Issue 29 – 2018 – Nick Halpern on Rilke (Essay)

Rilke’s Prompt:  A Fantasia     

By Nick Halpern

 

1

Finding Rainer Maria Rilke one morning outside Castle Duino on the Adriatic Sea, an angel speaks eleven words to him. Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordungen?  (Ten words in Stephen Mitchell’s translation: Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ / hierarchies?) Those are the first words of the First Elegy of the Duino Elegies, and many readers assume that Rilke himself speaks these words which, after all express his preoccupations and longings and sound like him.  But it’s the angel, and he’s imitating Rilke, though the mimicry isn’t mocking or cruel, but intimate. It’s an extraordinary and mysterious moment. Here is the first stanza of the First Elegy: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ / hierarchies? And even if one of them pressed me / suddenly against his heart I would be consumed/ in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing, / but the beginning of terror which we still are just able to endure, / and we are so awed because it serenely disdains / to annihilate us. Every single angel is terrifying.”

Two objections can be raised. Here is the first: why not just call it dictation? An angel is telling Rilke the words with which to start his poem. In fact, although Rilke will use the words to begin his poem, nothing about the moment resembles dictation. Dictation doesn’t begin deep inside the poet’s most private doubts and misgivings. When poets are receiving dictation they tend to sound sober and responsible, at least at the start. Milton, for example, begins by talking about man’s first disobedience, and John of Patmos begins by talking about “things which must shortly come to pass.”  Dictation is too crude a word here. Rilke’s experience is strange and original, in fact it’s hard to find precedents for it. Here is the second objection:  it isn’t an angel because there are no angels.  Rilke is, however, quite certain he has an experience with an angel. In the course of that experience, the figure begins to seem not quite other, not quite wholly other and to offer Rilke a way forward. That process is what matters to Rilke, not the question of whether angels exist. My intention here is to see what happens if we try, as the angel did, to enter the poet’s subjectivity.

Rilke never writes about the experience. But he must have told Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, the owner of Castle Duino, about it because in her memoirs, published after Rilke was dead, she tells us about it. “Rilke had not foreseen what was preparing itself in him. A great sadness invaded him; he began to believe that this winter would come to nothing […] One morning he received an annoying business letter. He wanted to deal with it as quickly as possible and found himself forced to concentrate on figures and other prosaic matters. Outside a strong Bora was blowing, but the sun shone and the sea was radiantly blue, crested with silver. Rilke climbed down to the narrow path which connects the bastions jutting out to the east and west at the foot of the castle, from which the rocks fall down to the sea in a sheer drop of 200 feet.  The poet walked up and down this path, entirely absorbed in thought, and wondering how to answer the letter. Then, suddenly, as he was pondering, he stopped dead:  it seemed to him that he heard a voice call through the roaring of the wind. Who, if I cried, would hear me among the ranks of the angels? Taking out the notebook he always carried, he wrote down these words and several more verses that formed themselves without any conscious effort on his part.  Then he went up to his room quite calmly, laid his notebook away and dealt with the business letter. Yet by the same evening the entire First Elegy had been written down. Very soon afterwards, the Second, the “Angel” Elegy was to follow.” (Stephen Mitchell translation.)  His biographer Ralph Freedman’s retelling of Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe’s retelling is succinct: “from the depth of the wind he heard the Voice of the Angel intoning the opening words of his elegy.”

It’s January 1912. Rilke and his wife, Clara have lived apart for many years. The business letter with its “facts and figures” comes from her divorce attorney. Rilke is engaged in a correspondence with Lou Andreas-Salomé, his closest friend, about the possibility of moving to Munich and going into psychoanalysis with Baron Victor Emil Freiherr von Gebsattel, who is Clara’s therapist as well as Lou’s colleague and sometime lover. Should he do it?  Rilke writes to Lou Andreas- Salomé, “My wife, from whom, incidentally, I only rarely have short letters, thinks, if I am not mistaken, that a kind of cowardice is frightening me away from analysis.” He is, during his stay at Castle Duino, constantly writing letters. Writing to Baron von Gebsattel, he says “There is little to say against the surroundings, at most that the climate, an incessant alternation between sirocco and bora, is not exactly typical of the inner stability I want. Therefore not entirely advantageous—but on the other hand the advantages are so many that, if I set about it with some degree of sense, I could extract profit of a sort here.  Mainly through my absolute solitude. The castle is an immense body without much soul; obsessed with the idea of its solidity it holds you like a prisoner with its in-turned gravitational force; it is a somewhat austere abode. On the steep cliffs an evergreen garden climbs up to it from the sea; apart from that green things are scarce, we are in the Carso, and the hardened mountains have renounced the effeminacies of vegetation.”  The words, to readers of Rilke’s letters, are unexpected:  “Stability, advantageous, sense, extract profit, solidity, austere, renounced the effeminacies.”  Rilke was never quite himself when writing to men he wasn’t mentoring, and here he is writing to a man who might become his psychoanalyst.  In the same letter he tells the Baron, “I know all is not well with me.”

Count Harry Kessler, running into Rilke in July 1911, writes afterwards that Rilke had told him that he has been wandering from castle to castle “like a dead man, like someone without a soul […] Sometimes, when you see a tree in wintertime, which has lost all of its greenness, no leaf, no growth, you have the feeling that this tree must suffer nameless torments because the sap coursing inside it can find no outlet for its force, can share nothing, can find nothing living into which to flow, because every contact had been broken between it and the world.”  The Bulgarian novelist Elias Canetti, in his collection of aphorisms, The Agony of Flies: Notes and Notation offers a memorable evocation of such “nameless torments.” Canetti asks us to imagine “a life of wasted moments, moments which suddenly light up all at once.” The hopes of the discouraged person might be raised by the sudden appearance of light, and he might believe that the act of illumination will allow a rescuer to find him.  In fact, there is no rescuer. The act of illumination simply shows him (and no one else) a life of wasted moments.  Had the moments simply not lit up or had they lit up only at long intervals life might have seemed bearable. Canetti’s aphorism suggests what must have been Rilke’s sense of gloom when he contemplated his ‘wasted moments and squandered hours. (In the Tenth Elegy, Rilke will write that “we squander our hours of pain.”) He can find no outlet for his force, can share nothing, can find nothing living into which to flow, because every contact has been broken between himself and the world. He finished his semi-autobiographical novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, two years earlier. His last book of poems, New Poems, appeared in 1908, four years earlier. He is creatively paralyzed. What if he never writes again?  If he goes into psychoanalysis he fears he will almost certainly never write again. He is thirty-seven years old. Clara is living somewhere else and their twelve-year-old daughter, Ruth, somewhere else again– possibly with Clara’s parents. H. F. Peters writes, “The prolonged crisis in Rilke’s life that followed upon the completion of Malte in 1910 was briefly overcome by the creative euphoria in 1912 when, at Duino, he encountered the angel.” Shortly after that encounter, Rilke writes Baron von Gebsattel to say he has decided against psychoanalysis. A rescuer has found him, though, of course, he doesn’t tell the Baron that.

We expect such a rescue to take place in a private space, but there is something tantalizingly almost public about the event:  Rilke is not up in his room, after all, with its windows on three sides overlooking the sea, hearing a hypnagogic voice as he drifts off. (Angels in dreams aren’t the momentous, life-changing angels Rilke wants.  Charles Wright writes in a poem from his book, A Short History of the Shadow, “In some other poem angels emerge from their cold room  / Their wings blackened by somebody’s dream.”) It’s morning and not the middle of the night.  Rilke is wide-awake, the ground is beneath his feet. He’s outside and–no aspect of the experience is more crucial–the angel’s voice is not coming from inside him. Wallace Stevens has a poem called “The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.”  There is a paramour and a brief soliloquy of a sort here, but Rilke’s is an exterior paramour.

This exteriority makes us take an interest in the setting and want to visualize it more clearly. What time of day is it? Where is the poet standing when he hears the voice? Is he completely alone? What does the voice sound like? Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Holenlohe mentions a narrow path and bastions and morning.  The British poet Sidney Keyes mentions a windy wall (and night):  “Once a man cried and the great Orders heard him: / Pacing upon a windy wall at night / A pale unlearned poet out of Europe’s /Erratic heart cried and was full of speech.” William Gass, in Reading Rilke, sees him walking “along the precipitous edge of the Duino Castle cliffs.”  Kathleen L. Komar, in her essay on the Duino Elegies in The Cambridge Companion to Rilke, imagines him “standing atop the tower of the castle of Duino.”  Jesse Browner, the translator of Rilke’s Letters to Merline, puts him “high above the sea on a windswept promontory.” Elaine E. Boney, in her commentary to her translation of the Duino Elegies places him atop a parapet. All of the accounts, remarkably, have just the one account by Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe on which to base themselves. What does the voice sound like? Does it speak loudly? The angels in the Book of Revelation all have loud voices but they have to have them. This particular angel has to be loud enough to be heard above the strong wind or driving storm. But his voice is probably not booming. It just has to be audible to Rilke.

Rilke’s solitude, it should be said, is not absolute. There are two “discreet and devoted” servants. J. B. Leishman mentions Carlo, “the old man-servant born and bred in Duino” and “Miss Greenham,” the Anglo-Italian housekeeper. Rilke would have seen the humor in the phrase “discreet and devoted.” In the spring of 1921 he will describe a spa in Switzerland to Baladine Klossowska, or “Merline,” a woman with whom he is romantically involved, briefly. “They have a little private dining room there, where, at tables carefully isolated one from another, you were served in deepest silence and with great discretion, so much so that the lovely, unhappy Countess Merenberg, nee Princess Jurievsky, (granddaughter of Tsar Alexander,) despite her suffering state, always appeared at table. It was the dining room for the hypersensitive, for those who wanted to avoid everyone. Proust could have described the way we were served by the waiter: he took each of us to be so timid that he had a special way of presenting himself, before offering us the plate; a whole system of precautions preceded this gesture, from which no one, afterwards, could really claim to have suffered the slightest harm.” If Carlo and Miss Greenham see Rilke stop dead in his path they are too discrete ever to speak to him about it.  It should be said that discretion is of immense importance to Rilke.  It’s the word he uses when he tells Lou Andreas-Salomé that he imagines Baron von Gebsattel will use Freud’s methods with “discretion” and that therefore he (served in deepest silence and with great discretion by the Baron) will not suffer the slightest harm.

Carlo and Miss Greenham could easily have seen him on the grounds. It is morning, after all. Somehow, though, one pictures it happening at night. Sidney Keyes is on to something. It ought to be night. Because everything else about the setting resembles Elsinore Castle. Why do none of the writers mention the dreadful summit of the cliff that beetles o’er his base into the sea?  We are in the play Hamlet. The atmosphere is one of theatricality and extravagance. Rilke might well be standing on battlements. James E.B. Breslin uses a phrase in his biography of Mark Rothko that seems applicable to Rilke at this moment: “innocent grandiosity.” In a moment, though, for Rilke and Hamlet, the grandiose will turn very grand. The ghost of Hamlet’s father will appear to Hamlet, and Rilke’s angel will appear to Rilke, and now at last they will have something serious to do at their respective castles. Hamlet is dumbfounded, but Rilke has been expecting the voice. He’s been listening for it at all the palaces and castles, all the meeting places where no meeting took place.

 

2

What does it feel like always to be listening for such a voice? Rilke knows that the only thing that can set his voice going again is another voice.  Not the voice of a muse, dictating to him. A muse is discreet and well mannered, like a waiter at a spa who also attends to other customers. Rilke expects a different voice. A life spent listening for such a voice will involve, for one thing, always not hearing it.  A line from a poem by Paul Celan evokes the sense of a disappointment repeated day after day:  “No one’s voice, again.”  With the voice will come his real work. Rilke writes to the (affable, sinister) Baron von Gebsattel, “I long for work, sometimes I fancy for a moment that it longs for me—but we do not meet.”

What might he be expecting before he hears the angel’s eleven words?  G. Lynn Stephens and George Graham, in their book, When Self-Consciousness Breaks:  Alien Voices and Inserted Thoughts (2000) write (not about Rilke):  “In the case of voices, alien verbal imagery typically possesses the sort of grammatical forms that are appropriate for conversational or communicative speech. For example, often they are in the second person. Often they are in an imperative mood. Their content is similar to communicative acts like giving advice or criticism, issuing threats and orders, offering condolence or encouragement… “  A voice in the second person, speaking in an imperative mood? In his poem, “The Archaic Torso of Apollo,” Apollo told him he must change his life. What imperative would not seem anticlimactic after that? Threats and orders? That would be up to the angel. Advice, criticism, condolence, encouragement? Rilke conducts a large correspondence. He can get those things from letters.

Meanwhile, he waits. But he does not have to be completely passive. He can try to control his environment, particularly in regard to aural clutter. Silence is hard to find, though, because Rilke is a person of great charisma and people seek him out.  Although their intrusions present a problem he has defensive strategies. One strategy is to listen with exaggerated deference. One of Rilke’s interlocutors tells us that he listens with “outcries of astonishment and admiration,” suggesting by his outsize reactions how passionately he wishes he were really hearing astonishing things.  And this interlocutor is a woman with whom he is romantically involved, briefly. People, sensing that Rilke is waiting for a voice, misunderstand, thinking Rilke is waiting for their voice.  But he isn’t. There will be a voice and it will say astonishing things and against that voice there will be no defensive strategies. He writes Karl von der Heydt, a wealthy financier who is helpful to him, two and a half years before he hears the angels, “To endure and have patience, to expect no help but the very great, almost miraculous: that has carried me along from childhood up.”  Some people do offer help.  He writes on January 10, 1912, in words that anticipate what will happen shortly, “I have been alone again only a few days, am now at last thanking you for your good letter. I have, you may believe me, read much between the words. I walked up and down in the garden with it as something that one wants to learn by heart. What would I do without this voice, yours? I cannot tell you how intimate and comforting it was to me.”  But that’s Lou Andreas-Salomé. Most people aren’t her.  He can do without the voices of most people.

Rilke’s a mild misanthrope, compared, say, to the nineteenth-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who writes, “People on doomsday shall give an account of every idle word they have spoken.” But Rilke’s misanthropy is real. It seems almost old-fashioned, as if it hearkened back to an earlier time, earlier than the nineteenth century. We can hear in his misanthropy echoes from a time and place in which the fastidiously saintly flourished both in life and allegory. (He would not have identified with them, preferring more enraptured saints.) The allegorical figure, Talkative, in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), for example, tries to talk to another allegorical figure, Christian, but finally “flings himself away” from him, saying, “I cannot but conclude you are some peevish, or melancholy man not fit to be discoursed with.” And George Fox, a founder of Quakerism, writes in his journal about his fear of a specific kind of conversation:  “I was afraid of all carnal talk and talkers.” Retain the intensity but change carnal to casual and we are back in the world of Rilke’s fears. “Rilke was,” according to Bernhard Blume, “easily disturbed and distracted; a casual conversation was enough to wreck a day for him.”  (Not a disturbing conversation, it should be noted, but a casual one.) He writes Lou Andreas-Salomé in the summer of 1903, “for me it is difficult to the point of unbearableness to believe that a conversation that begins somewhere in the insignificant can end in the important.”  Casual people never seem to understand how disruptive mere informality can be. James E. B. Breslin discusses a contemporary version of what the Puritans called “conversation holiness” in his biography of Mark Rothko. “’He was very conscious of needing approbation all the time,” [a friend] commented. ‘He wanted to be treated like a genius or a great man. I remember once [another friend] meeting him on the street,” and saying ‘Hi.” Rothko was offended. ‘Don’t talk to me like that. Treat me with respect.’ He was very, very unhappy at being sort of just hailed like an ordinary person.’”  Rothko would have agreed with Kierkegaard, who wrote in his journal, “There really are people with whom it is horrible to be fellow humans.”

Rilke isn’t as uncompromising as Rothko or Kierkegaard. If he avoids us it’s because he has, in his more misanthropic hours, formed an idea of us in his mind. We are gregarious and friendly people. We don’t like solitude.  We’re willing to put up with polite conversation when the occasion demands it, although casual conversation is preferable and real conversation, a heart-to-heart, is best. Boisterousness is, for many of us, our default mode. We don’t hide from other people, we enjoy them, and we certainly don’t require of them that they constantly say astonishing things. (Although we don’t mind if they constantly say funny things.) We all share the same all-absorbing “project,” which is, as Adam Phillips suggests in his book, Terrors and Experts, (1995) “to be extremely normal.”  We’re confident that happiness, real happiness, is to be found once a week in church and on the other days in the many fulfilling experiences life offers us. (“In some individuals,” William James writes, “optimism may become quasi-pathological.”)  And if we can’t find the happiness we seek we’re willing to believe experts like Baron von Gebsattel’s guide and hero who say that ordinary unhappiness is happiness. That’s what we’re like. And it would be tolerable except that we’re so hard to get away from.  “To ward off all external interruptions for eight or ten days is quite possible,” Rilke writes to Lou Andreas-Salomé in the spring of 1904, “but for weeks, for months?” At his least misanthropic, Rilke sometimes suspects we might be right about everyday life. And he reaches out to us, or at least thinks kind thoughts about us. “Ah how good it is to be among reading people,” he writes. “Why are they not always like that?” And he makes friendly gestures towards the idea of daily life, even writing a play called Daily Life in 1901. It doesn’t go as well as hoped. Eric Torgersen, in his book, Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker (1998) quotes a contemporaneous reviewer: “‘the people speak as Pre-Raphaelite angels carrying lilies would speak… The audience was nearly writhing with laughter.’”  Robert Duncan had a similar failure. He too had given daily life a fair try but had his effort rejected—by William Carlos Williams himself. Duncan’s Domestic Scenes contained poems with such titles as “No ideas but in things,” “Breakfast,” Bus Fare” and “Lunch with Buns.” The poem, “Breakfast,” begins, “I shall awake to the ennui of breakfast foods.”

Some people and not just Lou Andreas-Salomé, are worth listening to, even if the list isn’t long, and even if, afterwards, he often feels a little dissatisfied with them and with himself. Is it that nobody, including himself, is quite rarefied enough? Still, conversation, when both parties are full of vitality and zeal and unafraid of exploring depths, can be pure pleasure. “O how often one yearns to speak a few degrees more deeply!” Malte Laurids Brigge, the hero of Rilke’s novel, says, and sometimes with some people one does speak a few degrees more deeply. These are moments to live for. What greater happiness than to feel out of one’s depth in another person’s company? Of course there is the possibility of greater happiness and a deeper depth and better company. But he does not know when that company will descend.

He is waiting for a non-human voice. But there are other non-human voices here on earth and they make him happy, although Rilke wishes, sometimes, it was in his power to improve their efforts. He tells Merline, for example, about “a blissful sheet of music that I should like to present to a blackbird, so that he might take up the entire piece, singing note by note.” A blissful tone is good but a tone of gravitas would be even better. Two weeks later, he tells Merline, “throughout the whole afternoon, the bird cries were already like those of the summer, before the rain: isolated, more serious, more sonorous.” The birds, or some birds, have learned how to please him.

But this is life at its best. And life is, more frequently, at its worst. What is the worst like?  The worst, worse than the sound of people making small talk or exchanging clichés, worse even than the sound of an audience laughing at him (although he did choose not to attend opening night), worse, really, than anything that comes out of people’s mouths or the mouths of birds is undifferentiated, ubiquitous, non-stop, meaningless noise. “Everything that lives makes noise,” E.M. Cioran, the Romanian philosopher, writes, and adds, “What an argument for the mineral kingdom.” Rilke even wishes, sometimes, that he were deaf, but deaf like Beethoven. “A man,” he writes, “whose hearing a god had closed up so that there might be no sounds but his own; so that he might not be led astray by what is turbid and ephemeral in noises.” Rilke says even of Auguste Rodin, whom he revered:  “His house and the noises of it are something unspeakably trivial and unimportant.” Everything that lives makes noise. And some things that do not live, like machines, for example, make very loud noise. One of them has designs on the poet, trying to consume him in in its overwhelming existence. Rilke writes Merline that he has “received a severe shock by an altogether unexpected disturbance, a disturbance which for the past two days has irritated and exasperated me. Just imagine, an ‘electric sawmill’ has been installed directly opposite, at the right exit to the park; it has been going since Tuesday, and makes a continuous, atrocious racket of singing steel as with a dentist’s cruelty it attacks that poor, wonderful timber brought down from the Irchel forest.  My nerves are not very resistant at the moment, and I am suffering awfully from this intrusive obstacle, which I shall have to fight every day with a portion of my strength that I would so have wished to concentrate on a single goal […] If the windows are kept tightly shut, and if the wind is not blowing from that direction, it is relatively quiet but all my walks in the park have become henceforward impossible […] This destruction of pure hearing is all the more devastating in that each thought only becomes real for me when I am also able to imagine it in tonal equivalencies, projecting it upon a background of purest hearing:  to find my hearing so overcrowded with alien sounds is exactly as I had to write on paper completely covered with scribbles and stains.”  For us it’s an electric sawmill, for Rilke it’s an “electric sawmill.” It’s as if he hopes the genteel, Jamesian quotation marks will choke the words to death. But they don’t, they can’t. Electric sawmills are what they are, and resist quotation marks. One of his translators in his introduction to Rilke’s poems puts quotation marks around the word “angel” and it has a much more punitive effect.  An angel is much more vulnerable to quotation marks than an electric sawmill. (“In his own lights,” Jesse Browner writes, “what made him capable of composing was an obedience to an order higher than himself, an ‘angel’ to which he was enfranchised and beholden for his inspiration.”) A reader might remember Charles Kinbote, the mad hero of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, trying desperately to concentrate on his detailed discussion of corrected drafts and fair copies, and stopping suddenly and telling the reader: “There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings…” If he sounds exasperated he will sound extremely normal, Kinbote hopes, or at least like a Chekhov character, as Rilke does, but he doesn’t sound normal, or even sane.  Still, since there is nothing to be done about amusement parks and electric sawmills, he carries on, and so does Rilke.

The people in Rilke’s life (Lou Andreas-Salomé, Clara Rilke, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Auguste Rodin), noting his low spirits, come up with a plan. His poems, when he first starts publishing them, are melancholy, amorphous, adolescent. (“Some of one’s early things give one the creeps,” Wallace Stevens writes in a letter.)  It’s unhealthy for him as a person and a poet, they suspect, to get too far away from the real world, and they advise him to look (hard) at “things.”  This seems like good advice, and Rilke takes it. Looking, though, means, for Rilke, learning to look, means an apprenticeship. He takes the notion of an apprenticeship seriously, going, for example, to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris in order to look hard at the animals there. But while his dedication is intense (and produces poems like “The Panther”) his investment is limited. (In reference to “The Panther,” Robert Hass observes:  “Rilke, deciding to write poems about really seeing, wrote immediately a poem about the exhaustion of seeing.”) And there is something else:  Looking, a solitary occupation, increases his sense of loneliness. Worse than that, it’s unsatisfying, looking hard. It doesn’t involve the blissful, the serious and sonorous. Rilke, waiting for the voice of the angel, wants to hear sounds that will make life seem larger than life. Such sounds are hard to find. But they’re easy to imagine, and after the angel speaks to him, he will write about them.  In the Duino Elegies we will hear dark sobbing, thunderous roars, strange marvelous words in the night air, endless uproar, drumming, bawling, a stairway of calling—and, in addition, he has a late, uncollected poem called, simply, “Gong.” Malte Laurids Brigge, addressing Beethoven’s death-mask, says:  “But Master, were a virginal spirit to lie with innocent ear beside your sound:  he would die of blessedness, or he would gestate infinite things and his impregnated brain would burst with so much birth.”  Nothing Rilke has looked hard at (so far) has made him feel like he might die of blessedness.

It’s not that the others feel they might, just looking at things, die of blessedness–for that, one has to wait for Mary Oliver. But they don’t want to die of blessedness. They just want to look at “things.” If only he could look with their eyes, these people (mostly artists and sculptors) to whom looking comes so naturally and looking hard so easily. Offering updates on his progress, Rilke can sound unconvincing. He writes Lou Andreas-Salomé, for example, “I begin to see anew:  already flowers mean so infinitely much to me, and from animals have come strange intimations and promptings.” (Or, as another translator puts it: “excitements of a strange kind have come to me from animals.”) This can’t be the kind of careful looking he’s supposed to be doing. (What do you call the opposite of an imagist?) Rilke knows he can be odd. As he writes elsewhere,  “I had become improbable even to myself.”  But even here, even at his most improbable, he can’t help but follow the familiar trajectory of his real desire, moving from seeing to listening to strange intimations and promptings. “We keep expecting,” Elias Canetti says, “that the breath of animals will turn into new words never heard before.” (Who expects that, apart from Canetti and Rilke?) Rilke, though he loves animals, especially dogs, is strange about them, maybe because he feels how strange they are. In his poem “Improvisations of the Caprisian Winter,” he writes, “Doesn’t one of the animals sometimes approach / as though it were pleading:  take my face?  / Their faces are too hard for them /and hold what little soul they have / much too far into the world.”  Their faces are too hard for them and maybe for Rilke too. Too often he sounds as if he’s trying to please his friends who are at home with the visible world. Writing to Lou Andreas-Salomé in the spring of 1904, for example, Rilke describes “a little first flower that struggles and comes, is a world, a happiness, to participate in which is infinitely satisfying.” Infinitely satisfied, and tentatively encouraged, Rilke moves on to people, about whom he seems every so often to have a guilty conscience. “And sometimes,” he continues, “I perceive even people so, hands live somewhere, mouths speak, and I see everything more quietly and with greater justice.” After their hands find a place to live, their mouths start speaking. So it isn’t quiet, really.

Then he seems to have an idea, though he never states it explicitly. What if he looked at people not when their mouths started speaking but when their ears started listening?  Auguste Rodin has obtained a gramophone, Rilke tells Clara. “I was apprehensive when I found myself invited to hear it,” he writes. “But it was marvelous; they have bought records of some old Gregorian chants [..] And when a castrato’s voice intoned a requiem of the 13th or 14th century, wailing forth like the wind from a crack in the world, then you forgot all the fatuity of the instrument, all the stupid mechanical noises…  [Rodin] himself was magnificent, quite quiet, quite closed, as though facing a great storm. He could hardly breathe with listening and only snatched a little air when the force of the voice abated for a few bars.”  Magnificence, a great storm, the force of the voice.  And all this from Rodin, a master of the visual and tactile. What does this tell us about the place of listening among the senses?  Rilke doesn’t say. But he remembers that Orpheus was happy, listening for the footsteps of Eurydice and Hermes behind him in Hades.  It was when he turned around and looked, looked hard, that disaster came. Rilke continues to observe acts of listening, noticing, for example a gazelle listening to a horse. In a letter to Clara in the summer of 1907 he writes, “Yesterday I spent the whole morning in the Jardin des Plantes, looking at the gazelles.  Gazella Dorcas, Linnaeus.  There are a pair of them and also a single female.  They were lying a few feet apart, chewing their cuds, resting, gazing.  As women gaze out of pictures, they were gazing out of something, with a final, soundless turn of the head.  And when a horse whinnied, the single one listened, and I saw the radiance from ears and horns around her slender head.”   The gazelle is radiant with listening. Note that she’s not one of the pair of gazelles. The greater one’s solitude, maybe, the more passionately one listens. And Rilke, solitary, lonely, impatient for the voice, hungry for the extraordinary sounds he wants to hear, contents himself for the time being with listening vicariously.

The apprenticeship is far from over. His friends and advisers send him to museums. Paintings are easy to look at hard. They expect to be looked at, demand it, are there for that. And nobody can claim that what is most compelling about painters is that they are listening. But some painters, Rilke suspects, are in love with listening, and are practicing with their ears a kind of infidelity to their eyes. We might think of Van Gogh, at least, as someone who looked, primarily, but Rilke imagines him as a person who listened, secretly: “Van Gogh, for having heard all these things spoken within him, listening secretly to the inside of his eye, like an eavesdropper.” Cézanne too.  Rilke writes of one his paintings:  “blue called for orange and green for red…secretly listening in his eye’s interior, he had heard such things spoken, the inquisitive one.” Rilke ends a sentence about Cézanne’s colors by talking about listening:   “Although it belongs to his peculiarities to use chrome yellow and flaming scarlet-lake absolutely neat on his lemons and apples, he nevertheless absolutely knows how to keep their loudness inside the picture:  resonantly, as into an ear, they boom into a listening blue and receive soundless answer so that nobody outside need feel apostrophized or accosted.” Listening is exciting, intrinsically. Not only do painters listen, colors themselves listen. Blue listens. 

Listening, for Rilke, involves, always, a sense of incipience:  listening, he is always listening for.  But what, when’s he looking, is he is looking for? For the sake of (spiritual, psychological) self-improvement, of course. Every act of looking hard, of close scrutiny, makes one more at home in the world. He tells Clara that he is trying to “see better, more unforgettably.” But when they’d told him to look hard at “things” they’d never mentioned how many there were. His use of the word unforgettably, with its telltale intensifier, hints at his suspicion that he’s expending hard labor on what may be, in fact, forgettable, might deserve to be forgotten. One might come away from a lifetime of looking with nothing but an accumulation of impressions. Rilke complains to Clara about Ellen Key, a mutual friend, a Swedish writer on educational subjects and her inexhaustible capacity for impressions. Anyone can gather impressions, can become an impression-gatherer. It’s a danger for travelers, for poets who travel. Nevertheless, he keeps at it. The world likes being looked at.

Rilke thrills most, according to his letters, to what doesn’t like being looked at, to what resists (rather than passively endures) his scrutiny. The year before he hears the angel, he spends two months in Egypt. In one of his letters to Clara, he writes about “the incomprehensible temple-world of Karnak, which I saw […] under a moon just beginning to wane:  saw, saw, saw—my God, you pull yourself together and with all your might you try to believe your two focused eyes—and yet it begins above them, reaches out everywhere above and beyond them (only a god can cultivate such a field of vision.)” Rilke focuses his eyes, as instructed, but he’s happiest when he discovers he can’t believe them. When he looks at what resists him and it appears not as interesting and allegorical but as weird and uncanny, he sees better, more unforgettably.  And when he sees that way, it means he is on the verge of listening, of seeing with his ears. When he goes out into the desert one night to see the Sphinx, a visual encounter turns little by little into an auditory one. (He remembers his experience when he writes the Tenth Elegy.)  “And then as I gazed at it, I was suddenly, unexpectedly, taken into its confidence. I received a knowledge of that cheek, experienced it in the perfect emotion of its curve. For a few minutes I didn’t grasp what had happened. Imagine: this:  Behind the great projecting crown on the Sphinx’s head, an owl had flown up and had slowly, indescribably audibly in the pure depths of the night, brushed the face with her faint flight:  and now, upon my hearing, which had grown very acute in the hours-long nocturnal silence, the outline of that cheek was, (as though by a miracle) inscribed.” The italics are his.

All this looking at animals, people, sculpture and paintings is going into poems, which he calls Ding-Gedichte, poems about “things.” According to Robert Hass, these are “poems […] in which the focus was thrown off the speaker and unto the thing seen.” And many of these Ding-Gedichte go into New Poems, the book he published four years before he heard the angel. Many of the poems in that book are deservedly famous. There must be a difference, though, between this commendable and irreproachable business of looking hard and the real work for which Rilke was born. Things are ubiquitous. Anyone can look at them.  Most people can describe them, more or less accurately. Not everyone can write poems about looking but many poets can. Rilke wants work only he can do. Robert Duncan says in a 1985 interview that the poet Jack Spicer is “antagonistic to the visible world.”  Rilke isn’t like that. Looking is a skill, one he can take up and later put down, which he does. But more and more he has the sense that he is never going to write something like the Duino Elegies if he keeps writing poems about “things.” At the same time, such poems are hard to write. So much depends (as William Carlos Williams implies) on concealing one’s unworthy motives from the poem. Charles Wright makes fun, in his poem, “Scar Tissue II,“ of the poet’s desire to throw the focus off the thing seen and back onto the poet.  “Whatever we see does not see us, / however hard we look.”  But there’s something genuine about the poet’s desire:  If only something mutual, something reciprocal could take place. Rilke himself wonders if there might be a more direct, and also more effective way of getting at flowers, for example. In one of his later poems he writes, capitalizing the word “things,” as he often does: “If someone were to fall into intimate slumber and slept /deeply with Things—; how easily he would come / to a different day out of the mutual depth.” Ideally, one would stay there among the flowers, “and they would blossom and praise / their newest convert, who now is like one of them, / all those silent companions in the winds of the meadows” (translator Stephen Mitchell).  One can go to sleep and get to know (and get to be known by) the flowers, and for once be praised by them.

Not only must one conceal one’s unworthy motives one must also avoid certain questions. Still, a poet might ask, in an irreverent moment:  what is in it, after all, for me? Or even:  what is in it for the things themselves? They don’t care. They’re things.  Or Things. In his poem, “The Vast Night” Rilke writes, “Even the nearest Things / don’t care whether I understand them.”  Here is the problem:  It’s hard to write a poem about looking because when the focus comes back to the poet, it comes back not to what is deepest in the poet but only to what is personal, that is, merely personal. What is deepest in us, after all, is impersonal. Timothy Gould, in his book, Hearing Voices (1998) puts it another way, writing about how hard it is “to take things intimately without taking them personally.” It’s a sentence Rilke would, I think, have appreciated. The personal, the merely personal, is the enemy of the kind of poetry he wants to write. Dangerous in one’s work it may even be more perilous in one’s life, which is not the same as one’s personal life. To care too much about one’s personal life is to make oneself vulnerable to the expertise of doctors. Rilke is, according to Robert Hass, “terrified by the idea of mental health.” One might have thought he would be mesmerized by his own inner life. He is, in a sense: he can’t take his eyes off it. But that’s largely because he fears it.  (Stanley Cavell, in The Claim of Reason, uses the word “psychophobia,” which means fear of one’s own inner life.)  What Rilke trusts in is, as I said, deeper than his personal life, deeper even than his inner life, it’s not even a life, really, it’s a space, the space of the impersonal (which is, not coincidentally, the space where mortals and angels can meet.) Doctors don’t know how to diagnose the impersonal life, they diagnosis one’s inner life, and such a diagnosis will be a disaster for him.  Here’s what will happen: All the poems, every poem, every word of every poem, will become a symptom, he himself will become a case study, and he’ll be disqualified somehow, and the angel will not show up. (One remembers the phrase “serene disdain.”)  Innocent grandiosity, if it never turns into grandeur, can turn grubby, seedy. And a person whose inner life a doctor has pathologized can come to seem trivial. Even to himself. Maybe especially to himself. I said at the start that the angel doesn’t mock Rilke when he imitates him. But think of Daniel Paul Schreber, for example, who tells us in his book, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), that, though he hears voices, has heard them almost nonstop for seven years, they are always only mocking and meaningless. They know that Schreber is, in spite of his achievements as a judge in his former life, a trivial person. What was particularly agonizing for Schreber is that the voices did not respect him enough to use “the sort of grammatical forms that are appropriate for conversational or communicative speech.” His voices don’t take Schreber seriously, and neither do readers of literature, really. Readers are generally shocked and moved by Schreber’s book but it’s a part of clinical literature, not literature itself. That will never happen to Rilke. The only way to escape the doctors is by establishing an interiority inaccessible to them, that is, an impersonal space. Once they decide that you are just a personality with a personal history you’re theirs. If doctors want to hound Rilke, let them hound his alter ego, Malte Laurids Brigge, a person who can’t be analyzed or helped or even described, really. But he has a personality, of sorts, (more than Beckett’s Molloy, say,) and that makes him bait. Let them go after him. Elias Canetti could be speaking for Rilke when he writes, in The Agony of Flies, “I’m sick of all perceptions, of the connections to all that has been before, the interrelations, the follow-ups, the disguises, the revelations; I wish to experience something which has no relation to anything that was in me earlier, something that does not reproduce itself and is not doomed to stay; something with swift, abrupt motions, never predictable […]  

 I wish to experience something which has no relation to anything that was in me earlier.  In a letter to Clara in 1910—two years before he hears the angel– Rilke writes, “I do not know how to let anything important happen to me.” It’s clear to him by now that what is important will happen to him as a passionate listener, not as a diligent observer. And in his poem, “Turning,” he says that he is going to end his apprenticeship to looking. “For gazing, look, has a limit,” he writes. (It must be pleasing to use the word “siehe” in a different sense than the one that has been wearying him.)  Rilke asks himself, in wonderment, “How long had this looking lasted? / How long had his soul fasted?” (William Gass translation.)  Although the sensory pathway Rilke chooses is the one least likely, perhaps, to keep him in the world, he’s content.

It probably is time Rilke ends the apprenticeship. The “things” Rilke looks at are starting to find him a little unnerving. “He had a wonderful eye,” according to Robert Hass, “for almost anything he really looked at, dogs, children, qualities of light, works of art; but in the end he looked at them in order to take them inside himself and transform them:  to soak them in his homelessness and spiritual hunger so that when he returned them to the world, they were no more at home in it than he was, and gave off unearthly light.” Blake said, “I can look at a knot in a piece of wood till I am frightened at it.” Rilke, in “Turning,” talking about himself in the third person (which somehow increases the atmosphere of dissociation and menace and makes us feel we are back in the world of Malte Laurids Brigge) outdoes Blake:  “He gazed at towers so hard / he filled them with terror.”  (My italics.) If he seems a little strange it doesn’t matter:  at last he’s the poet he dreams of being, the poet who is all ears.  And when the topic is specifically ears, he is at his strangest.  These phrases are from Sonnets to Orpheus, (written at the same time as the second half of the Duino Elegies):  She made herself a bed inside my ear.  There’s a hut in the ear. There’s a temple in the ear. You built a temple deep inside their hearing. Oh tall tree in the ear. Wallace Stevens has a similar impulse to imagine the relationship, at once alien and intimate, between hearing and imagination. In his poem, “Of Modern Poetry” he writes about “the delicatest ear of the mind.”  But there’s no bed, no hut, no temple, no tree, in that ear.  

Rilke’s abandoned his apprenticeship. So when the longed-for moment comes, and the listened-for voice can at last be listened to, there is nothing to look at.  The experience could have happened to a blind man, to Milton if he’d asked to be taken outside by his daughters. A blind man:  think how weary of looking Rilke had to be in order to be willing to do without visionary splendor. The visual-minded people (who had thought Rilke was one of them now) might ask him about what happened on the grounds of the castle but what could he tell them? That there was nothing to see or that there was but he hadn’t seen it?  His inattentiveness, his obliviousness—for which (he might have felt) he had waited almost as long as he waited for the angel—must have descended on him as a deep pleasure and relief. It should be noted that for some people, of course, something visual is required. Stephens and Graham, in When Self-Consciousness Breaks: Alien Voices and Inserted Thoughts, tell us about a deaf patient who was “apparently having verbal visual hallucinations.” He said, according to the authors, “that he could see someone address him in sign language.”  But Rilke, at this moment, was anything but deaf. He is like the figures that are shortly to appear in the First Elegy. “Voices. Voices.  Listen, my heart, as only /saints have listened:  until the gigantic call lifted them off the ground; yet they kept on, impossibly, /kneeling and didn’t notice at all:  / so complete was their listening.”  We asked where he was standing.  It’s possible he himself didn’t know.  Maybe he was kneeling. Maybe he was lifted off the ground.

 

3

I have described what it might feel like to be constantly listening for words. Now I want to imagine what it might feel like to listen to the words.

Who.

The word is so abrupt. The angel, as he suddenly begins to speak on the grounds and as he suddenly begins to speak in the poem, is an intrusion. (The poem has, in a sense, been taken over even before it exists.) Rilke writes to Karl von der Heydt in 1913, “It would be inconsistent with the passionateness of the Angels to be spectators; they surpass us in action precisely as much as God surpasses them. I regard them as the assailants par excellence.”  Robert Duncan, in his discussion of the Duino Elegies, uses the word “invasion.” “I wanted to make sure I didn’t have any involvement with angels,” he tells an interviewer in 1980. “Rilke’s Duino Elegies had been an overwhelming conversion for me, and I dreaded, and still dread, any angelic invasion—I’m not talking about angels as they invade religion but angels as Rilke found them invading poetry. And I would say the same thing: my difficulty with the proposition of angels is that they are so much a proposition of poetry; they must be the same danger there that they would be anywhere else. They’re not a proposition about do I do I not believe in them, and would it be disturbing if one walked into the room? All those doctrines of angels, about how they move our lives, are beside the question I’m entertaining here. I did know that if they come into a realm of poetry we’re in very heavy trouble, analogous to what happens in the Duino Elegies. I actually did pray that I’d be […] safe from angels.” Rilke, of course, does not want to be safe anymore. There was safety at the Jardin des Plantes.

I want to return to the abruptness of the word “Who.” It’s as though the ghost of Hamlet’s father began the play Hamlet by stealing one of his son’s soliloquies. We don’t know that Hamlet ought to be saying the words of course, because we haven’t met him yet but we know something isn’t right when we hear the words.  O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,/ Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,/ Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d/ His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!/How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,/Seem to me all the uses of this world!”  Now imagine Hamlet hearing his father speaking those words. Would he feel disoriented, aghast, grateful? And what if, watching the play, we think it is Hamlet, somehow, speaking the words of his soliloquy. How could it not be him? It would make no sense if it were his father.  But it is his father. 

 If.

Is it fair to say that the words might be said by either or both of them but only the poet could mean them? But the angel could mean them too, in his own way, as we’ll see.  Let’s say for now that it’s Rilke speaking. What might Rilke mean when he says “if”?  We assume—since nobody normally reads a poem one word at a time—that he’s going to say that he’s about to cry out and that he’s anxious that nobody will hear him. And we’re prepared to feel compassion for him until we notice something about the word “If.” The state of mind of someone who is going to actually cry out is different from that of a person who is speculating about what might happen if he did. The angel, after all, doesn’t ask himself, “Who, if I spoke out, would hear me among the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Holenhohe’s guest hierarchy?” He simply speaks.  And so questions arise. Why does Rilke need to know who would hear him cry out?  He knows who he wants. He’s narrowed down the list of possible first respondents, ruling out everyone who is not an angel. More questions come to us. Can we imagine a person demanding such information before agreeing to call an emergency telephone number or a suicide hot line? If no angel were available would the poet not cry out? That doesn’t seem human, really. And something needs to be said about the eerie lucidity of his tone. Rilke’s ability to focus on the question, while his panic is mounting, also seems not quite human.  And why, if he is fairly certain an angel will respond, does he hesitate to cry out? Is he afraid that if he cries out and gets an angel he might enrage that angel, who will (because, say, he craves silence even more than Rilke does) annihilate him? The poet’s situation is becoming less and less easy to identify with. At the same time there is the hint of another tone that, while more human in its way, is just as alienating. The question, “Who, if I cried out, would hear me,” could seem provocative. Is he flirting with the angel? Imagining a sort of dalliance?  There is something playful between them. Or maybe it’s just that the question, “Who if I cried out would hear me” is itself playful.  It’s not, after all, a question either of them can plausibly ask. If Rilke asks it, he must be trying to create a dramatic effect and to maybe flirt with the angel.  But who, in a state of despair, flirts? (Shortly he will talk about “wooing” angels.) Now let’s imagine it’s the angel speaking on his own behalf. But we can’t imagine it. Why would the angel ask, “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angel hierarchies?” Because he is, himself, in crisis? And hopes to be helped by other angels who will be, with another angel, merely irascible but not terrifying? If the angel asks the question on Rilke’s behalf, as seems likelier, the question answers itself.  He would hear Rilke. He’s already heard him. It’s a rhetorical question: it’s answered at the same time as it’s asked. And yet it’s filled with the affect we associate with real questions.

I

Rilke never tells us in the poem that an angel is speaking. Some poets are given to prose commentaries. John of the Cross wrote prose commentaries on the stanzas of his Spiritual Canticle. One can (almost) imagine Rilke writing one except that then he’d have to reveal the existence of the angel. It should be noted that after he has a fairly standard mystical experience, one not involving an angel or poetry, he writes, “I tried to make a record of the facts with the greatest possible acuity and precision.”  Now he makes no record of the facts. James Merrill says in a 1983 interview that he is of two minds about the reality of the voices from the Ouija board.  “One didn’t want to be merely skeptical or merely credulous. Either way would have left us in reduced circumstances.“  Maybe Rilke doesn’t tell us about the angel because he doesn’t want either our skepticism or our credulity. But he doesn’t have to be explicit. The words will seem to come from “somewhere else” if he makes them an epigraph. (But to whom can he attribute them?) Or he can set them in italics. (Maybe he doesn’t want to use italics or capital letters because of a sense that his mother’s presence would be somehow revealed in overwrought or affected typography. I will return to the subject of his mother.) He can put them in capital letters, as Merrill does with the voices that come to him from the Ouija Board. It should be noted that Rilke was, in the past, quite capable of treating his own words that way. According to Eric Torgesen, Rilke, having finished The Book of Images in 1902, “insisted, with dire effect, that the poems be published entirely in capital letters,” a format which, we learn, “astonished” Rodin.  

Rilke never tells or shows us that the words are the angel’s. But we know they are. Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe told us. Rilke writes as if the words are his own words. Who is speaking? We aren’t sure.  And that means that the word “I,” the magisterial, experience-organizing, identity-establishing word, the word that can control the most chaotic subjectivity, Malte Laurids Brigge’s or Daniel Paul Schreber’s, is somehow up for grabs.  Vagueness when it comes to the first person singular isn’t new for Rilke. The previous spring he had written to a friend about “the difficulty and dimness” of his life over the previous months: “I shrank from saying “I” and there was no word that brought with it more vagueness.” He meets the angel that morning in the same condition of dimness and difficulty and vagueness.  But the situation isn’t dim or difficult or vague for us. We know that the angel is saying the words. And we have an idea, as we listen to him, that he is saying them in order to sound like Rilke. But why? Angels, in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and the Koran and almost everywhere else, are problem-solvers. What problem is this angel trying to solve by imitating Rilke?

First it should be noted that this particular situation has happened to Rilke before, not with an angel but with people. And he’s been on both ends of it. There is a peculiar quality in Rilke’s words when he speaks that causes the people in his life to try to imitate them. To some of them it may seem the only way to get his attention and communicate with him. In her letters to Rilke from Egypt, Clara, for example, imitates the elevated style of her husband’s letters. And she also imitates his way of talking. Her friend the painter Paula Becker tells her, according to Torgersen, that “Rilke’s voice speaks too strongly and too ardently from your words.” But the act of imitating Rilke is irresistible. Paula tries it too; she and her future husband Otto Modersohn try to match Rilke’s intensity in their letters to him. And, like Clara, they try to imitate his “soft, vibrating” speaking voice. Rilke has, as I said, been on both ends of it. In fact, he takes the game a step further. He doesn’t just imitate style. He appropriates content as well. For example, he often tells Clara’s stories back to her in his letters. Torgersen tells us that Rilke, in the fall of 1900, sends Clara  “a lovely, praise-filled letter, one in which, as he had done before, he recounted to her a story she had told him—letting her know how precious it was to him and what a gift she had for storytelling.” Torgersen writes, “The practice had become so apparent that in the letters he spoke of it himself. ‘I am not ashamed that again, as before, it is your images, your words almost, with which I attempt to express myself, as if I wanted to make you a gift of your own possessions. But so it is, Clara Westhoff, we receive many of our greatest treasures for the first time when they come to us borne on the voice of another.”  Later, separated from his wife, he tries it out on other women, like Sidonie Nadherny von Borutin, with whom he was involved for a short time. As Torgersen writes, “he praised the writing in [her] letters, as he had Clara’s before their engagement. Often we find him recounting to her, as he had once done to Clara, her own experiences, past or to come: what it was like to be home alone at Janowicz, what her forthcoming trip to Italy would be like.”  Rilke is so enamored by this skill that he imagines exercising variations of it. To Merline, he writes, “Oh! If only I could use the voice already within you, without it passing through my mouth, to tell you the story of our love, you would be washed in a flood of bliss.” Someone feeding your self-absorption can be irritating after a while if you’re not a narcissist but if you are one it’s different. What could be better than now and then to hear one’s words borne on the voice of someone else?  His mother demanded of him when he was younger that he mirror her. What if someone else mirrored him?  He’s not thinking of the hapless attempts of the people close to him to match his intensity. He’s not thinking of anyone he knows. Or of anyone human. An angel, say. Words uttered out of despondency and fatigue would, if borne on the voice of an angel, achieve a kind of immediate splendor. Now, twelve years later, it’s happening. But if it’s gratifying, it must be a little peculiar as well, at least at first. The angel presents him with his own inner torment. No relief is offered. That might seem an odd use or misuse or even a waste of an angel’s powers, whatever they might be.  Except that it is a relief. Because of the splendor. And because it’s a performance of his misery and not a diagnosis of its causes. And because it’s an intimate thing to do and he’s never been lonelier in his life than now.

And because something of consequence seems to be happening, something someone might devoutly wish for, and be glad of. Because it’s hard not to feel the presence of a relationship. Relationship is an unexpected word. Angels, after all, are precisely the beings with whom one can’t have one. According to Robert Hass, “the purest creatures of [Rilke’s] imagination, the angels of the Elegies, don’t need relationship because they are complete as they are.” And it’s true that it’s easier to talk about such connections in the works of Merrill and Yeats, although that may be just because the occult figures in their poems stay around (much) longer. Rilke gets a few minutes one morning. (I will return to the problem presented by the angel’s extremely brief visit.)  But still:  however fleeting, a relationship.

What kind of a relationship?  The question brings us back to the problem of who is speaking the first eleven words. The first time we read the poem—and again on a subsequent reading and again on all subsequent readings—we feel as if Rilke is speaking them, even if we know (from Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe’s account) that it’s the angel speaking. It’s as though the words remains suspended, waiting to see to which of the speakers we will assign them. The ambiguity comes to seem strangely resonant. Because they occupy the same pronoun alternately we might well experience the auditory illusion that they are speaking the lines simultaneously. (Rilke, the first reader, experiences the same confusion himself later, up in his room. He imagines the words are his, knows they’re not, decides to pretend that they are. The words, which sound like something he might have said, become words he does say. And then, as I’ll show later, the situation becomes clearer to him.) Something emerges, for Rilke and for the reader, from the auditory illusion and cognitive confusion. Wallace Stevens, in his poem, “The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” uses the phrase, “the intensest rendezvous.”  What, one might ask, would constitute the intensest rendezvous? Two beings, one mortal, one immortal, occupying the same space. Allen Grossman, in his book, The Sighted Singer, writes of “the integration or lostness of the voice of the Other in the voice of the self: an intimacy which makes the two voices indistinguishable and mutually sustaining.” The word “mutually” recalls Rilke’s line from Sonnets to Orpheus:  “If someone were to fall into intimate slumber and slept /deeply with Things—; how easily he would come / to a different day out of the mutual depth.”  (Rilke’s moved beyond “things” now.) Grossman adds, “If I ever wrote a good poem in a successful style, it would be a poem in which the two voices were so fully hospitable to one another, so as it were profoundly and harmlessly in love, that they would be indistinguishable.” Poet and angel, occupying the same pronoun, seem, in Allen Grossman’s words, “lost in each other.” (Interestingly, poet and angel are behaving in precisely the way that Rilke, in his First Elegy and letters tells lovers not to behave.)

One might have two objections. First, there are no immortal beings. And second, there’s no context for a mystical union. Even lovers have the idea of “romantic love” as a context. But if there’s no context there’s some precedent. The relationship is, if not a mystical union, then erotic in a way that suggests the desire for such a union. (We shouldn’t forget that Rilke is about to imagine the angel pressing him suddenly against his heart.)  A similar erotic tension can be found in works like Hymns of Divine Love, in which St. Symeon the New Theologian, a tenth century Byzantine Christian monk, writes of his mysterious encounter with an angel:  “He stepped out, he came toward me, and he embraced me. ‘Why were you afraid, tell me, why fear and tremble? […] He made me come close, he clasped me in his arms and he kissed me again with a holy kiss and he himself gave out a scent of immortality.” One might agree that there are no immortal beings, and at the same time feel that something has been described and dramatized and solemnized in such hymns and be tempted to follow along. It is mysterious but as Frank Bidart, in his poem “Defrocked,” writes, “the true language of ecstasy / is the forbidden / language of the mystics.” If Rilke had chosen to see Baron von Gebsattel we would be imagining transference and counter-transference.

Rilke, writing to Lotte Hepner three years after hearing the angel, describes the “sure, mysterious relationship” it is possible to achieve with otherworldly forces. The word “sure” is notable.  Rilke calls the relationship “sure” because it is direct. Rilke doesn’t happen to stumble on words and then decide that they’re meant especially for him, as Augustine does with Paul’s words or Petrarch does with Augustine’s words. There are a surprisingly large number of such stories in the history of religion:  Saint Antony, for example, walks into a church and it so happens that the gospel is being read and he hears the passage in which…Or Joseph Smith happens to read the epistle of the Apostle James first chapter, fifth verse.  Rilke hears the words. He doesn’t overhear them. The contemporary poet Ange Mlinko has a book called Marvelous Words Overheard (2013). These words are spoken to Rilke.  Nor does he pick up the words from automatic writing, for example, like Yeats, or from a Ouija board, like Merrill. Rilke is being directly and intimately addressed. But again—to use Timothy Gould’s phrase—the address is intimate and not personal. The angel isn’t interested in the poet’s past.  (But he must know something about it or why would he be speaking to Rilke now? Has he been listening to Rilke as God listened to Job?) Rilke, meanwhile, must feel that morning that he has no past, just a present going by fast, and a very promising future. I will return to the mysterious relationship between the voice and the voice-hearer when I get to the word “and.”  We have to return to the problem of Rilke’s anguish, which seems so real and so unreal.  

cried out.

The German word “schriee” which Stephen Mitchell translates as “cried out” can also be translated as “screamed” or “screamed out.”  Such a translation would be apt. Rilke is drawn to the sound of screaming. In his poem, “Requiem for a Friend,” he imagines the ghost of Paula Modersohn-Becker screaming. That poem, in fact, is full of screaming. Even the angels “scream out.”  In Rilke’s poem “Alcestis,” King Admetus, told he is going to die within the hour: “began to scream and scream and could not /stop and screamed.” Rilke refers to him a few lines later simply as “the screaming one.” (Franz Wright translation.) Rilke writes to Lou Andreas-Salomé, “There are days when I look at the whole of creation with the fear that some agony may break out in it and cause it to scream.”  It’s hard not to think of Edvard Munch’s account from his 1892 diary of how he came to paint The Scream.  “I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”  Here is how Rilke describes the Spanish city of Toledo in a letter to Helene von Nostitz: “A sudden fright lets the towers rear up into the sky, a scream makes the gates what they are, a giving-in has put a bend in the span of the bridges, and none of this has any chance of coming to rest, for it happens on a terrified mountain around which, deep below, the river has drawn a noose as if to choke it off.”  (“How do the people who live there stand it?” he wonders later.)

Rilke, though smitten with the love of sounds, is not drawn so much to the sound of screaming but rather (as I suggested earlier) to the idea of screaming, to screaming as an action that a person might contemplate performing. (In the 1980s Arthur Janov developed Primal Scream therapy. Had it existed in Rilke’s time, he would have considered it.) Malte Laurids Brigge talks about “the fear that I may start screaming and people will come running to my door and finally force it open.” This must seem like the worst imaginable result to Rilke because the people, after forcing his door open, would have questions. There must be someone else to whom he can scream. Which brings us to the screaming, attended by its inevitable ifs and woulds, mentioned in the first line of the First Elegy. The poet is wondering whether, if he screamed, an angel might hear him. We might have thought he was revealing some form of metaphysical snobbery. In fact, he is trying to be certain that no one but an angel will hear him. He wouldn’t mind being an emergency, just not for people.

would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies

His mother knows all about angels and their hierarchies.  Rilke doesn’t. Although he is a self-described “theophile,” he is certainly not a religious scholar, and he is not, now especially, going to get distracted by angelic hierarchies. To some of his friends he seems like someone who ought to take an interest in Seraphim and Cherubim. Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, for example, calls him Dottor Serafico. (Curiously, the title is Rilke’s idea.) But angelology is never going to be all absorbing for him or even absorbing. He isn’t interested in the science of angel classifications, nor does he want an angel who will present him with the gift of new human classifications. Rilke’s angel brings no information of any kind. Rilke is offered no system, nor does he want one. Nor is he offered secret wisdom or good news or bad news.  (World War One would break out into a year and a half.) The angel does use the word “hierarchies” but Rilke does not expect his readers to read The Celestial Hierarchies of Pseudo-Dionysus or to pore over Aquinas. Nor does he plan to do so himself. In “The Last Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,“ Stevens writes, “we feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, /A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.” Like Stevens, Rilke prefers the feeling of obscurity.  He does write about  “a front row of angels” in a poem but he has no interest in taking his research further. And it’s worth pointing out that the angels in that front row are all screaming.

His mother must be one of the reasons Rilke tells his Polish translator, Witold Hulewicz, that the angel “has nothing to do with the angels of the Christian heaven.” If the angel isn’t Christian, then he isn’t one of hers:  she can gaze at him all she wants, she won’t recognize him. She can’t have him. She has nothing to do with him.  It is terrible to imagine that the angel and his mother could be contained in the same world, the same thought, the same space. (But they can’t occupy the same space, probably, because the angel knows only impersonal and his mother only personal space.) Robert Hass writes, “His mother, a complicated woman, cold and fervent, driven alternately by a hunger for good society and by pious Roman Catholicism, was an affliction to him.”  Rilke struggles not to be like his mother, with her “provincial piety,” her “sufferings and devotions.” It’s as if she can’t be described without the word fervent:  His biographer Ralph Freedman tells us that in his childhood Rilke was “administered a powerful potion of romantic religiosity, an adoration of saints and saints’ lives, holy relics, and fervent devotion.” The relics:  she is as intent on looking at sacred things as Rilke’s friends are on looking at things of this world. That may be why he feels, looking at things of this world, that he is as far as he can get from his mother. (With the angel he gets very close to her. Is that why the angel is invisible? So his mother can’t see him?)

He tries to keep a distance from her. In a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé in the spring of 1904, he writes, “My mother came to Rome and is still here. I see her only rarely, but—as you know—every meeting with her is a kind of setback.” He describes her to Lou Andreas-Salomé as a “lost unreal woman who is connected to nothing, who cannot grow old. I feel how even as a child I struggled to get away from her and fear deep within me lest after years of running and walking I am still not far enough from her […]” It’s a lifelong effort to get “far enough” from her, to keep a distance from her and from the church. In fact, he left the church eleven years ago, though without telling his mother, and probably she doesn’t suspect it. Geographic distance is crucial. Rilke avoids Prague. In fact, he avoids Austria. (“It is scarcely to be expressed how much everything Austrian repels me,” he writes, sounding like Thomas Bernhard.) It wasn’t always that way. He used to write with tenderness and gratitude about mothers. And the letters he wrote to his mother were designed to make her happy. “Although he could be unkind,” according to Torgersen, “in describing his mother to others, for a long time he wrote her dutiful, filial letters in which he described richly, for her delectation, those aspects of his new life (the salons to which he had gained entry, the eminent personages among whom he so often moved) that he knew would please her.” But that was then. Now, as I said, he keeps every kind of distance possible. But what good is distance if he and his mother are the same person, if they have the same personality? They are both cold and fervent. She’s a social climber. So is he. She loves castles, she took vacations “in their vicinity” when he was a child. He loves them too, if they’re beautiful and ancient. (Saint Teresa of Avila had her “interior castle.”  Is it coarse, literal-minded, too much like his mother to prefer exterior ones?) She’s flighty and weak-minded. Is he? He hopes not. Finally, he and his mother are highly spiritual and live in a constant state of sometimes vague, sometimes almost unbearably charged anticipation.

Had she known about it beforehand, she would have insisted on being there that morning. She would have loved to have been present. She’d stand around, waiting for things to happen, looking at her son with undisguised admiration. The first of Castle Duino’s poetry tourists. And if something did happen, she’d try to supervise, to preside over the occasion. Or she’d be like Augustine’s mother, who shared a mystical experience with Augustine, her only child. Rilke’s mother would share this experience with him, her only child. There they’d be, the two of them standing on the windy wall or on the parapet or on the precipitous edge of the cliffs of Castle Duino, his mother expecting a spectacle, an angel, like the one in Daniel 10:5 maybe, whose face was like lightning, whose eyes were like lamps of fire, whose arms and feet were like in color to polished brass, and whose voice was like the sound of many waters. But she would have seen nothing. (Because, again, there was nothing to see, probably.) Nor would she have been able to hear the voice since, as James L. Kugel in his book, The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times (2017), reminds us, ”someone standing next to a voice hearer hears nothing.” (Hearing nothing, seeing nothing, she might have been forgiven for suspecting her son was having a stroke.) It seems unfair that she couldn’t have heard the voice, at least. Kugel tells us that people in the early biblical period who hear the voices of angels tend to be “surprised, but not flabbergasted.” She would probably not be surprised, even. Instead, she’d cite Paul’s claim in 1 Corinthians 6:17. “He who adheres to God becomes one spirit with him.” She’d want to talk about her God and His angels and Rilke would never be able to persuade her that her God was not involved. He would try to explain to her that her God isn’t real and that therefore the angel hasn’t been sent.  He’s a go-between between Rilke and no one. It wouldn’t matter, of course, because what his mother really wants is to treat the angel as a go-between between Rilke and herself. Is that why he never writes about the angel’s visitation? Would it be too much like describing richly for his mother’s delectation, things he knew would please her? But maybe he’s always having conversations with her in his head. What is all this talk about angels, whatever their provenance, but a way to talk to his mother? There’s a sense, best not thought about, in which she sent the angel.

He shares her “romantic religiosity.” But his isn’t like hers. Hers is horrible. “I have a horror of her distraught pieties,” he tells Lou Andreas-Salomé, “of her obstinate faith, of all those distorted and perverted things to which she has clung, herself empty as a dress, ghostly and terrible.”  He isn’t like her, he can’t be like her. Robert Duncan talks in a 1980 interview about Charles Olsen’s “transvaluation of Catholic content,” noting that “this vivified my own activity, which is also to transvalue the things in my parents’ religion that I wanted to take with me because they made life vivid.”  Rilke tries something similar. But it isn’t easy. Keeping an aesthetic distance is hardest of all.  He has something she doesn’t have: his poetry, but over and over in his poems, even at (or especially at) their most intense, he finds himself at her plangent pitch. At the very moment when he thinks he is furthest from his mother (he is not Catholic, the angel is not Christian; the angel is autonomous; he himself is autonomous) he is closest to her:  an improbable man, fervent, inhuman, going about his mother’s business. Torgersen tell us that Rilke “treasured” the story that Cézanne stayed away from his mother’s funeral in order not to miss a day of painting. Rilke’s mother outlived him by five years.

A final observation about the word “hierarchy.” Enjambment sets us up for something that doesn’t happen. A question with so many one-syllable words culminates with a word of three syllables.  Rilke writes:  “aus den Engel / Ordnungen.” One can imagine a different outcome. “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels /who want to rescue me by restoring my poetry to me?”  But no.  Ordnungen.

and

The first word that belongs unambiguously to the poet is the word “and.” Does Rilke say it aloud? The angel is finished speaking, after all; it would be good manners to speak in return. (Did Rilke know nothing would follow? Did he wait?  How long?)  One imagines the poet saying the word rapidly, earnestly, appreciatively.  (Did Rilke, reading the first stanza of the first elegy in public or at a private gathering, imitate the voice in the wind? And then, with the word “and” did he switch back to performing his own voice?)  The “and” is clumsy. But angels are male, and that’s the way Rilke is with males.  We remember his letter to Baron von Gebsattel. And of course there is also Rudolf Kassner, the Austrian writer. Rilke writes Lou Andreas- Salomé in February 1912, “He is really the only man with whom I can get anywhere—perhaps better so: the only one to whom it occurs to make a little use of the feminine in me. I felt, unusually purely and directly, even when I saw him for the first time two years ago in Vienna, the bright radiance of his nature, which shines, which is an out-and-out light, a brightness in space.” (It’s almost as if the angel did not need to appear to Rilke’s eyes because he’d already manifested as Rudolf Kassner.)  Ralph Freedman tells us that Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe “remarked with pleasure how she had watched the two men walking up and down the castle terrace in deep conversation.”  She addressed Rudolf Kassner by the name of Dottor Mistico, though not at Kassner’s suggestion. Rilke dedicated the eighth elegy to him.

Another poet would have used the word “and” to begin a new sentence. But the sentence can be extended.  Using a lower-case “and,” Rilke keeps it going and then concludes it himself. It’s as though he wants to call the angel’s attention to the fact that he can finish the angel’s sentences. What greater sign of rapport can there be? Peter Ostwald, in his book, Schumann:  The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius (1985) tells us that Robert Schumann, when he was in a “euphoric state […] seems to have felt like the passive recipient of his own creative energies” and that it was as though “Schumann wanted to ‘sing along’ with his inner voices.”  (They’re more useful to him than Schreber’s voices were to Schreber.) Something like that may be happening here.

Rilke has one overriding motivation. He wants to delay the return to what he calls in one of his later poems the “dull quotidian hum.” (Everyday life, like death in the Poe story, “The Masque of the Red Death,”  finds it way even into a castle on the Adriatic.) If only he and the angel could keep talking, if only there could be “an extended series of questions and answers” such as occurred, according to James L. Kugel, between Ezra and the angel Uriel, for example. But this angel isn’t interested in being interviewed. He’s finished speaking. It’s as if all the people who’d ever tried to prolong a moment with Rilke were having their revenge.

If the angel is not going to keep talking, then delay is Rilke’s only strategy. A reader expects that with a new speaker there will be a new stanza. New speaker, new stanza. But the poet doesn’t start one. It’s as if they are still sharing something, maybe an intimacy like that evoked by James Merrill who, in his memoir, says that “one of the effects I cherished most” at the opera was “the sense, all evening, of sheltered communion and psychodrama.”  The psychodrama is over but the sheltered communion remains, maybe. Merrill, in one of his essays, refers to stanzas as “acoustical chambers.” Rilke and the angel share one, maybe. (Better to  tshare it with the angel than with his mother or with Baron von Gebsattel.) This kind of sharing is not supposed to happen, according to the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who writes, “When the light of God shines, the human light sets; when the divine light sets, the human light rises. This is what regularly befalls the fellowship of the prophets. The mind is evicted at the arrival of the divine Spirit, but when that departs, the mind returns to its tenancy. Mortal and immortal may not share the same home.” Here they seem to share it.  (It’s better than the Garden of Eden. That was a myth, and this is happening this very morning. And there’s been no eviction yet.) All of this is taking place in seconds but in Rilke’s imagination it is leisurely, gradual.  One thinks of one of Bill Viola’s ultra-slow motion videos, which shows the slowly changing expressions of his actors in such slow motion that the viewer is able to detect every modulation, variation, gradation, every nuance in the changes.)

We will continue to gaze at the word “and.” What else is happening during that word, so to speak? Hierarchies, for example, at least the interesting ones, those involving angels and mortals, are no longer applying. Rilke and the angel are equals of a sort. (Their places in human-angel hierarchy are, looked at one way, actually reversed. Although an off-season guest, Rilke is still a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Holenlohe at Castle Duino, and knows the traditions and customs, while the angel, who doesn’t, of course, know the Princess, is just visiting the grounds that morning. He’s an impressive visitor, of course. While there are rumors that Dante stayed at the Castle Duino and there is an actual piano in the White Salon on which Liszt played, he is the first angel.) But the truth is they’re equals. Certainly they have a great deal in common: neither has a home anywhere on earth or, in fact, elsewhere. They are both mysterious figures, innocently grandiose, granting each other a sense of being, to adapt a phrase from the Seventh Elegy, linked in a secret alliance against the everyday world, trying to make (to use a phrase Rilke used in a letter to his Polish translator) “an impossible life possible.” They’re accomplices. The word isn’t farfetched. Or it is, but it’s Rilke’s. In the Third Elegy, Rilke writes, “And every /Terror knew him, winked at him like an accomplice.” (Stephen Mitchell translation.) What else do they share? They’re stranded in a space sealed off from the world, though once, long ago, the space was the world. They’re nostalgic for the innocent grandeur of auditory encounters now lost in time, and not just the hardly-remembered meetings but the world-historical encounters in which angel predicted to prophet an annihilation that would not be one at a time but wide spread. The angel likes to imagine he’s an angel of the old kind, a throwback, from the time when Rilke’s mother’s God existed; Rilke likes to imagine he’s a prophet. But they’re anxious that for all their tone of high seriousness they are essentially unserious, like ghosts.  (Hamlet’s father, as if sensing his status, urges Hamlet to “lend thy serious hearing”)  Still, Hamlet was a play, and this is really happening and seems serious, at least to the two of them. What else do they share? William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, writes about lovers and their “habitual sense, by which each is haunted, of the other being in the world.” After this, Rilke will always be someone who heard an angel, and the angel will always be the one that spoke to Rilke. Is that sufficiently momentous? Nothing will be serious until Rilke writes the poem. Then the two of them will be collaborators in “at least a minor phase of immensity,” to borrow a phrase from a letter by Wallace Stevens. Minor because anachronistic. Rilke knows that poets like himself are disappearing. Judith Ryan writes of Rilke “seeing himself as a latecomer in a tradition already largely exhausted.” There will be angels, of course, in serious poems, and countless angels in sentimental ones, but not many Rilkean angels. Sylvia Plath, in “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” will write, “The wait’s begun again, / The long wait for the angel /For that rare random descent.” The lines are Rilkean until the word “random.”

He and the angel will share this acoustical chamber, this impersonal intimate space as long as Rilke can delay. The word “and” sounds eager, then, but also desperate. Is it only because desperation is Rilke’s default mode? (Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe has recently written to him, “If you were not so desperate, you probably would not write so wonderfully. So be desperate!  Be really desperate, be ever more desperate.”)  Or is he desperate because the angel spoke so briefly and used so few words? The experience lacked duration, to use one of the poet’s favorite words. Not knowing how long the angel was going to speak, Rilke must have been brought up short. The line’s enjambment, with its sense of something unstoppable in progress, seems just to underscore the angel’s brevity. In a poem written five years earlier called “Angel,” Rilke had written, “with a slight nod he dismisses forever / all that sets limits.” This angel’s a limit-setter. Does Rilke feel disappointed? The angel doesn’t fail him, exactly. He speaks to him. But (a terrifying thought) does he speak to him in order to fail him? Jeremiah asks God, “Will it turn out that what You have been is a fountain whose waters have failed?” Rilke’s depression had lifted that morning. Does it redescend? They’re both anachronisms but the angel is worse than that because anachronisms, presumably, retain some version of the power they once had.  Not this one. That’s the worst part of his autonomy:  he’s not the angel of anything, of mercy, for example, or of love, certainly not of the Lord. Should Rilke have stayed in the Catholic Church with his mother? The Catholic angels could be counted on at least to say more. At the same time (an even more terrifying thought) there is the possibility that Rilke interrupted him by saying “and.” (William Gass calls Rilke “an accomplished interrupter.”) What if the angel had more to say?

He’ll never know now. But an angel, if he had more to say, would say it. Angels are uninterruptable, surely. So why so few words?  It seems a deliberate withholding, given how much Raphael and Michael, for example, said to Adam in Paradise Lost. And that was an epic poem while this is really happening. Did Rilke’s angel speak so briefly in order to punish him? But why does Rilke need to be punished? For living so late in poetic history? So does the angel. Still, what if he had interrupted him and the angel had, out of serene disdain, refused to start talking again? What if he hadn’t interrupted him? The angel would have kept talking. If the angel had wanted to take over the Duino Elegies, for example, Rilke would have let him, probably, just as James Merrill let the voices from the Ouija board more or less take over the second and the third volumes of The Changing Light at Sandover. What if the angel had been the one to say the word “and” and had then, taking advantage of a quasi-biblical figure’s license to use unlimited parataxis, lavished words on Rilke, revealing greater and greater mysteries, and not stopping until there was a twentieth elegy, a thirtieth? Rilke’s angel might even bring in more angels, making them work in shifts. But what could they say? Given who they are. The only mystery they know of is their own, which the weakest skepticism would annihilate. Then let them philosophize or tell sad stories. But let them keep speaking.

What if the angel is just taciturn by nature? Rilke writes Clara in the fall of 1905, “Soon after supper I retire, and am in my little house by 8:30 at the latest. Then I have in front of me the vast blossoming starry night and below, in front of the window, the gravel walk goes up a little hill on which, in fanatic taciturnity, a statue of the Buddha rests, distributing, with silent discretion, the unutterable self-containedness of his gesture between all the skies of the day and night.” “Discretion”—that word again. But also: fanatic taciturnity. Could those words describe the angel? Could fanatic taciturnity be simply an intensification (in a direction the poet had not been expecting) and be something to praise rather than to resent? The angel does his job, says what he has to say. Maybe a superabundance is concealed in the meager words.    

Rilke, upstairs in his room, sits at his writing table, and (since the castle has no electricity) reads his notebook by candlelight. By writing the words down, he’s secured them, they’re irrevocable, “beyond undoing,” to borrow a phrase from the Ninth Elegy.  And he suddenly understands, maybe, that there is a superabundance there. Eleven words would not be enough for a prophet but they’re enough for a poet. Because they’re a prompt.  The angel must have known that the poet is highly alert to “strange intimations and promptings” from animals. Why not an angel? When does Rilke discover or recognize that it’s a prompt? Maybe when he looks at the words, imagining they’re his, knowing they’re not. Or when he decides to pretend that they’re his. When he realizes how few words the angel has spoken and that he himself is full of words, that he is about to use more of them than he has ever used in a poem. That must be when what happened becomes clear to him. Maybe he sees it slowly, as in a Bill Viola video. An angel found him one morning outside Castle Duino on the Adriatic Sea, and spoke eleven words to him. By giving angelic prestige to words that sound Rilkean, the angel showed him the value of the kinds of things he would write if he ever wrote again. The angel imitated him—but in a kind way, as if he identified with him. They seemed, suddenly, to share an identity. And then they separated but both felt a bond. But the angel stopped talking and Rilke had to say the word  “and.” Rilke, up in his room, goes over this narrative in his mind. Whether the angel will ever return, he’s offered Rilke encouragement, shown him that when he takes himself at his highest estimation, he is not wrong. Other figures, saints usually, not poets, have had this feeling. Saint Teresa of Avila, in The Interior Castle (1577) writes, “We ought to […] esteem more highly the soul in which he so delights.” So Rilke starts writing, immediately, in his notebook. For the artist, Rilke wrote in a letter in 1907, the work of art is “the ever-returning proof to himself of his unity and genuineness.” He is going to create a work of art that will prove (to himself and to his mother) that he is not scattered, false, lost, unreal, connected to nothing. The angel re-establishes his interest in himself, and shows him a way forward. Rilke writes the rest of the First Elegy that evening. “The Second Elegy,” as Stephen Mitchell tells us, “was written shortly afterward, along with a number of fragments, the Third and most of the Sixth a year later, and the Fourth in 1915. Then, after years of excruciating patience, the other Elegies came through during a few days in February 1922.”  And then he was done.

But we’re not. Something has to be said about the rest of the first stanza.

…even if one of them pressed me / suddenly against his heart I would be consumed/ in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing  / but the beginning of terror which we still are just able to endure, / and we are so awed because it serenely disdains / to annihilate us. Every single angel is terrifying.

The sentence that began so hopefully, so earnestly, so desperately with the word “and” ends in a mood of hopelessness. Why? The sentence ends:  “and even if one of them pressed me / suddenly against his heart I would be consumed /in that overwhelming existence.” Rilke tried to prolong the moment with the word “and,” but whatever happened with the angel is over. None of Allen Grossman’s terms apply anymore. “The integration or lostness of the voice of the Other in the voice of the self”:  that’s over. “An intimacy which makes the two voices indistinguishable and mutually sustaining”: that’s over too. Grosssman said, “If I ever wrote a good poem in a successful style, it would be a poem in which the two voices were so fully hospitable to one another, so as it were profoundly and harmlessly in love, that they would be indistinguishable.”  The first half of the first stanza of the First Elegy will be that “good poem in a successful style.” The rest of the Duino Elegies will be different.

The tone of hopelessness is not entirely sincere, at least when it comes to Rilke’s hopes as a poet. Because he is a poet, after all, not a mystic, and therefore has no real reason to linger with the angel. He can write now, up in his solitary room. Rilke wrote Merline, “in the depths of our being we live on sheer intensity,” and the Elegies, in their depths, live on the intensity of the angel’s first eleven words, which exert on the rest of the poem what Wallace Stevens in “The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” calls “miraculous influence.” But the Elegies aren’t going to be simply a demonstration of their own intensity. The poet’s been rescued but Rilke the person is still endangered and the ten Elegies will be about Rilke as a person, not a poet. If they were entirely about Rilke as a poet, they wouldn’t have so many readers. Readers don’t want twelve books worth of poetry about Milton’s blindness, they want to read about Adam and Eve. The Elegies will also be—it’s evident already in the move to the third person plural in the second half of the first stanza—about other people too, not as threats to his privacy now, but as sharers of a common fate. The Elegies will also be about other angels. We see that Rilke moves from “one of them” to “every angel” to (by the time of the second stanza) “angels.”  The poet knows how to move forward.

The Duino Elegies will be in large part, then, about what it is like for us to live in the world. We don’t know how to be compelling to an angel. He is certainly not interested in our projects to be extremely normal. Therefore angels are terrifying. (The angel might say: every single person is tedious.) It should be said that Rilke writes about us only in terms of what he shares with us.  Rilke can write about ordinary people as long as he can see them as like himself, people with existential status, people who have existential dilemmas, that is, not personal problems. It’s just as well:  Rilke is never going to be an Everyman. For one thing, his personal problems aren’t everyone’s.  Neither are his interests everyone’s:  saints, heroes, acrobats, women who love unrequitedly, those who die young, puppets. It’s best that he not try to write about ordinary people leading everyday lives. Of course everyday life doesn’t care if a person is an Everyman or not. Nor does it accept saint-like renunciations of it. It arranges for us to die, which is the ultimate everyday activity. Still, Rilke is defiant. There is a language that is stronger than the language of everyday life, and Rilke is fluent in it. Everyday life never conquers Rilke.  He isn’t chastened. We are never told that the Reality Principle must be worshipped above all else.

It’s surprising. One might have expected a morality tale about a poet who at some point experiences remorse for his hubris. But Rilke, unlike Pound in his Cantos, never writes, “Pull down thy vanity.” Rilke has no apologies, no second thoughts.  He is like Wallace Stevens who, writing to a friend in 1948, talks about the necessity of phrases like “blue and white Munich.” (a phrase he uses in his essay, “Imagination as Value.”) Stevens writes, “…unless we do these things to reality, the damned thing closes in on us, walls us up and buries us alive.  After all, as you spend your summer getting well again, aren’t you in the extraordinary position to carry on the struggle with and against reality, and against the fifth column of reality that keeps whispering with the hard superiority of the sane that reality is all we have, that it is that or nothing?” And the year before his death, he writes to his Polish translator, Witold Hulewicz, “We of the here-and-now are not for a moment satisfied in the world of time, nor are we bound in it.” He would agree with Kierkegaard, who writes in his journals of  “that dangerous rapport with finitude” and of being “shipwrecked in the temporal.” Yeats writes, “Now that my ladder’s gone, / I must lie down where all the ladders start, / in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”  Rilke loses his ladder for ten years but doesn’t lie down. And then, at the tower of Muzot, having finally finished the Duino Elegies, Rilke writes:  “So here is the triumph I was holding out for, through everything. Through everything.  This was what I wanted. Just this and nothing more.”  The story (one he narrates himself, in many letters) includes a moment of utter oddness, at once alienating and engaging: “I have gone out and stroked my little Muzot for having guarded all this for me and at last granted it to me, stroked it like a great shaggy beast.”

In the course of writing the Elegies, Rilke will repurpose the figures that have haunted his imagination for years. And the intensity will circulate in new ways. Rilke tells the angels that they must now be the ones who listen for, and that they must listen for us, for our voices (we can be interesting to the angels!) which will tell them what we know about on earth, which is “things” which have been calling to us because (so they do have a purpose!) they want us to show them to the angels. And one doesn’t have to see “things” anymore but just to say them “but to say them, you must understand,  / oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves /ever dreamed of existed.”  We will have such an intense relationship to things because we will internalize them. It’s a remarkable climax to the history of his relationship with the exterior world and with “things.”   The external world will disappear inside us and become invisible. In the Seventh Elegy, he writes, “a Thing that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt before– / just at it is, passes into the invisible world. “  And in the Ninth Elegy he writes, “Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us, / invisible? Isn’t it your dream / to be wholly invisible someday? – O Earth: invisible!”

Rilke can now move beyond his writer’s block, not by returning to an earlier way of writing but by moving beyond his recent work. Rilke’s novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, was a burning swamp of horror and disgust and fear. An unlivable life had become an uninterpretable book. Let the doctors go to work on it. His last book of poetry, New Poems, contained many of his poems about looking at “things.” Now he can write a big poem, but also an intimate one in the sense Mark Rothko means the word, when he claims the largest canvases are the most intimate.  And it will be filled with sounds. When the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep, there was a voice and there were sounds and now the earth is invisible and now, again, there is a voice and there are sounds. Rilke’s enraptured by the voice speaking the words for sounds, and the sound of those words and the sounds themselves now independent of the words that delivered them. Rilke is finally free to write any kind of poem he wants, even a poem as strange as this one, strange in part because its most authentic, most intimate life isn’t in its images, ideas or thoughts but in its sounds.  He’s been given permission by the angel, who acknowledged and validated the scream without Rilke even having to scream it, to fill his poem with blissful, serious, sonorous sounds:  gigantic calls, thunderous roars, screams, strange marvelous words in the night air, murmuring, a darkened voice carried on the streaming air, the sound of the night making itself hollow, fate singing the hero into the storm of his onrushing world, lamenting virgins plunging into ravines, harmony enrapturing, comforting, helping us, jubilation and praise sung out, drowning out his mother, drowning out Baron von Gebsattel, the thud of falling unripe fruit, music reaching higher than Chartres, bawling, weeping, heartbeats, hands clapping, an old man drumming, daring first notes of song, small questioning notes, a startled bird’s solitary cry, pure cries of birds, dark sobbing, a stairway of calling, continual uproar.

 

Nick Halpern is the author of Everyday and Prophetic:  ThePoetry of Lowell, Ammons, Merrill, and Rich.

 

 

[PREV][NEXT]