No One's Rose

Friday, June 14, 2013

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.

New Poems 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.

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.

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.

Notes: For short introductions to my approach to the Rg Veda, see get cite. In general, we can think of the rituals as: ° mimetic—fire was kindled to produce a ritual correspondence to the sun ° expressive—by speaking to the devas, the imagined world of their activity was asserted as a possible world ° participatory—the ritual allowed the singers to participate in the activities of the devas ° disciplinary—the ritual created a framework for ordering conflicting feelings of desire and gratitude Maurizio Bettini, The Portrait f the Lover, translated by Laura Gibbs, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Bettini locates what he calls a “fundamental story” in Pliny concerning the birth of the image in which a lover’s traced profile is the model for the art of modeling in clay. Alongside this, he places several motifs concerning the use of a simulacra or image as a means of uniting a person with his or her dead lover, including the story of Laodamia and Protesilaus and that of Alcestis. See Ibid. pp. 7-25. Anne Carson, Eros, the Bittersweet: An Essay, (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1986). Carson’s translation of fragment 31 is as follows (Ibid., pp. 12-13): He seems to me equal to gods that man who opposite you sits and listens close to your sweet speaking and lovely laughing—oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings for when I look at you, a movement, then no speaking is left in me no: tongue breaks, and thin fire is racing under my skin and in eyes no sight and drumming fills ears and cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me all, greener than grass I am and dead—or almost I seem to me. Carson uses the poems to argue that the activation of eros requires this triadic structure, anchored by the insertion of the imaginaire into the picture. In this sense, what I call the prosthetic, “plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates, marking the two that are not one.” (Ibid, p. 16). See Cartsen Strauthausen, The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around 1900, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 9-13, and Lawrence Ryan, “Neue Gedichte—New Poems” in Erika A and Michael M. Metzger, editors, A Companion to the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke, (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001), pp. 128-129. The stereoscoipic should be contrasted to the notion of the other as double. The latter takes each term (the hero and his double) to be unitary, whole—the problem is identity, and the double signals a disruption. The stereoscopic develops or responds to the disruption signaled by the double by rethinking identity as split, layered. That is, to the stereoscopic look, each thing is already doubled in itself, layered, palimpsest, and thus there is no original unity that is threatened. Being, at least, is recovered, even if the conceit of unity is surrendered. First published in 1906, The Book of Hours consists of three cycles of poems: the first written in late summer and early fall of 1899, the second completed in 1901, following his marriage to the sculptor Clara Westhoff, and the third written in 1903 in Italy after his first year in Paris. The poems collected in The Book of Images written between 1900-1901, first appeared in 1902 and were republished in 1907. Those collected in New Poems include poems written between 1904-1908, after Rilke’s exposure to Rodin’s work. Each of these collections staged its contents by framing the collection as an example of a recognizable cultural form—respectively, an illustrated children’s book (Bilderbuch), the copy book of a medieval icon painter, and the art museum or gallery show. This is a good example of the Aestheticist impulse to repurpose or restage traditional forms. Und wie bestürtz ist eins, das fliegen muß und stammt aus eimen Schooß. Wie vor sich selbst erschreckt, durchzuckts die Luft, wie wen nein Sprung durch eine Tasse geht. So reißt die Spur der Fledermaus durchs Porzellan des Abends. He also tended to bring out works that are staged in two parts—The Book of Images, New Poems and Sonnets to Orpheus—often reflecting an initial compositional unit and a second, richer, development worked out after the arrangement of the first. SW I, p. 262. Auch wenn wir nicht wollen: Gott reift. Even when we hadn’t wanted it: God ripens. SWI, p. 254. Mein Gott ist dunkel und wie ein Gewebe von huneret Wurzeln, welche scheigsam trinken. Nur, daß ich mich aus seiner Wärme hebe, mehr weiß ich nicht, weil alle miene Zweige tief unten ruhn und nur in Winde winken. My God is dark and like a web of a hundred roots that drink the silence. I don’t know more than that I lift myself due to his warmth alone, as all my branches rest deep below and sway only in the wind. SW I, p. 261 SW I, p. 314. Du bist der Erbe. SW I p. 315. SW I, p. 316. So fließt der Dinge Überfluß dir zu. Und wie die obern Becken von Fontänen beständig überströmen, wie von Strähnen gelösten Haars, in die tiefste Schale—so fällt die Fülle dir in deine Tale, wenn Dinge unde Gedanen übergehn. SW I, p. 327. Du bist der Dinge tiefer Inbegriff, der seines Wesens leztes Wort verschweigt und sich den Andern immer anders zeigt: dem Schiff als Küste und dem Land als ship. SW I, pp. 255-6. Du, Nachbar Gott, wenn ich dich mannchesmal in langer Machet mit hartem Klopfen store—so ists, weil ich dich selten atmen höre un weiß: Du bist allein im Saal. Und wenn du etwas brauchst, ist keener da, um deinem Tasten einen Trank zu recihen: Ich horche immer. Gieb ein kleines Zeichen. Ich bnin ganz nah. Nur eine schmale Wand ist zwischen uns, durch Zufall; den es könnte sein: ein Rufen deines oder meines Munds—und sie bricht ein ganz ohne Lärm und Laut. Aus deinen Bildern ist sie aufgebaut. Und deiner Bilder stehn vor dir wie Namen. Und wenn einmanl das Licht in mir entbrennt, mit welchem meine Tiefe dich erkennt, vergeudet sichs al Glanz auf ihren Rahmen. Und mein Sinne, welche schnell erlahmen, sind ohne Heimat und von dir getrennt. The apparent autonomy of the visual object is one of the key conceits by which a corresponding autonomous, “objective”, seeing subject is constructed. Here, the supposed power of the gaze is undone; the wall or door, to use Sartre’s motif, collapses and the terms become subject to each other. For epistemological approaches that similarly critique the supposed isolation of see-er and seen, see, Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith, (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1986). For other studies of the relation of visual art and poetry, see, John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Work of Art, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Martin Heusser, Claus Cluver, Leo Hoek, and Lauren Weingarden, editors, The Pictured Word: Word & Image Interactions 2, (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1998). See also David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). While Rilke sets himself the task of crafting autonomous things in language, his approach in the New Poems discloses an awareness of the discursive status of the visual art object. In each collection Rilke sets out a series of pictures, laid out like a museum, beginning with poems on Biblical and mythic figures and ending with poems that focus, like the Impressionists, on the day-to-day, on buildings and empty parks, and windows. In this way, the collections explore the history of efforts to realize God in visual terms, and offer Rilke’s own efforts as a new direction. Strauthausen, p. 222ff. Its of note that similar effects can be identified in Rodin’s sculptures: on the one hand, the continuous, shifting extension of the visual plane interrupts the apparent autonomy of the figure and, on the other, an occlusion of sight where figures and surfaces adhered. That is, by interruption, I mean, the way that a figure is interrupted as one moves around a sculpture, and by adhesion I mean the way figures rise out of a ground or the way the relationship between two figures is realized where their surfaces merge into a median of uncertain depth. SW I, p. 481. Früher Apollo: Wie manches Mal durch das noch unbelaubte / Gezweig ein Morgen durchsieht, der shon ganz / im Frühling ist: so ist seinem Haupte / nichts was verhinden könnte, daß der Glanz // aller Gedichte uns fast tödlich träfe; / den noch kein Schatten ist in seinem Schaun, / zu kühl für Lorbeer sind noch seine Schläfe / und spatter erst wird aus den Augenbraun // hochstämmig sich der Rosengarten heben, / aus welchem Blätter, einzeln, ausgelöst / hintreiben warden auf des Mundes Beben, // der jetzt noch still ist, niegebraucht und blinkend / und nur mit seinem Lächeln etwas trinkend / als würde ihm sein Singen eingeflößt. SW I, p. 557. Archaïscher Torso Apollos: Wir kannten nicht unerhörtes Haupt, / darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber / sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber, / in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt, // sich halt und glänzt. Sonst könnte nichte der Bug / der Brust dich blenden, und im lessen Drehen / der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen / su jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug. // Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz / unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Struz / und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle; // end bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern / aus wie ein Stern: den da ist keine Stelle / die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern. Since this is a lintel or threshold image, the reversal here might want to draw us into the collection that follows. Its not by accident that stelle is etymological cognate with stele—grave stone. Its worth comparing this moment to Pound’s “make it new”, which perhaps misdirects—at least its been misunderstood to mean we should have no relation to the past. Rilke’s “make it different/other” is more relational and, if we think this with a glance at Levinas, it’s a different kind of object and relation that is being considered. SW I, p. 732 Da steig ein Baum. O reine Übersteigung! / O Orpheus singt! O hoher Baum im Ohr! / Und alles schweig. Doch selbst in der Vershweigung / ging neur Anfang, Wink und Wandlung vor. // Tiere aus Stille drangen aus dem klaren / gelösten Wald von Lager und Genist; / und da ergab sich. daß sie nicht aus List / ud nicht aus Angst in sich so leise waren, // sondern aus Høoren. Brüllen, Schrei, Heröhr schien klein in ihren Herzen. Und wo eben / kaum eine Hütte war, dies zu emfangen , // ein Unterschlupf aus dunkelstem Verlangen // mit einem Zugang, dessen Pfosten beben, — / da schufts du ihnen Tempel in Gehör. SW I, pp. 710-11. Sichtbar wollen wirs heben, wo doch das sichtbarste Glück uns erst zu erkennen sich giebt, wenn wire s innen verwandeln. Nirgends, Geliebte, word Welt sein, als innen. SW I, 712 So haben wir dennoch nicht die Räume versäumt, diese gewährenden, diese unseren Räume. Durch den sich Vögel werfen, ist nicht der / vertraute Raum, der die Gestalt dir steigert. (Im Freien, dorten, bist du dir verweigert und schwindest weiter ohne Wiederkehr.) Raum greift au suns übersetz die Dinge: dass dir das Daesin eines Baums gelinge, wirf Innenraum um ihn, aus jenem Raum, der in dir west. Umgieb ihn mit Verhaltung in dein Verzichten wird er wirklich Baum.

Monday, May 10, 2010

The Room Next Door

The Room Next Door: Poetry, Ritual and the Production of Impossible Space

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 there was a honey locus tree with its thin willowy leaves. The folks who lived behind us fought sometimes, and their son was the “weird kid” at school who’d spend all day in the bathroom, sometimes climbing out the window to get free.

In a dream once, I crawled back through the hedge 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. In some ways I’ve been looking for this kind of thing since, places between, or further rooms, a twisting stairway above.

In the brief time I have here, I read Anne Carson’s treatment of a poem by Sappho in Eros, the Bittersweet, and my own analysis of early Rg Vedic hymns to dawn to explore the manner in which figuration/articulation functions to open what I call a second neighboring, proximate, dialogically imbricate “impossible space” that is, depending on circumstance, the “room” of the ritual or the space limned by the lattice work of a poem. I’ll then move way upstream to show the relevance of this with respect to Rainer Maria Rilke, so as to consider the ways in which poetry is used in modern contexts as a way of revealing and justifying impossible space in the face of the ascendancy of a materialist world-view and/or the deconstruction of metaphysical specularization of the figure

My degree is in History of Religions, with a focus on Vedic and Early Buddhist ritual and discourse. In the course of a long project focused on explaining the centrality of the Buddha-image in a supposedly non-theistic religion, I worked on the creation of figural relations in RgVedic poetry and ritual as a relevant contextual case. The key finding in this work was that the early context for many of these poems was a set of lauds sung at a ritual at which fire was kindled and brief offerings made at the sun’s stations at dawn, noon, and sunset.

Very briefly, the poems lay out two figural surfaces or topoi: the topos of the dawn itself figured by speaking of the quality 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 or the new blue shapes of just discerned surroundings; and a mythic, imagined topos figured by way of singing of the devas, powerful spirit lords associated with plays of light (the sun, storm-louds, the flashing waters, fire). The verses lay these topoi out like cloth and then weave them together using all the devices of poetry, and in that making, a third topoi is figured:the reflexive topos of the ritual ground itself on which the singer stands, the songs sung alongside the doubled dawn, doubling the dawn.

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—that then 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.

And so a tryptic: dawn world of the senses said doubled by an imagined topos writ across sky, by which singing a second doubling of fire and sun, world and the impossible space of the self—what Rilke will call a human space between river and rock—is gestured.

***

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, desire for an other is opened up through a figure, and, mediated by that figure, a necessary and mimetically constructed difference between other and self is founded, where self discovers itself, secret, seeing from a separate, and interior place, apart from, and in relation to, even though.

Again then a triadic structure related to a call: a sensible other, an imaginaire—vehicle or prosthesis by which the reach towards sensed other is said, and the 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, what mimesis makes involves a touch between imagination or thought and sensed world: a bending or weaving, a back and forth made possible by language: edge of one image folded into the next, enjambment or metrical slip, doubled vowel or consonant by which two worlds touch, dance apart, echo back proposed. In this way what sense said finds is a doubled world and an impossible place for desire.

***

And, in both cases, a third term infused or considered by an imaginative act of seeing (devas in clouds, the statued lover, Sappho, herself, in the man), slid over the other, makes possible both a difference (no matter this is understood in physical or embodied terms or as the difference of death) and relation.

My sense of the relevance of this for this conference is that, when the poem itself is thought of as a lattice or tongue, a word that covers what desires reaches towards, it is then, also, a means of interrogating the relation of self to other, and thus a means of interrogating all that we ask of the “other”—as object, as God, as lover—we are at stake in.

***

The early twentieth century poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s repeatedly took up the poem as a primal scene for considering the relations I find in the Rg Veda and Carson saw in Sappho. There is, of course, no way to make this point here in full. Hence, as a prolegomenon, I will spend the remainder of my time briefly reading a series poems—two from his early work, and two from the late Sonnets—as a way to trace this point.

The first is the lintel or bookplate poem for The Book of Images, “Entrance”. The poem 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 in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
And like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning
tenderly your eyes let it go…

Here, Rilke lims the basic figure of the poem as imagined gesture—tree listed up against the sky, figured—by which world and self is known: world as word grown ripe in silence, and self in the movement of reaching for and forgetting, in the aside which is its own impulse, a prior echo, perhaps, of the Eighth Elegy’s “any womb-born creature” that, “terrified as fleeing from itself, zigzags through the air, the way a crack runs through a teacup. So the bat quivers across the porcelain of evening”.” Here, the disclosure of desiring self produces a question related to the relation between self and world. In this poem, early in Rilke’s oevre, he can still imagine world can be relinquished, that the other can fall away, the ties undone.

If one looks at Rilke’s process, his major works generally came into being in pairs, differentiated either by genre or form, or by tactic. This suggests that, at the compositional level, a particular project was realized in at least two iterations. The second poem I want to consider is from the better-known sister of The Book of Images, whose English title is “The Book of Hours”, whose three sections were written over about five years. In the first section, written not long after Rilke’s return from a trip to Russia, Rilke attempts to fashion a series of icon-painting poems in which an image of his “dark God” was figured. Very much aware that the poetic gesture “brought God into being” (much as the tree made world), these poems explore the poets relation to an other that, like the poet, needs and wants.

The series of poems make “picture” or “figure” as Bettini would have it dialogical by adopting a conceit of direct address as an aesthetic dynamic. The poems are sketches in a workbook, but also letters and make full use of what the epistle allows—direct address, assumption of sympathy, self-disclosure and questioning. The force of this diction allows Rilke to imagine the God he draws a neighbor, in a nearby room, separated only by a thin wall.

The familiar diction Rilke assumes here is close to that of Indian bhakti or Rumi, where God is read as lover, as thou, rather than distant Lord. And its no surprise as many of the poems written were also, partly or in whole, written for Lou Andres Salome.

What is at stake in bhakti is an understanding that the intimate love relationship leads to a recognition of an other as a difference to which one must be loyal, and the use of this insight in thinking of the other in its relation to self whatever metaphysics or theology one has chosen to say the other in terms of. What Merleau-Pont calls chiasmus, a
doubling of world that makes it possible to imagine other (and thus objects too) as worthy of ethical care and consolation.

The last poems I want to consider here are the first two poems in The Sonnets to Orpheus. The first, which echoing “Entrance” begins”

A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
Oh! Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

Rilke imagines that this note makes the forest animal’s own cries seem smaller—it quiets their difficult desire, so that they who at best had had a “makeshift hut to receive the music” of beauty, “a shelter nailed up out of their deepest longing” now have a temple that Orpheus has built “deep inside 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. Hence, the difference of self and other that figure makes, when held to, is an ethical difference, a means of realizing a good in the face of the other.

In the second poem, Rilke produces a layering, showing how well he has learned that things are doubled. 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 to be
out of this single joy of song and lyre
and through her green veils shown forth radiantly
and made herself a bed inside my ear.

And slept there.

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, “as she feels herself become laurel, wants you to change into wind”. But here, it is her sleep—her forgetting is everything:

the awesome tree, the distances I had felt
so deeply that I could touch them, meadows in spring:
all the wonders that had ever seized 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.

Thus mimesis also as a way to make room, and not just room, but what Rilke speaks of in a poem from The New Poems, “The Rose Interior”:

Where is there the outwardness
to what lies here within?
Whose wound was ever dressed,
bandaged in such fine linen?
Reflected here, what skies
lie open and at ease
as in a lake within
these open roses
in which all softly rests
as if no accidental hand
could shake or make it spill?
Unable to contain
the riches that are theirs
they pour out their excess
sharing their inwardness
to enrich the days; until
the whole of summer seems
one great room, a room within a dream.

I want to end by briefly meditating on the place of the ear in these first two sonnets. In a poem from 1912, Rilke concludes a withering self-reflection on this exploration of stereoscopic effects in the New Poems by saying

Work of the eyes is done, now
go and do heart-work
on all the images imprisoned within you; for you
overpowered them: but even now you don’t know them.
Learn, inner man, to look to your inner woman,
the one attained from a thousand
natures, the merely attained but
not yet beloved form.

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. The relational space of hearing, however, is different. Hearing produces a sense of being somewhere. What we hear are the echoes back from what surrounds us, a domed space or room even when the roof is the sky. Thus hear is shelter made possible by the shell of the ear, and when a things 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.

***

PS:

In Atlanta, there is a painting by Anslem Kiefer, in which a stick figure drawing of the constellation Draco, steps down out of the sky across a shore of crashing waves. Crosses the horizon between imagination and sense, back.

In all this is the thought that the call makes room because it is heard.

Notes:

1. Maurizio Bettini, The Portrait f the Lover, translated by Laura Gibbs, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Bettini locates what he calls a “fundamental story” in Pliny concerning the birth of the image in which a lover’s traced profile is the model for the art of modeling in clay. Alongside this, he places several motifs concerning the use of a simulacra or image as a means of uniting a person with his or her dead lover, including the story of Laodamia and Protesilaus and that of Alcestis. See Ibid. pp. 7-25.

2. Anne Carson, Eros, the Bittersweet: An Essay, (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1986). Carson’s translation of fragment 31 is as follows (Ibid., pp. 12-13):

He seems to me equal to gods that man
who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing—oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, a movement, then no speaking
is left in me

no: tongue breaks, and thin
fire is racing under my skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me.

Carson uses the poems to argue that the activation of eros requires this triadic structure, anchored by the insertion of the imaginaire into the picture. In this sense, what I call the prosthetic, “plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates, marking the two that are not one.” (Ibid, p. 16).

3. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images, translated by Edward Snow, (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1994), p. 5.

4. Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell, (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 379.

5. Ibid

6. Ibid

7. Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Stephen Cohn, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), p. 247.

8. Mitchel Ed., Op cit.

No One's Rose

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Monday, May 10, 2010

The Room Next Door

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