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.

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.

Lexicon

From “Lexicon”

In “The Dialogic Imagination”, Mikhail Bakhtin writes about the way a word is shot through with semantic traces, echoes, the readings each person brings to it. When I read this passage, I imagined somehow the word suspended in the Philadelphia Train Station (I suppose I remembered it from “Witness”) shot through with gray afternoon light and the ghosts of all passing travelers and what they bring to it.

I don’t know what my readers bring to the words I use, but I thought I might explore writing out brief lexicon entries for words I use as short-hand for a complex set of relations. I include below the first three entries, for “knot”, “room” and “fold. I am thinking of extending this project to any number of terms I am stuck on—lattice, scar, fence, aster, sky, kiss, skin, wood/would/were/was, and so on.

I

Knot—count tied in cord, to measure sea
or affect clump in
body they call “cakra”
(eye or wheel) in yoga
or weight placed on
otherwise upward flowing
& departing airs to
say “here too, pause, spread,
flower”
dissipate mucus clot
lodged in intestinal throat
holds boat against shore
sail to sheet
to pull,
holds tent-taut sky
or skin, stretched
or not, naught, wind
blows through; punned
what, quartered know, gnaw
nauseous open

***

a broader bank of referents (inside Bakhtin’s Philadelphia Train Station)
tie score
knit’s dark and brooding
whale-like brother
cicatrice score
cranes in Eurasian autumnal African sky

My ancestor, John Howland, fell off the Mayflower east of Iceland in a storm; was hauled back heavenward where drag hawser knot stopped his drift and palm (sounding whale pulled “flick-o-the-wrist” ashore).


[we write to tie knots into, birds on a wire, mantras as stepping stones to throw the way back before us, through the old forest, as grackles search the grass sprung back in our footsteps, moon or sun dapple, what the old Vedic people called loka, open space you can see across, meadow, and then world]

***

rhythm of mantras Indra squats over
cow paddy
& flagstone
lillypond
pons upon

Nail a picture at the end, sister.

Body’s first simile is tumor

landing disintegrates as you step down

what holds me in the world/air before wind undoes



II

Room:

Threshold:

broken (he suspects himself in others)
a radio plays

ear as cup as template
first double makes others audible
all sound is echo

flute in Plato’s cave
no one believed the shadows anyway
even in the dark, an answer

floor and containing walls
thoughts still leak
they have a different toros

kitchen in my arm
bedroom in my side
stored memory I visit sometimes

I no longer allow tenets (if
I can help it) you must be ready
to be stabbed

places fill back up, the way
streams work under ground
sound travels less

in a field the echoes make a soft fuzz
each thing casts its own roar—
airplane, chainsaw,
become quick in the sun

in the field, thousands of tiny glass domes had been shattered
we moved faster than sound
and lost track of where we were.

Room—

° flat, palm of the hand (not mind), splayed back anemone
° thus flower blossomed or lotus lifted into sun’s radiant avenue
° raum, thus space made by a thought, hence double of knot, or knot’s echo or sister
° subtenant to, thus in sequence or as against other rooms by doorways, windows corridors, yards

In Stalker, the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky stages the quest to find a room, a deep inward, inside many tunnels and impossible to approach by door location, that is after all old and ordinary because this is the way we are in all places we decide are place. A door opens and closes and by the light that comes and goes we decide there is a skeleton there, and a flower or plant because there is changing sun.

Room deep inside that Rilke imaged as the deep inward endless summer with a rose. We search for—perhaps you’ve had a version of the dream, those who dream have taken quests or tasks where crossing a room took all day, with many arrangings and yet later, if the dreaming sleep is langorous futher and more charmed rooms are found you return to later—the upstairs rooms that turn back against the grain, aside, and then up to a gabled back room, blue lit, with window seats, and obvious slumber.

In Stalker, the room is plotted as a place where all your dreams come true—wealth falls from the sky, secret desires will out—all ruled by the inflexible justice of fairy tales and according to lot. Tarkovsky tells us about that, takes us to it, so as to pry a space open inside us—oh not so much a pry apart a place in the air, but to open what the air has scarred over. Depth we recognize. Place we know we have visited before.

° floor as affordance & threshold & walls—walls that are skin or perhaps cave that bends our voices back at us
° resonant
° and roof cupped hand, tabernacle—stars flung and river of Milky Way—that we are under veil, chrysalin or cyst

room depth resonant well
ribs swell ship side
proffered hand

A fire throws its light so far at the night & makes dome, perhaps tower, we step in an out of & echo or template of field and other open spaces framed by dark edge the eye cannot cross.

Old Vedic word for world is loka a lit up space a person can see across. Thus a measure and not a whole as always up against a limit eye no longer penetrates a distant haze. And yet, horizon far enough from us no spirit’s leaning reaches and we are apart, in a space, broken into time.

Hence world is a drinking, a sate, call it meadow, we say “in an open”.

I say room.

***

a human place between river and rock not silent or island, no thread bare carpet (Aladdin dreams)—a slip or sip of air from which figure appears or between (Samson did mighty push apart the walls, did push against the well & climbed out Saturday afternoon in Hollywood’s black and white blush) seed’s impossible force breaks nail.

room for two—what we see crosses through us to the bookshelves in search of a quote or story—we call that “my sister” to give being in two places at once a name

she says, “not two places at once, but twice there, in the canoe going upstream against the bend, and opening the mouth of the eye wider at the same time to shout something before the whole dream is swallowed and can’t be said

***

Down along the James River in Charlottesville, there’s a house built over an old mill such that the entry is built out over a millrace. you open a door and step into an entry. the race runs under the wall and crosses before you before disappearing back outside birchward. stairs lead up to a landing & the door to the living

***

A chi-gung teacher suggested we make our bodies into iron shirts so that no good chi leaked I thought damn you Adam Smith I want circulation thank you and airs. yes its true the whole open floor I’ve prized open could snap shut but I sleep between sheets where the night can enter and if this adds too much weight to the scale, I was growing heavier day by day. I want my chi to move around the room anyway, like a firefly, briefly lighting, sketching a summer or fall. I am tired of pushing it around a diagram I have stapled to a wall in my mind.

***

The second time I saw Richard Alpert, I sat dutifully through the talk but did not want to correct the mistake I’d made the last time. I thought, you cannot go backwards in dreams. When you drop a stitch, the stitch is lost. No amount of trading will ever get you back what you decided to keep. This was, admittedly a stubborn tack to take, but according to The Ticket That Exploded each error took at least five steps to occur.

Anyway, I got up before the end of the talk to forestall the moment he’d ask us to embrace him. I knew that was an off/on switch and neither setting was an adequate solution. Instead I started to leave, to get out before I had to choose, and as I reached the hall, I could hear Alpert, practically shouting “that’s just a strategy, just a strategy” so I’d cast my lot but wasn’t out of it yet.

***

Kitchen in my side, and bedroom back behind my eyes you open a small door to get to, all the bedrooms ever, whether you sleep alone or allow a second humming breath to stir in, all windowed we can look out & hide behind. Sleep turns us over in her hands and touches us soft apart the way you search careful through shell and chaff, a fingering my legs have. Bookstore and cupboard, beach, sky.

“Where’s you kitchen”, he asked, and he wasn’t talking about which way to go & instead put a pot on the stove and started to boil herbs. “Place needs a perfumin’”. I just wished someone else would drop by, find their way up the steps. It’d been weeks, years since anyone had visited but everything was prepared.

***

Tara Tulke said “when trouble knocks at your door, open the door to say hello”. I thought that was quite a change on what Rumi said in “The Sunrise Ruby” about knocking until the you inside opened a door to see who was calling, look out at the day. In Nostalghia, Tarkovsky tells a story about a man who keeps his family indoors for nine years to protect them from nuclear war—it seems like this creates problems, but sometimes, after reading many books, you are so far inside it’s a long way back. [Orpheus couldn’t make it back, so,frankly, how will you? }

So I took off the headphones and got up from the bed we had in the kitchen I’d been laying on and went to the door to see who’d knocked. And it was trouble I suppose, Lisa and her new daughter who used some shoeboxes for shoes while we talked. I hadn’t seen her in maybe five years. Our dead children slept in the air about what we were saying & obviously killing them didn’t in the end mean we couldn’t, at a later time, have others.

***

Its hard to say who was the trouble anyway. For awhile we’d been “just kids” and shared dreams. There was a catalytic effect, however, whenever we occupied the same room. Small explosions of force occurred just out of sight. Ghosts condensed more easily. You could shut your eyes a moment and find the room rearranged afterwards and have no choice but to adjust. Call it a chemical reaction made possible by poorly contained dream bodies. Call it repression.

She had a bad spell when she was forcing some kinds of energies into her walls, and then had the sense that, pregnant with new forces, the walls sagged or opened with many tiny mouths. I told her there was no such thing as black magic, but my plan by this time was to let the day come up by itself anyway. I wanted things, same as anyone, but it was easy, way too easy, to push too hard.

My plan was to stand still a long time.

***

In The Four Gated City, Dorris Lessing has a character escape an apocalyptic world by basically moving into the walls, which means prizing a space apart to be seed. Are these options around us all the time? Skins to peel back or air to part. Rilke says be ahead of all parting, but is that a way back? And, if not, how far ahead is that.

***

Bill sat down and said, “I think stereoscopic means to be in a room and in what Rilke calls the open at the same time”. The chorus says “no it means being twice at least, always”.

I read a poem out loud I wish made a room you could enter, or perhaps as a spell to show you how to find the stairs hidden by years of stars turned ivy and measured by moon’s departure—you are never going back so room can’t be where you left from no matter how many times you go back, no matter you don’t change the furniture, put pictures on the wall try to screw beauty there, hold it down. I’m no longer even sure what’s in it I am reading out loud so it echoes makes a place I wish would afford you same as its mine.

After the reading, we pack it up, put the things that floated free back in their nestling place. Subdued but waiting.


III

Fold:

pocket, fetus folds over so body is striate
small flute

dough rolled over once to kneed, folded again is form

stitch makes a pocket you can put a wish into, hand in a skirt

result of alignment of opposite edges—thus where we have two, heaven and earth, a third called “man” between & therefore lake, thunder, mountain, daughter, lightning, wind

***

in one of the early stages of fetal development a flat sheet of dividing cells folds into a tube. the outer edges meet along a line that is scored down the front of the body, makes lips and mirror halves—we are split along that axis into right and left now interwoven along a new shore line

***

I don’t remember the concepts in A Wrinkle in Time now, but I was talking a bit earlier about the idea that time is not linear but folded & thus the relation between lives a matter of layers now bent, and thus fold as a kiss I suppose or to explain haunting.

“He was folded down over me.” “The sky folded.”

***

womb I suppose or labial fold at least, lips folded and crease

***

wrinkle or blues drag, slight bend of word to fort, da to day

& so lexical also & a lyric principle—Pollack’s Blue Poles Patti says are “infinitely rising” I say are strident and thus tell rhythm as factual as grass we are confronted by, like it or not.

Hence notes as folds particular we repeat along, get creased—“That’s a seriously long fifth there Lamonte you are leaning along” old smoke says. “I am wondering each thing all imbricate to broke. You get it?”

All bent along is story.

“I’ll keep it with mine” Bob says we get folded into. Smoke stacks and oranges. The machine can’t make it because the foot slips and misses the refrigerator door. In the space between, it closes anyway.

So folds that way to, a cook bends into soup just a tang of this other you could reference by focusing hands just so on the rim of the bowl—same aspect the bowl is made to be rhythm to.

Loyal.

He folded his hands and made all the people. Fold that sheet down smooth over her corpse and tug it smooth.

Solstice 2009

In Nov., around the middle of Scorpio, I gave a reading of St. John’s Rose Slumber as a gift for the dead. Then the semester got busy, and I am just now getting my breath back and stirring on the shore. Still, throughout this time, I was developing some thoughts about religion. I teach in religious studies and spend a lot of time trying to get at what the topic is.

After the reading and as part of trying to understand differences I find I have with other writers and my time, I began to think about my comfort with the context of religion in relation to what is almost a prohibition on speaking in religious terms or about what I’d call a “good in being”, a prohibition on valuing anything that is enacted by relentless recursive reflexivity.

In this post for Solstice 09, I reflect on this. Over in O Pure Contradition and The Anderson Sisters, I offer my journal notes and drafts towards a new piece “The Star of Araby” that weaves together sense I have of being a girl, Kabbalah notion of the Shekinah as daughter of God, memories I have of WW II and of childhood and thus of being in some larger story or process I catch sight of now and then.

“A Good in Being” and “A Problem Given in Being”

When you teach religion, you run up against the problem of 1) intuiting patterns across religions, 2) looking for a language in which to talk about those patterns. A common strategy is to adopt a Universalist perspective that assumes an actual commonality, and thus to use words like “the sacred” etc as a way of referring to some common truth. This, however, is already to have assumed too much. That is, it assumes the patterns are proof of an actual common term or structure. It assumes something about precisely what is at stake—what our relation to any sacred might be.

I use the language “Good” for a number of reasons. I like that the semantic field of the term allows slippage into, for instance, 1) “merchandise” and thus, more generally, value, 2) the thought that it it indicates our desire/erotic natures have some bearing in the relation, 3) some awareness of a difference and relation between putative “secular” and sacred topoi (Good to God), and 4) we are aware it is somehow plural.

Hence, when I introduce a term to suggest this pole of a religious relation, I speak of “a good in being” and then quickly gloss this as somehow “radical”. I am not merely positing a space holder. I am saying some things about the phenomena of the relations posed in religious discourse.

Now, when I speak in these terms, some folks are quick to complain that I am using evaluative language (good versus bad). I get this from people who understand Buddhism to propose an ethical neutrality and from people who have inherited an Enlightenment suspicion with religion/ethics and notions of authority. I know that this is a room you can live in a long time—seeing things this way—but for me its not an adequate posture. As a position, it requires I render out of myself any actual love I have in and for being. I have to suppress an actual interest, and I have decided I am more loyal to the interest than to its negation.

I sometimes feel that this idea of neutrality or equanimity—when used to suppress actual interest—actual does a violence to our ability to love and relate. The counter is that it gives freedom, but I think it can only be an imagined or hoped for freedom, an ethereal freedom, since I believe, given our sense bodies and mode of being we are, in fact—and I mean in fact—limited and at stake.

When I speak of “a problem given in being”, I mean we have multiple interests in relation to objects—a desire for mastery, freedom, a desire to care, and interest in sharing, a desire to be concordant. The tendency in Western thought has been to simplify desire. For instance, in economic theory, we are told people simply want to win/have more. All desire boils down to this, etc. I think a better case can be made that the problem is that we have multiple and at times competing desires. So I am more in line with Freud’s basic intuition here that we are conflicted or split in being.

People tend to manage the conflict given in being by a bifurcation made possible by proposing some second, etheric ground of being—it could be mind, spirit, logos, Brahman, etc. In this move, being—experience—is rendered or inscribed or interpreted in terms of a new difference between an inanimate or dead body and an animate, lit-up other. Generally, this second ground is proposed in etheric terms—it is not sensible, lacks form, etc.

Whether or not there is a difference, what has happened here is that a resolution of conflict has been proposed as possible on this second ground (sometimes opened out by ritual, or a poem, or as a painting or story, etc).

In this analysis I am not saying there is not a difference (a difference in desires, a difference made possible by sense and language), but that that difference has been rendered or fixed (I first typed “foxed”) into a strong categorical difference between one term and another.

Hence, the point is not that the etheric is an illusion and that only dead body exists, but that neither the etheric nor the dead body exist as such. When that bifurcation is undone, we are still here breathing, still held, in our conflict and difference. There is no collapse back into.

***

A last note. Jehanne says that “in being” is the hard thing in all this. I am deliberately a little allusive here. I use a small “b” because I am not proposing some second or given Heideggarian ground. When students ask I say I mean “being here” or “being alive” as a rough way of locating a ground that is otherwise contested. That is, I accept an existential premise that our gestures into relation and our sense of self and world have a location whose limits and status has yet to be determined.
***

In general, the Enlightenment suspicion of religion and posture that we shouldn’t make value statements (a strange posture by the way in an era where we are subordinate to commodity value) are aimed at protecting a person from authoritarian violence (and, in a sense, accepting a personal discipline so as to avoid responsibility for one’s own authorial violence). But, my sense is that there is no way not to impinge, a counter thought visible as early as the Bhagavadgita critique of the renunciate ethic. The latter text points out what the sharpest students always point out which is that non-action is still an action. Less obvious is a correlate, which is that thinking is not a different mode of being. We don’t escape being at stake in, being in relation to form, by imagining we have a relation determined by knowing instead of action. That contrast falsely characterizes both knowing and action.

In the same way, relativism or tolerance or a posture that takes no evaluative stance is still a stance, and one cannot escape impinging on another in this way. Rather, such a mode of thought, as many ideologies do, simply displaces the violence, the being at stake, the spectre of authorial power, onto the other.

***

Finally, the posture that one should not hold notions of good and bad and so on is different from an appreciation or interest in being that takes on both good and bad tastes. These are not the same. The first assigns an equality to terms and effaces a felt difference (or warrant), the latter involves a decision to care for more than what one prefers. Most people who say they don’t believe in making value statements are not actually choosing to do the latter. They are often insisting on a total freedom to only do what they prefer.

***

I discuss the issue of equanimity and relativism in notes I have posted at “O Pure Contradiction” when I talk about why I find a good in being. I’ll end here with a brief heuristic note about why I find negation an unsatisfactory posture in the end.

In a story I read in that Vine DeLoria edited collection of Native American writing, there is this story of “Singing Stone” who travels in the four directions looking for power/duration/a home. When he goes West, he goes down into a cave and keeps digging further and further back until he has no room, and he meets a little mouse who tells him he has to go back. The gloss on this is that its an allegory for this kind of thinking that circles back on itself until there is no space.

Another way of thinking of it is to think of the West as defined by the element Air (Libra) and thus when thought becomes cut off inside self and only has further reflexive moves because not otherwise moved by other forces.

There is a way in which one kind of modernism goes in this direction, at least for me.