Ahead of All Parting

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  Emotions—, which? Incredulousness, timidity, fear, awe—: yes, which one of all the emotions that might be possible here? prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound that would at that moment come into the world …

  Putting this aside for now: couldn’t any kind of lines, appearing anywhere, be put under the needle and tested? Couldn’t any contour be, as it were, prolonged in this way, so that we could then feel it, transformed, approaching us in another sense-realm?

  *

  It wasn’t until I became interested in Arabic poetry, in which the five senses seem to have a more simultaneous and equal share, that I first realized, with a shock, how unequally and isolatedly the modern European poet makes use of these informants, of which only one, sight, overburdened with world, constantly overwhelms him; how feeble, in comparison, are the reports that come to him through the inattentive ears, not to mention the apathy of the other senses, which act only off to the side and with many interruptions, in their circumscribed areas. And yet the fully achieved poem can arise only on condition that the world, acted upon simultaneously by all five levers, appear in a particular form on the supernatural level which is, in fact, the level of the poem.

  A woman to whom these thoughts were proposed in a conversation exclaimed that this marvelous capacity of the senses to act together simultaneously is simply the presence and grace of love,—and in saying this she (parenthetically) testified to the sublime reality of the poem. But someone in love is in such magnificent danger precisely because he has to depend on the mutuality of his senses, which he knows can come together only in that single, dared center where, giving up all dimension, they converge, and where there is no duration.

  As I express myself in this way, I have before me the diagram I used as a pleasant expedient whenever ideas of this kind forced themselves on me. If we picture the world’s whole realm of experience, including all its areas that exceed us, as a complete circle, it is immediately obvious how much larger the dark sectors are, which stand for what we are incapable of experiencing, compared with the other arcs representing what is lit up by the searchlights of our senses.

  Now the situation of someone in love is this: he feels himself suddenly placed in the center of the circle, that is to say, where the known and the incomprehensible presses together in one single point, becomes complete, becomes possession, though, to be sure, with a removal of all particular details. This transposition wouldn’t help the poet, for him the minute particulars must remain present, he is obliged to use the sense-sectors to their full extent, and thus he must also wish to extend each one as far as possible, so that someday his tucked-up delight may leap through the five gardens in one breath.

  As the lover’s danger lies in the undimensionality of his stand-point, the poet’s lies in his awareness of the abysses that separate one order of sense perception from the others: these are, in fact, so vast and so engulfing that they could easily tear the greater part of the world—and who knows how many worlds—away from us.

  A question arises here: can scientific research significantly enlarge the extent of the sectors on the level which we have assumed? The acquisitions of the microscope, the telescope, and all the other devices that displace the senses upward or downward—don’t they lie in a different layer, since most of the increase gained in this way can’t be penetrated by the senses, and thus can’t be truly “experienced.” It may not be premature to conjecture that the artist, who develops this five-fingered hand of his senses (if one may call it that) to an ever more dexterous and more spiritual grasp, is working most decisively toward an expansion of the various sense-areas, although his substantiating achievement, which is ultimately impossible without the miraculous, doesn’t allow him to put the areas he has personally gained on the open, general map.

  But to someone who is looking for a means of establishing the ultimately urgent connection among realms so strangely separated, what could be more promising than the experiment suggested in the first pages of this memoir? If, here at the end, it is proposed again, with the previously affirmed caution, may the writer be given a certain degree of credit for resisting the temptation to arbitrarily carry the hypothesis further in the free movements of his imagination. The mission to do this, neglected for so many years and reappearing again and again, seemed to him too limited and too explicit.

  —Soglio, Feast of the Assumption, 1919

  MITSOU

  Forty Drawings by Balthus

  Preface

  Who knows cats?—Do you, for example, think that you do? I must admit that, for me, their existence was never more than a tolerably risked hypothesis.

  Animals (don’t you agree?), in order to belong to our world, must enter into it a little. They must consent, however partially, to our way of life, they must tolerate it; otherwise, whether timidly or with hostility, they will measure the distance that separates them from us, and that will be the way they relate to us.

  Take dogs: their confidential and admiring nearness is such that certain of them seem to have renounced their most ancient canine traditions, in order to adore our habits, and even our errors. This is precisely what makes them tragic and sublime. Their decision to admit us forces them to live, so to speak, at the very boundaries of their nature, which they constantly pass beyond with their humanized gaze and their nostalgic muzzle.

  But what is the attitude of cats?—Cats are, quite simply, cats, and their world is the world of cats from one end to the other. They look at us, you say? But has anyone ever known if they really deign to lodge for a moment, in the depths of their retina, our futile image? Perhaps, in staring at us, they are quite simply facing us with a magical refusal of their forever complete pupils?—It is true that certain persons among us allow themselves to be influenced by their charming and electric caresses. But let them remember the strange and abrupt distraction with which their favorite animal often put an end to the effusions which they thought were reciprocal. They too, these privileged persons admitted into the presence of cats, have been disowned and repudiated time and time again, and, even as they still held the mysteriously apathetic animal in their arms, they felt themselves stopped at the threshold of this world which is the world of cats and which they inhabit exclusively, surrounded by circumstances that none of us can ever guess.

  Was man ever their contemporary? —I doubt it. And I assure you that sometimes, in the twilight, the neighbor’s cat leaps across my body completely unaware of me, or to prove to the bewildered Things that I don’t exist.

  *

  Tell me, am I wrong to get you involved in these considerations, when my real purpose is to lead you toward the story my small friend Balthusz is going to tell you? True, he draws the story, without speaking to you any further, but his images will more than satisfy your curiosity. Why should I repeat them in another form? I would rather add what he has not yet said. But first, to summarize:

  Balthusz (I think he was ten years old at the time) finds a cat. This happens at the château de Nyon, which you probably know. He is allowed to keep his small, trembling discovery, and he travels home with him. Here is the boat, here is the arrival at Geneva, at Molard, here is the streetcar. He introduces his new companion to domestic life, he tames him, he pampers him, he loves him. “Mitsou” consents, joyously, to the conditions set forth for him, although occasionally he breaks the monotony of the household with some frisky and ingenious improvisation. Do you find it excessive that his master, when taking him for a walk, ties him to this annoying string? It is because he distrusts all the whims that pass through this tom-cat heart—loving, but unknown and adventurous. He is mistaken, though. Even the dangers of moving to a new house take place without a single accident, and the small, capricious animal adapts to the new surroundings with an amused docility. Then, all at once, he disappears. The whole house is in an uproar; but, thank goodness, it is not serious this time: Mitsou is found in the middle of the lawn, and Balthusz, far from scolding the deserter, installs him on the pipes of
the beneficent radiator. I think you will appreciate, as I do, the calm, the plenitude that follows this anxiety. Alas, it is just a short reprieve. Christmas sometimes turns out to be much too filled with temptations. You eat cookies, without really keeping track of how many; you get sick. And to recover, you fall asleep. Mitsou, bored with your too long nap, instead of waking you up, runs away. What a shock! Fortunately, Balthusz is feeling well enough to rush off in search of the fugitive. He begins by crawling under his bed: nothing. Look how brave he is here, all alone, in the cellar, with his candle, which he then carries as an emblem of the search, everywhere, out to the garden, into the street: nothing! Look at his small, solitary form: Who has abandoned him? A cat? —Will he be consoled by the portrait of Mitsou that his father recently sketched? No; there was some kind of foreboding in it; and loss begins God knows when. It is definitive, it is fatal. He goes back into the house. He cries. He shows you his tears with his two hands:

  Look at them carefully.

  There you have the story. The artist has told it better than I can. What is left for me to say? Very little.

  *

  Finding a Thing is always enjoyable; a moment before, it wasn’t yet there. But finding a cat: that is unheard of! For this cat, you must agree, doesn’t entirely enter into your life, as, for example, some toy would do; even though he belongs to you now, he remains a bit outside, and that always means:

  life + a cat,

  which, I assure you, adds up to an enormous sum.

  Losing a Thing is very sad. You imagine that it is in pain, that it gets broken, that it ends up in some garbage heap. But losing a cat: No! that is not allowed. Never has anyone lost a cat. Can you lose a cat, a living thing, a living being, a life? But losing a life: is death!

  Well then, it is death.

  *

  Finding. Losing. Have you really thought about what loss is? It is not simply the negation of that generous moment which came to gratify an expectation you yourself never imagined you had. For between that moment and loss, there is always what is called—rather clumsily, I agree—possession.

  Now loss, cruel though it may be, can have no effect on possession; it ends it, perhaps; it affirms it; basically it is just a second acquisition, completely inner this time, and intense in a different way.

  That is what you felt, Balthusz; no longer seeing Mitsou, you began to see him even more.

  Is he still alive? He survives in you, and his joy, the joy of a small carefree cat, having given you pleasure, now puts you under an obligation: you had to express it by the resources of your laborious sorrow.

  Thus, a year later, I found you grown up and consoled.

  For those, nevertheless, who will see you forever tearful at the end of your book, I have composed the first—somewhat whimsical—part of this preface. So that I could say at its conclusion: “Set your minds at ease: I am. Balthusz exists. Our world is quite solid.

  There are no cats.”

  Berg-am-Irchel Castle

  November 1920

  THE YOUNG WORKMAN’S LETTER

  At a meeting last Thursday, some of your poems were read to us, Monsieur V.; they keep returning to me; I can’t help writing down for you what is on my mind, as well as I can.

  The day after that reading, I happened to attend, by chance, an event sponsored by a Christian group, and maybe this was really the impetus which caused the explosion, which unleashed such commotion and urgency that I find myself rushing toward you with all my might. It takes an enormous act of violence to begin something. I can’t begin. I simply jump over what should be the beginning. Nothing is as strong as silence. It would never have been broken, if we hadn’t each been born into the midst of talk.

  Monsieur V.—I don’t want to speak about the evening when we received your poetry. I want to speak about the other evening. Something is forcing me to say: Who, yes (I can’t express it any other way now), who is this Christ who meddles with everything we do;—who has never known a thing about us, or about our work, or about our griefs, or about our joys, as we achieve them today, live them, and bring them forth—, and who nevertheless, it seems, constantly demands to be the first in our life? Or has that just been put into his mouth? What does he want of us? He wants to help us, supposedly. Yes, but he seems so strangely bewildered when he’s near us. His situation was so completely different. Or don’t the circumstances really matter; if he entered right here, into my room, or appeared over at the factory—everything would immediately be different, right? Would my heart burst open inside me and, so to speak, continue in some other realm and always in his direction? My instinct tells me that he isn’t able to come. That it would have no sense. Our world isn’t just outwardly different,—it has no access for him. He wouldn’t shine through a department-store coat, it isn’t true, he just wouldn’t shine through. It’s no accident that he went around in a seamless robe, and I think the kernel of light in him, the thing that made him shine so strongly, day and night, is long since dissolved, and distributed somewhere else. But if he was so great, this would, it seems to me, be the least we could demand of him—that somehow he should have vanished without any residue, yes, without any residue at all—traceless.

  I can’t imagine that the cross should have remained, which was, after all, just a crossroads. It shouldn’t be burned onto us, all over our flesh, like a brand. It should have been dissolved in Christ himself. For isn’t the truth this: he simply wanted to create the higher tree on which we would be better able to ripen. He, on the cross, is this new tree in God, and we were supposed to be the warm, happy fruit at the top of it.

  Now we shouldn’t always talk of what was before: the after should already have begun. This tree, I feel, should have become so one with us, or we with it, on it, that we wouldn’t have to be continually concerned with it but, simply and peacefully, with God, since Christ’s purpose was, after all, to more purely hold us up into God.

  When I say: God, this is a great conviction in me, and not something I have been taught. The whole creation, it seems to me, says this word, without thinking, though often out of a deep meditativeness. If this Christ has helped us to say it with a clearer voice, more fully, more genuinely—so much the better; but leave him out of the question. Don’t force us to always fall back into the trouble and affliction that it cost him to, as you say, “redeem” us. Let us finally enter into this redemption. —Otherwise the Old Testament is a much better resource, it is full of fingers pointing to God, wherever you open it, and whenever someone becomes heavy there, he always falls right into God’s center. And once I tried to read the Koran, I didn’t get very far, but I understood this much, that in it too there is a powerful finger, and God stands at the end of the path it is pointing to, grasped in his eternal rising, in an East that will never end. Christ surely wanted the same thing. To point. But the people here have been like dogs, who don’t understand pointing fingers and think they are supposed to snap at the hand. Instead of taking the crossroads, where the signpost was raised high into the night of sacrifice, instead of taking this crossroads as a point of departure, Christianity has settled there, and claims that it is living there in Christ, although there was no room in him, not even for his mother, and not for Mary Magdalene: as in every guide, who is a gesture and not a dwelling-place.—And that’s why they aren’t living in Christ, these stubborn-hearted people, who keep bringing him back again and live from the raising of a tilted or fully blown-down cross. They have this mob on their conscience, this standing around on the overcrowded place, it’s their fault that the journey doesn’t continue in the direction the cross’s arms point to. Out of what is Christian they have made a career, a bourgeois occupation, an alternately drained and refilled pool. Everything that they do themselves, according to their unsuppressible nature (insofar as they are still alive), is a contradiction of this remarkable tendency, and thus they muddy their own waters and have to renew them again and again. In their zeal they keep making the earthly, which ought to be a source of
joy and trust, evil and worthless,—and thus, more and more, they hand over the earth to those who are ready—failed and suspect as it is, and undeserving of anything better—to wrest a temporary, quickly won profit from it. This growing exploitation of life, isn’t it a result of the centuries-long devaluation of the earthly? What insanity to deflect us toward a Beyond, when right here we are surrounded by tasks and expectations and futures. What a swindle to steal the images of earthly delight and sell them to heaven, behind our backs! The impoverished earth should long ago have called in all those loans that have been drawn on its blessedness so that an afterfuture might be adorned with them. Does death really become more transparent because of these lights that have been dragged into place behind it? And, since no void can continue to exist, won’t everything that has been taken away here be replaced by a fraud?—is this why the cities are filled with so much ugly noise and artificial light, because true radiance and song have been handed over to a Jerusalem that can be inhabited only later? Christ may have been right when, in a time filled with decayed and defoliated gods, he spoke unkind words about the earthly, although (I can’t help thinking this) it is really an insult to God not to see that what is given to us here is thoroughly capable of making us happy, out to the edge of our senses, if only we use it well. The proper use, that’s the important thing. To take the earthly in our hands, properly, in a truly loving way, with awe, as our temporary and unique treasure: this is also, to use an everyday expression, God’s great “instructions for use,” it is what Saint Francis of Assisi intended to write in his canticle to the sun, a song that on his deathbed was more glorious to him than the cross, which stood there only to point into the sun. But what people call the Church had in the meantime already swollen to such a chaos of voices that the hymn of the dying man, drowned out on every side, was only noticed by a few simple monks and infinitely assented to by the landscape of his graceful valley. How often must such attempts have been made, to bring about a reconciliation between that Christian refusal and the obvious friendship and cheerfulness of the earth. But in other ways too, within the Church, even in its own crown, the earthly gained its fullness and its innate profusion. Why don’t people praise the Church for being vigorous enough not to crumble beneath the life-weight of certain popes, whose throne was loaded with bastard children, courtesans, and corpses. Wasn’t there more Christianity in them than in the dry restorers of the Gospels—that is to say, a living, irrepressible, transformed Christianity. I mean, we don’t really know what will come out of the great teachings, we just have to let them flow forth and go their own way and not be frightened when they suddenly burst into the fissured channels of life, and roll, deep under the earth, in imperceptible beds.