Reading Rilke by William H. Gass Read Free Book Online

if one day all we do and suffer done
should seem suddenly trivial and strange,
as though it were no longer clear
why we should have kicked off our childhood shoes
for such things—would not this length
of yellowed lace, this densely woven swatch
of linen flowers, be enough to hold us here?
See: this much was accomplished.
A life, perhaps, was made too little of, who knows?
a happiness in hand let slip; yet despite this,
for each loss there appeared in its place
this spun-out thing, no lighter than life,
and yet perfect, and so beautiful that all our so-be-its
are no longer too early, smiled at, and held in abeyance. 18
    This much was accomplished. But when Rilke reached Paris on August 28, 1902, to study and write on Rodin, he was still a young man in his twenties, given to depressions and hysterical highs, to enthusiasms which overmatched their causes, and to the habit of seeking in the world convenient containers for his copious but volatile and uneducated feelings. He needed to be reformed and focused, and he was: by Paris, by the example of Rodin, by the poetry of Baudelaire, which so suited its site and Rilke’s moods, by the fictions of Flaubert, and maybe most of all by the paintings of Cézanne.
    Not the dots but the distance between them that creates the line; not the lines which turn into contours, but the planes between; not simply the planes but the surfaces they define; not the surfaces alone but the light with which they combine to bring every point upon them vibrantly to life: these were some of the things he learned. He learned that in one’s art an elbow may flow into a thigh, a chin disappear into a palm, a walker walk more purely without the distraction of arms; he learned how a figure might emerge from a chunk of marble like a plant from the ground; he learned that “there are tears which pour from all pores” because everything has an expression, a face where a smile alone lives; that there is stone that can be set in motion, or a motion held like a pose; that every accident should be made necessary, and every necessity look like a towel thrown over the back of a chair—these were a few of the lessons he took to heart: that the poet’s eye needs to be so candid that even a decaying vulva, full of flies, must be fearlessly reported, following Baudelaire’s example; that exactitude is prerequisite to achievement, so that whatever is full should be fully shown, but rendered spare when sparse, and empty when empty; above all, that art is actually the opposite of nature, and that the creation of being—the breathing of statues—is what counts; not the imitation of nature but its transformation is the artist’s aim: thesewere some of the things he learned, they began his Wendung , his moment of “turning.” Finally, Rilke learned what seeing is, and then he learned to see.
    “To see” means to taste and thereby to “dance the orange,” to touch and feel at one’s finger end a little eternity, to smell ourselves cloud like steam from a warm cup, to hear voices, to listen so intensely you rise straight from the ground.
    And he saw a man growing from the shoulder of a seated woman; he saw Orpheus—Eurydice behind him helpless—Orpheus’ hand at his eyes; he saw a sculpture called The Death of the Poet , another called The Prodigal Son ; he saw plaster couples intertwined; he saw sleeping marbles, and birds of stone so artfully wrought that every feather implied flight and therefore a sky to fly through; he saw a victim of St. Vitus’ dance jiggling and convulsing on a Paris street, blind men blind and beggars begging; he saw a woman who, in grief, left her face in her hands: each called forth poems … eventually … prose that equaled the best of his poems … poems that filled space as much as their subjects did, such as the Buddha he contemplated so often in Rodin’s garden at Meudon.
As if he listened. Silence. Depth.
And we hold back our breath. Yet nothing yet.
And he is star. And