Tall Tree in the Ear The New Poems ends with a crisis related to discovering the limits of a look—understanding that it stops, that the other looks back, that looks are overlain and palimpsest rather that realm. In Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke makes the not completely unforeseeable move of turning to the ear. While it might be too difficult to overcome the difference of a look so as to find common place, hearing produces a place we must admit is shared. What we hear are the echoes back from what surrounds us, a domed space or room even when the roof is the sky. Rilke moves decisively to develop this theme. The opening poem of the first suite, echoing The Book of Images’ “Entrance” begins: A tree rose there. Oh pure overflow! Oh! Orpheus sings! Oh taller tree in the ear! And everything went still. Yet even in that silence a new beginning appeared, a wink and transformation. Rilke imagines that this beckoning note makes the forest animal’s own cries seem smaller—it quiets their difficult desire, so that they who at best had had a hovel to offer as welcome, “a shelter out of their darkest longings, with an entrance whose tent-pole shook” now have a temple that Orpheus has built “in their hearing”. The notes here are caught from the Seventh Elegy and Rilke’s determination there that at the heart of the relation figured by desire was call—and that call could be a sheltering tree, a stop against desire, a place for it, shelter, or well, or room. There Rilke offers several of his most decisive affirmations, the lyrical slip of Hiersein is herrlich “Being here is beautiful”, the assertion that “even the most visible glory cannot make itself known to us until we transform it within—Nowhere, beloved, will world be, but within.” Indeed, he says temples are no longer known, and many fail to see they can build even greater temples within themselves. And yet, even then, thinking about this, Rilke argues with his Angel interlocutor, “we have not neglected the rooms we have been given, these rooms of ours” the Cathedral at Chartres was great, or a woman in love—we do make beauty in the room we are given. In the second poem, Rilke produces a layering, showing how well he has learned that things are doubled. In the first poem, we read about the Orphic call, the tree ascended sheltering, and turn the page, and he names it differently as a girl, beginning again: And it was almost a girl and came forth out of that lucky break of song and lyre and shone clear through her spring-time veils and made herself a bed in my ear. And slept within me. Towards the end of Part Two, Rilke pairs this poem with one that takes a note from the myth of Daphne to finish the thought of tree as dancing girl who, “since she feels herself to be laurel, wants you to change into wind.” But here, it is her sleep—her forgetting is everything: The trees that constantly astonished me, the marked distances, the meadows I longed for, every wonder that touched my heart. She slept the world. And so tall tree in the ear is doubled by girl asleep in the ear and dreaming. A doubling that is made formally explicit where Rilke makes us aware of Sonnet as lattice, pouring his thought across the end of the first quatraine, and then again across the turn the first tercet should signal. Following a mimetic impulse has led him to say world and self as garment laid down over a lattice, a bit of cotton seed, caught by a thorn. In this way then, hearing produces a shelter made possible by the shell of the ear, and when a thing said makes a shelter, the word—the tree lifted up—not only covers over what it says, it makes a place for it as well, there in the cupped hand of the ear. Rilke’s Rose Room In 1925, Rilke realized the likelihood that the illness—undiagnosed leukemia—he had been suffering for several years might be uncurable. He prepared a will that included the request that the following be inscribed in his stele: Rose, oh pure dispute, joy, to be Noone’s sleep under so many lids. Shortly after preparing this, the story has it that he pricked his hand gathering roses from his garden to give to one last amoureuse, a young Egyptian woman he had met at a nearby spa. An infection set in which exacerbated the damage done to his immune system by leukemia and led to his death several months later. Just two years earlier, he had composed the Roses cycle, working out what feel like brief drawings at the edge of an open. Spare on the page, the majority of them simply double quatrains, as if Rilke had written the first movement of a sonnet and then left off, as if to offer silence instead of the tercet’s turn. There at the verge, profile and face revealed, but the depths unsounded and still to sound. The rose’s room. This word I’ve been using, “room”. My choice for rendering the German raum—expanse, room, space. A key word for Rilke that often is translated as “space”—this is what Mitchell uses—a term that might be right up against the notion of the “open” (offen) that so excited Heidegger when he read the Eighth Elegy, the idea of a radical exterior verge towards which all being opens. In general, when Rilke uses the term, it suggests an affordance rather than something we might find terrifying or have to think as an absence. When, in the Eighth Elegy, Rilke glosses raum as the “open”, the open is not empty. It is a “pure raum, in which flowers endlessly unfold,” where there is always world and “never a nowhere without [saying] a no” (niemals Nirgends ohne Nicht). Rilke contrasts a look out into the open, a look that would fill with room, with the way “we, spectators, always, over against things, are turned towards things and never outward” (Und wir: Zuschauer, immer überall, dem allen zugewandt und nie hinaus!) Its we who thus become empty, who can be filled with something else. Room is something different, an allowance hinged impossibly to our limits. Rilke makes much the same point in the other poem in which raum is contrasted with an absence of relations: What birds drop through is not the intimate room that intensifies form for you. (There, in the Free you would refuse yourself and dwindle away and never return.) Room reaches from us and translates Things: so that the tree’s being-there for you succeeds, throw inner-room about it, from that pure room that turns in you. Surround it with restraint. It has no way to stop itself. Until in the in-forming in your sacrifice it becomes an actual tree. So much happens here—the pure room that turns—Rilke uses an archaic verbal form “wen” here to stress the strangeness of the transformation—Daphne in Laurel, you into wind—he elsewhere speaks of in terms of a double movement—this flurry of wings by which we are, both in ourselves and moving out of ourselves. The way a tree becomes actual—workable (wirklich)—because of the thought, the imagination we bring to it. The “in-shaping” (eingestalt) of this, that thought is already sacrifice, a make by which room is given to be. I’ve chosen room rather than space not only because it echoes the sound of raum, but because we tend to think of space as unfilled, void, empty, Cartesian, theoretical, and thought is not theoretical. It happens to us. In the work I did on the Rgveda, one of the things I found was that there were words for thought and mind before there was a common, discrete word for body. It seems to me that this suggests we needed to say thought and mind in the same way that we needed to say sun or river or kill. Because thought happened, and it was a difference that mattered. We did not dream up thought to shore up a metaphysics, we dreamt up metaphysics to shore up thought, which otherwise we might have been unable to say. And, like the Sanskrit word garba, that can mean both seed/embryo and womb, “room” because it feels as if its doubled, a space for and the walls around, and when we say it, rolling the semi-vowel, we say something that is between, that has to be two things, that transgresses the Law of the Excluded Middle and has to be lived in relation to rather than mastered. Something we might want to give each other, the way we give each other roses, the way we put these in vases, and vases on shelves, to make the room that is otherwise impossible between us, a room we could never have by murder, a room that actually affords.