Ahead of All Parting

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  O you mothers of poets. You favorite dwelling places of the gods, in whose womb the unheard-of must already have been appointed. Did you hear voices deep inside your conception, or did the divinities communicate with one another only by signs?

  I don’t know how one can deny the utterly miraculous quality of a world in which the increase of the calculated has never even touched the supplies of what passes beyond all limits. It is true, the gods have neglected no opportunity of exposing us: they let us uncover the great kings of Egypt in their tombs, and we were able to see them in their natural decay, how they were spared no indignity. All the utmost achievements of that architecture and art—led to nothing; behind the fumes of the balsam cake no heaven lit up, and the loaves and concubines, long turned to clay, had not apparently been used by any subterranean revelers. Anyone who considers what an abundance of the purest and most powerful ideas were here (and continually) rejected and repudiated by the inconceivable beings to whom they had been dedicated: how could he not tremble for our more exalted future? But he should also consider what the human heart would be if, outside it, anywhere in the world, certainty existed; final certainty. Suddenly it would lose all the readiness it had gathered during thousands of years; it would still be a place that was praiseworthy, but in secret people would tell of what it had been in former times. For truly, even the greatness of the gods depends upon their need: upon the fact that, whatever shrines are kept for them, they are safe nowhere but in our heart. That is the place they plunge into, out of their sleep, with their still-unsifted plans, the place where they gather to take counsel, and where their decree is irresistible.

  What do all disillusionments prove, all unsatisfied tombs, all diskerneled temples, if here, beside me, in a suddenly darkened youth, God becomes conscious. His parents see no future for him, his teachers think they have the clue to his apathy, his own mind makes the world seem inexact to him, and his death already keeps trying to find the place in him where he could most easily be broken; but so great is the carelessness of the heavenly power that it pours its streams into this untrustworthy vessel. Just an hour ago the most fleeting glance of his mother was capable of surrounding this nature; now she wouldn’t even be able to take its measure: even if she gathered together the resurrection and the angels’ fall.

  *

  But how can a new creature, who hardly knows his own hands, inexperienced in his true nature, a novice in the most ordinary turnings of his mind, adapt himself to such an unheard-of presence? How is he, who is obviously destined later on to act with the greatest precision, supposed to achieve his development between threats and pampering, which both exceed the utmost exertion of his unprepared strengths? And it is not only that eruption of greatness in his depths makes the heroic landscape of his feeling almost impassable to him: in the same proportion as his true nature takes control, he becomes aware, as he looks up, of mistrustful questions, bitter demands and curiosity in the faces loved until then in all confidence. Surely a boy in such a situation might go away and become a shepherd. He might, in long speechless days and nights, enrich his confused inner objects with marvelingly felt space; he might make the crowded images in his soul equal to the outspread constellations. Ah, if only no one urged him and no one contradicted him. Do you really want to engage this creature, who is measurelessly claimed, to whom, prematurely, an inexhaustible nature has given a task?

  Is it possible to explain how he endures? The power that suddenly inhabits him finds contact and kinship with his childhood, which still lingers in all the corners of his heart; now, for the first time, it becomes apparent toward what immense relationships this outwardly so inadequate condition lies open. The disproportionate spirit, which has no room in the consciousness of the young man, hovers there above a developed under-world full of joys and dreads. Only by using this world, disregarding the whole outer universe, might it be able to achieve its mighty intentions. But already it is tempted to have dealings with the world that exists on the other side of the purely conducting senses. And just as, inside, it finds its contact with the most powerful hidden forces, so in the visible it is quickly and exactly served by small beckoning occasions: it would, after all, be incompatible with Nature’s reticence to separate the significant from the intelligible otherwise than with discretion.

  Whoever reads the early letters of Kleist will, to the extent that he grasps this figure which clarifies itself in thunderstorms, understand the importance of the passage which describes the arch of a certain gateway in Würzburg, one of the first impressions upon which, lightly touched, the already stretched genius burst outward. Any thoughtful reader of Stifter (to take another example) might suspect that the inner vocation of this poetic storyteller became inevitable at the moment when, one unforgettable day, he first tried to bring closer, by means of a telescope, some extremely distant point in the landscape, and then, in an utterly startled vision, felt a flight of spaces, of clouds, of objects, a terror of such richness that during these seconds his openly surprised spirit received World, as Danae received the outpoured Zeus.

  In the end, every determination to be a poet may have been formed this unexpectedly, by just such incidental occasions, not only when it took possession of a temperament for the first time, but again and again, at each turning of a nature which had to fulfil itself artistically.

  Who can name you all, you accomplices of inspiration, you who are nothing but sounds, or bells that stop, or strangely new birdvoices in the neglected woods. Or gleam that an opening window throws out into the hovering dawn; or cascading water; or air; or glances. Accidental glances of passer sby, glances, lifted for a moment, of women who sit sewing by the window, down to the unsay ably anxious looking-around of squatting dogs, so close to the expression of schoolchildren. What a decision to call forth greatness goes through the most trivial everyday object. Events so insignificant that they wouldn’t be able to deflect the most yielding fate by a ten-thousandth degree—, look: they beckon here, and the godlike verse steps over them out into the eternal.

  Certainly the poet will, with growing insight into his boundless tasks, attach himself to what is greatest; when he finds it, it will delight or humble him, as it wishes. But the signal for the rebellion in his heart will be given willingly by a messenger that doesn’t know what it is doing. It is impossible to imagine him aligning himself with greatness from the start, since he is, precisely, destined to approach it, his ever-present goal, by still indescribably personal paths. And how, truly, should it first have become known to him, since in the world that originally surrounded him it appeared perhaps only in camouflage, concealing itself or despised, like that saint who lived in the space under the stairs? But if it lay before him, openly, in its confident glory, which has no regard for us,—wouldn’t he then, like Petrarch before the numberless vistas of the mountain he had climbed, have to flee back into the ravines of his soul, which, even though he will never search into their depths, are of inexpressibly closer concern to him than that alien and, if need be, explorable region.

  Terrified within himself by the distant thunder of the god, bewildered from outside by an unstoppable excess of phenomena, the young man treated so violently has just enough room to stand on the strip between both worlds, until, all at once, an indifferent little happening floods his monstrous situation with innocence. This is the moment that places in the scales, on one tray of which rests his heart overburdened with endless responsibilities, to balance it with sublime serenity: the great poem.

  *

  The great poem. As I say it, it becomes clear to me that until a little while ago I have accepted it as something that certainly exists, removing it from all suspicion of coming into being. Even if the originator were to step out from behind it and appear before me, I wouldn’t be able to imagine the power which, with one burst, had broken so much silence. Just as the builders of the cathedrals, comparable to grains of seed, immediately arose, without residue, into growth and blossoming, in their work, which already stood
there as if it had always existed and was no longer explicable as coming from them: in the same way the great poets of the past and the present have remained purely ungraspable, each single one of them replaced by the tower and the bell of his heart. Only since a younger generation, pushing upward and at the same time into the future, has not insignificantly expressed their own becoming in the becoming of their poems, does my glance try to recognize, alongside the achievement, the conditions of the generative spirit. But even now, when I have to admit that poems are formed, I am far from thinking that they are invented; it seems to me rather as if in the soul of someone gripped by poetry a spiritual predisposition appeared, which was already (like some undiscovered constellation) spread out between us.

  If we consider what fine accomplishments even now stand surety for some of those who have recently entered their thirties, we might almost hope that they would soon make everything that in the past thirty years has claimed our growing admiration seem just a preface to the perfection of their later work. The most diverse favorable circumstances, it is clear, have to collaborate, for such a decided success to be possible. If we examine these circumstances, the outer ones are so numerous that we finally give up trying to penetrate to the inner ones. The excited curiosity and endless cleverness of an age freed from a hundred restraints penetrates into every hiding place of the spirit and effortlessly lifts up works which, in the past, their authors would have slowly and painfully brought to birth. Too practiced in insight to stop, this age suddenly finds itself in inner places where perhaps no age has ever been in public without divine pretext; walking in everywhere, it makes workplaces into exhibition halls and has no objection to having its dinners in the storerooms. It may be right, since it comes from the future. It occupies us in a way that no age has, for a long time, occupied its inhabitants; it pushes and displaces and clears away, each of us owes a lot to it. And yet, who hasn’t looked at it, at least for a moment, with distrust; asked himself if it is really concerned with fruitfulness, or only with a mechanically better and more exhaustive exploitation of the soul? It bewilders us with constantly new visibilities; but how much has it already placed before us for which there was no corresponding progress inside us? Now I will assume that it offers, at the same time, to this determined younger generation the most unexpected means of giving external form to its purest inner realities, little by little, visibly, in exact equivalents; I can even believe that it possesses these means in the highest degree. But while I am now prepared to attribute to it much new artistic achievement, my admiration passes beyond it to the poems, as ungraspable now as ever.

  Even if there were not one of the young poets who, for his own sense of things, wasn’t happy to make good use of the dared and intensified quality of these days, I still wouldn’t be afraid that I had burdened myself too heavily with describing the poetic nature and its effect on the inner self. All lightenings, however penetrating they may be, cannot reach into the place where the heavy rejoices in being heavy. What can finally change the situation of someone who, from early on, has been destined to arouse within his heart the utmost, which other people hold off and appease in theirs? And what kind of peace could be made for him, when, inside, he is undergoing the on-slaught of his god.

  PRIMAL SOUND

  When I was a boy in school, the invention of the phonograph must have been quite recent. At any rate, it was still at the center of public astonishment, and this may be the reason that our physics teacher, who liked to tinker at all kinds of mechanical projects, taught us to build one of these devices, out of the most ordinary materials. The only things needed were the following: a piece of light cardboard, taped into the form of a funnel, whose narrower round opening you immediately pasted over with a piece of waterproof paper, the kind used to seal jars of preserves, improvising in this way a vibrating membrane, in the center of which you next stuck, vertically, a bristle from a stiff clothesbrush. With these few items the first part of the mysterious machine was made, receiver and transmitter were ready, and now all you had to do was build a recording cylinder, which, turned by means of a small handle, could be moved up to the needle that marked the sounds. I don’t remember what we made this out of; some kind of roll was found which we covered, as well as we could, with a thin layer of candle wax, which was barely cold and hard before, already—with an impatience that grew in us as we excitedly glued and fitted, shoving one another aside—we put our work to the test. It is easy to imagine how this was done. When someone spoke or sang into the funnel, the needle in the parchment transferred the sound waves onto the impressionable surface slowly turning beneath it, and then, when the zealous pointer was allowed to retrace its own path (which had been fixed in the meantime with a coat of varnish)—trembling, wavering out of the paper cone, the sound that was just a moment ago still ours, unsteady now, indescribably soft and timid and at times fading out altogether, came back to us. This always had a most powerful effect. Our class wasn’t exactly disciplined, and there couldn’t have been many moments when it attained such a degree of silence. The phenomenon was just as surprising, was in fact truly staggering, every time it was repeated. We children stood, as it were, opposite a new, infinitely sensitive place in reality, from which we were addressed by something that far surpassed us, yet that was, in some unsay able way, still a beginner and in need of our help. At that time, and over the years, I thought that this independent sound, taken from us and preserved outside us, was what would remain most unforgettable about the experience. That this wasn’t the case is the reason I am writing now. As will be shown, what remained most present in my memory was not the sound from the funnel; it was rather those marks scratched onto the cylinder that much more distinctly remained.

  Fourteen or fifteen years must have gone by before I became aware of this. It happened during my first stay in Paris, when I was attending, with a good deal of enthusiasm, the anatomy lectures at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in which I was attracted not so much by the complex interweaving of the muscles and sinews or the perfect accord among the internal organs, but rather by the arid skeleton, whose restrained energy and elasticity had already at that time become visible to me in the notebooks of Leonardo. However deeply I puzzled over the structure of the whole, it was too much for me; my attention always returned to the study of the skull, which seemed to me to represent the utmost achievement, so to speak, which this chalky element was capable of, as if precisely here it had been persuaded to strain all its forces into a decisive function, so that it could take something which had been ultimately dared—something which, in a narrow enclosure, was already boundlessly active again—into its most solid protection. The enchantment which this strange container, shut off from every kind of outer space, exerted on me, finally became so intense that I procured a skull, in order to spend many night hours with it; and, as always happens to me with Things: it wasn’t only the moments of deliberate attention that made this ambiguous object truly my own—, unquestionably I owe my intimacy with it, in part, to the passing glance with which we unconsciously examine and take in our customary environment, if it has even some slight relationship with us. It was this kind of glance that I suddenly stopped in its course and focussed, exactly and attentively. In the often so strangely awake and challenging light of the candle, the coronal suture had become strikingly visible, and I immediately knew what it reminded me of: one of those unforgotten grooves which had once been scratched by the point of a bristle onto a small roll of wax!

  And now I don’t know: is it because of some rhythmic peculiarity of my imagination that ever since then, often at intervals many years apart, again and again the impulse arises in me to leap from this abruptly perceived resemblance into a whole series of unprecedented experiments? I must admit that whenever this desire has made itself known I have treated it with the most severe mistrust,—if proof is needed, it lies in the fact that only now, more than a decade and a half later, have I made up my mind, cautiously, to communicate my idea. Nor is there anything I can add
in its favor except its stubborn recurrence, which, without the slightest relation to the rest of my concerns, now here, now there, in the most diverse circumstances, has continually taken me by surprise.

  What is it that keeps suggesting itself inside me? It is this:

  The coronal suture of the skull has (this assertion would first need to be investigated, but let us assume it is true) a certain similarity to the wavy line that the needle of a phonograph engraves onto the receptive rotating cylinder of the machine. But what if you tricked the needle and, for its return path, directed it along a groove that didn’t originate from the graphic translation of a sound, but already existed in nature—, all right: let’s be quite explicit: along (for example) the coronal suture—: What would happen?—A sound would have to arise, a succession of sounds, a music …