Read Reading Rilke Online

Authors: William H. Gass

Reading Rilke (6 page)

BOOK: Reading Rilke
6.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

These explosions of poetry were regularly accompanied by
prose—such was the pattern of the past—and it was no different this time: Rilke writes
The Young Workman’s Letter
, summing up his attitudes toward art, Christianity, and sexuality, in his most important prose piece since
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
. As if he is hitched to a runaway, the second section of the
Sonnets to Orpheus
rushes into being in eight more February days. There are now fifty-five of these dense yet crystalline poems. And Rilke still has the energy to write numerous triumphant letters. What had been wrung from him was more than wine.

It caps a life, and Rilke feels, in a way, that he has been concluded like a symphony. Yet, as Edward Snow points out in
Uncollected Poems, Rainer Maria Rilke
,
16
his alleged dry spells, his troughs, are dotted, as a dry creek by nuggets, with remarkable poems (as occasional as lit matches in a crowd) which Rilke simply does not bother to collect, his focus elsewhere, or his health a painful preoccupation.

Raum
. If there were one word it would be
Raum
. The space of things. The space of outer space. The space of night which comes through porous windows to feed on our faces. The mystical carpet where lovers wrestle. The womb of the mother.
Weltraum
. Not just the room in which the furniture of the world rests, but the space of the things themselves. The space made by Being’s breathing. Then
Innerweltraum
. (The German language, the German spirit, can and must compound.) Not just the space we call consciousness, but the space where we retire in order to avoid a feeling, the touch of a lover, the plea of a friend, the threat of intimacy. Distance. Darkness dotted by stars. These spaces are always palpable, as though space were smoke, or the mountains of the heart where the last hamlet of feeling may be discerned. The various distances of death. Time itself is a spaceline. For when we are dead we journey on through what we once believed was past. Cathedral spaces. The
spaces made by music.
Innerweltraum
. The slopes shaped by the word in the countrysides of poetry.

Music: breathing of statues. Possibly:
stillness in pictures. Speech where speech
ends. Time upright and poised
upon the coastline of our passions.
Feelings for whom? You are the transformation
of all feeling into—what?… audible landscape.
You stranger: music. Heart’s space
that’s outgrown us. Innermost us
which it’s scaled, surmounted, gone beyond
into holiest absence:
where what’s within surrounds us
the way the most skillful horizon does,
or the other side of the air,
pure,
immense,
no longer lived in.
17

Similarly,
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
are not to be moved through like so many passing minutes. Isn’t any book of hours, because it is a book, a thing? and if it is a thing, it is a space—two spaces, really, the space it makes and the space it’s in—and if it is a space, it exists all at once, not bit by bit or leaf by leaf or line by line. The scenes in the novel which fasten the two notebooks together depict the famous unicorn tapestries in Paris’ Cluny Museum. And the whole of
Malte
is built, is painted, is woven, like those calm and gracious images, symbols for each of the senses. They are there all at once, traveled over by the eye, made of threads, but they are not thin, lengthy, or
line-like like threads, these flowered places where solemn creatures hover like symbols hung about a hidden neck.

Every line which Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in early life is there in later life: an
Offering to the Lares
and the
Sonnets to Orpheus
may stand beside one another like two parked bikes, and I in fact did read the so-called later poems before I read their many predecessors. So the poet’s development is drawn now on a lifemap held flat on a tabletop. I may, if I wish, travel back or go forth or leap ahead—into books in which Rilke is only subject matter—where words about him are the only words.

Everything passes, there is nowhere we can rest, even if it is on a flight to Egypt; yet what did Proust prove? That the world can be taken out of time and given a place. A place in permanence. Because
rühmen dass ist
. The most modest object—a bit of lace, perhaps—can provide proof.

And if one day all we do and suffer done
should seem suddenly trivial and strange,
as though it were no longer clear
why we should have kicked off our childhood shoes
for such things—would not this length
of yellowed lace, this densely woven swatch
of linen flowers, be enough to hold us here?
See: this much was accomplished.
A life, perhaps, was made too little of, who knows?
a happiness in hand let slip; yet despite this,
for each loss there appeared in its place
this spun-out thing, no lighter than life,
and yet perfect, and so beautiful that all our so-be-its
are no longer too early, smiled at, and held in abeyance.
18

This much was accomplished. But when Rilke reached Paris on August 28, 1902, to study and write on Rodin, he was still a young man in his twenties, given to depressions and hysterical highs, to enthusiasms which overmatched their causes, and to the habit of seeking in the world convenient containers for his copious but volatile and uneducated feelings. He needed to be reformed and focused, and he was: by Paris, by the example of Rodin, by the poetry of Baudelaire, which so suited its site and Rilke’s moods, by the fictions of Flaubert, and maybe most of all by the paintings of Cézanne.

Not the dots but the distance between them that creates the line; not the lines which turn into contours, but the planes between; not simply the planes but the surfaces they define; not the surfaces alone but the light with which they combine to bring every point upon them vibrantly to life: these were some of the things he learned. He learned that in one’s art an elbow may flow into a thigh, a chin disappear into a palm, a walker walk more purely without the distraction of arms; he learned how a figure might emerge from a chunk of marble like a plant from the ground; he learned that “there are tears which pour from all pores” because everything has an expression, a face where a smile alone lives; that there is stone that can be set in motion, or a motion held like a pose; that every accident should be made necessary, and every necessity look like a towel thrown over the back of a chair—these were a few of the lessons he took to heart: that the poet’s eye needs to be so candid that even a decaying vulva, full of flies, must be fearlessly reported, following Baudelaire’s example; that exactitude is prerequisite to achievement, so that whatever is full should be fully shown, but rendered spare when sparse, and empty when empty; above all, that art is actually the opposite of nature, and that the creation of being—the breathing of statues—is what counts; not the imitation of nature but its transformation is the artist’s aim: these
were some of the things he learned, they began his
Wendung
, his moment of “turning.” Finally, Rilke learned what seeing is, and then he learned to see.

“To see” means to taste and thereby to “dance the orange,” to touch and feel at one’s finger end a little eternity, to smell ourselves cloud like steam from a warm cup, to hear voices, to listen so intensely you rise straight from the ground.

And he saw a man growing from the shoulder of a seated woman; he saw Orpheus—Eurydice behind him helpless—Orpheus’ hand at his eyes; he saw a sculpture called
The Death of the Poet
, another called
The Prodigal Son
; he saw plaster couples intertwined; he saw sleeping marbles, and birds of stone so artfully wrought that every feather implied flight and therefore a sky to fly through; he saw a victim of St. Vitus’ dance jiggling and convulsing on a Paris street, blind men blind and beggars begging; he saw a woman who, in grief, left her face in her hands: each called forth poems … eventually … prose that equaled the best of his poems … poems that filled space as much as their subjects did, such as the Buddha he contemplated so often in Rodin’s garden at Meudon.

As if he listened. Silence. Depth.
And we hold back our breath. Yet nothing yet.
And he is star. And other great stars ring him,
though we cannot see that far.
O he is fat. Do we suppose
he’ll see us? He has need of that?
Sink in any supplicating pose before him,
he’ll sit deep and idle as a cat.
For that which lures us to his feet
has circled in him now a million years.
He has forgotten all we must endure,
encloses all we would escape.
19

Rodin had an actual exhibition pavilion from the 1900 Paris World’s Fair moved to his property in Meudon-Val-Fleury, just outside the city. In this building, which was flanked by Rodin’s own manor house and surrounded by a number of cottages, workshops, studios, he installed a bounty of his sculptures. On the grounds were placed numerous stone pieces, both whole and in fragments, both Rodin’s own and antique, including the Buddha just celebrated. Among the statuary minced many doves, in spite of the dogs, and on the grounds near the banks of the river three swans managed to waddle. Here, too, the
New Poems
emerged, the
Dinggedicht
—a set of solids set in their book as if in a gallery. As Norbert Fuerst correctly observes: “It is characteristic of many of these chiseled and sculptured poems that one can read them backwards, or that one can read back and forth in them. They are more spatial than temporal.”
20

Eventually, and for a time, enlisted as Rodin’s secretary, Rilke will occupy a cottage at Meudon, lunch with Rodin and his anxious wifewishing mistress, feed the swans, and inspect the stones.

I wonder if Rilke ever realized how ironic the outcome of his and Rodin’s careers would be, for Rilke leaves the Master to become a Master, to grow through each succeeding year toward his whirlwind, while Rodin is sucked by sycophants into a whirlpool. Sexually overcome … again and again … Rodin is tamed by an American lady who has managed with Jamesian ingenuity to become a duchess. She dressed him, Kenneth Clark says, “in a silk top-hat and frock coat and led him round Europe in a black limousine like a dancing bear.” When Rodin finally got rid of her (beseeched to do so by friends), he
remained at Meudon, where the parasites could find him and deprive him of his intestines. “The chorus of praise from enthusiastic ladies and
littérateurs
,” in Clark’s opinion, “was calculated to bring out the worst in his genius for it dwelt on the pseudo-mystic qualities in his work.”
21
That is precisely what many of Rilke’s female friends offered him: adoration of his flaws. But they only induced in him a weakness for séances and table-tipping. One must fly from fan and foe alike, for how alike they are. Saved because sex could not entrap him; saved because he always needed …

Raum
. And felt the fear of its lack. Breathing room. He walks the parks, but even when crowded, the parks are vacant, because the spiritual spaces between the people who form the crowds are empty. The poet has sought solitude and found only loneliness. At the zoo, the animals appear superior, yet even they pace, turn like the horses of the carousel, or like the panther in that celebrated poem:

His gaze has grown so worn from the passing
of the bars that it sees nothing anymore.
There seem to be a thousand bars before him
and beyond that thousand nothing of the world.
The supple motion of his panther’s stride,
as he pads through a tightening circle,
is like the dance of strength around a point
on which an equal will stands stupefied.
Only rarely is an opening in the eyes
enabled. Then an image brims
which slides the quiet tension of the limbs
until the heart, wherein it dies.
22

Rilke’s strategy for the defeat of time was to turn it into space. In that way what was passing—and everything was—merely passed on to another part of reality. Sometimes, if it were the water of a fountain, its changing never changed. And the observer’s inner world would be spread out inside him like an alpine meadow or even an armed camp or an independent country, despite the fact that consciousness has no objective location. Emotions could be measured and sited among the mountains of the heart, so when love died, it died of closeness and confinement, not from aging or duration.

Aren’t lovers
always arriving at the borders of each other,
although both promised breathing space, unimpeded hunting, home?
23
BOOK: Reading Rilke
6.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Rising Tides by Emilie Richards
Freelance Love by Alvarez, Barbara
Personal Pleasures by Rose Macaulay
Forever True (The Story of Us) by Grace, Gwendolyn
You're Not Pretty Enough by Tress, Jennifer
Cobra Killer by Conway, Peter A., Stoner, Andrew E.
Leaving Blue 5.1 by Thadd Evans