Someday, when I lose you, will you be able to sleep without my whispering myself away like a
Linden's crown above you? Without my waking here and laying down words, almost like
guidance on your breasts, on your limbs, on your mouth. Without my closing here and keeping you alone with one of these moments, with my garden, my past, my business, and my stories.
In title opinions, coming to you from the Garden of Melissa's on the margins of history, but not detached from history.
The topic of our show today is Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet of soft solitudes, the poet of praise, the poet of elegy and birth, but above all the poet of autumn's descent into earth.
The leaves are falling, falling as from far off distant gardens withered in the sky, and in the nights the heavy earth is falling from all the stars down into loneliness.
How many times does Rilke do that from one verse to the next, expand a local scene to a cosmic scale?
Rainer Maria Rilke, the inflationary cosmologist, the poet whose liar quivers the strings of the universe.
I love Rilke as much as anyone, his orphanic incantations find their way into reckonedite layers of my psyche, yet for years I've hesitated to do a show on him, believing that anything one could say about him in such a forum would only blunt the subtle reverberations of his poetry.
But Rilke himself in his ninth elegy declares, here is the time for the utterable, here is his country, speak and acknowledge.
So today we're going to speak and acknowledge what Rilke has bestowed to us in his literary corpus.
The guest who joins me today in KZSU teaches in the departments of German, comparative literature and environmental studies at Binghamton University.
He is also co-editing a volume of essays about the poetry of Rilke and phenomenology.
Alexander Sorenson is also the author of a book that was published in September of this year by Cornell University Press.
It's called The Waiting Water, Order, Sacrifice and Submergence in German Realism.
It explores the significance of water and in particular the motif of drowning in 19th century German literature.
And since we'll likely be discussing the theme of transients in Rilke's Dreno Elegies today, I'll also mention that Alex Sorenson has published an article in Forum for Modern Language Studies called
Amor Mundi, The Ecology and Praise of Transients in Rilke's Dreno Elegies.
So much by way of bio, Alex, welcome to entitled opinions.
Thanks so much for having me, Robert.
So let me begin with a quote from the American poet Robert Lowell.
"I have always found the Elegies hard to compare or even read with our own best poems."
Stephen Mitchell, one of Rilke's major translators in English, begins the introduction to his addition of the Dreno Elegies and Sonus to Orpheus with the following declaration, I quote,
"The Dreno Elegies are widely acknowledged to be the greatest poem of the 20th century.
The Sonus to Orpheus, in their subtler way, string quartets to the Elegies full orchestra are at least as great.
Is it possible to speak of them and not speak in superlatives?"
In his essay, "What are poets for?"
Heidegger writes, I quote him, "Rilke's valid poetry concentrates and solidifies itself in the two slim volumes, Dreno Elegies and Sonus to Orpheus."
And Heidegger repeats that word a few times in his essay.
As in, we shall use as our markers some of the basic words of Rilke's valid poetry.
Now, what could Heidegger possibly mean by valid?
Good to you.
That the rest of Rilke's poetic corpus is perhaps invalid?
Be that as it may.
Walter Kaufman, the great translator of Nietzsche into English.
In his note on Rilke in 25 German poets wrote the following,
"As an undergraduate, I still considered Rilke one of many fine German poets and felt that he was overestimated in the English-speaking world.
But the longer I have lived with his poems, reading them again and again and translating some of them, the more I am persuaded that no other poets since good they has written so many superb poems.
Still, I have two reservations about him.
The poems that are widely considered his greatest achievement and have elicited the largest body of interpretations, commentaries and criticism is Dreno Elegies still seem somewhat overrated to me, especially in relation to his other poems.
There is no reason for disparaging them, but there is a growing tendency to measure greatness by the weight and bulk of secondary literature and to underrate simple excellence, however profound, in favor of what is obscure, difficult, long, and in need of explanation.
The point is not to deny the beauty of the allergies, but rather to praise his shorter poems much more than his usual.
So I apologize for those lengthy quotes, Alex, but as a reader and scholar of Rilke, I'm curious whether you lean more toward Heidegger or Kaufman when it comes to Rilke's corpus as a whole, and I could formulate that question in a more specific manner by asking,
Had Rilke never written, either the Dreno Elegies or the Sonus to Orpheus, do you think that he would nevertheless still be considered one of the greatest European poets of the 20th century?
Well, I would probably fall on Team Kaufman, personally, but it is a very subjective issue. It's definitely the case that those later works have attracted more of a concentration of philosophically oriented criticism than anything else in Rilke's corpus.
I personally was first drawn to him by his earlier works, the new poems in particular, and some of the later religiously oriented works, poems that try to combine visual art with language to express the one through the other, and that's where I was captivated first as a reader.
I think that most non-academic readers of Rilke feel the same way, and it's only when you get to these ponderous works like the Elegies which exploded in a very mysterious and often documented way, almost in what Rilke himself called a savage and creative storm in the period of a few weeks in February,
and already there's so much mystique around them that you can see why someone like Heidegger and the other philosophers who have commented on him are drawn to them before you even get into the content.
So I myself find the earlier work to be where he first reaches out and grabs you, and if you stay with him and you let him bring you down deeper than the Elegies and the Sonus are waiting for you, but one needn't necessarily start there.
Well, let me just tell our listeners that you mentioned the month, but you neglected, I think, to mention the year in which we had this hurricane of in the soul as Rilke called it this year in 1922 when he wrote the Dweeno Elegies and the Sonus to Orpheus within a very compressed period of a few weeks or something of that sort. So it's 1922.
A lot, you know, Rilke is beloved by many people, and I think you were telling me off-mic that you go to any bookstore and you'll find Rilke poems or Rilke writings about depression or gardening, I just got a book on Rilke letters around a garden, Rilke on the spirit, I love and so forth.
I have a feeling that that confirms what you were saying that his popularity, his widespread popularity outside of academia, is not due to either the Dweeno Elegies or the Sonus to Orpheus, right?
That's right. They're not that conducive to popular readership, and it was for that reason that I avoided them actually for a long time as I was first getting into Rilke.
What do you make of his earliest poems and first collection of poems? In the 1890s, he begins publishing his earliest work. They're generally regarded by scholarship to be rather imitative.
He was trying to sound a particular way based on what he was reading, what was popular at the time. They're highly lyrical.
They have an almost song-like bouncy quality in some instances. They're inspired very much by where he grew up, which we can get into later probably.
But the distance that separates that early work, which some scholars I think maybe go a little bit too far in comparing to almost jingles or something of the sort, nursery rhymes.
The distance that separates that work from what is generally called his mature work, beginning with the book of ours, is a considerable distance and the transformations that happens to him personally, but also aesthetically in that time are remarkable for sure.
So let's talk about the biography just, you know, we don't want to get mired in it, but we could very easily get mired in it. His life was quite singular in many ways.
But his childhood, childhood is a big motif in a lot of his poetry. He had a very unusual one, like Gather.
He did indeed. He was born in 1875 in Prague, and he was born into the German-speaking minority of that city, and already there a really important motif of his life that has been remarked upon by a number of commentators is that he is a figure first, personally, and then later a poet of crossed boundaries, the blurring of borders,
moving from one sphere to another, and this is marked already in the time and place that he's born in the capital Bohemia, but set within a larger context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
He straddles the 19th and the 20th centuries. He moves in and out of different languages that were part of that historical cultural context.
And what most people immediately focus upon related to his childhood is the fact that, until the age of seven, he was raised as a girl. He was christened René, Carl, Wilhelm, Johan, Joseph, María, real good.
So his first Christian name, René, is phonetically and sonically indistinguishable from the feminine form.
María then is the name that he would continue to carry into his publishing career. It was only much later that he substituted the masculine German form Reina for René, and his mother is known to have been suffering from what Freud would probably later have called Melancholia.
He had had an older sibling, a sister who had passed away shortly before he was born also at a very young age, and his mother for reasons that different biographers have gone into varying levels of depth and detail about Raises, young René as a girl for the first seven years of his life.
Because she was traumatized by the death of the daughter. That's been the supposition. We don't know for sure a lot of it is speculative, but it is impossible to resist thinking about it in these terms of substitution and of compensation for this loss that she is known to have been struck dumb with grief over.
Yeah, and she would dress him as a girl and he would dress more dresses and things of that sort. And talking again about the boundaries, he had a very masculine father, I think, who was in the military, and highly feminizing mother on his early development.
And of course, it's hard not to think of the extraordinary feminine sensibility that even the mature Reelke had as a poet, and how much his corpus has these major motifs of birth, gestation, the fruit of a long labor and so forth.
Not to mention the many relationships that he had, amorous as well as, you know, patronage and so forth with women. I mean, women have played a huge role in his life and his inspiration.
So shall we talk a little bit about some of these women? Yeah, there are a number of notable ones. After his mother, the next one that was probably most pivotal for him was Lu Andre Asalome, a very well-known name in this time and place.
Well, no one because Nietzsche proposed marriage and he turned him down. Yes, loved and admired by many. And Reelke had initially become aware of her because of an essay that she had published called Jesus the Jew, and he had been struck by this text and is thought to have anonymously sent some of his own poetry to her in sort of a gesture of admiration.
And it was only later in 1897 that he actually meets her in person and reveals himself as the hidden poet who had reached out to her, and they begin a friendship that very quickly becomes romantic. Several years or several weeks, I should say, after their first meeting and that amorous relationship lasts for a few years and turns eventually into a lifelong friendship, primarily through correspondence that was maintained up to the end of his life.
She is quite a woman and in title opinion, it's really should do a show on Lu Andre Asalome one day. Absolutely.
But in his case, she got him to change his name from Rene to Hyena. More masculine. I guess she took him to Russia also twice.
And you believe that that was an important moment in his development as a poet.
Most scholars agree that these two trips to Russia that he took interestingly first in 1899 with Lu Salome as well as her husband, whom she had been married to for the previous 10 years, they got married when Rilke was in the military academy that he was enrolled in as a child.
And then again, the following year in 1900, he himself wrote of Russia as his spiritual homeland.
He met Tolstoy, he met Leonid Pasternak, the father of Boris Pasternak, the writer.
They visited the peasant poet, Spiridon Drosion, on the estate he worked on, which also happened to be owned by another member of the Tolstoy family.
And up until the year 1904, you can see pictures of Rilke wearing Russian garb. He dressed in the traditional Russian fashion.
So it left a very important mark on him personally, but what's most important for us with respect to his poetry is that it was after these visits that he began writing the collection of poems called the Book of Hours.
Which most regard to Mark the beginning of his mature poetic career, that's really where his poetry changes from an imitative, very lyrical form to the more profound wide-ranging form of exploration that he's known for in his later work.
Do we have any idea why he considered Russia a kind of spiritual homeland?
People have proposed different things. Something that seems to have been a very important moment for him, in addition to the relationship that was contextualizing these visits, was an experience he had visiting the Easter service.
And at this point he began to become deeply fascinated by iconography. He had always been a very avid reader of the Bible, though he was an equally avid repudiator of organized religion, Christianity in particular.
But from an aesthetic point of view, rather than an ascetic point of view we might say, he always remained deeply fascinated by religious texts.
And this was amplified during his visit to Russia where the notion of the icon, this tradition of representing in a secondary way, the unrepresentable, the fascination with the idea of what an image is and what it does, what it means to look at something that is looking at you.
This is part of the theology of icons in the Orthodox world. All of this gestated over the next year, and he began then writing, after his return from the first visit in Russia, he began writing what became the initial section of poems in that book of ours called of monastic life.
And over the next few years he would then add to this and write two subsequent cycles that then complete the collection as it was published in 1905.
So it was a huge turning point aesthetically, poetically, personally, and left a lasting mark for sure.
Yeah, we should mention Lou Andre Selome was a Russian herself. Yeah, born in St. Petersburg, yeah.
She was definitely the right Virgil to that Dante going into.
I have to believe that in addition to all the regions that you've enumerated, that there's something about the Russian attachment to the Earth, the kind of mysticism of the Earth that you have in...
You have in the Russian soul, and how great an affinity might have felt with that, because for me he does remain the poet of the Earth, and even that word or the major, not only word, but motif, and I'd like to imagine that something came up from the soil of that land into a soul, and he felt like he was really in his element.
Out of the four elements, I think I would imagine Earth was the primary one for him.
I imagine he would be happy to hear you say that.
Okay.
So you talked about...
This is a good way to get us into the new poems.
We don't have time to go through the whole development, but the new poems are considered the major achievement of...
We talked about that a little bit later, but when we talk about the new poems, there's a few things to be mentioned.
First is that he had gone to Paris in order to write an essay or a book on Odette, and there he was exposed to Odette's sort of commitment to the material.
The development to the materiality of the artwork and the form of it and the visibility, and he ends up moving away from this intensely subjective, feeling the lyric eye emotions of his...
A lot of his earlier poetry to what are known as these thing poems, right?
Maybe we can read one, but before we do, I think we probably read that famous poem about the archaic torso of Apollo.
Is there something you want to say about his sojourn in Paris with Odette and this turn to the thing poems away from the self-phombs?
Yeah, it was a really organic extension, but also next step from what he had been exploring up to that point as you say.
The book of ours was subjective in a way that his earlier work hadn't been.
One could characterize it as a movement at that time from the sentimental to the mystical.
So the role of subjectivity and of the lyric eye and all of this in the book of ours remained in the foreground, but it performed a different poetic role than in the earlier works.
And the subject remains important in this notion of the thing poem or what he then would characterize during this time as a new way of seeing that Odette was performing the role of mentor in.
But this new way of seeing that is hyper-focused on the other, on the objective, on the material, what makes it so revolutionary in Rylka's work is that it's not so much a focus on mimetically or minutely recording simply the outward appearance of things.
What he's trying to record and what Woldam was really encouraging him to try to do was to record those outward appearances and material contours as they were perceived by the experiencing subject who was there to see them.
So you get the sense in reading these poems that they're not so much describing these these objective appearances as they would appear to anyone who happens upon them.
These are encapsulations of a singular experience of perception that is unique to the one seeing in this moment to the one who is being seen.
We can talk about that as an important motif of what Rylka means by the visible end of seeing.
And though they're singular, I think what continues to strike people about them and certainly this was the case for me as I first got into Rylka, was that that singularity nevertheless leaves room for you to enter into as a reader and experience it again.
Well, it's true, I'm both famously said, it or note, I is another and in these poems you do have a sense that by looking at that object that presumably at first glance doesn't have anything to do with you actually finds a way of the otherness of the eye finds itself in this object.
The eye ego as well as the i-e-y-e, right.
So one of the paradigmatic poems in this regard is known as the archaic torso of Apollo will read another poem of his in German, but if I can just read the translation for the sake of time.
Please, here I'll do so. It reads as follows, the archaic torso of Apollo is looking at a statue of Apollo, which is without a head, I think, and it's in Rome if I'm not mistaken.
I might be mistaken, but in any case, here's how he goes.
We did not know his legendary head in which the eyeballs ripened, but his torso still glows like a candelabrum in which his gaze only turned low, holes, and gleams.
Else could not the curve of the breast blind you, nor in the slight turn of the loins could a smile be running to that middle which carried procreation.
Else would this stone be standing maimed and short, under the shoulders translucent plunge, nor flimmering, like the fell of beasts of prey, nor breaking out of all its contours like a star?
For there is no place that does not see you, you must change your life.
So there you go, you have there at the end that experience of the viewer, the perceiver, which all of a sudden, everything in that object, that thing is kind of looking back at you.
Absolutely, these are some of the most famous lines from this collection of poems, both the first volume and the second volume of which this particular poem is the opening number.
So to speak, it opens the second volume that are dedicated to Hoda, actually, and they do encapsulate much of what is going on throughout both of these collections of poems from the Paris years.
One thing I think that's interesting to note is that these are thing poems in two senses.
Certainly they are concerned with trying to capture the perceptive moment or the instant in which a thing appears to a perceiving subjectivity in a certain way at a certain time.
But at the same time, we can see, particularly towards the end, they were not simply getting enecphrassus, we're not just getting a descriptive recapitulation of what something looks like, as you would find in, say, a catalog of an exhibition or something like that.
What we're hearing is the way, the inner life of this particular thing is bringing itself into visibility and allowing itself to be glimpsed.
And that's something that, for me, is so interesting about these poems, is they feel contingent, they feel that you would only be able to read them in the way that you are reading them because of how that experience unfolded to a particular subjectivity at a particular time.
And that if he had looked at this torso the next day or the next year or at a different time of day, we would have a different poem in front of us.
Because what we read about isn't tied to the material objective reality of the thing out there in space, what we have is a subject and object becoming part of each other.
And there we have another important instance of this crossing of boundaries or thresholds that scholars have spent a lot of time unpacking in this period of his work and in the new poems in particular.
And those last two lines that there is no place that doesn't see you, that gives you this sense that the subject is both perceiving it being perceived by the object and therefore subject of perception.
And the line after that you must change your life also shows us that these encounters don't leave the spectator unchanged.
And the reader is then implicated in this process as well.
So the space of separation between the one looking and the things being looked at and that agency can shift between who is looking at whom, as we see in that penultimate line.
What Rooka shows us in poems like this is that that space of separation isn't a static thing. It's a dynamic, processual thing of exchange of boundaries changing places and it's something that involves anyone who allows himself to be taken along for the ride, it's not closed off.
Yeah, I have a number of questions or remarks. First, I mentioned that you're editing a volume on Rooka and phenomenology and I would imagine that something like this is right in the wheelhouse of phenomenology about the relationship between the observer and what is being looked at.
So I would try to, well, leaving that aside, a question for you about whether it's the artwork which is looking back at him or is it the object, could it be a non aesthetic object that could have the same effect upon the viewer?
In the original German, what we read in the line you're referring to is Den-dah-est-kind-ish-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-in-German is a very capacious word. It can mean there, it can mean here in either a very specific or a very open-ended way.
And I've always read these lines not so much as being localized within a particular point on the sculpture itself, rather they're opening up the sense that one is seen from any potential angle.
And that, for whatever reason, the encounter with this particular object is making that sensation known for the first time, because what comes in immediately after that realization that there is no place or spot from which you are not seen in turn, that leads to this injunction that one's life then must change.
And the injunction to the reader, I think, is a little bit more complicated than simply not to say that changing your life isn't complicated.
But I think we're invited not so much to go out and change our lives, whatever that might mean for us, but to wonder how it would be that having that sense that you as a Cartesian perceiving ego are in fact an object as much as you are a subject.
How does that then change the world around you, such that you need to change your life? And how does it revise the 'versarily in phenomenology' assumption that there is, you know, the ego is the constituting force and that it's the objects or just these passive objects of intentionality.
It actually reminds me a little bit of Walter Benjamin's notion of the aura, where he defines the aura as when the artwork, the aura of the artwork looks back at you.
And that the loss of the aura is when that sort of reciprocal gaze is no longer possible. So here it does seem to be the aura of the statue that's coming forward.
He also calls the "a unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be." And one has that sense here too that you are in intimate proximity to something and at the same time all of your orientations have been rewired.
Excellent. So one more poem from the new poems, or it's not actually the not the new poems, but it's related to the torso poem because it's another artwork in marble, which is a poem called "Pietta", which is about real good looking at, I'm presuming, looking at the famous statue of Michelangelo that he did that's now in the Vatican.
Michelangelo was only 25. When he did it, that beautiful Madonna with Jesus, the dead Jesus in her lap right after the crucifixion. And here maybe we could read this poem both in the original and then the translation.
I should tell our listeners, we're in the studio also with Jan softener, it's going to be a future guest on entitled opinions and he's visiting here in our Department of German Studies, he's teaching a course, very interesting course. And since he's here in studio, Jan, would you do us a favor of maybe reading this short poem in German for us? Why don't you come and take my seat at this chair?
Yes, but my new landfall on Nerman laws, a field is me, Istara, village times, in a restart.
How do we spin? Wising your hands. Do what a source.
Well, I can't say that I understood all the German words but music was absolutely beautiful.
Thanks to Jan softener for helping us out here. Alex, do you want to read the English at this point? Yes, I would be happy to.
Now my misery is full and ineffably it fills me, I stare numb like the stones inner core.
Hard as I am, I know only one thing. You grew and grew, so that as a pain grown too great, you could step completely out of my heart's frame.
Now you lie across my lap, now I can no longer bear you.
Yeah, very interesting. You have a note in your translation because this is your translation that you've read, right? It is, yeah.
This last word of the poem, it's a German word that unfortunately, you know, it doesn't have the same privilege in English.
We can, that word that you chose to bear you is great because to bear means to carry, but it also means to give birth to.
So in German, would any German speaker just assume that what the Virgin Mary is saying there is that now I can no longer give you birth?
I mean, keep an eye on Jan to confirm this.
But Gebieren does specifically mean to give birth. The reason I chose the word bear in English, which is a more archaic form that has that meaning as well, is that earlier in the poem, we have a unique moment in the German language where there are two meanings coexisting simultaneously within a single word.
And this seemed like a unique opportunity to try and reciprocate that in English, which you're very rarely able to do.
With any language and with Rilke's German in particular, so in the English there we're able to hear a little representation of what's going on in an earlier part of the poem within the German itself.
And so what is that word? Gebieren.
No. Oh, the earlier one. Yes.
So in the, in the second and third lines in the German, we hear Ichstare, Videsstine's inneristat.
And that verb Staren is a really fascinating one because it can mean both to stare and to become rigid or to become frozen.
It forms the lexical basis for a more contemporary German word Ichstaren, which means to freeze or to solidify.
And so what's really fascinating and Rilke makes full use of this is that to a German ear that word Staren can evoke simultaneously the idea of looking and of becoming solid, becoming, becoming hard.
And what's going on in this particular moment of the poem is that she is doing both of those things.
She is staring at the body of her son draped across her lap. That's another moment actually where the same thing happens. The German word shooze can be translated either as lap or as womb depending on the context.
And again, in this poem there's a unique instance of both of those kind of coming into proximity with each other.
So it's a very short poem, there isn't a lot going on in terms of formal experimentation, but already along those few lines I've mentioned there's an incredible amount of depth being woven into it.
Well, listen, I, as a Dante, I'm not a Dante scholar, but I teach Dante a lot.
I can't help but think, you know, this is the moment right outside of the city of this where the devils who are telling Dante and Virgil that they're not going to enter, they call for the Medusa to come and turn him to stone.
And what does Virgil do? He covers Dante's eyes, he says, shut your eyes and then it's not enough he has to cover his eyes because to look at the Medusa is to get petrified, to get frozen.
And it's that staring and it seems to me that there is this Medusa subtext right here that the Virgin Mother is turning to stone in her staring at the death, the early death of a son, absurd death, the absurdity.
The staring is also stony insofar as the statue itself is made of marble. So she is looking at something that she's looking at the dead body.
In earlier medieval pietas, the Virgin Mother is usually looking to the sky. God has an answer to this death of the son.
Michelangelo seems to be more dark in his intent because she's just looking at the brute fact of a murder, that's without justification.
And there's a violence in her looking so much so, and I don't know if I've told this anecdote on another occasion on entitled opinions, but when I was in high school in Rome, a schoolmate of mine under the driving age got pulled over and taken to a jail cell by the kind of unietti because he was driving his parents' car without permission, without a license.
And he spent the night in the same cell with that Hungarian band who, the day before, two days before, had attacked this very statue.
And it's very interesting because he attacked the eye of the Virgin and he shouted, "I am Christ, I am Christ, you have murdered me."
Almost as we're suggesting that there is a violence at the heart of the artwork of which vandalism is a counter-response. It's the counter-violence to something that is perceived.
And perhaps he was seeing in his mad visionary way something that this poem is bringing out in its, you know, the threat of petrification of this meaningless death, I don't know.
There's so much there. There is actually, interestingly, a connection to Dante with this poem, which is that it was written at the Castle of Dweino, where he also began composing in the same month, the first two alligies that we might talk about later.
And I believe that Dante is thought to have stayed at that castle following his exile from Rome.
There's a rock that's called Dante's rock and everything. But more interestingly, I think that's interesting enough on its own, but in addition to that, I should say, we do know that this poem was specifically inspired by not Michelangelo's Pieta, but an earlier Pieta in the Cathedral of Aquilea nearby.
Nevertheless, I've always found it very likely that he had Michelangelo's work in mind as well. There's a number of reasons for that, but I think I can maybe sum them up by saying that what's literally formally and also thematically at the center of this poem is the idea of ongoing potential that has suddenly become actualized in an unexpected way, namely through interruption or cessation.
And as you may know, on Michelangelo's statue, you look closely on the sash of the Virgin Mary, you can read the words Michelangelo "fachier bat".
So he was working on this or was making this. And to anyone looking at this insane Peter's, we would assume that it looks pretty complete. It doesn't seem unfinished.
And yet, from the perspective of the artist, he put it in the imperfect tense like that. And what seems to be going on in this poem that I find so fascinating about it is that the speaker here, Mary, moves to the past tense in the middle of the poem when she describes the growth of her son, initially within her, within her shoes, which he's now lying across.
And then, eventually, as she says, when he becomes a pain grown to great, a swoosh, a schmats, and stepped out of the frame of her heart, leaving behind this space.
Now, what's interesting, then, is we have this process of growth, of gaining, of potentiality, of movement forward in time, of expansion in space.
And then, the last lines of the poem return us to the now, to the yes, you lie across my lap, and the most fascinating, mysterious lines of the whole thing, now I can no longer give birth to you.
And the implication, then, would seem to be that, up into this point, somehow it remained open as a potentiality, or as a recurring possibility that she was somehow still giving birth to him, or was still in the position to be able to participate in that process.
And it's only now, when he, as this stony, heavy presence that she's literally cradling, it's only at this moment where he can no longer grow, he can no longer continue forward in space and in time, that she is unable to continue bearing him.
And it almost seems like his birth is only now becoming fully actualized, that potential has become fully actual, at the moment precisely of the cessation of a life, which returns us to that stony now, the poem is spoken out of.
And there you're touching on the major theme of your essay on the ninth elegy, right? And you're having a firsthand experience of just how quickly time goes when you're on entitled opinions and in the midst of a conversation, and believe it or not, we don't have much time left.
That's a point that I'm going to ask you, just, I hate to, you know, have to ask you to be very succinct in summarizing what your argument is about the way in which absence and death is not a termination, but is a fulfillment of presence and life, you know, from the beginning.
Now you relate that theme that we carry our this absence within us to the whole idea of visibility and invisibility and then we know it's not that we know allergies as a whole, but just specifically the ninth one.
So I'm sorry, I'm going to put you under pressure here to come back. I will do my absolute best.
Well, what you spoke to is something that I regard as kind of a red thread through all the real cause work in the middle period on, which is this recurring motif of absence, not just conditioning, but really being contained within and allowing for presence to take form.
And you can trace that in a number of the new poems, it turns up in a really interesting line in Malta. We find it here in this poem, I would argue that we've just read.
And then it comes rushing onto the page in the dween of allergies, and particularly the ninth, where the speaker there is
wailing the fact that our relationship to things and to the world around us more generally has degraded in some way things are ceasing to be what they are.
And what I argue in this reading of the poem is that what things are in their essence, according to the vision that we have in Rilka, is inherently transient.
That is to say that they are as things constantly passing into and passing back out of particular states, places, moments.
So it's not just finitude, it's not just the fact that everything will eventually come to an end, it's the fact that they came into being as well, and both of those dynamics, when they are at an equal pitch, give rise to presence when it is most overwhelming and most delightful.
And that is precisely what the speaker of the poem instructs us to praise, to praise the things of the earth, of the world, in their evanescence.
In their evanescence, what makes the most present is certainly the fact that they will pass away.
And one of the things he's critiquing is within a modern context of industrialization, the new possibility for things to be replaced.
And here, Benjamin certainly would be an interlocutor, mechanical reproduction, but in addition to the finitude of things, or the mortality of things, if you will, equally important is their Natality, the fact that they have beginnings, so you could bring aren't in there as well, which I try and do in the essay.
And what we end up seeing in the final lines of the poem is to me, a really fascinating response to this motif we see in the earlier work of death, or absence, or lack, kind of being the conditioning, kernel of presence.
And we get an interesting response and echo of that, where the poet has been praising these things in and for their transients.
And through language, the quick version of the invisible would be that it is this process of making things language and bringing them inward.
And through that poetic process of saying and praising things by virtue of their transients, we end up reading about a very interesting internal process that is kind of the contra-puntal response to what we read in the PA-TA poem, if I could just quote really briefly here.
So the final lines of the 9th elegy, I'm reading Edward Snow's translation here, Rita's follows.
Earth isn't this what you want to arise in us invisibly, isn't it your dream to be invisible someday? Earth invisible? What, if not transformation, is your urgent charge?
Earth, my darling, I will. Oh, believe me, you need no more of your springs to win me. One, just one is already too much for my blood.
Namelessly, I'm wed to you forever. You have always been right, and your most sacred tenant is death the intimate friend.
Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future grows less.
Over abundant existence wells up in my heart.
So what we end up ending with is this fascinating image of the world having been brought in by virtue of its evanescence.
The earth, not the world. All the earth is brought in. Maybe in a more ineffable mode through this process of praise, it saturates the heart and then spills back over out into the earth and the world.
And so it's sort of a, almost musical, notific reply in a way to the state that Mary found herself in in the PA top home.
Transience is not any less. It's precisely by virtue of the recognition of that transience that this ecstatic process is able to take place, and that's what we're instructed to try and emulate.
That's great. Well, I would just like to conclude by confirming something in another poem. I mean, one should let all these verses sink in, but there's this remarkable poem that you provided me a really good translation of on Orpheus, Eurydicean, Hermes.
And it's a rather long poem, so I'm not certainly not going to read it at all, but it begins with Orpheus who is leading the way out of Hades.
The underworld with Eurydicean has recently dead wife following him because Pluto, the god of the underworld, you know, said if you can get out of here without ever turning back to see that your wife is following, then she will be restored to life.
And Rilka describes in the first part of the poem, the anxiety and the determination of Orpheus as to get out there, and he's very impatient, and he's taking these long strides, and he's just dying to turn around and make sure that she's following along with the thing, and he doesn't do that.
But then the poem shifts to Eurydicean who has just recently died, and it's just amazing that now she walked at that god's hand, Hermes. Her steps constrained by long winding sheets uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
It was within her, this is a state of being dead as it's imagined. I've never read something so kind of insightful here. She was within herself like a woman close to birth, so this is what you were saying earlier, birth and death are really inseparable here.
And thought not of the man who walked ahead, and not of the path ascending into life, she was within herself and her having died, filled her like abundance.
So that's that abundance, that your super abundance at the end of the ninth elegy. Like a fruit with sweetness and night, she was filled with her great death, which was so new that she understood nothing.
So it goes on to a kind of climax in the next verses, but it just seems to resonate very powerfully with your thesis in that article of yours or Mundi in the ninth elegy.
So, Alex Sorenson, thanks so much for coming on to the title of pinions. We've only scratched the surface of Rylken, next time you're in town, you know, we'll come back in here and try to do another show, a follow-up show on Rylken.
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure and an honor. Okay. I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.
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