After the turning, Rilke was spiritually capable of continuing, indeed of completing, something he had started, which as yet had no shape: the work which came to be known as the Duino Elegies. He had begun these in 1912 at Castle Duino on the Adriatic coast, the home of a patroness, Princess Marie Thurn-und-Taxis-Hohenloe, one of Europe’s richest women. The war would interrupt him. After the war, he continued to work and parts of the Elegies, as he was calling them, came in fits and spurts. But in February 1922, at Château Muzot, his borrowed home in Switzerland, he finished the 10 Elegies and 55 Sonnets to Orpheus. One of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century was born into the world.
On 11 February, in the evening, he wrote to Lou:
Lou, dear Lou:
At this moment, now, Saturday, the eleventh of February, at six o’clock, I lay my pen aside after the last completed Elegy, the tenth. The one whose beginning had already been written in Duino (even back then it was meant to come last): “Someday, at the end of the nightmare of knowing, I may emerge singing praises and jubilation to assenting angels…” … only the first twelve lines remain, everything else is new and: yes, very, very glorious!—Think of it! I have been allowed to survive until this. Through everything. Miracle. Grace.—All in a few days. It was a hurricane, as on Duino all that time: all that was fiber in me, tissue, framework, groaned and bent. There was no thought of eating.1
For 20 years she had been his mentor, his spiritual director, his confessor, his analyst, and his best friend. She had steered him, and called him to purpose, and brought him on. These were her Elegies too.
Ah praise God, dear Rainer, how rich his gift to you—and yours to me! I sat and read and cried for joy and it was not just joy at all but something much more powerful, as if a curtain were being parted, rent, and everything were growing quiet and certain and present and good.2
Lou tells him how, “On my way back from Vienna,” she has read his translations of some of Michelangelo’s poems that he had been working on (but did not publish in his lifetime), “and saw before me how you were climbing after the deepest that has been attained in poetry, and yet it is nothing, even when it comes from this powerful mind—so very, very different from the inexpressibility that has become word through you. And now I think: how he also must have struggled for it; and to you yourself it seemed powerful enough that you would subsume it into your own language. But what is it worth compared to this primal text of the soul?”
Rilke had copied out and sent her three of the Elegies: the Sixth, the Eighth, and the Tenth.
Through Rilke’s translations, she was previously enabled to apprehend, vicariously, how Michelangelo struggled to express what was on his soul, as an artist. Rilke, now, has gone beyond channeling the artistic struggle of Michelangelo, perhaps the greatest painter of all time when it came to “this primal text of the soul.”
The Duino Elegies, although nostalgic, say primal words about enchantment—only it is a dark enchantment. The reason is not now—or not simply—the cohabitation of life with death, of life in death, which is dark enough in Rilke’s poetry; but the Elegies are a signing-off on an age, the Christian era, perhaps, and a glimpse—that lets us glimpse too—of the work ahead, beyond war and its eponymous peace, and beyond the war on the world which we call industrialization and technology, beyond political “isms” with their false solutions, to the inter-faith work of restoring the earth to its angel.
That you are there, dear, dear Lou, to seal it so joyously in my inmost heart with your response! As I read your good, assenting letter: how it flooded me anew, this certainty from all sides that it is here now, here, this thing that has gestated so long, from the very start.3
Rilke copies out the rest of the Elegies and inserts them in subsequent letters that are now flying back and forth between the pair. Lou writes in one letter:
To feel such a sun-time so utterly is given only to human beings like you: the ones who take risks, the ones who go on and on endangering themselves, for whom at any moment any season could topple over into an absolute light-blind wintriness.4
One thinks of Hölderlin, Ruskin, and Nietzsche, who all went insane before the end.
For the creator who will enchant us, enchantment is a task. Enchantment is a task in our time, in any time perhaps, although the resistances differ between one time and another. Even we who seek enchantment, who realize that there is no soulfulness without enchantment and who realize that soullessness and disenchantment go equally together, even for us soul-work is a task. The resistances to soul-work and enchantment in our time come under the umbrella name of “the economy,” which means, now that state socialism is dead, commodity capitalism, its enemy, which is no better. This “economy” is a total system which, as our brainchild, comes back to get even and get inside, to govern our choices, desires, hopes, and wishes. To commodity capitalism, enchantment is a resistance. It is a powerful means because it works on our inner life, within our inner sensitivity and sensibility, with a contrary indication to every totalizing objectivism and realism that capitalism conjugates.
Lou could read the Elegies straight away for she had been party to their creation.
The most powerful and at the same time gentlest [Elegy] for me is the Ninth. There reading, reading on to the end, is scarcely possible, as in gardens whose paths one can’t even use as paths, since what is blooming and greening all around slows down every step, brings to a halt; again and again, in every stanza, every section of a stanza, I sit down, feel myself in a bower, as if little branches were plaiting themselves together above me into an unheard-of homeland.5
This is reading as soul-work. But I must warn my reader. These Elegies that it took a poet, a master of soul-work as great as Rilke, 10 years to write, we will not read in a day. It must take time before we know what Lou means where she writes: “ I can never tell you: how much this means to me and how I have unconsciously been waiting to receive what is Yours as also Mine, as life’s true consummation.”6
The pressing into her in order to take form inside her that Rilke wrote in Narcissus has, at last, managed to come true. What Rilke has now achieved is the unification of self and nature, of drives of self-preservation and self-sacrifice, of depths and surfaces, of melancholy and enchantment.
The melancholy is because we are estranged from the “homeland,” as Lou calls it. The homeland can mean different things: paradise that was, heaven that will be; but in any case “we are not at home in this interpreted world,” as Rilke says in the First Elegy. In the Narcissus myth, our un-at-home-ness (unheimlichkeit) is the self-alienation. My image is me and not-me. And I am this, the kind of being that can be both me and not-me at one and the same time; and the world is a world in which this is the case; such is this world! Hence, my melancholy.
And the Elegies are about the dead who have gone before us. A melancholy prospect—for we are joining them. Not soon. Already.
In singing the praises of the Angel, Rilke sings praise to our unseen unity with the dead.
This unity is an experience of the soul, which the Elegies speak forth.
The dead are not dead; they are where the young Lament leads us (Tenth Elegy):7
Only those who died young, in their first state
of timeless equanimity, that of being weaned,
follow her lovingly. She waits
for girls and befriends them. She shows them gently
what she is wearing. Pearls of grief and the fine
veils of suffering.—With youths she walks on
in silence.
The young Lament leads out to the valley of Lament. Even human beings, we living, she reminds he who follows, know us, when in their mines or on their mountain ranges they sometimes find “a lump of polished primal grief or the lava of frozen rage from some old volcano.” Yes, we living know these well. And she leads him into the wide landscape of Lament and shows him “the columns of old temple… Tear trees and fields of flowering Sadness,” where he sees herds of Grief, grazing, and the Lament leads on, out toward the mountains of primal grief.
All this happens behind the façades of our daily living. Only when we can fight free of all the distractions, which distract us from soul and soulfulness, can we follow, as we must.
For the dead are there—only we have our backs turned to them and all our senses turned away from them.
The dead have life. The Angel is witness and testifies:
Angel: if there were a place we know nothing of, and there,
on some unsayable carpet, lovers revealed
what here they could never master, their high daring
figures of heart’s flight,
their towers of desire, their ladders,
long since standing where there was no ground, leaning,
trembling, on each other—and mastered them,
in front of the circle of watchers, the countless, soundless dead:
Would these not fling their last, ever-saved,
ever-hidden, unknown to us, eternally
valid coins of happiness in front of the finally
truly smiling pair on the silent
carpet? (Fifth Elegy)
Yes, it is possible. But, for the animal, it is not like it is for us:
The creature gazes out into openness with all
its eyes. But our eyes are
as if they were reversed, and surround it,
everywhere, like barriers against its free passage. (Eighth
Elegy)
The open is where the curtain dividing the living from the dead is rent from top to bottom and, there, one can see through the rent. In the open, there is no “life” and “death.” Our eyes have “not that openness/ that is so deep in the animal’s vision. Free from death.” (Eighth Elegy)
We never have pure space in front of us,
not for a single day, such as flowers open
endlessly into. Always there is world,
and never the Nowhere without the Not: the pure,
unwatched over, that one breathes and
endlessly knows, without craving. (Eighth Elegy)
“Lovers are close to it” (Eighth Elegy), close to the open, which opens out behind the other…but it turns back to world again. The mute calm look of the animal looks through us and our world to the open.
And yet in the warm waking creature
is the care and burden of a great sadness. (Eighth Elegy)
It is not the animal but the Angel that is the creature who can witness to us of the open.
The Angel is the proper name of the unison of melancholy and enchantment in the Elegies.
“Every angel is terror.”—the Second Elegy begins by repeating. “And yet,/ ah, knowing you, I invoke you, almost deadly/ birds of the soul.”
The Angels are not unctuous expressions on Rilke’s part, or pseudo-religious imagery,8 let alone real intermediaries of some sort. Rilke’s epistolary explanations have done more damage and caused more confusion in relation to understanding the Elegies than anything anyone else has written badly about them. Lou is right; the Angels are “a horizon” of the soul’s experience, “an optically unifying illusion.”9 The enchantment of a “dark rapture,” which is death “before the heart of the ‘stronger presence’.”10
Rilke’s Angel is a word for metaphysical experience. “Experience” is the key word that unlocks the Elegies, just as Rilke said to Lou was the case with The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge. To read the Elegies, we must learn to read them until the words sound in our soul, just as, for Swann, the words “two or three times” or “I knew what she was after” carved themselves on the living tissues of his heart, else their music must haunt us like Vinteuil’s sonata. The Elegies enable us to experience vicariously, through his words, Rilke’s experience—the dark enchantment of Rilke’s Angel—for his words capture it. His Elegies provide us the opportunity, were we to read them, of metaphysical experience as soul-work, and soul-work as enchantment.
The dark enchantment of the Elegies turns to jubilation. The experience of the elegiac and the jubilant become one, as life and death are one.
Rilke knew that religion spoke the nihilistic other-worldly language of spirit, rather than the poetic and this-worldly language of soul. Perhaps, once, religion had been soul-making, in Medieval times, or, Rilke believed, in Russia; but, in the twentieth century, in Europe where he was, religion was soul-destroying. And many millions of souls would literally be obliterated. And it would be no accident—although something of a bizarre paradox—that the world’s worst wars were in the established heartland of Christianity; millions of obliterated souls would be Jews. Politics was the obvious reason, but the religious culture with an immemorial anti-Semitism that crossed denominational and national boundaries belonged to the spiritual context. But the religious Christian (not just the cultural Christian—under which heading I would include the atheist), reading Rilke, is forced to put the soul back at the center of personal being and be “simple-souled.”11 Rilke was not spiritual in the “pure” sense that seeks to purge itself of all that is “unclean” and “unholy”; he was soulful, which means purity is creativity and psychological depth. As a soul-worker, he knew melancholy, the ground-mood of the soul that opens the soul to the enchantment that is the desire of the soul.
In a letter Rilke writes, “Whoever does not, sometime or other give his full consent, his full joyous consent, to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgment is given, will have been neither alive nor dead. To show the identity of dreadfulness and bliss, these two faces on the same divine head, indeed, this one single face, which just presents itself this way or that, according to our distance from it or the state of mind in which we perceive it—this it the true significance and purpose of the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus.”12
To these marvelous serious and joyous Sonnets we now turn.
Notes
1. Rilke and Salomé, Letters, 331. (Italics in original)
2. Ibid., 333.
3. Ibid., 334.
4. Ibid., 337.
5. Ibid., 338.
6. Ibid., 338. (Italics in original)
7. All excerpts from the Elegies in this chapter are from the translation by A.S. Kline (2001), <http://www.poetryintranslation.com> (accessed January 2, 2010).
8. This is what Adorno thought in “Theses upon Art and Religion,” Notes to Literature, Volume 2, 294.
9. Salomé, You Alone Are Real to Me, 110.
10. Ibid., 118.
11. Rilke, Selected Letters, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Macmillan: London, 1946), 336.
12. Rilke, Letter of April 12, 1923 to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy. Briefe, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1950), II, 407.