dock door, to shudder some in front of a broken window, does not
mean one has returned to a state of mana worship, or even that one has simply made an emotional mistake, for a mountain can seem menacing even to a positivist who not only knows better, but bets both top and bottom dollar on it. For Rilke the world has an expressive surface, and its “look” should not be ignored when we look.

If the first transformation is everyone’s obligation, the second transformation is more pointedly a task for the poet. The language of ordinary use suffers the same fate as those of functional things—silverware, tea service, pin-striped suits. Paul Valéry’s distinction between dancing and walking (not strolling) is after the same game. Customarily, we look past the word to its referent, or into the word for its idea. If we reach the referent, we again look beyond, this time at its importance to us; and when we dig out the idea, we take it, like a nugget, to be assayed. Normally, we do not listen to the music the syllables sing; we don’t appreciate the conceptual connections a word has made in its life; we don’t understand why Adam was asked to “name” the animals—for we don’t know that naming is knowing. According to the
Elegies
, we are here just to utter. To sew concept to referent like a button on a coat … a button meant not to button but to be.

You might think we were on the stage, we’ve been asked to make so many changes. Well, of course, we are, and in “The Fifth Elegy” we shall watch our own heart’s curtain rise. (Change 1): our self must become selfless, in order (Change 2) fully and unreservedly to accept the world, making matter into consciousness, and following these (Change 3) to alter the medium of what will be an artwork so that it is ready to serve a purposeless purpose. Think, as Thales did, of stream and steam, lava and ice: one substance having many modes of life. Believe, as Heraclitus did, in the perpetual flux, in unceasing metamorphosis,
in the caterpillar’s pupal sleep, its nymphhood, and its butterflying form.

Will transformation. Be inspired by the flame

where a thing made of Change conceals itself;

this informing spirit, master of all that’s earthly,

loves nothing more than the moment of turning.

What’s heartset on survival is already stony;

how safe is it, hid in its innocuous gray?

Look out, from afar a far harder hardness warns it:

feel the approach of a hammer held high.

Whoever flows forth from himself like a freshet, Knowledge will acknowledge,

and lead him, entranced, through her wondrous world,

where endings are often beginnings and beginnings ends.

Every fortune-favored space you wander through, astonished,

is the child or the grandchild of Change. Even Daphne,

as she leafs into laurel, wants to feel you become wind.
⁸

Language restored to its purity is ready to praise. The fourth metamorphosis requires the poet to make a verbal object from the previous transformations, and insert it into the world. Such an object will, in a sense, be material again, public, no longer invisible. Its reason for existing will be its own inherent value. Mont Sainte-Victoire will have passed through the painter’s gaze into immateriality only to return through his art to the canvas. It is no longer a mountain. It is a mountain seen. Seen superbly. Seen from Les Lauves, seen from Bibemus Quarry. Seen not by Cézanne the man but (to adopt the formula of Gertrude Stein) by the human mind. It will, however, be more
than a mountain so supremely seen, because it will have been transmogrified by the painter’s paints, the painter’s artistry, the art itself. Now it will no longer need to resemble. If the easel has to be brought to the mountain, the mountain must move toward the easel. In the case of the poet, the perception will have soaked for a long time in a marinade of mind, in a slather of language, in a history of poetic practice. The resulting object will not be like other objects; it will have been invested with consciousness, the consciousness of the artist. Then we, as we read, see, hear, shall share this other superior awareness. We shall be Bach, be Keats, be Cézanne, again, not as they were as men—who desires that?—but as they are as artists.