The Dove Descending

This poem was inspired by a recent reading of Rilke's The Dove and Lowell's Pigeons.

The Dove Descending

The dove descending breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror

TS Eliot Little Gidding, Four Quartets

Eliot said the end of our exploring
will be to arrive at where we started
and realise our home was not so boring
before we panicked, packed our bags and parted.

And Rilke said a dove must fly the world
in order to appreciate the dovecote.
In storm and roaring wind is peace revealed.
The raging torrent rocks, then calms, the love boat.

Danger and distance, certainly,
and fear, and fear of fear itself,
delay departure, often indefinitely,
leave us like bookends on a dusty shelf.

We know the multi-coloured rainbow beckons
from edge of town, but our fenced-in backyard
requires attention. Drab suburbia threatens
but comforts also. It is always hard

to quit the friendly space one knows and loves,
to doubt the ones inhabiting that space.
Yet constantly a restless heart outgrows,
outflies the limits of this time and place.

Yes, all of us are arrows in the dark
speeding from God-knows-where to God-knows-where,
unsure of making a true mark on earth,
falling unsteadily through endless air,

skimming the ocean till we disappear
into the fire of the sinking sun,
all fight extinguished, as the Temeraire,
all flight unfeathered, Icarus undone.

In pieces, we reform to our true shape.
In dust, we scatter like primeval seeds.
Divorced from cells of coelacanth and ape,
no more embodied by our thoughts and deeds,

alone – no myth or metaphor or art –
and open to the stars which are our home,
we still the beating of our weary heart,
finding at last the place that we’ve come from.

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.

Ekphrasis

Here's one of Rilke's most striking poems. The imperative in the last line to 'change your life' still has the power to surprise, shock and challenge every time I read this magnificent sonnet.

Apollo's Archaic Torso

We cannot know his incredible head,
where the eyes ripened like apples,
yet his torso still glows like a candelabrum,
from which his gaze, however dimmed,

still persists and gleams. If this were not so,
the bow of his breast could not blind you,
nor could a smile, steered by the gentle curve
of his loins, glide to the centre of procreation.

And this stone would seem disfigured and stunted,
the shoulders descending into nothing,
unable to glisten like a predator's pelt,

or burst out from its confines and radiate
like a star: for there is no angle from which
it cannot see you. You have to change your life.

(Looser translation)

We will never know his magnificent head,
the ebb and flow of his youth —
an orchard of ripening fruit,
yet his fire has not diminished,

incandescent light radiates
from his torso, and in the curve
of his loins, a smile turns
towards the centre of creation.

Or else this body would be disfigured —
a lump of rock with no vision,
unable to glisten like a lion's mane.

It would not burst out of its skin
like a star: for its searing gaze
penetrates your soul, the way you live.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Translated by SARAH STUTT 

Archaischer Torso Apollos

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein enstellt und kurz
unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und bräche nicht  aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

(Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the image of Apollo.)

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.

A Purely Human Place

If only we too could find some defined, narrow,
purely human place, our own small strip of fertile soil
between stream and stone. For even now our heart
transcends us . . .

RILKE Duino Elegies: The Second Elegy (Translated by EDWARD SNOW)

Forever Taking Leave

And we: Spectators, always, everywhere,

looking at, never out of, everything!

It overfills us. We arrange it. It falls apart.

We rearrange it, and fall apart ourselves.

Who has turned us around like this, so that

always, no matter what we do, we're in the stance

of someone just departing? As he,

on the last hill that shows him all his valley

one last time, turns, stops, lingers —,

we live our lives, forever taking leave.

RILKE Duino Elegies: The Eighth Elegy (Translated by EDWARD SNOW)

O Fig Tree

O fig tree, how long I've pondered you —
the way you almost skip flowering completely
and release, unheralded, your pure secret
into the sprigs of fruit already poised to ripen.
Like a fountain's pipe, your bent boughs drive the sap
downward and up: and it leaps from sleep, almost
without waking, into the joy of its sweetest achievement.
Look: like the god into the swan.
                                                        . . . . . . But we, for our part, linger,
ah, flowering flatters us; the belated inner place
that is our culminating fruit we enter spent, betrayed.

RILKE Duino Elegies: The Sixth Elegy (Translated by EDWARD SNOW)

(Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the pictures)

Angels

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?

RILKE Duino Elegies: The First Elegy (Translated by EDWARD SNOW)

Why can't they hear me, the angels?

Because they are far too busy meditating, mediating and annunciating . . .

. . . and pinned like butterflies . . .

. . . being frozen in paint and fresco . . .

. . . in galleries, museums and medieval churches . . .

. . . or publicising their appearance in new-age self-help books.

(Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the pictures)

The Sayable And the Unsayable

 . . . Ah, but what can one carry across

into that other relation? Not the art of seeing,

learned so slowly here, and no event that transpired here. Not one.

The pain, then. Above all, the hard labor of living,

the long experience of love, — all the purely

unsayable things. But later on,

among the stars, what then: there the unsayable reigns.

The traveler doesn't bring from the mountain slope

into the valley some handful of sod, around which all stand mute,

but a word he's gained, a pure word, the yellow and blue

gentian . . .

 . . . What if we're here just for saying: house,

bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window, —

at most: column, tower . . . but for saying, understand,

oh for such saying as the things themselves

never hoped so intensely to be. Isn't this the sly purpose

of the taciturn earth, when it urges lovers on:

that in their passion each single thing should find ecstasy?

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home.

Speak and attest. More than ever

the things we can live with are falling away,

and ousting them, filling their place: a will with no image.

Will beneath crusts which readily crack

whenever the act inside swells and seeks new borders.

Between the hammers our heart

lives on, as the tongue,

even between the teeth, remains

unceasing in praise.

RILKE Duino Elegies: The Ninth Elegy (Translated by EDWARD SNOW)

(For AS Kline's line-by-line commentary on Rilke's Ninth Elegy, please click here.)

O Trees Of Life

O trees of life, how far off is winter?

We're in disarray. Our minds don't commune

like those of migratory birds. Left behind and late,

we force ourselves suddenly on winds

and fall, exhausted, on indifferent waters.

Blooming makes us think of fading.

And somewhere out there lions still roam, oblivious,

in all their splendor, to any weakness.

RILKE Duino Elegies: The Fourth Elegy (Translated by EDWARD SNOW) 

When A Happy Thing Falls

But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem:
they might point to the catkins hanging
from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain
descending on black earth in early spring. —

And we, who always think of happiness
rising, would feel the emotion
that almost baffles us
when a happy thing falls.

RILKE Duino Elegies: The Tenth Elegy (Translated by EDWARD SNOW)

(Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the pictures) 

The Interpreted World

. . . how little at home we are

in the interpreted world. That leaves us

some tree on a hillside, on which our eyes fasten

day after day; leaves us yesterday's street

and the coddled loyalty of an old habit

that liked it here, stayed on, and never left.

RILKE Duino Elegies: The First Elegy (Translated by EDWARD SNOW) 

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

Divided

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. WALT WHITMAN

It's clear to me that we spend much of our lives in a state of division, in a state of negotiation or even conflict between mind and body, thinking and feeling, intellect and intuition, puritanism and hedonism, art and life, form and content, sin and sainthood, the physical and the metaphysical, sanity and madness.

We have been ever thus, in this very human state — or at least since Adam and Eve's expulsion from the harmony, unity and innocence of the Garden of Eden in the Biblical myth. From then on the dialectic of dualism has pervaded most religions, philosophies and sciences. And in his book The Divided Self the psychiatrist RD Laing argues that psychosis results from the struggle between the two personas within us: our authentic, private identity and the 'false' self we present to the world.

I know I've simplified and conflated lots of ideas here, and to unpick them all would take many words of explanation and clarification or many hours of argument and discussion. And how divisive that would be!

What I'm really getting at is this: can we perhaps see these polarities, rifts and conflicts within us, within our thought structures and within the world, as part and parcel of and definition of the whole; accept them as inevitable and right; reconcile them and recognise them as necessary to the multiform yet unified self; consider them indivisible? After all, day is as essential to night as night is as essential to day; and without the light there would be no dark, and without the dark there would be no light, and everything would be a uniform shade of grey, and rather tedious. Heaven — with its eternal do-gooding and happy-clappy saints — must be such a boring place.

This would entail a paradigm shift in our thinking. It would require us to examine and understand the darker sides to our nature. It would require us to appreciate and tolerate different religions, philosophies and cultures, different ways of doing things. It would require us to indulge as well as to fast, to follow our animal passions as well as the dictates of our intellect, to act with our body and soul as one, and not feel guilty or conflicted. The love and the hate, the harmony and the division, the beauty and the terror will always be there, coexisting. Can we accept this?

Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. RAINER MARIA RILKE

(Divided is is the final part of the 'D' trilogy. The first two parts are Deluded and Distracted.)  

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)

Let Us Disappear Into Praising

This post is dedicated to Ruth's blog synch-ro-ni-zing, which came to a close this week. There were real and heartfelt tears wept in blogdom, I assure you. Let us praise and celebrate this fine blog in all its beauty, creativity, intelligence, numinosity and generosity of spirit. True soul-work indeed.

Hymn

Praise the sky to the tree
And praise the tree to the ground
Praise the word on a leaf
And paraphrase some praise in song

Ride the curve of a question
Streaming down the wing of a swan
Uncurl your tongue with a holler
Or fly on praise without sound

Exhale the body to praise the air
Burn brittle sticks of hate
Clean the room with incense
Sniff the glue of "Celebrate"

Blossom a path to the plum
And flower-fountain the moon
Waterfall your hair on rocks
Then tease it out like the sun

Shout in yellow and laugh out red
Amen the sinners, admonish the dead
Swing on the tire to praise the clock
Then hug the hammock and sleep full stop

Heat up your heart 
And mercy your mind
Climb on the couch, bounce 
Your jiggles divine

Puff milkweed pouts and explode the pod 
Shake your bones till they’re humble
Fill that space with God!

RUTH MOWRY

Praise, my dear one.
Let us disappear into praising.
Nothing belongs to us.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

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)  

The Hermit Of Muzot

Castle Muzot, Switzerland

During his feverishly creative final years, Rilke lived at Castle Muzot, idyllically positioned above the town of Sierre in the upper Rhône valley. Here he lived in silence and solitude, with no telephone, electricity or running water. His housekeeper, whom he called a 'ghost', kept out of his way as much as possible. Living on the second floor of his 'tower', Rilke worked at a heavy oak table with glorious views over the valley. He ate meagre vegetarian meals and saw almost no one except, occasionally, Baladine Klossowska (whom he called 'Merline'), his last lover and confidante. Muzot, and its surrounding countryside of mountains, forests, rivers and streams, became dearer to him than any place he had ever lived.

Here, in a letter to Marie von Thurn und Taxis dated 25 July 1921, Rilke has just found Muzot, and is considering living in this enchanting place:     

So, if everything works out, I could live at Muzot for a while, with a housekeeper. The castle is situated at the top of quite a steep hill, twenty minutes from Sierre. It's a rural area, charming, and not too dry, with abundant springs — from it your gaze extends down the valley towards mountain slopes and the most wonderful depths of sky. A small, rustic chapel lies a little higher on the left among vineyards...     

Rilke in the garden of Castle Muzot

In the same letter Rilke continues to praise his new home in the Swiss canton of Le Valais:

In these last weeks I have often come very near to announcing my visit, and a peculiar current came into my rather sluggish spirit whenever I wanted to do so; but what keeps me here is this wonderful Valais. I was imprudent enough to travel down here, to Sierre and Sion; and I have told you what a singular magic these regions worked on me when I first saw them last year at the time of the grape harvest. The fact that Spain and Provence are blended together so strangely within the features of the landscape struck me immediately even then, for, in the final pre-war years, both these lands spoke to me more strongly and decisively than anywhere else. And now to find their voices united in a broad, Swiss mountain valley! This echo, this family likeness is not fanciful. Just recently I read, in a brief treatise on the plant life of the Wallis, that certain flowers appear here which are otherwise found only in Provence and Spain; it is the same with the butterflies: thus does the soul of a great river (and to me the Rhône has always been one of the most wonderful) bear endowments and kinships through the countries. Its valley here is so wide, and so grandly filled out with little heights within the frame of the big border mountains, that the eye is continually provided with a play of the most delightful changes, a chessgame with hills, as it were...

Hölderlin's Tower

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), now considered one of the greatest German Romantic lyric poets, was little read and largely misunderstood in his lifetime. Even after his death it took at least another fifty years before his importance was recognised. One of the first people to acknowledge the genius of Hölderlin, and, indeed, to be influenced by him, was the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

A cataclysmic event in Hölderlin's life was his love affair with Susette Gontard, the wife of Frankfurt banker Jakob Gontard, who employed the poet as a private tutor. Hölderlin was dismissed when the affair was discovered, but the couple continued to meet each other in secret, until Susette fatally contracted influenza in 1802. Already showing signs of mental illness, Hölderlin never really recovered from Susette's death (she became the 'Diotima' of his poems), and his mental condition worsened.

After a fruitless stay in a clinic in Tübingen — where he was given three years to live — a local carpenter, Ernst Zimmer, took pity on Hölderlin, giving him a room in his house, a tower in the old city walls overlooking the river Neckar (see pic). Zimmer and his family were to look after him for the next thirty-six years until his death in 1843. During this time Hölderlin's own family and friends (who included the philosophers Hegel and Schelling) completely deserted him. The only mourners at his funeral were the Zimmer family themselves.

Another day

Another day. I follow another path,
Enter the leafing woodland, visit the spring
Or the rocks where the roses bloom
Or search from a look-out, but nowhere
Love are you to be seen in the light of day
And down the wind go the words of our once so
Beneficent conversation...

Your beloved face has gone beyond my sight,
The music of your life is dying away
Beyond my hearing and all the songs
That worked a miracle of peace once on

My heart, where are they now? It was long ago,
So long and the youth I was has aged nor is
Even the earth that smiled at me then
The same. Farewell. Live with that word always.

For the soul goes from me to return to you
Day after day and my eyes shed tears that they
Cannot look over to where you are
And see you clearly ever again.

FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN (Translated by DAVID CONSTANTINE)

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)