Reading Rilke

by William H. Gass

  inconspicuous; had gently withdrawn your beauty

  as one lowers a festive flag

  on the gray morning of a working day.

  You had but one wish, for a lifetime of work—

  which is not done: despite all, not done.

  If you’re still there, if there is still a place

  in this darkness where your spirit resonates

  with the shallow soundwaves that a voice,

  by itself, in the night, stirs up in the air of a lofty room:

  hear me; help me. Look, we inadvertently

  slip back from what we’ve labored to attain

  into routines we never intended, where

  we weakly struggle, as in a dream, and die there

  without ever waking. No one will be any wiser.

  Anyone who has lifted his heart for a lengthy task

  may discover that he can’t keep on, the weight

  of the work is too great, so it falls of that weight, worthless.

  For somewhere there’s an ancient enmity

  between ordinary life and extraordinary work.

  To understand, to express it: help me.

  Don’t come back. If you can bear it, stay

  dead among the dead. The dead have their own concerns.

  But help me, if you can, if it won’t distract you,

  since—in me—what is most distant sometimes helps.9

  THE GRACE OF GREAT THINGS

  In 1919, at summer’s end, while staying in the Swiss town of Soglio, where he was given access to the library of the Palazzo Salis and was able to acquaint himself there with some of the Salis family past (it was Rilke’s habit to look into the background of the families and the houses in which he became a guest), Rilke allowed his mind to drift back to those allegedly hideous days in the Military School of St. Pölten, and to an inventive physics teacher who one day set up an experiment to teach his pupils a few things about the nature of sound. The essay inspired by this memory is one of the strangest and most revealing of his pieces, and Rilke liked it well enough to include it as a sample of his prose when he gave public readings from his works—at Winterthur, for instance.

  At their instructor’s direction, the young bricoleurs found a piece of pliable cardboard, which they twisted into the shape of a funnel. Over the narrow end they fastened a piece of wax-like paper normally used to close up fruit jars. This was to be the vibrating membrane into whose center they thrust a clothes-brush bristle. A small cylinder about the size of a typewriter platen, I imagine, and equipped with a rotating handle was then coated with candle wax and brought in contact with the bristle. When someone spoke into the funnel, the bristle bristled, scratching the wax on the slowly turning cylinder. The exact character of its course, Rilke remembers, was preserved by a coat of varnish.

  Miraculously, as it must have seemed, when the needle retraced its previous path, “the sound which had been ours,” Rilke writes, “came back to us tremblingly, haltingly from the paper funnel, uncertain, infinitely soft and hesitating and fading out altogether in places.” He thought he would remember that tremulous whisper forever, but what really remained in his mind were the grooves on the cylinder. The lesson Rilke learned should be of immeasurable importance to all of us. Wittgenstein would later use the relations among the musical score, the performance, and the phonograph to express a similar point. Rilke had heard, then seen, how a few spoken words could be transformed (one of his talismanic terms) into a modest physical groove—a line—which so preserved those sounds that they could be recovered again. The matter was, of course, more complex than that. Movements in a larynx had set the air to vibrating. The vibrations in the air became vibrations in the membrane and hence wiggles in the bristle, which wrote them upon the slowly revolving wax.

  This process—of transforming and detransforming a sound into a groove and back again—was possible because both media passed the form along; that is, the media retained the relations, although they expressed them differently. Galileo, as if he were the most divine of magicians, represented a moving body as a point, the time and distance of its travel as vectors from which a rectangle might be constructed. The formula for the distance traveled at a certain speed over a fixed time was identical with the formula for the area of a rectangle: a = xy, or d = vt. When Descartes discovered analytic geometry, he transformed geometry into algebra, and mechanics was consequently also drawn into algebra’s abstractness. There are two kinds of transformations, then: material (vibration of the brush into wiggles of the groove) and conceptual (geometry elevated into algebra). It was a move of this conceptual sort that Poincaré had performed.

  Rilke regularly achieved such conceptual elevations in his poems by having one metaphor set upon, swallow, and digest another. And then another … like the traditional line of increasingly large-mouthed and voracious fish.

  Many years later, in Paris, where Rilke was attending some anatomy lectures at the École des Beaux-Arts, he made the second of his important connections. “The coronal suture of the skull … has … a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of the phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder.… What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally … along the coronal suture, for example.” At the present time technicians have done something similar for the movement of the heart, so that death is seen as a straight line, or heard as a continuous drone.

  It is of course a fanciful project: to fill the world’s cracks with needles that will let us hear those cracks speak. It is only … only a poetical idea—a bit inaccurate, too, since it isn’t the line but the wiggles in the crevice that matter. The line exists only to allow the vibrations to change, to provide a place for new ones, and to order their appearance in time.

  If one can transform the dance of a groove into the sound of a waltz, and if the sound of the waltz can similarly excite the atmosphere so that every ear in the room sympathetically trembles, and if bursts of energy are then sent along many nerves until brain cells light up like Vegas signs and the sound is heard—in so many places at once it seems to have filled its space—if all these changes in one chain of cause and effect can take place (go back and forth, actually, like a fan in front of the face), then, Rilke wonders, wouldn’t it be possible to translate taste into color, color into sound, sound into the run of an amorous finger along a thigh, for instance: “Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?”

  That is what we have people like Descartes for. A body is reduced to its linear contours. These lines are compactions of dots. Each dot has an address. If the line lies on a plane, two bits of information are required to fix its points; if it lies on a cube or sphere, three pieces are necessary: the location on axes, x-1, y-2, z-3, for instance. Thus any line can be expressed as a set of numbers. Rilke’s mind is far away from this sort of transformation, yet his model is not inappropriate. European poetry, he observes, is dominated by the sense of sight (so is its philosophy, as well as its science). “And yet the perfect poem can only materialize on condition that the world, acted upon by all five levers simultaneously, is seen, under a definite aspect, on the supernatural plane, which is, in fact, the plane of the poem.”

  The poem is like a Persian garden, affecting every sense simultaneously, but it does so by putting itself at a distance advantageous for observation, and placing the various vectors of awareness in the same arena, the area of the poem. The lover, in contrast, because he rushes toward the center of his desires, in closing in—cleaving skin to skin—loses sight of things. We kiss with our eyes closed because there isn’t much to see. And if there were, we wouldn’t want to see it. Then the rubbing necessary to touch and taste are soon replaced, as the blood rises, by a warmth which overwhelms every other sensation.1

  By
the time he is ready to write “The First Elegy,” Rilke has his epistemology worked out.

  The material world has scattered about in it, apparently plentifully in some places, less in others, transmitters of various kinds. Signals are constantly being sent by means of air and light out into the surrounding space, where, from time to time, they are picked up by receivers, for there are receivers, too. Our receptivity is determined by the extent and quality of our sensory equipment, by our ability to integrate separate signals into a single coherent experiential “message,” and by the width and generosity of attention we are ready to allow ourselves. Pleasure and pain are the result of transmissions, too, as are feelings of joy and fear. Strong and/or threatening communications can narrow our focus to a single source. Persistent interests will cause us to scan the world for certain things rather than others. A person’s character can be frequently read through its habitual choice of signal to search for, its openness to experience, and its use of what it receives.

  Not only do we miss things because our receivers are limited in number and quality and narrow in focus, but we use sensory cues to tell us what we have in our consciousness; we typecast those clues immediately, conceptualize them, interpret them, and respond, not to experience, which we allow to disappear, but to concepts, to ideas and theories—easier to hold on to and generally furnished with predetermined evaluations and automatic responses. Both Schopenhauer and Bergson were particularly mistrustful of concepts. For Schopenhauer, the replacement of experience by accounts of it created a “corrupt consciousness.” For Bergson, concepts falsified experience by dividing its continuities up into discrete blocks the way a motion-picture camera cuts action into a set of stills.

  These fears are legitimate, but only if we make a prior mistake, common enough, and certainly critical. Not all properties of the conceptual systems we use to describe experience are characteristics of experience itself. Obviously we can use the German language to talk about the world, to say Die Welt ist alles was der Fall ist, or employ arithmetic to measure a room, or use a thermometer to take the temperature of the roast. But Nature does not speak German, the space of the room is not infinite just because between any of the numbers used to measure it there are an infinite amount more, and 20°C is not twice as hot as 10°C to the leg of lamb. Logical connections do not exist in Nature, only in Logic. And poetry is merely … merely poetry.

  Duchamps may have moved the urinal out of the john and onto the floor of the museum, calling it a Fountain, but that act of defamiliarization will not cause the concept to flee my mind. Quite the contrary. Nevertheless, I can mentally peel off the label (it’s a urinal, that’s a bicycle wheel atop the kitchen stool, the spiky thing over there is a bottle rack) and contemplate the Fountain as a sculptural object. If its basin were awash in piss, detachment would be more difficult. With a cigarette butt afloat there, more difficult still. Yet possible. Then, in that detached and formal state, I can decide whether the Fountain merits esthetic appreciation. Duchamps, of course, had another agenda, and was making a different point. He was advancing the projective or label theory of art—with what sincerity it is impossible to know. “If I say it’s art, it’s art.” “If it’s in a museum, it’s art.” Found art, or Ready-Mades, as Duchamps called his, are at best only interesting, or they have local shapes and patches of real quality which you must focus on, ignoring the rest. Occasionally, however, a bit of rusted metal or a once-working tool will allow neglect to turn it into art. As photographs attest, the Fountain was more menacing than pleasing. Contemporary urinals have far more style and grace: those, that is, whose enamel, like a white ball gown, flows to the floor.

  Animals, Rilke felt, unencumbered by concepts, could look openly out at the world and were more at ease—at one with it—than man. This is Nietzschean. This is romance. Animals are even more “interested” than we are, alert to food signs and danger signals. Rats remember. Squirrels learn. Raccoons adjust. A herd can grow uneasy at the stir of a leaf, a pride become accustomed to human presence, a flock of geese turn aggressive. However, only we have the potentiality for that detachment from the self that yields the purer eye.

  Rilke was prepared to push his transformative metaphors quite charmingly far, as he does in a letter of July 15, 1924, to the princesses Mary and Antoinette Windischgraetz:

  In the great cathedrals, in Notre Dame in Paris, St. Mark’s, or on Mont St. Michel, I often brought myself to believe that over the centuries the ever-swelling waves of organ music have had some influence on the curves of the arches, the intertwining of the ornaments, or the more customary smoothness of the pillar fluting and of the columns.… Do not iron filings form figures when a string is bowed near them?2

  Rilke makes breathing itself, apart from its olfactory duties, another of our sensory organs. The air we inhale—night air particularly—is the materiality of space itself, which we alter, then, into the space that shall serve our inner world. Moreover, the spoken poem is made of nothing but the poet’s breath.

  Breath, you invisible poem!

  The continuous pure exchange

  of our existence with the world’s space.

  Counterweight to the rhythm in which I am.

  Single wave

  through the slowly forming sea of me;

  among seas the most frugal of all,

  conserving such space.

  How many of these waves have been

  In me already. Some winds

  seem my son.

  Do you know me now, breeze, made of my breath?

  You, who once were the smooth bark

  and foliage round my words.3

  Although this was the last of the sonnets to arrive, Rilke decided to let it lead off the second part. He then placed another “breath” poem at the conclusion of the entire series.

  Silent friend of many distances, feel

  how your breath still enlarges space.

  From the dark tower let your bell peal.

  Whatever feeds upon your face

  grows strong from this offering.

  Transform matter into mind.

  What is the source of your deepest suffering?

  If drinking is bitter, become wine.

  In this limitless night, be the magical force

  at the intersection of your senses,

  the meaning of their intercourse.

  And if what’s earthly no longer knows you,

  say to the unmoving earth: I flow.

  To the rushing water speak: I stay.4

  We have already heard Rilke tell lovers to throw the emptiness out of their arms to broaden the spaces we breathe, but now we know that our own breath broadens it. Likewise, in “The First Elegy,” the poet’s face becomes a pasture. “Oh, then there’s Night, when a wind, made from the space where the world resides, feeds on our faces.”

  To breathe, to see, feel, touch, taste, hear, smell, realize the world, widely, without judgment or repudiation: this was the first task—to allow the world in. To inhale all, to swallow all, to become the place observed. For no more reason than its recognition. Such openness permits the initial transformation that the Elegies demand; for when we breathe, when we see, feel, touch, taste, hear the world, we alter its materiality profoundly. What was simply an emitted signal, the outcry of a thing to let us know it was there, becomes a quality in consciousness. The object is visible because its messages can be received, but the message itself is invisible; it is nowhere; or, rather, it is now in an inner space, not the space between our ears, but the space between what our ears hear. Rilke called it “innerworldspace.” He liked to imagine that the material world of flux was, with its signaling, beseeching us to become conscious of it, to realize it fully, free it from its grave.

  You earthly things—is this not what you want,

  to arise invisible in us? Is not your dream

  to be one day invisible? Earth!—things!—invisible!

  What, if not this deep translation, is your ardent aim?5

 
Yet Rilke was Mr. Fastidious himself, and that squeamishness, Rilke knew, had to be overcome if he was at last to learn “to see.” Contemplation was possible for him—but it was more likely to occur in front of a Cézanne. Most of the revolutionary “new” poems, supposed to demonstrate this saintly openness to objects, are about animals in zoos and flower beds in parks, photographs in books, works of art in the shelter of their museums, figures in myth, icons of the church.

  Here we encounter more romance. Animals and birds make noises in order to communicate with one another, flowers use their scent to attract pollinating moths and bees. But many of the signals they send are inadvertent. However stealthily the lion slinks through the tall grass, the grass will sway a little, whisper of the predator’s presence. Light falls on unconcerned surfaces and is reflected back to us unsent by any solid, bearing no petition.

  As Rilke knew, and knew better than he cared to, normal experience is interested, not contemplative. People don’t perceive an IT, they perceive what that IT means. The poet as a person is no exception.

  Yes, the springtimes have needed you. There’ve been stars

  to solicit your seeing. In the past, perhaps,

  waves rose to greet you, or out an open window,

  as you passed, a violin was giving itself

  to someone. This was a different commandment.

  But could you obey it? Weren’t you always

  anxiously peering past them, as though

  they announced a sweetheart’s coming? (Where would you

  have hidden her, with those heavy foreign thoughts

  tramping in and out and often staying overnight?)6

  When we perceive fully, and do the work assigned to us, the world becomes glorious. Then “it is breathtaking just to be here.”

  However, I feel obliged to say, when we perceive fully, we do ourselves a favor, not the world.

  I doubt if Rilke ever read a word of Immanuel Kant’s, but when two “great minds” are right about something, why shouldn’t they seem to say the same thing? The esthetic experience is not mediated by concepts. It displays disinterested interest, and appreciates purposiveness independently of any purpose.