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. *** Rilke’s work in Book of Images and Book of Hours was largely rooted in the provincial imagery and landscape of his childhood in Prague, his college years in Munich and Berlin, and the years up to his marriage to Clara Westhoff—time spent with Lou Andreas-Salome in Austria and Berlin, two trips to Russia, and a sojourn in the newly founded artists colony in Werpswede (Northern Germany). Both were published after his move to Paris in 1902, but it’s two volumes of New Poems (1907, 1908) that bear the mark of the Paris years. Rilke’s time in Paris from 1902-1910 was spent between extremes. These were the years he was most captivated by Lou’s recommendation that he avoid sexual and romantic entanglements for the sake of his art. The efforts he and Clara made to model a bourgeois life increasingly foundered, and they eventually separated. At the same time, he was exposed to the Paris art world, spending time with the by then famous Rodin, first for background for a monograph on Rodin’s work and then, for a brief season, as his secretary. And, of course, the move from province to city paralleled and must have seemed a piece with the transition from the 19th century Hapsburg-Victorian Era to 20th century nation state struggle. Its no wonder that, given the prestige and cosmopolitan slum of the Paris art world, Rilke would have tried to fit his work into the terms of the day. The two most important influences on Rilke’s work at this time were Rodin—who seems to have given Rilke an example on which to model himself—and Cezanne, whose work confirmed key intuitions Rilke had been developing. Rilke learned at least two kinds of object lessons from Rodin—the first about the importance of work, the second about the relationship of sight to image or form. Although Rilke would not always accept that he had learned the former, a fairer assessment would include correspondence as part of his work and would belie that doubt—from as early as 1906, daily correspondence alone might take as many as five hours. But writing was never the physical work of sculpting, and a poem never something as solid as stone, and this, at least would haunt him. More difficult, if not unrelated, was the lesson Rilke learned about sight and its relationship to form. Here, the lesson was that shape existed in three dimensions and not two, that at any time, the eye could see one plane or surface and yet an artist could work so as to accentuate the way an object changed as one moved around it. Many of the strange, apparently unnatural dimensions of Rodin’s sculptures function precisely to make the object dynamic and shifting in relation to spectator’s movement through the shared space. This made Rilke wonder if similar effects could be produced in language, if there were ways to write that would produce analogous effects, indeed, would make the reader aware of both the movement of reading and the actual change of place required by the poem. Could Rilke make the reader feel the transformation of word? And what could Rilke learn from the way Rodin’s figures so often only partially stepped away from background, from the way a couple’s bodies so often shared an unfinished space that lay between them, a dense clot of the stuff they were worked up out of, where the chest of one turned and became the thigh of the other? Cezanne’s influence, coming towards the end of the work on the first volume of the New Poems, largely confirmed both Rilke’s sense that the “place” of an image was contingent and “naturally” artificial—that artifice was not an obstacle to validity, and his sense that validity was, in some way, connected to an autonomy and anonymity that allowed the image to be displayed on its own terms, in an “open” untroubled by subjective projection. The significance of Rilke’s project for our understanding of the relationship of language to visual image lies then in his effort to effect the apparent autonomy and transformational dimensionality of the visual object by producing effects in language. Since thought is so often understood to be a kind of visual image, this was, in the end, also a project about the way we change in thought. Visual objects appear to us as if apart—sight does not seem to involve touch and tells us of distance. By attempting to realize such an object in language, Rilke was essaying whether language was an adequate means of knowledge; but, curiously, he was also testing the conceit that objects—even visual objects—stand in such a relation to us. That is, the question he asks about language is also, in the end, a question about the autonomy of the visual object. Is, in fact, autonomy a characteristic of thought? The basic idea that structured Rilke’s approach was to attempt a gaze in which a subject could give itself as gesture. That is, Rilke sought to empty himself—to make a room of himself, to make himself a shelter around a given subject or art object, in which the answering or springing gesture was the “look” the thing gave back. On the one hand, Rilke sought to stage this emptying through developing the personae of the solitary artist who was subject to nothing but this task. More practically, he attempted to accomplish this by an objectivization of language by which he hoped to bracket his own subjective influence. The methods by which this objectivization was accomplished are fairly well-known: dense syntax, complex neologism and compound, language use that disrupts the aura or spell produced by the poet’s diction and that takes it measure from the graphic as well as sonic. For the purposes of this essay, the key is that all of these practices are modes of interruption or adhesion; methods by which Rilke interrupted his own gesture and speech such that a stereoscopic surface was produced, a surface that forces the reader to move between registers and positions and that echoes the distinct and transformational play of surfaces Rilke saw looking across Rodin’s figures. One of the best known of the New Poems, “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” gives a good example of all of these features. It is the first of the 1908 The Other Part, a title echoed in the Archaic Torso’s famous final lines, where Anderer (other) becomes ändern (to alter or change). Like “The Doorway”, the poem functions as a threshold to the collection the follows. Moreover, the poem also revisits and thus offers us a second pass through the classical motif Rilke had used when he placed “Bygone Apollo” as the first poem for New Poems 1907. I translate both here. Bygone Apollo Just as so often through still barren branches a morning shines that is the whole of spring: so, nothing in his head was able to keep the radiance of all poems from striking us senseless; for there was still no shadow in his gaze, his temples were still too fresh for laurels and only later would a long-stemmed rose garden grow out at his eyebrows, whose leaves, separately, would stir and wash against the whispers of his mouth, which is still quiet, unopened and shining, drinking everything in with just his lips, as if to allow his song to flood in. The Archaic Torso of Apollo We did not know his enormous head, within which the apple of his sight ripened. But his torso still glows like a candelabra, as if his gaze, now lowered, was stilled and glittered. Otherwise the bust’s bulge could not dazzle you, nor could a smile go along the slightly twisted loins to the middle where he bears his manhood. Otherwise this stone would be disfigured and squat beneath the transparent slope of the shoulders and would not shimmer like a leopard’s skin and would not burst from all its surfaces as if a star: So, there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. Both poems are Italian sonnets—a preference for Rilke—with end rhymes and metered tone, so that in one way each poem falls within a traditional form and voice. However, syntax—sentence, punctuation, units of meaning—is not structured by rhyme and lineation, but rather falls across it; because of this sense, does not resolve in relation to the organizing form, and, instead, a second surface is established. Units of meaning spill over breaks between lines and stanzas, and the rhymes fall oddly in relation to sense. In “Bygone Apollo,” a single sentence is draped over the lines so that the sense of overwhelming radiance and flood occurs as the otherwise too ornate clauses, given suspension by the lattice-work of line, fall out and on. Rilke means this piece to be a painting, so there is an overall flatness to the image, but there is also the interruption of affect across the first stanza break as he shifts from the pastoral to talk of the way the poems crash (treffen) against us, and a disruption of syntax in the first tercet where he splits what we first read either as a verbal or as an adjectival modifier (ausgelöst) from the verbal unit it modifies. The first clears space for the central figure—we are unsettled and read what follows more intently. The second makes us slow down just Rilke moves us into a hush. It establishes the first contrast in the emergent rhyme scheme that alternates between en/end and öst and prepares us for the difficult reversal of sense Rilke attempts to work when he suddenly speaks of song—all the while flooding out at us, or like the sun, through appearing forms—as something that floods into (eingelöst). “Archaic Torso” is similarly fashioned both as an individual piece and in relation to the sequences Rilke has laid out. A sense of both a rupture in time and a rupture in history is marked by absence of Apollo’s head, even if his sight (Schaun) lingers, and this does much to make us feel the one collection goes on impossibly after the first. Because of the violence and difficulty of “Archaic Torso” there is also the sense that the difference is related to a trauma—its not unlike the way the second story opens out in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Archaic Torso works to build up a three-dimensional figure. Short sentences establish different possible planes inside and across the lineation, the oblique construction of the image of the Torso’s loins leaves us both too close but also limns the shape—Zeugung literally hangs out at the end of the second stanza, after a stammer of demonstration (die die). The space of the room around the torso is actualized by the unexpected “candelabra”, while the different uneven bulges of the Torso are built out through the second stanza by the placement of the blunt nouns of the description. All of this prepares us for the turn in the third tercet where we are told there is no place (stelle) that does not see us. The words and grammar here are quite simple, but the sense so unusual—especially after the reference to the stars—that we want to restate what’s been said. Have we been at the center of the poem’s gaze all along? Weren’t we the lookers? And if this refers to the places on the torso, and if there was no place that did not see me, then the torso must somehow be all around me—I inside it, it the room. And all that disruption of sense, all that disruption of our sense of the order of our relation to world, right before the equally simple and direct “You must change your life”. Still, the effect is not entirely autonomy, and while the discipline applied to produce these poems may have gone a ways towards self-emptying, the result is something different. Attempting to surround the “other” in a gaze, Rilke finds it looks back from all sides: the other that he would make surrounds him, and he is at stake, must change his life, because he cannot so empty himself as to cancel the relation. And, because of that, he must think about what it might mean to give room. In a key, uncollected poem, written after New Poems was published Rilke makes this explicit, saying that “for a long time he gained power by looking” but in the end saw that his heart “did not have love”. That is, he determined that what defeated his project was that “there is a limit to the look. And the world that is looked at wants to flourish in love.” Thus: The work of looking is done, now do heart-work on each image imprisoned within you; for you overwhelmed them: but you still don’t know them. Look, inner man on your inner woman, the one attained from a thousand natures, this still unattained, not yet beloved find. In the new poems Rilke had attempted to master the doubling I speak of here by creating stereoscopic effects in his poems—doubling surfaces that were realized in specular rather than tangible or felt terms. Seeing, however, as a mode of relation is one that ever allows ourselves the fantasy that we either do not touch—hidden like Sartre behind his keyhold—or can fully grasp without destroying the object we desire. In seeing, the heart has not yet bent itself to care.