Reading Rilke

by William H. Gass

  Rilke does not understand how the transformation of matter into mind works, but we should not blame him for that. No one does. After several thousand years of wondering, we still don’t know. Although materialists will be happy to explain to us how the nervous system functions, and hope we shall confuse this explanation, as marvelous and detailed as it is, with an account of the character of consciousness and how consciousness came to be, they are not a step closer to crossing that threshold. We may not know how our awareness got here, but Rilke believes he knows what its purpose is: to make the signals we receive from external things into inner, and hence invisible, manifestations—the invisible visibly invisible, if you like.

  When we experience things as we at least sometimes should, the psychological distance between them and ourselves disappears. We are what we perceive, and what we perceive exists nowhere but in us. We touch. Neither of us is any longer lonely. It constitutes what E. F. N. Jephcott calls “the privileged moment” in his excellent study Proust and Rilke: The Literature of Expanded Consciousness.7

  We should not imagine that such moments involve the cancellation of the self. A union is not a cancellation. What has to be left out of the self is its selfishness, but not its particular quality of mind. Nor could we afford to prolong such states of awareness or increase their frequency even if we could, because living does demand selection, utility, and action.

  Nevertheless, this saintly acceptance of life is an obligation laid upon all of us … “a kind of commandment.” In Henry James’ version the injunction is: try to be someone on whom nothing is lost. James, however, is asking us to be quick, clever, and deep about interpreting social signals; he is advising us not to enjoy the look of haystacks in the rain, but to catch signs of adultery in an eyelid, doubt in a pause. From the Austen/James/Wharton point of view, Rilke lived little in society; he just visited it from time to time.

  Rilke’s inwarding does have a level of “interpretation,” however, though it probably wouldn’t satisfy James. If the world awaits realization by an accomplished human mind, then the world should have wants and wishes, which would mean it, too, has an interior, so that the expressions on the faces of things might allow us to read the state of their inwardness, as if they too were alive. We habitually infer the contents of another’s innerworldspace from his or her outerworldactions. In a Sherlock Holmesian mood we may also read anger or impatience in the forcibly stubbed cigarette butt, haste in a spill of gravel, weariness in signs of wear and tear, meanness in the root that trips us up, loneliness in the atmosphere of a rented room, willfulness in a twitch or tic. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge has much animism of this kind throughout its early pages.

  Furthermore, the use which clothes receive—and books suffer, and pots and pans undergo, and windowsills and stoops endure—this use wears and soils and pits them, mars and creases and scars them, so that gradually, and over time, these effects will shape a surface that resembles their life, reflecting there all that history has done to them, everything they’ve labored to achieve. Rust destroys, but it creates character more surely than most playwrights. Aging delights in lines.

  To observe the brook gurgling happily, to enter a gloomy wood with trepidation, to feel the melancholy of a motel room, to appreciate the sturdy character of a scar-faced loading-dock door, to shudder some in front of a broken window, does not mean one has returned to a state of mana worship, or even that one has simply made an emotional mistake, for a mountain can seem menacing even to a positivist who not only knows better, but bets both top and bottom dollar on it. For Rilke the world has an expressive surface, and its “look” should not be ignored when we look.

  If the first transformation is everyone’s obligation, the second transformation is more pointedly a task for the poet. The language of ordinary use suffers the same fate as those of functional things—silverware, tea service, pin-striped suits. Paul Valéry’s distinction between dancing and walking (not strolling) is after the same game. Customarily, we look past the word to its referent, or into the word for its idea. If we reach the referent, we again look beyond, this time at its importance to us; and when we dig out the idea, we take it, like a nugget, to be assayed. Normally, we do not listen to the music the syllables sing; we don’t appreciate the conceptual connections a word has made in its life; we don’t understand why Adam was asked to “name” the animals—for we don’t know that naming is knowing. According to the Elegies, we are here just to utter. To sew concept to referent like a button on a coat … a button meant not to button but to be.

  You might think we were on the stage, we’ve been asked to make so many changes. Well, of course, we are, and in “The Fifth Elegy” we shall watch our own heart’s curtain rise. (Change 1): our self must become selfless, in order (Change 2) fully and unreservedly to accept the world, making matter into consciousness, and following these (Change 3) to alter the medium of what will be an artwork so that it is ready to serve a purposeless purpose. Think, as Thales did, of stream and steam, lava and ice: one substance having many modes of life. Believe, as Heraclitus did, in the perpetual flux, in unceasing metamorphosis, in the caterpillar’s pupal sleep, its nymphhood, and its butterflying form.

  Will transformation. Be inspired by the flame

  where a thing made of Change conceals itself;

  this informing spirit, master of all that’s earthly,

  loves nothing more than the moment of turning.

  What’s heartset on survival is already stony;

  how safe is it, hid in its innocuous gray?

  Look out, from afar a far harder hardness warns it:

  feel the approach of a hammer held high.

  Whoever flows forth from himself like a freshet, Knowledge will acknowledge,

  and lead him, entranced, through her wondrous world,

  where endings are often beginnings and beginnings ends.

  Every fortune-favored space you wander through, astonished,

  is the child or the grandchild of Change. Even Daphne,

  as she leafs into laurel, wants to feel you become wind.8

  Language restored to its purity is ready to praise. The fourth metamorphosis requires the poet to make a verbal object from the previous transformations, and insert it into the world. Such an object will, in a sense, be material again, public, no longer invisible. Its reason for existing will be its own inherent value. Mont Sainte-Victoire will have passed through the painter’s gaze into immateriality only to return through his art to the canvas. It is no longer a mountain. It is a mountain seen. Seen superbly. Seen from Les Lauves, seen from Bibemus Quarry. Seen not by Cézanne the man but (to adopt the formula of Gertrude Stein) by the human mind. It will, however, be more than a mountain so supremely seen, because it will have been transmogrified by the painter’s paints, the painter’s artistry, the art itself. Now it will no longer need to resemble. If the easel has to be brought to the mountain, the mountain must move toward the easel. In the case of the poet, the perception will have soaked for a long time in a marinade of mind, in a slather of language, in a history of poetic practice. The resulting object will not be like other objects; it will have been invested with consciousness, the consciousness of the artist. Then we, as we read, see, hear, shall share this other superior awareness. We shall be Bach, be Keats, be Cézanne, again, not as they were as men—who desires that?—but as they are as artists.

  And when Auden watches Icarus fall and completes his poem about it, we shall be able to read the poet weighing Breughel as he weighs the world. It is a perception which paintings have let the poet have. And so the indebtedness proceeds, threatening regressions in both directions. Let them be. They are benign.

  BLUE HYDRANGEA

  Like the green that cakes in a pot of paint,

  these leaves are dry, dull and rough

  behind this billow of blooms whose blue

  is not their own but reflected from far away

  in a mirror dimmed by tears and vague,

&nbs
p; as if it wished them to disappear again

  the way, in old blue writing paper,

  yellow shows, then violet and gray;

  a washed-out color as in children’s clothes

  which, no longer worn, no more can happen to:

  how much it makes you feel a small life’s brevity.

  But suddenly the blue shines quite renewed

  within one cluster, and we can see

  a touching blue rejoice before the green.9

  This sonnet is made of many observations, some information, one metaphor for the leaves, three more for the petals, and one conclusion in the first triplet. When we translate Hortensia, which is the name these flowers have in Europe (so called after the mistress of a French botanist), we lose one meaning and gain another (which the “water cup” shape of the seedpods supplies). This plant is like litmus paper. In alkaline soils the blooms are likely to be pink; under acid conditions they are likely to be blue. Aluminum sulfate will provoke the plant in the blue direction; lime will intensify the pink. My grandmother buried nails near her hydrangea, and they bloomed blue as jeans.

  The petals do fade toward a dirty beige, with a little yellow appearing, a bit of purple, too, as the poem says. Here we have a rather namby-pamby soil, and this is what the distant mirror reflects. The color is “washed-out.” The blue shade of old writing paper also pales in a similar way. The poem proceeds through three fades: a teary mirror, a faded letter, worn-out children’s clothes. The brevity of a small life: petal, paper, child—and all they stand for. Until a spot more fertile for the flower is found, and the blue is suddenly renewed, whereupon it rejoices as one risen might. This, then, is a poem of consolation.

  Little more than a year later, Rilke writes another Hortensia poem. This plant bears pink blossoms, perhaps because it is not a sonnet, but the roles of the petals and the leaves are reversed. The flowers are giving away their scent, hoping perhaps, with this generosity, to escape a decolorization. However, the poet observes that underneath the pink of the petals, the plant’s leaves have grasped the situation. Their green is going, as though they wanted to be a reminder of what must come, because the leaves understand the inevitable. No consolation here, only a memento mori.

  Do we need to be told? No. These are simply … simply poems. It is the quality of the awareness encapsulated here that counts. The teardrop in a distant mirror which speaks to us of vanity perhaps or beauty’s loss; the billet-doux whose ink has probably faded, too; the folded children’s clothes about to be buried in an attic hamper: advancing stages of life that are most delicately invoked, so sadly sensed, little losses everywhere to brighten by contrast one sudden blue renewal. The poem’s final line, then, is both positive and pathetic.

  The poem transforms many things—precepts, facts, feelings, memories, rhythms, words—and represents them. It is now a verbal “thing”—an object unlike the leaves, which are said “to know” but really know nothing; an object which is a complex bit of human awareness of the world, an awareness of which we become aware ourselves … and then again … and then again …

  Many grow impatient with what, in Rilke, they see as an escapist view of art: this emphasis on Being rather than on Doing, on relinquishment rather than retention, on acceptance rather than revision; it smacks more of moral indolence than saintliness to them; and its radical subjectivity is offensively antisocial and indifferent to the collective.

  The desire to improve the world, and therefore the condition of the people who occupy and who despoil it, is, however compassionate, an impulse born of ignorance and arrogance.

  To wish to better a person’s situation presupposes a degree of insight into his circumstances that even a writer does not enjoy regarding a character born of his own imagination.… To wish to change, to better a person’s situation means to give him, in exchange for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties which may find him even more helpless.10

  Here is another example of how cleverly Rilke hid behind the truth (or a partial truth) and concealed his unconcern.

  Yet the Elegies, over and over, denounce the times, most particularly their cheap pleasures and their commercial culture.

  Squares, O square in Paris, ceaseless showplace,

  where the modiste Madame Lamort

  weaves and winds the restless ways of the world,

  those endless ribbons, into ever new designs:

  bows, frills, flowers, cockades, artificial fruit,

  each cheaply dyed, to decorate

  the tacky winter hats of Fate.11

  Surely, in these sentiments, Rilke is not out of line. “The Tenth Elegy” is particularly fierce.

  Oh, how completely would an Angel crush underfoot their market of cheap comforts,

  with the church at its side, purchased ready-made,

  as swept, as shut, as disappointing as a post office on a Sunday.…

  Especially worth seeing, but for adults only: coins in copulation,

  right there on stage, money’s metal genitals rubadubdubbing.

  Educational, and sure to stimulate multiplication …

  Denounce is all he does. Rilke has no program for social reform. Our problems are basically metaphysical and cannot be voted out of office or, their heads on pikes, paraded through the streets. Again reflecting Rilke’s stoicism, the human condition (as it has come to be called) can only be understood, appreciated, and endured.

  We’re not in tune. Not like migratory birds.

  Outmoded, late, in haste, we force ourselves on winds

  which let us down upon indifferent ponds.12

  We are not at one with Nature the way the animals are. Actually, we surround ourselves with ourselves (farms, towns, cities, nations, education, technology, art) to blot Nature out, only to find no soul is reachable, touchable, knowable, but our own. And it? Left begging to belong. Rilke suffered, as Nietzsche did, and many others before him, from an envy of the animal. The grace of the big cat, the eagle’s easy soaring, the spider’s patience—qualities we so desperately desire—are granted to these creatures along with their furs and feathers as a birthright. And the bees hive, starlings flock, cows herd, geese fly together north to south, reading the air, knowing towns and times. Alas for us, as Plotinus wrote: life is the flight of the alone to the alone.

  This is not the worst of the Elegies’ mistakes, though it is half-baked ideas of this kind which lead many people to dismiss poetry as merely poetry. They know that instinct—the source of blind repetition—is a species of stupidity. Instinct opposes change; it cannot cope with difference.

  Nor does one need another ideology to reject Rilke’s view that life and death are in the same continuum as though one were infrared and the other ultraviolet. Plato, in the Phaedo, struggling with the idea of significant contraries and the problem of relations, tries to argue for the immortality of the soul by suggesting that life is dependent upon death the way warmth is connected to cold; that the life/death continuum is therefore a matter of degree; and that without death (as is the case with “right” and “left” and “high” and “low”) we could not understand or possess life. One is made from or comes out of the other: the cold can be said to “cause” warmth, and short things make tall ones possible. Rilke makes this point repeatedly. But the argument first confuses a condition like death (which is not a matter of degree) with dying (which is). If I am not running but standing still, my stationary condition should not be understood as very slow running, or my running, when it occurs, as very fast standing. The argument also assumes that if two terms must be defined jointly, because our understanding of one requires our understanding of the other, then the existence of these states or qualities is equally interdependent. We cannot infer from the fact that good and evil are correlative terms (if it is a fact) that Paradise, in order to be Paradise, must have its snake. The most we can conclude is that if there were a perfect place, the people there would be unaware of its perfection, just as the good book says. A
dam and Eve know neither good nor evil until they’ve eaten of the apple.

  Plump apple, banana, gooseberry, pear,

  speak life and death into the mouth.

  I have seen them there. I swear …

  on a child’s face when eating them.

  This comes from far … from far.

  What’s slowly growing nameless in your mouth?

  Freed from the fruit’s flesh,

  where words once were, the juices of discovery are.

  How can you call this “apple.”

  This sweetness that feels at first so dense

  and reluctant, yielding slowly to the tongue,

  until it clarifies, becomes awake, transparent,

  doubly meant, sunny, earthy, wholly here:

  Oh, such touching, carnal knowing, joy—immense.13

  Dying is indeed a diminished form of life, but there is no realm of the dead where the dead dwell like shades cast into an underworld. It may be possible to die your own death, as Rilke also believed, by making your death a clear consequence of your “way” of living, and in that sense growing your death inside you. Moreover, one could refuse the ministrations of doctors and the help of hospitals—dying on your own—alone. Howling, as the Chamberlain’s death howls in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

  The seed image serves Rilke well. As the tree reaches fruition, and realizes the purpose of its growing; as flowers flower and exemplify theirs; as couples couple, too, to produce anew; so pods and fruit appear, only to fall and rot or lose their life between a child’s greedy jaws, or, shaken by a breeze, to reseed the earth for another season, populate a meadow with Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod. Life thus passes from one body to another, and we all must make way for the vast numbers who are coming; yet it is not my life, nor yours, that seeds itself in a son or daughter, to rise again and look out with refreshed eyes, no, it is just life as life—life that has no single owner.