11

“The little rust-colored sail”

In his letter to von Hulewicz, “the little rust-colored sail” of the Sonnets to Orpheus is how Rilke compares them to “the gigantic white canvas of the Elegies.”¹

Before we turn to the Sonnets, let us pause. We have entered into Rilke’s world now, quite deeply, and hopefully have already begun to be affected by it, or to feel the potential effect that it could have on us, if we persist in reading. But what appreciation of enchantment and the work of enchantment has it brought us? I may just comment on this in order to highlight a few points.

First, enchantment is an erotic relationship, and although we may be blasé about reading, listening, and gazing, they too are erotic activities. We need sex in our minds and senses; that is to say, we need that procreative power in our minds and in our senses. For it is this procreative power that gives birth to enchantment, or allows our insemination by the seeds of that which is enchanting. Reading, listening, and gazing do this—at least they do so in their proper meaning, which we distinguished at the outset from their mundane meaning.

Secondly, enchantment is narcissistic. It is our response-ability. At the heart of every act of enchantment is self-love and self-surrender, Lou Salomé taught. This translates into saying, for example, “I am reading this for myself”—Rilke’s Sonnets, say—but to do so, I must surrender myself. And the same goes for every work of enchantment. If I am gazing at a picture by Vermeer, looking for that little patch of yellow wall, or if I am listening to a work of a well-known composer, I am both doing it absolutely for myself (maybe with others, who, equally, are doing it for themselves) and, by the same act, totally surrendering myself to that picture (with a devotion like Bergotte’s) or that piece of music.

So the work of enchantment is erotic and narcissistic, and the two go together. Thirdly, my last point before we get into the Sonnets, we need a turning. We need something, some work of art, or some love of our life—even some Odette perhaps—that will switch our sensibilities the right way, in the right direction and orient us. It is my claim that the works of Proust, Rilke, and Goethe do this, but that is a very narrow claim. There are many arts and, in every one of them, many great artists. Great art is the art that can provide such a turning; mediocre art cannot. And, of course, there is a lot of rubbish which calls itself “art,” but does so merely out of vanity or stupidity. But, before, I said it was a sign of great art that it abides; and to that I would add that great art abides because it has this “turning” quality.

Here then, with these recapitulatory comments summing up the last few chapters, we may turn back to Rilke, for whom the kinds of things I am saying are taken for granted. Enchantment for Rilke, as we will see now, is really to develop powerfully our inwardness as sensibility and sensitivity to all creation.

“The Elegies set up this norm of existence,” Rilke tells von Hulewicz.²

This norm is that we become “transmuters of the earth,”³ which is to say, we “transform” (Verwand, to use Rilke’s word) or we might say “transubstantiate” the earth into ourselves, and, we might add, transubstantiate ourselves into the earth (which is our physical destiny in any case). What this means, I think, is that we become the channels between life and death, or, more precisely, between lament and jubilation.

But how do we do this?—If we become enchanted, if “our whole existence here, the flights and falls of our love, all strengthen us for this task (beside which there really is no other).”

It starts with reading, listening, and gazing as primary educational activities of the soul. They are educational because they educe, they bring out soul from amidst the walls of the self and its precepts.

The Sonnets, Rilke tells von Hulewicz, “reveal single aspects of this activity.”

Elegies and Sonnets sustain each other at all points.

The Sonnets to Orpheus are in honor of him, Orpheus. He went into the underworld and rescued Eurydice by guiding the way through the dark with his music.

Rilke’s Sonnets are sonnets of praise because he (Rilke) has been, in a sense, Eurydice, and has listened to Orpheus’s music in his soul and found his way out to the light. He has written the Elegies as if to say, “See, I’ve been there!”

The Sonnets are light, jubilant—even, at points, for a serious poet like Rilke, frivolous. He wrote them quickly; for him, in a rush; and he believed in their inspiration, which is why he left them rather than begin to work on them to make some of them better poetry. Those who criticize the Sonnets at the level of poetic technique have not begun to understand what they signify at the level of their enchantment and the world of enchantment: they belong to a post-Elegies world, for they are indicative of a changed inner prospect. It is this which the reader needs to appreciate.

But still for us existence is enchanted: from a

hundred places

it is still origin. A play of pure forces

that no-one touches unless he kneels and admires. (II.10)⁴

It is not the perfection or imperfection of the Sonnets that matters, but the overflowing (cf. II.22), which of course they represent, but which, more importantly, they transubstantiate into word, so that the word can enter us and enchant us likewise.

The Sonnets are divided into two books—of 26 and 29 Sonnets, respectively. They may be read quickly and re-read, rather than pondered on.

Rilke dedicated the Sonnets to Vera Ouckama Knoop, a beautiful young teenage dancer who died, if we are to believe I.25, from a fatal blood condition, perhaps leukemia, of which Rilke himself was to die, although Rilke never knew the proper name of the disease which afflicted him and took him to his deathbed because he refused anyone in his presence to mention the name. As far as he was concerned, he was dying the death which was his, the death to which his life had given birth. He was dying because he was mortal, but the author of the Elegies and the Sonnets had been there and back, and so he knew where he was going; and he was aware young Vera, who he hardly knew, was not far away.

As a dancer, the transformative expressive power of the body was her element:

Dancer: oh you translation

of all transiency into action, how you made it clear! (II.18)

Vera’s death is as much sung as lamented:

Sickness drew near. Already by shadows mastered,

the darkened blood, half-suspect, could not wait,

but surged, toward its natural springtime bounding.

Again and again, interrupted by dark and disaster,

it glittered, earthly. Till after terrible pounding

it entered the desolate open gate. (I.25)

But on the very next page, it is affirmed that Orpheus sings in all things:

Finally, driven by vengeance, they broke and tore

your body, but in cliffs and lions lingered

your music, in birds and trees. You still sing there. (I.26)

The song is one breath through life and death. “Breath” is of course pneuma in Greek, which, in Latin, is spiritus, and, in English, “spirit.”

The Sonnets are primarily occupied with this breath, but it is more of a note upon which we hear Orpheus’s lyre that Rilke celebrates here. Rilke both identifies with Orpheus and dis-identifies with him.

Rilke’s “Orphism” is not a new attempt at cult, or a “New Age” spirituality. After 20 centuries of Christianity in Europe, the figure of Orpheus as a god of transformations, including the transformation from life to death, and from death to life, the idea of rebirth, is still alive and well. Rilke’s “Orphism” is an aesthetic which perhaps belongs in more than one world. It harks back, at least, to a Magian spirit and to pagan myth like a Renaissance painting in an Italian church, but then it would have us see in creation a beauty that is levity and a “song” which vibrates through matter and can make even the stones cry out, but that has been lost to historic Christianity because of its rationalism and moralism. Rilke points beyond this world. And so Orpheus (who stands in the mythical world) does not displace the Angels of the Elegies (of the world to come). They are both of this world and its imagination.

O you God that has vanished! You infinite track!

only because dismembering hatred dispersed you

are we hearers today and a mouth which else nature would lack. (I.26)⁵

The world Rilke wrote in was full of a dismembering hatred which would tear Europe and the world apart. Big ideology would co-opt myth for its own purposes. For instance, what mythic power would the color red hold for millions! Christianity, insofar as it is pagan, turns its history and the sayings of Jesus and his disciples into philosophical metaphysics, the new discourse of theology, and, in the long run, into an architectonic belief system that purports to “know” about God as, for instance, Trinity. The Reformation only hardened this tendency to “truth” as systematic theology, while, at the same time, purporting to rely on “scripture alone.” Christianity, insofar as it is Jewish, as Jesus and the disciples all were, is an instructive ethic. Christianity tells us, today, to bring some light into someone’s life by doing something for him or her. This is not myth but the spirit of a law and points to a duty. However, Christianity in Rilke’s Europe was about to implode, and ours is the time of the aftermath.

But Rilke’s poetry, it is my belief, is untimely, for he knew that he, like Lou, Nietzsche, and Freud, and contemporary artists who influenced him—Tolstoy, Rodin, Cézanne, Mallarmé, and Valéry—were all working for a time beyond the one they were mired in; perhaps, for the time of the aftermath; certainly for a future time not their own.

For Christmas 1923, Rilke sent Lou, in Göttingen, special limited editions of the Elegies and the Sonnets. He inscribed the Elegies:

For Lou,

who has owned it with me from the first, this now in its ultimate form,

Rainer.

In the Sonnets he inscribed:

Lou

Rainer

(in the spirit of Christmas)

Lou had been in Berlin since the end of September and did not get home until March 1924. She had initially gone to attend the psychoanalytical congress, where she had stayed at Eitingon’s Biedermeier, where the Freuds had stayed as well. Eitingon had founded the polyclinic, as it was known, in Berlin, where psychoanalysis was practiced. Lou stayed on, working there. But at last, back at Loufried, her home in Göttingen, she wrote on 16 March to Rilke at Muzot.

In the middle of the room, as its very centre, your two books, consummated and come home. All the way to the blue of their covers so full of memories.⁶

A picture rather reminiscent of Proust’s description of Bergotte’s books, “arranged three by three kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.”

Rilke’s work too will raise the dead.

“But I must tell you something further immediately,” Lou goes on, “namely, the experiences I had using handwritten versions of your poems with damaged, recovering patients. They were the sort of people for whom, as a result of their neurosis, everything had become dead, and they felt no differently about their own lives: they existed in a deep apathy, and it caused anything alive—human, creature, nature—to turn immediately into a thing for them, into a material object, a worthless non-thing, in the end garbage, a cast-off piece of filth. This produces severe states of anxiety, bitter terror: dead among dead things.”

“Dead among dead things.” This is the perfect expression of soullessness and an indictment of the commodity capitalism that brings it about in us by turning all things into objects of monetary value and potential profit or loss. We remember, in his letter to von Hulewicz, Rilke had said:

Nature, and the objects of our environment and usage, are but frail, ephemeral things; yet, as long as we are here, they are our possession and our friendship, knowing our wretchedness and our joy, just as they were the familiars of our ancestors. Thus, it is meet for us not only not to pollute and degrade the Actual, but precisely because of the transitoriness which it shares with us, we should seize these things and appearances with the most fervent comprehension and transform them.⁷

“Transform” means, in our language, things must be allowed, and made able, to enchant us.

Rilke’s idea of “possession” is not capitalist acquisition and ownership—the scourges of our world—the idea that we possess things, though things possess us.

“Even for our grandfathers,” Rilke goes on to point out to von Hulewicz, “a house, a fountain, a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat, was infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost every object a vessel in which they found something human or added their morsel of humanity.”

The intimacy of things is also the intimacy of beauty to truth—truth here being not some delusory metaphysics of speculation but the veracity of proper names: coat, fountain, tower, gate, and tree.

But commodity capitalism surreptitiously wars on things and on proper names and destroys both together.

“Now, from America,” Rilke continues, “empty, indifferent things crowd over to us, counterfeit things, the veriest dummies. A house, in the American sense, and American apple or one of the vines of that country has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which have entered the hope and meditation of our forefathers. The lived and living things, the things that share our thoughts, these are on the decline and can no more be replaced. We are perhaps the last to have known such things.”

Rilke is not talking about going back to how things were; he is not here expressing some kind of reactionary conservatism, which is how he is most often taken. He is not stupid, he knows that turning the clock back is impossible, and he knows Europe is on the brink of further disaster. He knows that, whatever happens, the world cannot move forward in any shape or form without enchantment. If we lose that we lose ourselves. Our humanity, our humanism, is tied to the health and well-being of enchantment, which in turn is tied to things: a coat, a tower, a tree, a piazza, and an old pearl-handled hairbrush.

Little could Rilke see that people would no longer afford to live in houses, but would live in “flats” or “units.” And the home would become more and more like a mini-leisure center kitted out with the devices and gimmicks which a capitalist economic system invents to retain our continued subservient loyalty to it. The mockery is that people with these things count themselves happy; and poverty is measured by not having them. Little could Rilke see wine become totally disconnected from the particularity of place, field, and the fence, from what the French call terroir to refer to particular soil, climate, and conditions in a specific year. All this has gone and been replaced with blending grape types in massive industrial vats to obtain “flavor,” a ruination of the grape supported by a self-serving industry of “expert” tasters, wine journalists, and “connoisseurs.” Little could Rilke have foreseen our genetically modified force-fed fruits (and now animals)—all tasteless—but that look good in the shop, even if, as in the case of bruise-free identical, manufactured apples, the cores may be rotten from radiation. What about the American corporation which “plays God” by purporting to own seed, so that anyone who uses it without paying may be sued and possibly imprisoned? The monopolization which commodity capitalism naturally tends toward—hence its lean toward totalitarianism, not freedom, as is evident from plain experience—sees the kind of company that can “play God” as the ultimate goal, where the whole market is theirs and theirs alone. And such helpless complaints as these are already so familiar to our ears that we have become numb and indifferent to them; even though it is our fate at stake. Rilke could see the idolatry but not envisage the global “playing out” which we are witnessing today.

Rilke’s words, and his poems, point to a world beyond commodity capitalism, and after Capitalist rule; they do not essentially point back to Old Europe, to the world as it ostensibly was before. His words point at what is in us as the possibility for enchantment, but what, invisibly, with ghostly power, commodity capitalism sucks out of us.

So often, Rilke’s words, quoted above, are criticized as being specious and are quickly dismissed. However, they are a core text that connects with his poetry, as well as everything we are saying in this book about enchantment. Only with Rilke’s words in mind can we see how difficult or well-nigh impossible enchantment is in our world, and how easy it is to become “dead among dead things.”

Lou knew Rilke’s mind on this better than anyone ever did. But let us pick up her letter to him where we left off:

Different moments can bring about the resolution in a recovering patient: on a forest trail above our house, a woman with agoraphobia first saw trees lived and what the harvested fields expressed so clearly and with such yellowness and she cried out in delight over the force and strength of the world that had suddenly been given back to her and was accepting into herself her liberated steps. But there were others who sat up and took notice for the first time when they heard your tone as that of Life: and it was indescribably moving that they heard and understood it before they were capable of grasping even the most readily understandable attributes of the day around them, much less any experience from the realm of art, as something alive. And not one of them had previously had some special relationship to poetry, rather the opposite: what resounded there had come all the way across to them only because those who have been blessed as artists and those who have been stripped of their blessings by an affliction live in a single region, in close proximity and at the same depth—for Heaven and Hell are not at all two places.

They are two ways of being in the same place and in this world. In his earliest poetry, which Rilke “placed into the hands of Lou” in his dedication to the Book of Hours (1905), Rilke saw people in hell in our cities—especially those crushed by capitalist poverty, which is so different from the holy poverty and which Rilke celebrates as heavenly and free. The other way is this way that Lou discovered upon reading.

Lou found Rilke’s Elegies and Sonnets revived people and brought them back from the dead.

Suddenly, these patients became enchanted with the world. Sometimes we have to be patients first, before this becomes a possibility. Otherwise we can continue in our capitalist consumer-induced miasma, working for leisure and eponymous happiness, for which the economic system defines the terms.

Upon receipt of this letter, Rilke wrote back⁸; his first line confirms what we have been saying:

My dear dear Lou,

I cannot tell you what a grand, marvelous Easter you have brought me with your letter…

Notes

1.    Rilke, Selected Letters, 396.

2.    Ibid., 395.

3.    Ibid., 396.

4.    Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. C.F. MacIntyre (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California, 1960), 75.

5.    Rilke, Later Poems, trans. J.B. Leishman (London: Hogarth Press, 1938), 170.

6.    Rilke and Salomé, Letters, 345.

7.    Rilke, Selected Letters, 394.

8.    Rilke and Salomé, Letters, 347.