Preface

ANITA BARROWS

 

 

 

 

 

 

I knew nothing of the poems in Rilke’s Book of Hours until the evening in May 1993 when Joanna Macy read to me, in German, the two that would initiate our work, “You are not surprised at the force of the storm” and “What will you do, God, when I die?” The second, in its affirmation of God’s need for us, seemed very close to a thought that had accompanied me in childhood. Brought up as I was in a highly patriarchal Jewish family—both my grandfathers had been Orthodox rabbis, one in Poland and the other in Hungary—I was steeped in an image of a God who was anything but dependent. Jealous, hot-tempered, the Yahweh I intuited from those around me was a huge, remote eye in the sky watching and waiting for us to falter and fail him.

What could I feel except fear before such a punitive God? And yet one Saturday in autumn when I was about six, trailing after my father on the walk home from Sabbath services, I understood something new about God. There on the boulevard, amid the noise and bustle of Brooklyn, was this delicious mulching smell, this crispness, this crackling noise of dry red and yellow leaves. The smell awakened me after the morning spent in the dim, drafty synagogue, where I had to sit upstairs listening to the men chanting below in a language I did not understand. God made these leaves, this smell, I said to myself, and suddenly it occurred to me that God created the world because he was lonely. He needed it—needed the ripeness of autumn, the bright air, the sunlight making patterns on the sidewalk through linden leaves that were yet unfallen. God had created all this, and us as well, to keep him company. That far, chilly place where he lived had felt empty to him without our world. The idea seemed so blasphemous to me that I dared not speak it, but I found it both exciting and comforting.

Rilke’s poem of the great oncoming storm spoke to me of the repeated moments in my life when I had departed from what was known and familiar—a place, a group, a belief, a partner—to follow something that compelled me from what seemed a place of deep instinctual knowing. “Now you must go out into your heart / as onto a vast plain,” Rilke wrote.

I left the synagogue at sixteen in search of something that felt more akin to the God revealed to me under the linden leaves, and less like the father “in king’s robes,” with “scepter and crown,” as Rilke describes the images of God he, too, resisted. Coming west from New York at nineteen, I experienced in the vast, dramatic geography of California the same awe I had felt in the presence of Yahweh, with none of the remoteness. Nature became what was holy for me: the silence of redwoods, the granite peaks of the northern Sierra, the desert. For a long time I did not want to speak about God.

Then, during my graduate student days, my study of medieval Italian literature, especially Dante, drew me to Catholicism, with its incarnate God who loved and suffered humanly. I took instruction in the Church and was baptized. Week after week I received the Eucharist and found great joy in it; but I could not get over feeling like an impostor. My Jewishness would not let me give myself fully to Christian forms and rituals, and anyway, it was the spare medieval monastery I longed for and not the institutional Church. After a time I returned to a meditative practice I had been doing on and off for years, without naming it religion; eventually it was an open, nonsectarian Buddhism that I embraced.

In the spring of 1993, when Joanna and I began working with The Book of Hours, I was completing a long poem of my own, which I called A Record. I was weaving together images from the Jewish Holocaust with images of the suffering of other peoples and species, the suffering of our earth. The poem grew from my utter conviction of the interconnectedness of all these forms of suffering. I did not intend to trivialize any particular suffering by setting it alongside others; but some of my Jewish friends criticized the poem for doing just that. How could I speak of the dying of frogs and the incineration of Jews in the same breath? Inner voices judged me as well; as a Jewish child born only two years after the liberation of the concentration camps, I grew up steeped in stories of Nazi atrocities. Was I minimizing my people’s pain by placing it in context with other pain? And yet I knew, from the ways in which my heart kept breaking over the genocide of other peoples as well as the dying of frogs and the poisoning of the seas, that for these, too, a holocaust was occurring, and I had no choice but to name it.

 

Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you. [II, 1]

 

Rilke’s summons to the journey into his own heart helped me find the courage to continue writing A Record. It helped me, as well, to put into perspective my own doubt about what I was doing and how my friends and colleagues might judge it. Reading these words, it was a relief to see myself just as one bit of God’s creation, no more exalted than a branch, a stone, or a drop of water. Rilke’s sense of a God who could reach for me in my barest simplicity—in my most “real” and “ripened” self—pleased me.

Reading Rilke again also brought back to me my own beginnings as a poet. In 1964, when I was seventeen, I was invited to spend a week on Cape Cod with a friend whose parents were German. On the long drive up from New York, my friend’s father, a writer, recited by heart one after another of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus—first in German, then in his own elegant impromptu translation. Imagine the fire kindled in me! When, months later, I tentatively brought to my friend’s Manhattan apartment a notebook filled with sonnets of my own, her father’s first response after reading them was to go to his shelf and pull out a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. “If you are going to be a poet you must read Rilke,” he told me, and gave me the volume to keep. “Rilke is the poet’s poet.” The letters went everywhere with me for years, along with The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which I read shortly afterward. It would not be an exaggeration to say that those two books shaped and concentrated for me my vocation as a poet, and when I signed up for a German class in my second year of college, it was with the express purpose of reading Rilke in the original.

When Joanna and I started working—or, actually, playing—with those first two poems, I had not translated anything for a long time, even though I had worked professionally as a translator for ten years before I trained as a psychologist. On my early-morning walks in those weeks after we began, I found myself obsessively turning phrases in my head, and remembered the joy I had experienced in translation—different from the act of writing my own poetry, yet similar. This playful experiment with Rilke’s early poems was answering some very deep longing within me. It was a complex longing, born of delight in language, yes, but also of the isolation of being a poet—isolation precisely in moments of the purest fulfillment my life knew. To share this process, this intimate space, with another person seemed an incredible privilege. It made me quiver with happiness, and also a little apprehension. It was hard to believe, at first, that poetic creativity could really be shared. Apprehension quickly yielded to exhilaration.

As Joanna and I allowed these poems to reveal their meanings to us, I discovered still deeper resonances between them and the most pervasive themes of my life. Rilke’s love for things of this world, his insistence that they—we—are what is sacred, his capacity to see the holy in the ordinary—all these had informed my own poetry from the start.

I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met. [I, 1]

 

A person (or a thing) comes to exist by being met in the most authentic way by another. My practice of psychotherapy has been deeply informed by the Jungian principle of reciprocal individuation, which means that a deep and loving encounter is what generates development.

How close this is to Rilke’s declaration that our greatest summons is really to see the things of this world. We are because we are seen; we are because we are loved. The world is because it is beheld and loved into being. On a silent retreat, while watching a line of ants traveling up a hillside, words came to me that I would repeat again and again in my mind: I am in the world to love the world. I knew, standing there in the parched summer grasses, how deeply the poems of The Book of Hours had already penetrated my being, speaking to me as instructions for living.