Ahead of All Parting (27 page)
Read Ahead of All Parting Online
Authors: Rainer Maria Rilke
Now there is, it seems to me, something absolutely immeasurable, which humans are never tired of misappropriating with their criteria, measurements, and institutions. And here, in the love which, with an unbearable mixture of contempt, desire, and curiosity, they call “sensual love,” here we find the worst consequences of that devaluation which Christianity felt obliged to assign to the earthly. Here everything is distortion and repression, even though we come forth from this deepest of events and ourselves possess again in it the center of our delights. I find it, if I may say so, more and more incomprehensible that a doctrine which puts us in the wrong
there
, where all creation enjoys its most blissful right—that such a doctrine is able, if not anywhere to establish itself as true, nevertheless to hold its ground so permanently over such a wide area.
I think, here again, of the animated conversations I had with my deceased friend, that time, in the meadows of the Barthelasse Island in the spring and later. Even the night before his death (he died the following afternoon a little after five o’clock), he opened for me such pure vistas into a realm of the blindest suffering that my life seemed to begin anew in a thousand places, and when I tried to answer, I had no control over my voice. I didn’t know that there are tears of joy. I cried my first ones, like a beginner, into the hands of this young man who in a few hours would be dead, and felt how the tide of life in Pierre was once again rising and overflowing, as these hot teardrops were added to it. Am I being excessive? I’m speaking of a
too-much.
Why, I ask you, Monsieur V., when people want to help us, we who are so often helpless, why do they leave us in the lurch, there at the root of all experience? Anyone who would stand by us
there
could be confident that we would want nothing further of him. For the help he gave us would grow by itself with our life and would become greater and stronger together with it. And would never end. Why aren’t we placed into our most mysterious part? Why must we sneak around it, and finally enter into like burglars and thieves, into our own beautiful sex, where we get lost and bang into things and stumble, and finally, like criminals caught in the act, rush out again into the twilight of Christianity. Why, even if, because of the inner tension of the soul, guilt or sin had to be invented, why didn’t they fasten it to some other part of our body, why did they let it fall there, and wait till, as it dissolved,
it poisoned and muddied our pure source? Why have they made our sex homeless, instead of transferring there the festival of our competence?
All right, I’ll admit that it shouldn’t belong to us, we who are incapable of assuming and administering such inexhaustible bliss. But why don’t we belong to God starting from
this
place?
A priest would point out to me that there is marriage, although he would not be unaware of the state this institution is in. Nor does it help to move the will-to-propagation into the sunlight of grace—, my sex is not just turned toward the future, it is the mystery of my own life—, and it’s only because, as it seems, it may not occupy the central place there that so many people have pushed it out to their edge and thereby lost their equilibrium. What good is all this? The terrible untruth and uncertainty of our time has its foundation in our not acknowledging the happiness of sex, in this strangely mistaken guiltiness, which continually increases, and cuts us off from all the rest of Nature, even from the child, although, as I learned during that unforgettable night, his, the child’s, innocence doesn’t at all consist in the fact that he, so to speak, doesn’t know sex,—“on the contrary,” said Pierre almost voicelessly, “that inconceivable happiness which, for us, awakens in
one
place deep within the fruitflesh of a closed embrace is still namelessly scattered everywhere in his whole body.” To describe the peculiar situation of our sensuality, we would have to say: Once we were children
everywhere
, now we are children just in one place.—But if there were only one single person among us for whom this was certain and who was capable of showing the proof for it, why do we let it happen that one generation after the other wakes up under the rubble of Christian prejudices and moves in a trance through the darkness, in such a narrow space between mere refusals!?
Monsieur V.: I write and write. A whole night almost has gone by on this. I have to come to an end.—Have I said that I have a job in a factory? I work in the office, sometimes I’m also at a machine. Before, I was once able for a short time to take some courses. Well, I just want to say how I feel. You see, I want to be usable to God just the way I am. What I do here, my work, I want to keep doing it toward him, without having my stream interrupted, if I can express it like that, not even in Christ, who was once the water for many. The machine, for example—I can’t explain it to him, he doesn’t grasp it. I know you
won’t laugh if I say this so simply, it’s the best way. God, though: I have a feeling I can bring it to
him
, my machine and its firstborn, or even my whole work, it enters him without any trouble. Just as it was easy once for the shepherds to bring the gods of their life a lamb or a vegetable-basket or the most beautiful bunch of grapes.
You see, Monsieur V., I’ve been able to write this long letter without using the word faith even once. For that seems to me a complicated and difficult business, and none of mine. I don’t want to let myself be made bad for Christ’s sake, but good for God. I don’t want to be considered a priori as a sinner, perhaps I’m not. I have such pure mornings! I could talk with God, I don’t need anyone to help me compose letters to him.
I know your poems only from that reading the other night, I own just a few books, which mostly have to do with my job. A few of them, it’s true, are about art, and history books, just what I could get.—But your poems, you’ll have to accept this, have caused this commotion in me. My friend once said, “Give us teachers who praise the earthly for us.” You
are
one of these.
FROM
THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE (1910; begun in Rome, February 8, 1904; written mostly during 1908/1909; finished in Leipzig, January 27, 1910)
The speaker in these passages is Malte Laurids Brigge, a twenty-eight-year-old Danish writer living in Paris.
[The Bird-feeders]
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,
painted figurehead:
The so-called galleon-figures: carved and painted statues from the bow of a ship. The sailors in Denmark sometimes set up these wooden statues, which have survived from old sailing-ships, in their gardens, where they look quite strange.
(To Witold Hulewicz, November 10, 1925)
[Ibsen]
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,
and now you were among the alembics:
where the most secret chemistry of life takes place, its transformations and precipitations.
(Ibid.)
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You couldn’t wait:
Life,
our
present life, is hardly capable of being presented on stage, since it has wholly withdrawn into the invisible, the inner, communicating itself to us only through “august rumors.” The dramatist, however, couldn’t wait for it to become showable; he had to inflict violence upon it, this not yet producible life; and for that reason too his work, like a wand too strongly bent back, sprang from his hands and was as though it had never been done.
(Ibid.)
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go away from the window:
Ibsen spent his last days beside his window, observing with curiosity the people who passed by and in a way confusing these real people with the characters he might have created.
(Ibid.)
[Costumes]
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, Admiral Juel: Niels Juel (1629–1697). In July 1677, having overwhelmingly defeated the Swedish fleet in the Battle of Køge Bay, one of the greatest sea victories in Danish history, he was acclaimed as a national hero and raised to the highest naval rank.
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, bautta (pronounced ba-oot’-ta): Venetian mask, covering the lower part of the face.
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dominos:
Venetian cloaks, worn chiefly at masquerades.
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Pierrot:
Character in French pantomime.
[The Temptation of the Saint]
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those strange pictures:
The reference is to the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder or of Hieronymus Bosch.
[The Prodigal Son]
Cf. Luke 15:11–32.
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Tortuga:
Island off northwest Haiti. In the seventeenth century it was a base for the French and English pirates who ravaged the Caribbean.
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Campeche:
Port in southeastern Mexico, frequently raided by pirates during the seventeenth century.
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Vera Cruz:
City in east-central Mexico; the country’s chief port of entry. It was looted by pirates in 1653 and 1712.
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Deodatus of Gozon:
A fourteenth-century member of the Order of the
Knights of St. John of Jerusalem (Knights of Malta). Because so many had lost their lives trying to kill the famous dragon of Rhodes, the Grand Master of the Order had forbidden all knights even to approach its cave. Deodatus went ahead and killed the dragon, but because of his disobedience he was stripped of his knighthood. Later he was pardoned, and in 1346 he himself became Grand Master.
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Les Baux:
Magnificent landscape in Provence, a land of shepherds, even today still imprinted with the remains of the castles built by the princes of Les Baux, a noble family of prodigious bravery, famous in the 14th and 15th centuries for the splendor and strength of its men and the beauty of its women. As far as the princes of Les Baux are concerned, one might well say that a petrified time outlasts this family. Its existence is, as it were, petrified in the harsh, silver-gray landscape into which the unheard-of castles have crumbled. This landscape, near Aries, is an unforgettable drama of Nature: a hill, ruins, and village, abandoned, entirely turned to rock again with all its houses and fragments of houses. Far around, pasture: hence the shepherd is evoked: here, at the theater of Orange, and on the Acropolis, moving with his herds, mild and timeless, like a cloud, across the still-excited places of a great dilapidation. Like most Provençal families, the princes of Les Baux were superstitious gentlemen. Their rise had been immense, their good fortune measureless, their wealth beyond compare. The daughters of this family walked about like goddesses and nymphs, the men were turbulent demigods. From their battles they brought back not only treasures and slaves, but the most unbelievable crowns; they called themselves, by the way, “Emperors of Jerusalem.” But in their coat-of-arms sat the worm of contradiction: to those who believe in the power of the number seven, “sixteen” appears the most dangerous counter-number, and the lords of Les Baux bore in their coat-of-arms the 16-rayed star (the star that led the three kings from the East and the shepherds to the manger in Bethlehem: for they believed that the family originated from the holy king Balthazar). The “good fortune” of this family was a struggle of the holy number “7” (they possessed cities, villages, and convents always in sevens) against the “16” rays of their coat-of-arms. And the seven succumbed.
(To Witold Hulewicz, November 10, 1925)
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Alyscamps:
The ancient cemetery near Arles, with its uncovered sarcophagi.
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“sa patience de supporter une âme”:
“his patience in enduring a soul.”
This comes, I think, from Saint Theresa (of Avila).
(To Witold Hulewicz, November 10, 1925)
UNCOLLECTED PROSE, 1902–1922
The Lion Cage (First draft, Paris, probably November 5–6, 1902; edited and completed, Paris, summer 1907)
A Meeting (Capri, between January 5 and 7, 1907)
The Fishmonger’s Stall (First draft, Naples, shortly before January 16, 1907; edited, Paris, summer 1907; completed, Muzot, end of 1925)
How much we have seen in Naples! A table with fish was itself enormous, so enormous that I would have to tell you about it more precisely: you above all. But it wants to be made, not told; and if someday I make it well enough, you shall read it.
(To Paula Modersohn-Becker, February 5, 1907)
Acrobats (Paris, July 14, 1907)
An Experience (Ronda, approximately February 1, 1913)
I am offering you a prose piece whose contents are so important to me, and which is so complete in its manifestation, that it is not easy for me to part with it. The small, precise sketch seems adequate for publication inasmuch as not often is a more indescribable experience presented, which here, to some extent, is apprehended and described,—if I am not totally mistaken.
(To Katharina Kippenberg, July 19, 1918)
Thank you for your kind and extremely sympathetic response to my piece. I had myself wondered, as I was revising “An Experience,” whether to erase the word
Duino;
so let it be left out: this way, the
most intimate connection stays contained and concealed in the names Polyxène and Raimondine, and for the reader in general the prose piece, not being linked to a specific place, is more uncircumscribed and thus more valid. / If my desk drawers were full, I would perhaps not yet have parted from this sketch; it is, after all, in a certain sense, the most intimate that I have ever written down—, on the other hand, though, one cannot possibly have a large enough conception of the shelter in which the most deeply inner remains hidden, when it once has entered in its most absolute form.
(To Katharina Kippenberg, August 10, 1918)
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Polyxène or Raimondine:
Two sisters of Marie von Thurn und Taxis’ mother; both of them died young.