Reading Rilke (24 page)

or bowing and scraping

like a courtier to a king.

With them, memory has no point;

they wring their awareness dry;

and all they retain inside them

they generally employ

to beat upon their breast

till it’s unable to resist.

They know all breasts

are beaten so.

Their large and formal faces

are there for all to see,

simpler than ours, more

forceful and ideal;

open as eyes seem

when awakening from a dream.

A sight which makes laughter

rise from the pit like steam;

for those on the benches see

how the puppets pound,

wound, and frighten one another,

and collapse in loose heaps,

dead of their exertions.

If anyone were to understand it differently,

and fail to laugh at their consternations,

the puppets would replace their play

to reenact a Last Judgment Day.

They would yank on their wires

to pull before the painted porch

the hands that, hidden high above,

had danced them into their desires—

hands hideously red, gloved no longer—

and they would pour from every door,

and climb those wires and cardboard walls

to set their former land afire,

and assassinate those hands.
⁶

If, from earliest youth, your inmost self had cried out to escape its circumstances; if you’d looked about and wondered why your presence had been needed even for a moment where you were; and if that meant you had to disappear into an inner distance, leaving your face and figure to fend for themselves, seeking a realm where you could claim an absolute autonomy; if, somewhat to your shame, considering your abject and unaccomplished condition, you had immortal longings in you; if you knew without being told, without having seen any evidence, without therefore knowing, that you were unique, that inside your small delicate body, behind your heavy-lidded eyes, a wide world was contained, and every house there was haunted by dreams, dreams of greatness, ambitions that Ewald Tragy, your namesake, gave away in a petulant moment—“I am my own lawmaker and king,” he’d said, “nobody is above me, not even God”—and furthermore, if, to write the great poetry you meant to write, you had first to be a great poet (for where would this sublime stuff come from if not from a sublime soul?), then the fatal division of the self is set; then that hidden ruler must remake both actor and role and push them onto the stage. So his childhood name is eventually altered; so is his handwriting, at Lou Salomé’s suggestion, though that is accomplished through the persistent efforts of his will; consequently he must change his nature, change his life; change … change … with the worry that (in unhappy harmony with his mother’s
practice) a fine label would not improve the cheap wine that had been decanted down the bottle’s slender throat to create a successful deception. Henceforward the poet will be nothing but a Poet, and wander if he must, free to find his inspiration, free to wait for the Muses’ touch, despite life’s temptations, despite the need for the crowd’s applause, because he’ll be Orpheus, singing though he seems only a head now, floating downriver in the furious flux of things, for really he’ll be whole, head and heart will be at last one. Yet in all this there is the possibility that he’ll fail in the role he has assigned himself: which is? that the perfect self (an Angel) must play the part of a perfect appearance (the puppet); in other words, in the first place, that the poetry won’t come, and he’ll be an ape or a mimic, or, in the second place, that the audience will not be there to applaud, will see the puppet is a puppet, and that, in the third place, the puppet, full of resentment at having lost a normal life for nothing, will turn upon this inside Angel and pull upon his strings, the strings once, solely in his hands, and haul him down from on high (since he’s not as on-high as all that, not as perfect as the imagined Angels of the
Elegies
); whereupon the whole show will be over, Doctor Serafico will have failed to heal himself—and there will be no Angel, no poetry, and no poet.

Erect no memorial stone. Let the rose

bloom each year just for his sake.

There Orpheus is. His metamorphosis

is in this, is this. We don’t need to take

on other names. It is always Orpheus

when there’s song. He comes and goes.

Isn’t it enough that he can be with us

a few days longer than a bowl of roses?

Oh, he has to vanish so you’ll know,

though he dreads his disappearance.

Even while his word transcends our souls,

he’s already where we cannot go.

The lyre’s strings do not bind his hands.

And he obeys while breaking all the bans.
⁷

Vindication came that February of 1921, and the inside Angel and the puppet poet came together in the guise of Orpheus, who could be called to, who could come, and who did. Rilke felt an immeasurable relief. Yet, during his career, as he thought about what he’d written and would write, Rilke realized that if the puppet, who had sprung into an unpuppetty life to become a person, had written these poems—not just the
Elegies
he was struggling to complete, but his entire oeuvre—that puppet-poet-person could not be Rainer Maria Rilke. Even in his laments, his singular outcries, as local as their environment was, as momentary as their occasion, as different from others as his life; even with these, it could not be Rilke who was writing them, not if they were going to appeal to the world, not if a reader was going to be willing to put Rilke’s words into his or her own mouth, to beg the Lord to be allowed to make one single thing, as if they both were in Spain, at Ronda, in anguish, in despair.

On July 29, 1920, before the great storm has burst, Rilke writes to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart: “Ultimately there is only
one
poet, that infinite one who makes himself felt, here and there through the ages, in a mind that can surrender to him.” I have already interpreted Rilke’s esthetic position in Kantian terms, and one could continue that perspective to include even Ewald Tragy’s boast about autonomy, since it could be considered
as a claim to be a noumenal self. “True art,” Rilke writes in the fall of that same year, to another correspondent, “can issue only from a purely anonymous center.”
⁸

If poetry issues from an anonymous center, it certainly gets individualized by the time it reaches the suburbs. Although it is sometimes difficult to tell a cubist painting by Braque from one by Picasso, or a poem by Dryden from a poem by Pope, it is nevertheless generally true that works of art reveal the individuality of the artist in their every brushstroke and semicolon. Where is this anonymous center, especially when we are considering a prototypical Romantic poet? Ewald Tragy says he is unique. “There’s no one like me.” Rilke might reply that the poet has access to this humanly shared nature, he is not simply governed by it. He can and does sometimes demand an audience, and then he can and sometimes does become its ambassador.

A more compelling reply may be found in the poetry itself. It is not simply at those times when there is a dialogue between Angel and Puppet that the problem of poetry is confronted. It occurs at every intersection: heart roads, lyre strings. And we know that when Rilke issues a command, it is himself he is commanding. Such is the case with the sonnet I call “Dance the Orange.”

Wait … that tastes good … But already gone.

… A little music now, a tapping, a humming—:

you girls who are silent, you radiant girls,

dance the taste of the fruit you are tasting.

Dance the orange. Who can forget it,

how, drowning in its wealth, it grew

against its sweetness. You have possessed it,

as it transforms the delicious into you.

Dance the orange. Fling its sunny clime

from you, so that ripeness may shine

in native breezes. All aglow,

peel perfume from perfume! Share the relation

that the supple pure reluctant rind

has with the juice that fills the joyous fruit.
⁹

Wait? There is no waiting room for Time. And fruit, as we know, speaks win and loss into the mouth. Like everything else, the taste is gone before you know it. It is the young women again—
Mädchen
—who are called upon to perform the familiar transformation, whether it is hearing the line that Nature has drawn across our skull, and shivering as though suddenly cold, or out of a bitter taste making wine, or, like Daphne, at her father’s wish, turning into a tree, already leafy, awaiting her breeze and the embrace of Apollo. It’s not the reputed apple from the tree of knowledge which Adam is somehow handing back to Eve, but the orange—symbol of a rich warm southern life. Dance the sweetness that has become you so that this northern world will feel the sunshine, too. Crucially, the young women are to express the relation between a protective outer appearance and an inner worth.

The rind conceals and protects, but it is not merely an actor, pretending with its peel that the orange is a rock, because the rind is also real. When the poet dies, the praised-over parts of the world, which had become his face because he had so intensely looked at them, will disappear—dissolve to reveal the soft inner core. Rilke, I think, liked to believe that the world he so often watched from a distance, through a window, was a kind of skin, and had its core, too, as he had his. “Ripeness is all” is something he would surely have been willing to repeat,
and did, in his own way, often. The poem, too, lets us speak of life and death together—indeed, as he says, in the same breath.

The poem is thus a paradox. It is made of air. It vanishes as the things it speaks about vanish. It is made of music, like us, “the most fleeting of all” yet it is also made of meaning that’s as immortal as immortal gets on our mortal earth; because the poem will return, will begin again, as spring returns: it can be said again, sung again, is our only answered prayer; the poem can be carried about more easily than a purse, and I don’t have to wait, when I want it, for a violinist to get in key, it can come immediately to mind—to my mind because it is my poem as much as it is yours—because, like a song, it can be sung in many places at once—and danced as well, because the poem becomes a condition of the body, it enlivens our bones, and they dance the orange, they dance the Hardy, the Hopkins, the Valéry, the Yeats; because the poem is a state of the soul, too (the soul we once had), and these states change as all else does, and these states mingle and conflict and grow weak or strong, and even if these verbalized moments of consciousness suggest things which are unjust or untrue when mistaken for statements, when rightly written they are real; they themselves
are
as absolutely as we achieve the Real in this unrealized life—
are
—are with a vengeance; because, oddly enough, though what has been celebrated is over, and one’s own life, the life of the celebrant, may be over, the celebration is not over. The celebration goes on.