Rilke: Love your loneliness.
Such a Special Guy
IN 1992, RIVERS Cuomo was still hiding in the garage with his X-Men comics and Kiss posters. Back then, he was worried we might call him a nerd or a dork. Now, he couldn’t care less what we think of him. He has become the thing he used to dream about — an axe-guitar-wielding superman, a not-so-teen Titan. He can do what he likes — in or out of the garage. In ‘Pork and Beans’ he sings:
I’m-a do the things that I wanna do
I ain’t got a thing to prove to you1
With 2008’s The Red Album, Rivers Cuomo seemed finally to have busted out of the underground. The self-loathing and self-denial of the late ’90s was long gone. Part of Cuomo’s disgust with the cult of Pinkerton stemmed from his belief that emo’s insistence on misery and the inability to act was profoundly unhealthy. Andy Greenwald has observed that post-Pinkerton emo — the period that produced lyrics like ‘I’m afraid to try, I’ll keep my hands by my side’ — was defined by ‘an arrogance derived from superior humility’.2 Greenwald’s description of emo ethics here echoes Nietzsche’s thoughts on Christianity in his On the Genealogy of Morals. In Nietzsche’s view, Judeo-Christian morality is a fairy story invented by the weak to justify their weakness. ‘They are stronger,’ say the oppressed, ‘but we are more virtuous.’ For Nietzsche, nothing could be further from the truth:
All truly noble morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation. Slave ethics, on the other hand, begins by saying “no” to an ‘outside’ an ‘other’ and that “no” is its creative act.3
A rock-and-roll superman could have no use for such perverse ethics. With The Red Album, Cuomo traded slave morality for triumphant self-affirmation — emo self-denial for the Nietzschean philosophy of Queen’s ‘We Are the Champions’. The new Cuomo had no time for losers. ‘One look in the mirror and I’m tickled pink,’ he sang in ‘Pork and Beans’. His mood was proud and defiant. No wonder he never fit in — he’s not one of a herd, but a lone, inspired individual. In ‘Troublemaker’, Cuomo boils the romantic philosophy down to one sentence: ‘There isn’t anybody else exactly quite like me.’4
While the self-asserting superman of The Red Album might seem worlds away from the human wreckage at the centre of Pinkerton, one very important trait connects the old Rivers to the new Rivers. In ‘Troublemaker’ he reminds us he’s a big star, and that everyone wants a piece of him. But the grabbing hands will never touch him. You won’t see Rivers out having fun like everybody else — and even if you do, you might as well not be there. Here’s why:
In this one important respect, the new Rivers is not that different to the old Rivers. Because whether he’s living in a black box, hiding in the garage, meditating, or just partying by himself, Cuomo needs solitude. But it’s not just because he enjoys it, and it’s not even because he needs the angst. The success of The Red Album shows that meditation wasn’t so bad for his art after all. Turns out it wasn’t the angst he needed so much as the isolation that produced it. It took him fifteen years to figure this out — Cuomo might have saved himself some trouble by reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.
Rilke was a Czech-born poet whose first mature work was produced at a time when Nietzsche’s influence was virtually inescapable. Rilke’s poetry is steeped in Nietzsche’s proto-existentialism — his insistence on life over thought, his search for redemption in this world rather than the next. Rilke also inherited Nietzsche’s supreme subjectivity — his belief that the artist creates truth rather than merely recording or revealing it.
In 1903 Rilke received an unsolicited book of poems from a young soldier named Franz Kappus, with a note asking whether the poet would mind reading them and sharing his thoughts with the author in the form of a critique. Rilke politely refused, but he and Kappus struck up a correspondence in which Rilke, while never dealing specifically with Kappus’s poems, offered the young man a lifetime’s worth of advice on the subject of being a poet. First of all, Rilke advised, you should stop asking for advice.
You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you — no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself.6
Rilke returns to the theme in his sixth letter, sent shortly before Christmas. Knowing that Kappus would be alone for the holiday season, Rilke urged him not to be frightened of loneliness, but to embrace it.
What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours — that is what you must be able to attain.7
Over and over in the course of the ten letters, Rilke returns to this theme. ‘Love your loneliness,’ he says. This is not an easy thing to do. But Rilke suggests to his protégé that if he’s really a poet, he’ll find that solitude suits him, that he’d rather be there than anywhere else.
We already have an idea why. Being weird and lonely at school was a blessing in disguise for Rivers Cuomo (as it was for Billy Corgan and Gerard Way) because it gave him the experience and the insight to write his earliest songs. He made use of his melancholy by writing profoundly affecting music about his condition. But just when it seemed like he’d broken through his loneliness and connected to the world, he went out of his way to make sure that he stayed lonely — moved out of the big world, and back into the garage. Now he’s triumphantly solitary — indeed, he insists on aloneness as a condition of his existence. That’s because Cuomo feels that being lonely is an important part of his job, and Rilke would agree.
Rilke insists that for a good poet there is no poor subject matter since all his experience is filtered through the unique prism of his own sensibility. That’s why he advises the young man to look inside himself to find out whether or not he is a poet. Cuomo insists in ‘Troublemaker’ that he doesn’t need books because he learns by studying the lessons of his dreams, and Rilke confirms this. The outside world is overrated, he says: learn to do without it.
…even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds — wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not.8
It’s exactly this self-reliance that Cuomo developed during his long and painful apprenticeship in the garage. In ‘Troublemaker’ he realises it was this, and not any of the dumb stuff they tried to teach him at school, that made him an artist. At school, they’d tried to teach him arts and crafts; in his garage, he taught himself to shred on his axe guitar while gazing up at his posters of Kiss and reflecting on his emotions. Who looks stupid now? ‘You wanted arts and crafts?’ sings Cuomo. ‘How’s this for arts and crafts!’ He unleashes a face-melting guitar break, and the world is put in its place.9 This, he explains in ‘The Greatest Man…’ is how it’s going to be from now on.
If you don’t like it — you can shove it,
But you don’t like it — you love it10
Cuomo knows he is a great artist because…he knows he is a great artist. Society’s pronouncements on his worth have proven to be consistently unreliable — why should he care what we have to say about him or what he does? He is expressing himself authentically. What could be more important than that?