A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  a few wailing women. Women who will weep for money,

  and if well-paid will howl for you all night,

  when otherwise all is quiet.

  Customs! We haven’t nearly enough customs.

  All gone and out of use.

  So that’s what you had to come back for:

  the mourning that was omitted. Do you hear mine?

  Rilke is the restless one. He is, when he composes this poem, but one year older than Paula Modersohn-Becker would have been had she not lost the struggle between life and art, the battle with her body, biologically bent upon a different kind of birth than gratifies the artist. A year later, Rilke wrote these explanatory lines in a letter to Hugo Heller:

  The fate that I tried to tell of and to lament in the Requiem is perhaps the essential conflict of the artist: the opposition and contradiction between objective and personal enjoyment of the world. It is no less conclusively demonstrated in a man who is an artist by necessity; but in a woman who has committed herself to the infinite transpositions of the artist’s existence the pain and danger of this choice become inconceivably visible. Since she is physical far into her soul and is designed for bearing children of flesh and blood, something like a complete transformation of all her organs must take place if she is to attain a true fruitfulness of soul. (Stephen Mitchell’s translation in Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, New York: Random House, 1982. Letter to Hugo Heller, June 12, 1909. Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 1, 1892–1896, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton. New York: W. W. Norton, 1945.)

  In a series of astonishing lines, Rilke describes how Paula, having reformed her birth-bearing body and become a painter, now devours the green seeds of her proper artist’s death, and orders her blood to return to its normal maternal course. Her blood obeys, but sullenly.

  Do you know with what hesitation,

  what reluctance, your blood, when you called it back,

  gave up its commitment to an incomparable circulation?

  how confused it became when asked to take up

  once again the restricted circuits of the body?

  how, full of mistrust and astonishment, it flowed

  into the placenta again, exhausted suddenly

  from the long journey home?

  The poem blames the poet, blames Otto Modersohn by implication, but more enthusiastically blames men in general for the wrongs done women, who have been subjugated, co-opted, and denied their creative opportunities. Rilke is only too painfully aware of his early condescension, his own serious falls from grace, his fearful failure to support Paula’s efforts at independence, his own Modersohn role.

  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.

  So the petition turns out to be in the poet’s, not the painter’s, hands, though hers are ghostly and his fictitious. It is he, all along, who has needed rest, and for whom all his requiems were written. To remain ordinary is his failure and his fear. No high Mass here, either, with music by Mozart or Berlioz or Verdi. This is the low Mass, a Mass said, not sung, for those who have accused themselves of hypocrisy and contradiction, a Mass to be spoken in the catacombs. Kyrie eleison. It is not for the victims, but for the victimizers. Christe eleison. Clara Westhoff’s pregnancy might have ended with a Schade, and she might now be haunting that dismal just-married cottage as Christine Brahe haunts her castle. Have mercy on the living, then, who must sit upon their swelling conscience, trying to cry out as loudly as the chamberlain’s death did. It is not Hamlet’s father’s ghost, but Banquo’s—a ghost that guilt has sent for—that the poet faces. Where were the poet’s principles when, in Paris, Paula appeared to be approaching him, and he helped send her, instead, back to her marriage, child, and deathbed. Now he charges her with a lack of courage. “Don’t come back,” the requiem’s last lines read.

  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.

  Life is a series of embroilments; living is entangling; hell, as Sartre said, is other people; that is why Rilke always had a preference for things and made his best love by post. The artist must deny life in order to celebrate it. He must transcend the ordinary altogether. It is a sort of death, a freeing of the soul. Death dissolves these worldly relations, and those who die young, especially as virgins (for love is a knot made of knots), have less disengaging to do. The great series of sonnets to Orpheus that Rilke dedicated to Wera Ouckama Knoop, and that serve as her requiem, contains one (part 2, number 13), addressed directly to Orpheus himself, that can serve as a summing up and a welcome to the world of wraiths, phantoms, and almost holy … ghosts.

  Anticipate all farewells, as if they were behind you

  like the winter that’s just past, for among winters

  there will be one so relentlessly winter

  that in overwintering it your heart will be readied to last.

  Remain with Eurydice in the realm of death—rise there

  singing, praising, to realize the harmony in your strings.

  Here—among pale shades in a fading world—

  be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.

  Be—but nevertheless know why annihilation

  is the unceasing source of your most fervent vibration,

  so that this once you may give it a full affirmation.

  To the store of copious Nature’s used-up, cast-off,

  speechless creatures—an unsayable amount—jubilantly join yourself and cancel the count.

  SACRED TEXTS

  Exemplum

  1. And God decided to write the world. He wrote the words round vast empty dark. They made a line He liked. He wrote the word vast in triplicate because He wanted the world to be very, very vast. He wrote the word empty twice because he wanted the world to be mostly empty, so that one might turn tens of thousands of its pages and find them all blank and black. The word dark he doubled for the same reason. There was no point in writing the word round more than once, because whatever was round (and surely round was round) could not become any rounder, even by rolling. God appointed one vast to accompany the darkness like a friend, and another to confront emptiness like an enemy, for what is it to be vast if your vastness is for rent?

  2. round vast empty dark

  vast dark empty vast

  was the way it went. Then He wrote revolve so there might be a place for time, but nothing did, for there was nothing but a vast emptiness, as He had decreed; moreover, had that vast dark emptiness turned, no one would have noticed. God had thought He could write down whatever He wished. But the Creator was corrected by His creation. God had thought He was omnipotent until He began to write. He thought about adding erase, but what was the point of erasing Nothing to get nothing? Vexed, God decided to let those vast black pages curl from exposure and disuse. He didn’t write another word for what would have been a long long time.

  3. And then, still miffed, He wrote the word revolver. The chambers did, but the chambers were empty.

  4. And then, still more miffed, he thought about mixing meaningless in, or pointless, or aimless, but why should the Future know? Let it remain ignorant as the cows that would come to be.

  5. God remembered, being omniscient, how Plato’s Demiurge would one day do it. When the Demiurge (who had fashioned the world
’s soul and set the planets moving in perfect circles, and who, using the harmonic mean as a recipe, had readied the rational light that was to be set in man’s head) was confronted by the problem of creating the lower parts of the human soul, he realized that he had better outsource that aspect of the job (as we say now), because the lower parts of the soul called for imperfection, and imperfection was exactly what was beyond the Demiurge’s abilities.

  So he turned the task over to the planets, inadvertently giving astrologers a big boost, for these lesser gods, striving to do their best, would still be unable to surpass or even equal their own natures, and thus, though aiming high, create just the lowness necessary. Man’s whole soul in a sense would have three authors: (1) Plato, who created the Demiurge, (2) the Demiurge, who created the planets and their rational paths, as well as, out of the leftovers, man’s mind, and (3) the planets, who would supply the soul with its darker dimensions.

  God then remembered that it would get worse. Among men, some would be poets. There’d be Hesiod, for one. And he would invent gods by the dozens and give them hierarchy, home, and history. Valleys would be haunted, woods, too, cliffs and caves. There’d be Olympians, Titans, Fates, and Furies, Nymphs and Naiads, Sprites and Lemurs, bugbears aplenty.

  6. Instructed by the future, then, God wrote host of angelic scriveners in His very long hand. Let them do the writing, which is damnably hard, God silently, inside Himself, said; I’ll just publish. These were God’s last words, even to Himself, since He wished to remain Omnipotent.

  round vast empty dark

  vast dark empty vast

  host of angelic scriveners

  God’s last thought, however, was a bit of rearrangement.

  round vast empty dark

  host of angelic scriveners

  vast dark empty vast

  He wanted his writers to be in the thick of things.

  7. Soon the Heavens were full of Bards creating all kinds of creatures, including a class called prophets, through whom the Bards liked to scream and bellow, rant, promise, and threaten. Thus, as inpast times Plato told it, did sacred books come into being: first as the word of God, told and retold, memorized and related syllable by syllable, through generation after generation of prophets, seers, oracles, sibyls, gurus, and rishis, and then set down in various forms of writing, which would be finally gathered, compiled, and anthologized to make the sacred texts.

  The pages and paragraphs, the verses and chapters, the sentences and lines of these books were divinely revealed; therefore, they were at once good, true, and beautiful. And those who lived under their spell received the name Hindu or Moslem or Christian or Buddhist or Jain or Jew.

  The Hindus had the Rigveda, the Samaveda, and the Yajurveda, the Atharva, the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas, and the Upanishads, just to begin with, for fully sacred texts soon lent a little of their aura to other works that gathered around them, such as the Kalpa-sutras, the Srauta-sutras, Grhya-sutras, and Dharma-sutras, which grew more and more divine over time, the way the holy men grew their beards. Even epics became canonical in order to please the public. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana, as well as the Puranas, made the grade.

  The holy book of the Jains is called the Agama, and contains eleven Angas, twelve Upangas, ten Painnas, six Chheda-sutras and four Mula-sutras. The Hinayana Buddhist books are called “baskets,” which even God would have to find charming: the Sutta-pitaka, the Vinaya-pitaka, and the Abidhamma-pitaka. The Mahayana Buddhists appeal to the Maha-vastu, the Buddha-charita, and the Lalita-vistara, but they have their sutras, too, among them the Saddharmapundarika, the Prajnaparamita, the Dasabhu-misvara, the Samadhi-raja, the Karandavyuha, the Gandavyuha, the Lankavatara, the Suvarnaprabhasa, the Sukhavativyuha, and the Tathagata-guhyaka. The sacred book of the Sikhs is the Adi-Granth.

  The Hindus, like the Romans and the Greeks, set about inventing gods even faster than the seraphim could inspire them: Siva and Kali and Agni and Atar … as well as Et Cetera … the deity of endless lists.

  The canon of the Zoroastrian faith got badly knocked about during its first thousand years and exists now only in fragments: the Yasna, the Visparad, and the Vendidad, among them. They made up for this lack later by adding the Dinkart, the Bundahishn, the Arda Viraf Nameh, the Sayast la-Sayast, the Datistan-i-Dinik, and the Shikand Gumanik Vigar.

  They invented Ahura Mazda, and let Atar be his son. They also invented his opposite and equal, the dark star, Angra Mainyu, so that the condition of the world would always be one of war.

  Muhammad believed that the One Book has existed eternally (which gets around God’s writer’s block), and has been revealed in the Jewish Torah, in the Christian New Testament, as well as by him in the 114 surahs of the Koran, which his followers collected after the Prophet’s death.

  Despite the fact that there is but one God called Allah, Moslems managed to give him ninety-nine names, and plenty of companions—angels, jinns, genii, and prophets too numerous to number. Sanctity spreads as swiftly as some plagues.

  This aggrandizing tendency, in which Yahweh, for example, is promoted from local chieftain to God Almighty has been praised by theologians, who regard monotheism as a kind of religious and intellectual progress; but every such Grandfather God harbors a multitude of lesser beings, not all of them nice, in His heavenly house. Monotheism is just a rock under which polytheism lurks like a crowd of roly-polys.

  The early Christians created God the Father, then Jesus Christ, and then the Holy Ghost. Although technically Mary is not deserving of worship, but should properly receive merely adoration, the highest degree of veneration due saints, the reality is that as the Blessed Virgin she is treated like a god. There were all those angels, of course, and plenty of saints, who were all but deified, and whose pickled body parts both healed and inspired.

  Western philosophers lamely offered the Absolute, the One, or the élan vital, while some politicians tried to Bible-ize Das Kapital.

  Shinto principally depends on the Kojiki and the Nihongi. The Chinese regard their books as simply the work of wise men; however, that has not prevented them from being as dogmatic about the contents of these wise writings as everybody else is about theirs. Their canon contains Five Classics and Four Books. The Classics are the Shu-Ching, the Shih-Ching, the I Ching, the Li Chi, and the Ch’un Ch’iu. The Four Books are the Lun-Yü, or the Analects of Confucius; the Ta Hsüeh, the Great Learning; the Chung Yung, the Doctrine of the Mean; and the work we call Mencius on the Mind.

  I have always admired the Yezidi, who have tried to isolate themselves from the rest of mankind, since the rest of mankind sprang from the intercourse of Adam with Eve, whereas they are descendants of Adam alone. They have two sacred texts, the Black Book and the Book of Revelation. Their supreme God is passive (perhaps fed up, see above), and He has turned the management of the universe over to seven angels, the most important of which is the peacock angel, Malak Ta’us. He fell from Heaven along with the rest of that disobedient crowd, but repented so copiously, his tears quenched the fires of Hell. Like many others, the Yezidi do not utter his name, although I can—he is, but is not called, Satan.

  For our part, returning from Kurdistan to the USA, we have fathered the Book of Mormon in addition to Oashpe, Science and Health, The Joy of Cooking, and Dianetics. Is everything sacred? … How many volumes, then?

  Perhaps not so many as stars.

  Exegesis

  Every significant religious system stands upon a sacred text. This text is indeed its temple. Inside, its heroes and their history are enshrined. Although leaders of varying degrees of divinity are always involved in the creation of a new sect, they usually have short lives, often come to bad ends, and their influence, diluted by disciples, soon disappears as water does in sand. What the leader leaves behind is Mein Kampf or its equivalent: his testament. Occasionally, by the indolent, an existent text is chosen, or a compilation selected—a golden treasury. From time to time, other writings may be dubbed divine, as though knighted. This is
not a simple social thing, however. It is more important than a nation adding to its territories. Any addition to the divine canon will approve, proscribe, or admit new thoughts, new practices, and, in consequence, elevate different people to positions of privilege and power.

  Once, the Word, almost any word, if written somewhere, was an object of wonder. Previous to its materialization, the word was like air that dare not be let out of its chamber—some tribal member’s memory—lest it escape for good. Cast in language full of devices to aid its retention—the descent of the gods, or the history of the clan, with its founding heroes, its notable triumphs, the lessons of its history, including, of course, an account of the legitimate passage of power through persons and families—each was enshrined in the poet/archivist’s head, and sections of the great saga sung on appropriate ritual occasions, its lessons taught to kids, and periodically reinforced by being dinned in every nearby ear.

  Lest there be unseemly alterations (which was likely in any case), great emphasis was placed on retaining the history word for word, and variations of any kind were forbidden. Apprentice bards listened, and learned, and sang the same story generation after generation. Since all lore lay in either tribal memory or in what the skilled hands of hunters or weavers or magicians remembered, this caution made splendid sense.

  Nevertheless, mistakes were bound to be made. We just don’t know what they were. Additions and revisions and omissions would be certain to occur over time. And as stories spread, floating like weather-driven clouds over regions foreign to them, the need for literalness would be loosened, and updating would not be entirely unwelcome. The Homeric epics, based on tradition, acquire a patina of contemporary lore and custom. Like a tall drink, they are repeatedly refreshed.

  Although the poet is supposed to pass on, like a professional gossip, what he’s heard, and is properly to be appreciated for his performances, the aura of the gods hangs round his head, the great song issues from his mouth, and the deed depicted enhances its reciter, so that it is natural that the poet should borrow a little of that divinity his text has so much of, and, as actors often are, be identified with his role.