Ahead of All Parting (49 page)

Any “allusion,” I am convinced, would contradict the indescribable
presence
of the poem. So in the unicorn no parallel with Christ is intended; rather, all love of the non-proven, the non-graspable, all belief in the value and reality of whatever our heart has through the centuries created and lifted up out of itself: that is what is praised in this creature.… The unicorn has ancient associations with virginity, which were continually honored during the Middle Ages. Therefore this Sonnet states that, though it is nonexistent for the profane, it comes into being as soon as it appears in the “mirror” which the virgin
holds up in front of it (see the tapestries of the 15th century) and “in her,” as in a second mirror that is just as pure, just as mysterious.

(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, June 1, 1923)

I am like the little anemone I once saw in the garden in Rome: it had opened so wide during the day that it could no longer close at night. It was terrifying to see it in the dark meadow, wide open, still taking everything in, into its calyx, which seemed as if it had been furiously torn back, with the much too vast night above it. And alongside, all its prudent sisters, each one closed around its small measure of profusion.

(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, June 26, 1914)

the rose of antiquity was a simple “eglantine,” red and yellow, in the colors that appear in flame. It blooms here, in the Valais, in certain gardens.

—Rilke’s note

Every day, as I contemplate these admirable white roses, I wonder whether they aren’t the most perfect image of that unity—I would even say, that identity—of absence and presence which perhaps constitutes the fundamental equation of our life.

(To Madame M.-R., January 4, 1923)

By the brook I picked marsh-marigolds, almost green, a bit of quite fresh yellow painted into the calyx at the last moment. Inside, around the stamens, an oil-soaked circle, as if they had eaten butter. Green smell from the tubelike stems. Then to find it left behind on my hand, closely related through it. Girl friends, long ago in childhood, with their hot hands: was it this that so moved me?

(Spanish Notebook, 1913; quoted in
Rilke und Benvenuta
,
Wien: W. Andermann, 1943, p. 157)

I think of him often and keep returning to his image, which has remained indescribably moving to me. So much “childhood”—the sad and helpless side of childhood—is embodied for me in his form, in the ruff he wore, his little neck, his chin, his beautiful disfigured eyes. So I evoked him once more in connection with that eighth sonnet, which expresses transience, after he had already served, in the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, as the model for little Erik Brahe, who died in childhood.

(To Phia Rilke, January 24, 1924; in Carl Sieber,
René Rilke: Die
Jugend Rainer Maria Rilkes
, Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1932, pp. 59 f.)

Refers to the way in which, according to an ancient hunting-custom in certain regions of Karst, the strangely pale grotto-doves are caught. Hunters carefully lower large pieces of cloth into the caverns and then suddenly shake them. The doves, frightened out, are shot during their terrified escape.

—Rilke’s note

Meanwhile I went along on a dove-hunting expedition to one of the Karst grottos, quietly eating juniper berries while the hunters forgot
me in their concentration on the beautiful wild doves flying with loud wingbeats out of the caves.

(To Katharina Kippenberg, October 31, 1911)

In a letter telling Vera’s mother about the unexpected appearance of the second part of the Sonnets, Rilke wrote:

Today I am sending you only
one
of these sonnets, because, of the entire cycle, it is the one that is closest to me and ultimately the one that is the most valid.

(To Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, March 18, 1922)

The thirteenth sonnet of the second part is for me the most valid of all. It includes all the others, and it expresses
that
which—though it still far exceeds me—my purest, most final achievement would someday, in the midst of life, have to be.

(To Katharina Kippenberg, April 2, 1922)

Renunciation of love or fulfillment in love:
both
are wonderful and beyond compare only where the entire love-experience, with
all
its barely differentiable ecstasies, is allowed to occupy a central position: there (in the rapture of a few lovers or saints of
all
times and
all
religions) renunciation and completion are identical. Where the infinite
wholly
enters (whether as minus or plus), the ah so human number drops away, as the road that has now been completely traveled—and what remains is the having arrived,
the being!

(To Rudolf Bodländer, March 23, 1922)

What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges
from
us.

(To Franz Xaver Kappus, August 12, 1904)

… I sank, weighted down with a millstone’s torpor, to the bottom of silence, below the fish, who only at times pucker their mouths into a discreet Oh, which is inaudible.

(To Princess Marie von Thurn und
Taxis-Hohenlohe, January 14, 1913)

Jacobsen once wrote how annoyed he was that his remarkable short novel had to be called “Two Worlds”; again and again he had felt compelled to say: “Two World.” In the same way, it often happens that one is at odds with the outward behavior of language and wants something inside it, an innermost language, a language of word-kernels, a language which is not plucked from stems, up above, but gathered as language-seeds—wouldn’t the perfect hymn to the sun be composed in this language, and isn’t the pure silence of love like heart-soil around such language-kernels? Ah, how often one wishes to
speak a few levels deeper; my prose in “Proposal for an Experiment” [“Primal Sound”] lies deeper, gets a bit farther into the essential, than the prose of the
Malte
, but one penetrates such a very little way down, one remains with just an intuition of what kind of speech is possible in the place where silence is.

(To Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, February 4, 1920)

For me it was Easter just once; that was during the long, excited, extraordinary night when, with the whole populace crowding around, the bells of Ivan Veliky crashed into me in the darkness, one after another. That was my Easter, and I think it is huge enough for a whole lifetime.…

(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, March 31, 1904)

(to the reader)

—Rilke’s note

Alas, I have not completely gotten over expecting the “nouvelle opération” to come from some human intervention; and yet, what’s the use, since it is my lot to pass the human by, as it were, and arrive at the extreme limit, the edge of the earth, as recently in Cordova, when an ugly little bitch, in the last stage of pregnancy, came up to me. She was not a remarkable animal, was full of accidental puppies over whom no great fuss would be made; but since we were all alone, she
came over to me, hard as it was for her, and raised her eyes enlarged by trouble and inwardness and sought my glance—and in her own way was truly everything that goes beyond the individual, to I don’t know where, into the future or into the incomprehensible. The situation ended in her getting a lump of sugar from my coffee, but incidentally, oh so incidentally, we read Mass together, so to speak; in itself, the action was nothing but giving and receiving, yet the sense and the seriousness and our whole silent understanding was beyond all bounds.

(To Princess Marie von Thurn und
Taxis-Hohenlohe, December 17, 1912)

Does it confuse you that I say God and gods and, for the sake of completeness, haunt you with these dogmatic words (as with a ghost), thinking that they will have some kind of meaning for you also? But grant, for a moment, that there is a realm beyond the senses. Let us agree that from his earliest beginnings man has created gods in whom just the deadly and menacing and destructive and terrifying elements in life were contained—its violence, its fury, its impersonal bewilderment—all tied together into one thick knot of malevolence: something alien to us, if you wish, but something which let us admit that we were aware of it, endured it, even acknowledged it for the sake of a sure, mysterious relationship and inclusion in it. For
we were this too;
only we didn’t know what to do with this side of our experience; it was too large, too dangerous, too many-sided, it grew above and beyond us, into an excess of meaning; we found it impossible (what with the many demands of a life adapted to habit and achievement) to deal with these unwieldly and ungraspable forces; and so we agreed to place them outside us.—But since they were an overflow of our own being, its most powerful element, indeed were
too
powerful, were huge, violent, incomprehensible, often monstrous—: how could they not, concentrated in one place, exert an influence and ascendancy over us? And, remember, from the outside now. Couldn’t the history of God be treated as an almost never-explored area of the human soul,
one that has always been postponed, saved, and finally neglected …?

And then, you see, the same thing happened with death. Experienced, yet not to be fully experienced by us in its reality, continually overshadowing us yet never truly acknowledged, forever violating and surpassing the meaning of life—it too was banished and expelled, so that it might not constantly interrupt us in the search for this meaning. Death, which is probably so close to us that the distance between it and the life-center inside us cannot be measured, now became something external, held farther away from us every day, a presence that lurked somewhere in the void, ready to pounce upon this person or that in its evil choice. More and more, the suspicion grew up against death that it was the contradiction, the adversary, the invisible opposite in the air, the force that makes all our joys wither, the perilous glass of our happiness, out of which we may be spilled at any moment.…

All this might still have made a kind of sense if we had been able to keep God and death at a distance, as mere ideas in the realm of the mind—: but Nature knew nothing of this banishment that we had somehow accomplished—when a tree blossoms, death as well as life blossoms in it, and the field is full of death, which from its reclining face sends forth a rich expression of life, and the animals move patiently from one to the other—and everywhere around us, death is at home, and it watches us out of the cracks in Things, and a rusty nail that sticks out of a plank somewhere, does nothing day and night except rejoice over death.

(To Lotte Hepner, November 8, 1915)

(Companion-piece to the first spring-song of the children in the First Part of the Sonnets)

—Rilke’s note

(to Vera)

—Rilke’s note

(to a friend of Vera’s)

—Rilke’s note

With this bell tower the little island, in all its fervor, is attached to the past; the tower fixes the dates and dissolves them again, because ever since it was built it has been ringing out time and destiny over the lake, as though it included in itself the visibility of all the lives that have been surrendered here; as though again and again it were sending their transitoriness into space, invisibly, in the sonorous transformations of its notes.

(To Countess Aline Dietrichstein, June 26, 1917)

Oh and the night, the night, when the wind full of cosmic space / feeds upon our face—

(The First Elegy, ll. 18 f.)