You Must Change Your Life (15 page)

“Good.”

“Did you have any enemies?”

“None that could keep me from my work.”

“And fame?”

“It made work a duty.”

“And your friends?”

“They expected work from me.”

“And women?”

“I learned to admire them in the course of my work.”

“But you were young once?”

“Then I was like all the rest. You know nothing when you are young; that comes later, and only slowly.”

IN RODIN'S ABSENCE,
Rilke sought out the company of other artists he admired. He met the Spanish portrait painter Ignacio Zuloaga, who was only five years older than Rilke but already well established in Europe, with several works on view at the Venice Biennale that year. From his barrel chest and thick black mustache the Basque artist exhaled an effortless confidence. He did not bother making sketches for his paintings, instead outlining figures in black streaks of charcoal directly on the canvas, then filling them in with a dark palette of paints.

Rodin had been so impressed with Zuloaga that he once traded him three bronze sculptures for one painting. Rilke would later conclude that, aside from Rodin, Zuloaga was the only figure in Paris “who affected me deeply and lastingly.” But their connection seems to have been largely one-sided. Despite several letters expressing Rilke's admiration for the Basque painter, Zuloaga never responded as enthusiastically as Rilke probably would have liked. Yet Zuloaga did allow him to visit his studio once, where he introduced him to the work of another great master: El Greco. The stormy biblical scenes of the Greek-born Spanish Renaissance painter struck Rilke with a violent intensity he had only before known in nightmares. El Greco's misproportioned bodies, long and sinuous as candle flames, seemed so far ahead of the present day, much less that of the sixteenth century, when they were painted.

That month, Rilke also had to arrange for his wife's imminent arrival in Paris. He rented them each apartments a few blocks south of his Latin Quarter hostel, at 3 Rue de l'Abbe de l'Éppé. They would
share the same roof, but keep separate rooms. The couple saw each other only on Sundays, when they often read each other passages from
Niels Lhyne
. For her birthday, Rilke bought her a volume of Gustave Geffroy's essays,
The Artistic Life
, and inscribed it, “To Clara. The beloved mother. The artist. The friend. The woman.” No mention of the wife or the lover. But Westhoff may not have minded the omission then. She had already received several sculpture commissions within that first month, so this second residency in Paris was already proving far more rewarding than her first.

Most importantly, she finally had access to Rodin's eyes. She brought him her work for critique nearly every Saturday, when he hosted an open house at his studio. “The nearness of Rodin, which does not confuse her, gives to her effort and becoming and growth a certain security and peace—and it proves to be good for her to be in Paris,” Rilke wrote. Of a visit to Meudon with her husband, she recalled a feeling “of being set free, of being surrounded by everything that did one good. The beautiful figures and fragments stood next to one in the grass or against the sky, the lawn invited one as if to children's games, and in the middle of a little depression an antique torso stood in the sun.”

By this time, Rilke had nearly finished writing the monograph. He had observed and considered Rodin's art from every angle and it had changed the way he saw the world: “Already flowers are often so infinitely much to me, and excitements of a strange kind have come to me from animals. And already I am sometimes experiencing even people in this way, hands are living somewhere, mouths are speaking, and I look at everything more quietly and with greater justness.” But while Rilke was learning to see like an artist, he had not yet mastered the handicraft of one. Where was the “tool of my art, the hammer,
my
hammer”? he wondered. How could he build objects out of words? How could he apply the principles of Rodin's art to his poetry?

Rodin suggested that Rilke try out an assignment that he himself had undertaken as a student many years earlier.
Regardez les animaux
, professor Barye had told young Rodin. To the aspiring figurative sculptor, staring at beasts had seemed a second-rate task. But Rodin
soon understood why animals have been objects of reverence for artists dating back since the cave painters.

Zoos at that time were research centers for the study of heretofore undiscovered specimens and symbols of colonial might. Displaying a lion or monkey at home paid tribute to France's brave explorers abroad. For artists, they were museums of animals, providing contact with previously unseen aesthetic forms. For Barye, the Jardin des Plantes “was his Africa and Asia,” the author Henry James once said. The painter Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau also spent years seated on a bench there, taking inspiration for his dreamlike jungle tableaux.

For Rilke, the menagerie of bears, gazelles, flamingos and snakes was a sanctuary compared to the human zoo on the other side of the gates. He began to study the caged animals, displayed behind bars like objects, the way Rodin looked at sculptures on pedestals. Each one was a frontier to be discovered. To guide him on this journey, Rilke recalled the teachings of his old professor from Munich, Theodor Lipps, and devised a process of conscious observation, which he would come to call
einsehen
, or “inseeing.”

Inseeing described the wondrous voyage from the surface of a thing to its heart, wherein perception leads to an emotional connection. Rilke made a point of distinguishing inseeing from inspecting, a term which he thought described only the viewer's perspective, and thus often resulted in anthropomorphizing. Inseeing, on the other hand, took into account the object's point of view. It had as much to do with making things human as it did with making humans
thing
.

If faced with a rock, for instance, one should stare deep into the place where its rockness begins to form. Then the observer should keep looking until his own center starts to sink with the stony weight of the rock forming inside him, too. It is a kind of perception that takes place within the body, and it requires the observer to be both the seer and the seen. To observe with empathy, one sees not only with the eyes but with the skin.

“Though you may laugh,” Rilke wrote to a friend, “if I tell you where my very greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my earthly bliss was, I must confess to you: it was, again and again, here and there, in such in-seeing in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this godlike in-seeing.”

In describing his joy at experiencing the world this way, Rilke echoed Lipps's belief that, through empathy, a person could free himself from the solitude of his mind. At the same time that Rilke was studying at the zoo in Paris, Lipps was in Munich working on his theory of empathy and aesthetic enjoyment. In his seminal paper on the subject he identified the four types of empathy as he saw them: general apperceptive empathy: when one sees movement in everyday objects; empirical empathy: when one sees human qualities in the nonhuman; mood empathy: when one attributes emotional states to colors and music, like “cheerful yellow”; and sensible appearance empathy: when gestures or movements convey internal feelings.

Animals provided Rilke with a uniquely rewarding case study of his old professor's teachings. One can relate to animals on the basis that they possess drives similar to those of people, but because they do not share a common language they remain fundamentally mysterious to us. Artists can scrutinize animals as curiosities, then, but unlike objects, animals look back. The two-way gaze tethers these separate lives together and fulfills the “beholder's involvement,” which the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl argued was a necessary component in a successful work of art.

Rilke returned to the zoo day after day, practicing his inseeing skills before returning home at night to draft rough portraits of the creatures he had seen. He found himself especially drawn to a solitary panther, pacing in its cage. It reminded him of a small plaster panther that Rodin kept in his studio. The sculptor adored the thing so much—“ ‘
C'est beau, c'est tout
,' he says of it”—that Rilke had gone to the Bibliothèque Nationale to see the original bronze version it was modeled after. He visited that display cabinet again and again until he finally began to understand what Rodin saw in it:

And from this little plaster cast I saw what he means, what antiquity is and what links him to it. There, in this animal, is the same lively feeling in the modeling, this little thing (it is no higher than my hand is wide, and no longer than my hand) has hundreds of thousands of sides like a very big object, hundreds of thousands of sides which are all alive, animated, and different. And that in plaster! And with this the expression of the prowling stride is intensified to the highest degree, the powerful planting of the broad paws, and at the same time, that caution in which all strength is wrapped, that noiselessness . . .

The plaster panther stirred in Rilke a sensation much like what Rodin had felt when he stumbled upon Barye's greyhounds in the shop window, when he realized that an inanimate object could move with as much vitality as a living beast. Rilke had this in mind when he began to describe the panther in one of his impressionistic zoo sketches, which he called his “mood-images,” and later when he developed it into “The Panther,” one of his most celebrated poems. It begins with an image of the cat circling its cage:

His vision from the passing of the bars

is grown so weary that it holds no more.

To him it seems there are a thousand bars

and behind a thousand bars no world.

A reader might be tempted to see the panther's pacing as a reference to Rilke's own artistic plight. Yet there is no poet present here. Rilke no longer draws attention to himself with florid descriptions. He tells us nothing about the panther's size, for example, or the texture of its fur. He instead defines it only in terms of its captivity: It becomes the freedom it does not possess. The “passing” bars move, while the animal has become the cage, become
thing
.

The perspective then shifts from Rilke's to the panther's when it begins to hear the sound of its feet padding around. In doing
so, Rilke makes the circuit of empathy itself a subject of the poem. Near the end, Rilke returns to the panther's eyes: “the curtain of the pupil / soundlessly parts—” Then images enter the animal's vision, tunnel into the center of its body and into its heart, where they are captured and consumed for eternity.

Rilke had at last found a way out of himself and into the material world of objects. Just as young Rodin memorized paintings in the Louvre, the poet now allowed images to gather and take shape inside him before writing. He received them rather than created them, waiting while
they
formed
him
. It was as his future protagonist Malte Laurids Brigge would say, “Poems are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough)—they are experiences.”

Written in November 1902, “The Panther” was Rilke's first composition for his breakthrough collection of
New Poems
, which he often referred to as his “thing-poems.” This sculpturally composed work, deeply bearing the mark of Rodin, was also his first attempt at a kind of alchemy of mediums. It was a radical poetic experiment, “as revolutionary as anything by Eliot or Pound,” wrote John Banville in the
New York Review of Books
years later. But this one poem did not bring about the artistic transformation that Rilke sought so desperately then.

As fall turned into winter he ran out of ideas. The wordless days turned to months, and “still nothing has happened,” he said. He continued to see Rodin as a stream rushing in its path, leaving behind the people and facts of his daily life to “lie there like an empty riverbed that he no longer flows through.” But the poet could not stop his creativity from splintering off into dozens of aimless channels, no matter how badly he wanted to “course through one riverbed and become great.”

Was he too weak? Did he want it too desperately? He had once believed that digging his roots into the ground with a house and a family would render him “more visible, more tangible, more factual.” But while the reality was certainly more concrete, “it was a reality
outside
me,” he said. It did nothing to help him achieve the existential change “for which I yearn so strongly: To be a real person among real things.”

     

THAT FALL, WHILE RILKE
was writing “The Panther,” a nineteen-year-old Austrian cadet named Franz Xaver Kappus sat in the shade of a hundred-year-old chestnut tree with a book of poetry. A student at the St. Pölten military academy, Kappus was an aspiring writer disguised in a soldier's uniform. When he heard about a radical new poet who was modernizing German Romanticism, he picked up the author's recent collection
In Celebration of Myself
and settled into the grass.

Rebelling against the Romantic tradition, Rilke had begun filling his pages with saints, angels and gods, harnessing the potency of religious symbolism, but secularizing it. In one work, a Christ character sleeps with prostitutes and mourns his failure to impregnate Mary Magdalene. Rilke's irreverence made him a hero among a younger generation. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig recalled how he and his classmates used to copy Rilke and Nietzsche verses into their textbooks to read while the teacher delivered some “time-worn lecture” about Friedrich Schiller.

One can imagine that Kappus, not two years younger than Zweig, felt similar awe at discovering Rilke's disaffected verses for the first time. The cadet became so engrossed in the book that afternoon that he almost failed to notice that one of his favorite teachers, Franz Hora
ek, had come over. The professor took the book from Kappus's hands and looked at the cover: “Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke?” He flipped through the pages, glancing at the verses and running a finger along the binding. Then he shook his head and said, “So our pupil René Rilke has become a poet.”