Onto A Vast Plain

Krista Tippett (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

I've been enjoying the podcasts on Krista Tippett's inspiring website, On Being (thanks, George McHenry). Out walking this morning I listened to her conversation with Joanna Macy — translator of Rilke, philosopher of ecology and Buddhist scholar.

Summer has gone and winter storms will soon be with us.

'Onto a Vast Plain'

You are not surprised at the force of the storm —

you have seen it growing.

The trees flee. Their flight

sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:

he whom they flee is the one

you move toward. All your senses

sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.

The trees' blood rose. Now you feel

it wants to sink back

into the source of everything. You thought

you could trust that power

when you plucked the fruit:

now it becomes a riddle again

and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you know

where each thing stood.

Now you must go out into your heart

as onto a vast plain. Now

the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind

sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.

It is what you have.

Be earth now, and evensong.

Be the ground lying under that sky.

Be modest now, like a thing

ripened until it is real,

so that he who began it all

can feel you when he reaches for you.

RILKE Book of Hours, II 1 

Translated by JOANNA MACY and ANITA BARROWS

Experiencing Unique Particulars

Rilke is one of those writers and poets who is never far from my side. Strangely, I'd never read his prose work The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge until recently. It's not as remarkable as the wise and wonderful Letters to a Young Poet, but I was struck by the following two short passages:

Poems don't come to much when they are written too soon. One should wait and gather the feelings and flavours of a whole life, and a long life if possible, and then, just at the end, one might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people suppose, emotions — those come easily and quickly enough. They are experiences . . .

. . . No, no, nothing in the world can one imagine beforehand, not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be foreseen. In imagination one passes them over and does not notice that they are lacking, hasty as one is. But the realities are slow and indescribably detailed.

Rilke writes about all the important things — the poignancy of transitoriness, the necessity of solitude, the praising of creation in all its diversity, the recognition of love in all its complexity, the radiance of life which sparkles in spite of and, indeed, because of the ever-present nature of death; his poems, and many of his letters and prose pieces, may be considered deep meditations on existence. His artistic territory straddles the borderline between the expressible and the inexpressible.

There's a very fine book on my shelf called A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke, beautifully translated and edited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. The entry for 29 April, from a letter written to Witold Hulewicz on 13 November 1925, reads:

Impermanence plunges us into the depth of all Being. And so all forms of the present are not to be taken and bound in time, but held in a larger context of meaning in which we participate. I don't mean this in a Christian sense (from which I ever more passionately distance myself) but in a sheer earthly, deep earthly, sacred earthly consciousness: that what we see here and now is to bring us into a wider — indeed, the very widest — dimension. Not in an afterlife whose shadow darkens the earth, but in a whole that is the whole.

Finally, here's a poem taken from The Book of Hours:

How surely gravity's law,

strong as an ocean current,

takes hold of the smallest thing

and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing —

each stone, blossom, child —

is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,

push out beyond what we each belong to

for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered

to earth's intelligence

we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves

in knots of our own making

and struggle, lonely and confused.

So like children, we begin again

to learn from the things,

because they are in God's heart;

they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:

to fall,

patiently to trust our heaviness.

Even a bird has to do that

before he can fly.

You Inherit The Green (9)

I would find it hard to imagine the world of poetry without the guiding, reflective voice of Rainer Maria Rilke — for me a cornerstone, like Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Whitman, Eliot and Heaney. I turn to the entry for today's date, 9 June, in A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated and edited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows, and find this:

Trust

You know that the flower bends when the wind wants it to, and you must become like that — that is, filled with deep trust.

RAINER MARIA RILKE Early Journals

The next entry, 10 June, is a poem:

You Inherit the Green

And you inherit the green

of vanished gardens

and the motionless blue of fallen skies,

dew of a thousand dawns, countless summers

the suns sang, and springtimes to break your heart

like a young woman's letters.

You inherit the autumns, folded like festive clothing

in the memories of poets; and all the winters,

like abandoned fields, bequeath you their quietness.

You inherit Venice, Kazan, and Rome;

Florence will be yours, and Pisa's cathedral,

Moscow with bells like memories,

and the Troiska convent, and the monastery

whose maze of tunnels lies swallowed under Kiev's gardens.

RAINER MARIA RILKE The Book of Hours II, 10

Let us be glad of this inheritance, these gifts of green gardens and blue skies, of morning dewfalls, of summers, springtimes and winters, of bells and beautiful cities and spiritual places, knowing at the same time they are all transitory, all destined to be dust and memories. Let us internalise and so immortalise them. Let us be grateful for Rilke, and for his poems like love letters.

Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke is one of my favourite poets, though I suppose some may find him a little too melancholy and introspective. I was fortunate enough to study Rilke under the sensitive aegis of poet, translator and short story writer David Constantine (he is now co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation and a commissioning editor for Carcanet Press) at university many years ago.

Rilke's poetry and other writings deal with solitude, transience, beauty, longing, love, life, death, God, angels, creativity, the created universe and our place in it: all the important things. Rilke struggles for meaning and connection and, in the very act of creating his beautiful, transcendent poems, achieves both.

The following three pieces (two poems and one journal entry) are translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows, and can be found in their book A Year with Rilke on the pages headed November 21, November 23 and December 1 respectively.  

Autumn Tree

Oh tall tree of our knowing, shedding its leaves:

It's a matter now of facing the preponderance

of sky appearing through its branches.

Filled by summer, it seemed deep and thick,

filling our minds, too, so comfortably.

Now its whole interior is an avenue of stars.

And the stars do not know us.

Uncollected Poems

Friends

Friends can only be compared to dance and music. You cannot approach them intentionally, but only out of some involuntary need.

Friends must be the ends and not the means. Otherwise they can get in the way.

Early Journals

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower

and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.

Move back and forth into the change.

What is it like, such intensity of pain?

If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

say to the silent earth: I flow.

To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

Buddha

Preparation of sculptural exhibits, Doddington Hall, July 2012.

As if he were listening; stillness, distance.
We hold our breath and cease to hear it.
He is like a star surrounded
by other stars we cannot see.

He is all things. Do we really expect him
to notice us? What need could he have?
If we prostrated ourselves at his feet,
he would remain deep and calm like a cat.

For what threw us down before him
has circled in him for millions of years.
He, who has gone beyond all we can know
and knows what we never will.

Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

Unreal City

Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many. TS ELIOT The Waste Land

Visiting London one recent long weekend, I was shocked at some of the ugliness and unsympathetic architecture. Brutalist modern structures rub shoulders with delicate Christopher Wren churches; 1960s-built concrete and glass eyesores jar next to Nicholas Hawksmoor baroque masterpieces. Although the celebrated 'Gherkin'...

... and the new 'Pinnacle' (still under construction)...

... are more imaginative in design than most of London's new buildings, there are far too many boring, angular office blocks...

Unused as I now am to cities (I did live in London once), the frenzied pace of things agitated me, and the anonymous crowds of workers and tourists hurrying through the cold, wintry greyness reminded me of rats scurrying down a sewer. I longed for some greenness amongst the South Bank wasteland, a field of flowers perhaps...

I recalled Rilke's poem, Cities, from The Book of Hours:

Cities

Lord, the great cities are lost and rotting.
Their time is running out...
The people there live harsh and heavy,
crowded together, weary of their own routines.

Beyond them waits and breathes your earth,
but where they are it cannot reach them.

They don't know that somewhere
wind is blowing through a field of flowers.

(Taken from A Year With Rilke, translated and edited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows)

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)