Between Image and Thing: Rilke’s Aesthetic Inquiry From 1897-1908, Rilke produced the major works by which his early reputation as a poet was established: The Book of Images (1902), The Book of Hours (1905), and New Poems I & II (1907, 1908). The question developed in all three projects concerns the status of the work of art—its value as a gesture, its relationship to any real that might be actualized in its construction—in the light of news ideas about subjectivity, identity and referent and in relation to newly emergent, urban, social forms. Rilke’s answer to these questions came with the completion of the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus in Feb. 1922. In what follows I trace the development of Rilke’s thought by reading the way in which Rilke sorts out the relationship between constructed image and extant self or thing. The first poem “Doorway” in Rilke’s The Book of Images, functions as a bookplate or lintel for the collection as a whole. The trope—the image of the doorway that doubles as an entry to the collection—highlights the artificiality of the initial image, a status then conferred to the collection as a whole. The poem itself begins with an imperative invitation to “whoever you are” that we step away from our room “where we know everything” at “the last house before the far-off” and from that threshold he imagines: With your eyes, which, barely tired, free themselves from the worn-out threshold, you slowly lift a black tree and place it against the sky: simple, alone. And you have made the world. And it is huge and like a word, it ripens in silence. And as your will grasps its meaning your eyes tenderly let it go… In a very simple movement, Rilke has proposed that we make world or place through a gesture in which an image is realized. Its not that the tree against the horizon—the existence of figure against background—makes world, but rather the work we do to mark a tree against horizon. Here Rilke hints that even sight, which we imagine to be passive, is a kind of figuration, is active. Place is not found but comes into being through art. And yet, place and our relation to it is unstable. We make world, but we also fall away from what we’ve made, and, if some thing is realized, it involves an impossible double movement in which what is realized is released. Hence, even as the poem proposes schematic by which we might understand our creative relation to world, it unsettles our sense of what this might mean. The gesture is unfinished and something presses against our powers that is not yet done. Here the sense is occasional and light, but the movement aside marks an uncertainty about what we make of creative action that is more fully realized in the Eighth Elegy’s depiction of “one that must leave its womb and fly”, that flashes through the air: “the way a crack goes through a cup. So the track of a bat crosses the porcelain of evening.” At the doorway in 1902, Rilke can still imagine that the falling away that is a part of realization, the erasure that comes with gesture, is like an out-breath; by the Elegies he faces more directly the implication that the gesture produces a crack or flaw by which we are captured. *** Throughout Rilke’s life, he tended to bring out works that were paired or adjacent—linked often by period or theme, but different in terms of form and, in some cases, treatment. The Book of Images contains poems written during the same period as those collected in the better-known Book of Hours; the difference between the two collections lies in difference between the governing conceit. The Book of Images contains something of a child’s miscellany and, thus, reflects a contemporary genre, while the Book of Hours pretends to be the workbook of a young medieval icon painter. The latter conceit allowed Rilke to meditate on the theological implications of the framing thesis that the work of art brings a contingent world into being. In the first section of The Book of Hours, “The Book of Monastic Life” written not long after Rilke’s return from a trip to Russia, Rilke fashioned a series sketches in which an image of his “dark God” was figured. By imagining himself to be an icon painter, Rilke directly considered whether the modernist idea of the way that the artist makes world could be accommodated to the theological conceit that an image reflects God’s hand. That is, are traditional motifs—Christ’s love, his acceptance of poverty, salvation through negation—still salient once one adopts a modernist notion of artistic construction, and if so, how? As with The Book of Images, The Book of Hours does not answer this question. Rilke tactically defers by allowing that the book is a workbook rather than a finished icon. This allowed him to entertain the idea that an artistic gesture might, much as the limned tree made world, “bring God into being” without having to claim he had done this in any particular work. It also produced a sequence of poems that were, in a sense, versions or treatments of a theme and, in this way, to suggest that the artificial, incomplete nature of any single poem or painting did not cancel out the possibility that the work brought something of God into being. This conceit allows Rilke to speak of God in ways that go beyond doctrinal rigor. That is, because this is a workbook, because each poem is a version, Rilke can play out the different sides of a range of knots that come up in theological discourse—God exists, but cannot be named or seen, God is full but can be known only by emptying oneself, God is light and yet unknowable, God dies, and yet God lives; his task is to make an image, not to think everything back to a code. Hence, for Rilke “God ripens” and yet is a darkness that is “like a web of a hundred roots that drinks in silence, out of which I raise myself,” is a cathedral dome that we can never complete. A sense, then, of growth and reach alongside lapse, the tension between finitude and something that apparently exceeds, if only because the limit is reckoned— and this, not a new, unfamiliar problematic split disclosed by a modernist sense of self, but quite the same old problem spoken of as God, when God is the name for what a doubling (at least!) we cannot fully say. In the second suite of poems, “Pilgrimage,” Rilke refers to God as heir and son because although father’s die, “son’s stay and bloom”. This poem is short, only five lines, a hush before one of Rilke’s great outpourings, a sweeping description of ways that God inherits what is realized, whether God inherits the “many summers that the sun says” or the paintings that painter make “so that You endlessly take back Nature which You made transient—everything is eternal.” This rush of song ends with one of the wonderful, mingling moments in Rilke’s writing where the different movements in the relation he considers resolve: So the overflow from things flows into you. And just as the upper basins of a fountain constantly pour over, like strands of loosened hair, into the lowest bowl— so falls the fullness into your valleys when things and thoughts change hands. Here, Rilke works against the grain, both semantically, understanding creation as an influx or return to God, and concretely through metrical shifts. Things that flow out and also inflows—to say something of God requires we say both. Towards the end of “Pilgrimage,” Rilke says: You are the deeper in-working of things, whose word conceals their final essence and shows the other ever otherwise: to ship, as coast, and to land, as ship. The relationship posed here between God and things, that is echoed in the relationship between things is not itself reciprocal, not a mirroring. To be visible—to be drawn up against the sky—is to be covered, to conceal; to cover or be concealed is to be an other, to be different; to be different is to exist in relationships that are not reciprocal but turn. Rilke writes: You, neighbor God, when I sometimes disturb you in the long night with hard rapping— I do that because I seldom hear your breath and know: you are alone in that room. And if you needed something, there’s no one there to give your groping hands a drink: I am always listening. Give me the slightest sign. I am quite close. Only a thin wall is between us, just chance: so it could happen: a cry from your mouth or mine— and it would break down without fuss or fury. The wall’s made out of images of you. And the images of you serve as your names, and when, sometimes, the light flares up in me that would reveal you in my depths it wastes itself in the gleam of the picture frames. Because my senses quickly tire, they are homeless and fall away from you. In Rilke’s hands, then, to think of God, is to think of place or world as relational and dialogical. World is the locus of what seems to be a double movement of flowing out and in, but the theological conceit requires that we also consider world and God as places or positions, vantages on each other, from which I can speak to God, and God to me. When I speak to God, it is not unlike what I did when I lifted a tree against the sky and made a world, and that way that world turns and slips away (or I from it) is the same whether I speak in terms of God or I don’t. The world is full of things that are outside me and yet also lovers; I can talk about them as if they were material artifacts whose obdurance teaches me my own radical difference, and yet, I have a place in them. I give them room, and they give me theirs, and it is not the same thing that is given. Something lays against something else, unevenly. What Merleau-Pont calls chiasmus, a gap between or doubling of sense that makes it possible to imagine an other (and thus ourselves as well) as worthy of ethical care and consolation. That gives us the impossible place to do this, a room next door.