Enchantment is always enchainment.
Enchainment is to our proper destiny or calling, or the difference which we are here to make; this destiny or difference is what pulls us, and keeps pulling us, in a particular direction and one day becomes our story. That is the path of enchantment for each of us. But only by virtue of enchantment does our enchainment become our enthrallment. For Rilke, this destiny was especially enthralling because he was to become a poet of the first order. As a top-rank poet, his job would be to disclose something to the rest of us, to enthrall us in turn, if there is anyone left to hear. Of this, Rilke was not too certain. But he knew Lou could hear, and not just hear, but listen.
On the morning of June 20, 1914, a date on the brink of the collapse of Europe and the thousand-year-old Austro-Hungarian empire, he wrote a poem called The Turning and sent it to Lou. The poem was not about the imminent end of Europe, but about himself. Narcissus again. And yet, in being about himself, he wrote words that belonged on the other side of the catastrophe, not to the time which was catastrophic. August 1914, the start of the First World War; Europe would not recover. The Second World War was almost a denouement of the lack of settlement in Europe, the level of “unfinished business” among nations and peoples. But Rilke’s words chimed beyond these horizons—and, perhaps, even beyond our own. For haven’t we entered an unprecedented time of war? Aren’t we still in it?
The Turning is about the emergence of what it is to be Rilke.1 Lou was the first, before Rilke, to realize this. She was the rational one. This was not just a poem called The Turning; this was a turning point for Rilke, a turning point for his destiny. The Turning finds its consummation in the Duino Elegies, started around this time, and finished in February 1922.
In an epigraph to The Turning, Rilke cites Kassner.
“The path from inner intensity to greatness leads through sacrifice.” Rilke would have to live these words, and I think he did.
In a word, the poem is about gazing—about the transformation of soul wrought through gazing.
He had long prevailed through gazing.
Stars fell to their knees
under his grappling up-glance.
Or he gazed kneeling,
and the scent of his urgency
lulled a Force immortal,
until it smiled on him from sleep.
Towers he gazed at with such force
that they were startled…
The poem continues as a gaze.
Rilke’s gaze is not of this world but of the world to come, a world beyond the European wars all around him, even though he wrote in the break. A world beyond the rape of the earth by state socialism with its big industry, and commodity capitalism with its encroaching technology. Rilke’s poetry is already the poetry of this world to come; in this sense, his poetry is “not of this world” any more than he was. His turning is in a sense yet to be determined (yet where might it be determined?) by the turning of we who gaze, listen, and read.
Lou, who normally does not write to Rilke at anywhere near the same length that she writes to him when she receives this poem, writes straight back. “I am so fully in company of your words and with them alone.”2 And she replies in a heartfelt way, trying to reflect Rilke’s achievement back to him, because she knows he knows that she alone is capable of this. She goes on to work with him the whole way to the Elegies.
Rilke’s turning marks a reassessment of all values. When this happens, as occasionally it must, at axial times, it happens silently, far from the fleas of the marketplace.3 Lou, of course, knew this as well as Rilke.
Lou sends another letter to Rilke a couple of days later. Even to her soulfulness, which was optimal—for she was a wise enchantress, a muse, a genius of a sort not recognized by public prizes—Rilke’s poem had taken a while to fall.
It was only after my letter to you had gone off a few days ago that I began to live with the poem itself; I couldn’t do so at first because its personal immediacy had overwhelmed me too thoroughly. And now I read, or more accurately: say it out loud to myself again and again.4
She realizes that this poem is what it says. It is a turning indeed, and in how many ways? In how many directions? She cannot say. But:
Somewhere in this realm, deep down, all art begins again with renewed force, arises as from its primordial origin, where it was magic formula, incantation,—a calling forth of life in its still concealed mysteriousness,—yes, where it was at once prayer and the most intense breaking-forth of power.
I do not tire of contemplating this.5
These are dramatic words of realization. She cannot fully foresee the consequences of what he has written, of what he will now write, and she will read. Neither can he. Neither can we. This book now, in fact, is part of the consequences of that poem, then. But she could feel the Elegies coming. So could he. And now we have them. They are ours to read. But we need to read them aloud (yes, even translations of them) as well as to listen to them, as well as to read them silently to ourselves, and see if we can see and hear what they transfigure.
And later, we will come to the Elegies, to read them for their dark enchantment.
On reading The Turning, Lou turned back to the poem Narcissus, which Rilke had written for her the year before.
This gazing that The Turning speaks of is narcissistic. But the poem, says Rilke, has reached the edge of the narcissistic gaze.
Work of the eyes is done,
begin heart-work now
on those images in you, those captive ones;
for you conquered them: but you still don’t know them.
Lou knew that for Rilke “Art is the dark wish of all things. They want to be the images of our secrets…”6 What Lou realized with The Turning is that this art, this “heart-work,” was to be lived and embodied. In her memoir of Rilke, she wrote, “Rilke perceived his corporeality as just such an awkward abode; it was that aspect of the self that could not be subsumed in the creative process. As such, it represented, in no ascetic or moral sense, an opposing force, a threat. It embraces the creative principle, even if it is not interchangeable with the other.”7 But she wrote this years later. It was in 1914 that this became apparent to her, for in her letter to him, she shows that she is aware that he is turning because he is about to embrace the creative principle bodily.
This running up against the inorganic, this becoming doll, in other words, this running up against our body, which for us (even though it is organic life) is yet the outermost outside in its most intimate sense, the first partition that differentiates us from ourselves, makes us the “inner being” lodged in it like the face in a hedgehog; our very body, with its hands, feet, eyes, ears, all the parts we enumerate as “us”; this perplexing tangle generally unfurls only in response to the loving comportment of an other, who alone legitimates, in a manner we can bear, our body as “us.” In a “creative person” though, the components perpetually loosen and renew their ties: which is why, instead of repetition, new reality emanates from him.
You are in pain: I, through your pain, feel bliss.
Forgive me for that.
She believed that the eros of Rilke’s poems—his Elegies, as it would turn out—would be bisexual, for at the heart of Narcissus, and the tension we have noted, is the clash of a dual sexuality within us, which is creative. We need to be careful here not to confuse the post-1960s “liberationist” ideas of bisexuality (as self-indulgence or self-expression) with what Lou is talking about. The latter version stands in relation to what she is talking about as kitsch does to art; or, in a more Rilkean comparison, as mass-produced things stand in relation to those things generations old, loved, and handed down to us by our forebears. For Lou, the investiture of the external form, the exertion of power is “the masculine moment” of creativity; the feminine moment is the power by which one surrenders to one’s art, to one’s lover; it is a longing for pregnancy.8 Rilke, in his creativity, was going to take both forms of power together, which, elsewhere, we have called the melancholy and the enchanting.
His pain is our bliss. All true art is a service for all on behalf of all, the artist obliging him—or herself before all others.
Notes
1. The whole poem may be seen in context in Rilke and Salomé, Letters, 243–4. The original title is “Wendung.”
2. Rilke and Salomé, Letters, 245.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (London/ New York: Penguin, 1978), 51–2.
4. Rilke and Salomé, Letters, 246.
5. Ibid., 246–7.
6. Salomé, You Alone Are Real to Me, 95.
7. Ibid., 64.
8. See Lou’s discussion in You Alone Are Real to Me, 54–5.