The Room Next Door: The Impossible Affordance of the Rose When I was a child, I lived in a subdivision town called Middleburg Heights, on the south side of Cleveland. The lots were small, just a bit wider than the houses, with yards that backed up to a short hedge that separated one yard from another. Alongside the garage, my father had planted fruit trees and rhubarb, and over the sand box and the driveway, there was a honey locus tree with thin willowy leaves. In a dream once, I crawled back through the hedge that separated the yards and, instead of the back neighbors lawn, I found an open strip of land, a bit like the cuts that travel along power lines, but wind tossed & high grass & purple shadowed bushes like Van Gogh’s Arles, and the excitement of this, discovering this between where it couldn’t be, an impossible space, tossed by June airs. It was the first of this kind of dream—later there’d be a hidden valley south of Pearl St. in the short dell behind Schugel’s Drugs, or a twisting stairway above into a warehouse or attic that couldn’t be there—a ruined temple with a flight of stairs leading up to a door frame, behind which there is only the sky. Places that opened out where they couldn’t have and the thrill of stumbling into them that’d linger through the day. Although I didn’t see it at the time, there is probably a connection between the dream and my decision to work in the History of Religions where scholars use the idea of sacred space to speak of the ways in which ritual and discourse create physical spaces by which we orient towards religious values. Still, it wasn’t until I stumbled over Rilke in graduate school that I began to tease out the connections between religion and the arts that allowed me to see more clearly at least one way of reading Rilke’s Roses—to make sense of Rilke’s use of the rose as the epitome of a loved interlocutory and to understand what he proposes when he speaks of the space (l’espace) or the inner room (raum) of the roses. And from there to make a different sense of the dream. A Detour through an Impossible Room Its not hard to see that we humans want and need impossible space—more room than can be had, a place in which our imagination is realized. At the table, there are only so many places and yet somehow we all have to eat. And it won’t do simply to lay angle after road of suburban tract out into the distance, because a point on a grid is not shaped like a heart is shaped—the heart, which like the hand or the ear, is meant to fit something—what Rilke might have meant when he spoke of our need for “a pure, thin, contained human place, our fruit-bearing haunt between river and rock”. Impossible space is necessarily, at least in part, imagined space. It depends on a thought we have, whatever thought, finally is—an actual image, a feeling that is not yet image, the chime of thought and body we call word, the bird-like flight of a sentence that passes silently, perhaps almost whispered. Thus we bear on the world, our thoughts working against stone to shape, the asking that is in this, the desire we pursue, the places where we come up short. Of course, one of the questions we have—and in the European tradition, we’ve had it formally since Plato wrote his Socratic phantasies—has to do with the relationship of what we imagine to some other “out there” world we also know in our senses—a world we eat, a world where we’re eaten. These days, at least as long as we aren’t reading Harry Potter, we are used to the thought that imagined is not real. And somehow, despite the fact that something as impossible as the Chrysler Building rises like a mast over Manhattan, we think the imagination doesn’t matter. It’s as if we’d decided we didn’t have hands or necessarily had to work blind. And we still long for space, and we dream it up all around ourselves all the time. Two Cases In the course of a long project focused on explaining the centrality of the Buddha-image for a supposedly non-theistic religion, I worked with an early (1200-800 BCE) collection of Sanskrit language poetry, the Rgveda, as a relevant contextual case for reading the construction of Buddha images. The Rgveda is a collection of some 1100 lauds used by a Central Asian nomadic people who migrated into and became dominant in North India between 1500-800 BCE. It is one of the earliest large collections of liturgical text we have in the human record. The key rituals associated with the hymns were daily fire oblations done at the sun’s stations at dawn, noon, and sunset on behalf of powerful beings called “devas” who guarded, preserved, and sustained the sun’s gifts of life. Of these the most extensive address the opening of light at dawn. Without going into extensive detail about imagery or belief, I’d like to briefly discuss the way in which the poems echo the appearance of the world at dawn to “make place”. Very briefly, the poems refer to or speak in terms of three “worlds” or topoi, where world means something like an ordered set of terms. These are what I call the external sense world—the world we know of through our senses that lays outside us, an imaginary world, and an internal sense world that comes into being—is marked out—as a result of the performance of the poem by which the first two are woven together. In the context of the Rgveda dawn hymns, the external sense world is figured by referring to a dawn as it occurs to sense—the change of light, the new colors, the sun ranged in the morning’s clouds or perhaps just the bare line of red lifted into a lowering charcoal night, the new blue shapes of just discerned surroundings. This world is “there” because we sense it—it’s “out there”; we don’t make it as much as we find ourselves in it. Similarly, the mythic, imaginary topos is admitted by way of singing of the devas, powerful spirit lords associated with plays of light (the sun, storm-louds, the flashing waters, fire) and their relation to the sense-world. The verses weave these topoi together using all the devices of poetry—correspondences are asserted through metaphor and sound, what is sensed is named and then known in terms of the imaginary. The last topos referred to in these hymns is the ritual space brought into being by 1) kindling fire in imitation of the dawn, and 2) singing hymns of praise which weave together the imaginary world of the devas and the sense-world, and 3) making offerings which tie these worlds together. That is, the hymns include direct, self-reflexive awareness of a sense-world location (the space around the fire, the implements used to kindle the fire, the hymns as such) that is posed as a special double of the sense-world. It is an “as if” space that has been brought into being through performance, one I call “internal” because we bring it about in our performance. It’s a fold or gap we make in the fabric of things by which we propose an inflected sense of the day. Imagine then: a guy or several men sitting around a fire at dawn, somewhere on the vast steppes of Central Asia, their cattle moving about nearby, tawny in the fresh light, wind brushing the straps of their tents, calling out into—spelling out—the day. Like a bird song, something flung out into the air as a way of projecting a shape—a duration—an “as if” that actually was and so now exists as a figure among the other objects of the world. A figure that opens out a space of relation. A field in which they suddenly see themselves stand as such. *** In a class on Poetry, Desire, and Religion, I have students read from Maurizio Bettini’s The Portrait of the Lover alongside Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet. Bettini’s work includes a study of the trope by which a drawing or statue of a lover becomes a sometimes haunting, sometimes fruitful portal to an absent, often dead, lover. Carson considers a proximate case, taken from a fragment by Sappho, in which a triangular set of relations is figured: Sappho, the poet, watches a man embrace a woman, and, in the saying of that, her own desire for the woman is admitted. Carson suggests that in this case, the poet comes to know her desire for an other by way of an identification with a second figure—the man embracing the woman she loves. That is, a necessary and mimetically constructed difference between other and self is founded by way of a term, a figure that mediates their relation. In this way, self discovers itself, secret, seeing from a separate, and interior place, apart from, and in relation to, even though. *** In both cases then, a triadic structure related to a call: an other, “out there,” that matters; an imaginaire—vehicle or prosthesis by which the reach towards sensed other is said; and a newly disclosed and impossible place of the self, now layered in relation to the other by the articulation of the poem. A space opened up between self and world in which one is said to stand. In both cases, a bending or weaving, a back and forth between imagination and sense made possible by language. In both cases, a third interior, personal term infused or considered by an imaginative act of seeing (devas in clouds, the statued lover, Sappho, herself, in the man) that, considered palimpsest to sense, makes possible both a difference and relation. Aesthetic Modernism: Embracing the Double Rilke’s work in the first decade of the 20th century occurred against and amidst several currents of thought in Europe, including 19th century realism, the Art Nouveau-influenced Jugendstil movement, Symbolisms(s) in Belgium and Russia, and the fin-de-siècle “language-crisis” concerning subjectivity, reference, and representation. Rilke’s aesthetic approach during this time is considered part of an Aestheticist trajectory in high modernism that responded to these issues through a new attention to the materiality of language—taking language as material or fabric—alongside a renewed attention to the relational play by which a figure is expressed. There was in this both a return to the world of the senses—a visible human world in contrast to the intuited or dreamed Symbolist landscape—and an effort to disclose the extent to which, far from being given as such, visible things are rendered in the play of our sense. Significantly, both for its time and for ours, Aestheticism understood value as such is constituted not simply in terms of surface relations but also in terms of a dynamic play of surfaces and depth. What this means is that alongside its critique of Symbolism, Aestheticism resisted both a reductionist materialism and the new privilege given the visual image by photography and film. It did so by reading the visual image, the sensed object, and the word as constituted in terms of sensuous surface and a desiring depth that “looked back” at the interpreting reader. In this way, being was both doubled and dialogical, and the artwork became a condensed and intensified form by which a complex desire might be shown. Aestheticism can be thought of as a conservative modernism in so far as its project did not emphasize a decisive break with prior notions of mimetics or value, but, instead, applied old methods (painting, lyric poetry, sculpture) to newly conceived subjects. One still painted vases, for instance, but the position of both the vase and the painting of it was no longer fixed. Indeed, both needed to be looked at through what Cartson Strauthausen has called the “stereoscopic look”, an understanding that both the sense world (as source of objects to be rendered) and the work of art (its rendering) are doubled or layered, are, in a sense, fabrics with surfaces but also depth and weight. The stereoscopic was one solution to the fin de siècle language crisis, the growing awareness, both in political and in social science circles, that the language we use has only a nominal, arbitrary relationship to its referents. New theories, such as Freud’s assertion of the unconscious, and Saussure’s identification of what he called a semiotic dimension of language suggested both the possibility of a new kind of control and mastery with respect to self-constructed invention—one sees this impulse for instance in various Futurisms and Surrealism—and a new awareness of possibly yawning gap between our imagination and the real. The Aestheticist assertion of the stereoscopic allowed one to admit both the constructed nature of the image and the limits of our knowledge of it in a way that allowed us to admit a relationship to it despite its contingent and arbitrary status. This notion is fundamental to Rilke’s approach in the Roses, both in his awareness that the depths or essence of the rose can only be imagined (and thus he can speak to it as if it were a friend) and that the rose presents an impossible beauty, grounded in nothing other than its show.