Reading Rilke by William H. Gass Read Free Book Online Page A

other great stars ring him,
though we cannot see that far.
O he is fat. Do we suppose
he’ll see us? He has need of that?
Sink in any supplicating pose before him,
he’ll sit deep and idle as a cat.
For that which lures us to his feet
has circled in him now a million years.
He has forgotten all we must endure,
encloses all we would escape. 19
    Rodin had an actual exhibition pavilion from the 1900 Paris World’s Fair moved to his property in Meudon-Val-Fleury, just outside the city. In this building, which was flanked by Rodin’s own manor house and surrounded by a number of cottages, workshops, studios, he installed a bounty of his sculptures. On the grounds were placed numerous stone pieces, both whole and in fragments, both Rodin’s own and antique, including the Buddha just celebrated. Among the statuary minced many doves, in spite of the dogs, and on the grounds near the banks of the river three swans managed to waddle. Here, too, the New Poems emerged, the Dinggedicht —a set of solids set in their book as if in a gallery. As Norbert Fuerst correctly observes: “It is characteristic of many of these chiseled and sculptured poems that one can read them backwards, or that one can read back and forth in them. They are more spatial than temporal.” 20
    Eventually, and for a time, enlisted as Rodin’s secretary, Rilke will occupy a cottage at Meudon, lunch with Rodin and his anxious wifewishing mistress, feed the swans, and inspect the stones.
    I wonder if Rilke ever realized how ironic the outcome of his and Rodin’s careers would be, for Rilke leaves the Master to become a Master, to grow through each succeeding year toward his whirlwind, while Rodin is sucked by sycophants into a whirlpool. Sexually overcome … again and again … Rodin is tamed by an American lady who has managed with Jamesian ingenuity to become a duchess. She dressed him, Kenneth Clark says, “in a silk top-hat and frock coat and led him round Europe in a black limousine like a dancing bear.” When Rodin finally got rid of her (beseeched to do so by friends), heremained at Meudon, where the parasites could find him and deprive him of his intestines. “The chorus of praise from enthusiastic ladies and littérateurs ,” in Clark’s opinion, “was calculated to bring out the worst in his genius for it dwelt on the pseudo-mystic qualities in his work.” 21 That is precisely what many of Rilke’s female friends offered him: adoration of his flaws. But they only induced in him a weakness for séances and table-tipping. One must fly from fan and foe alike, for how alike they are. Saved because sex could not entrap him; saved because he always needed …
    Raum . And felt the fear of its lack. Breathing room. He walks the parks, but even when crowded, the parks are vacant, because the spiritual spaces between the people who form the crowds are empty. The poet has sought solitude and found only loneliness. At the zoo, the animals appear superior, yet even they pace, turn like the horses of the carousel, or like the panther in that celebrated poem:
His gaze has grown so worn from the passing
of the bars that it sees nothing anymore.
There seem to be a thousand bars before him
and beyond that thousand nothing of the world.
The supple motion of his panther’s stride,
as he pads through a tightening circle,
is like the dance of strength around a point
on which an equal will stands stupefied.
Only rarely is an opening in the eyes
enabled. Then an image brims
which slides the quiet tension of the limbs
until the heart, wherein it dies. 22
    Rilke’s strategy for the defeat of time was to turn it into space. In that way what was passing—and everything was—merely passed on to another part of reality. Sometimes, if it were the water of a fountain, its changing never changed. And the observer’s inner world would be spread out inside him like an alpine meadow or even an armed camp or an independent country, despite the fact that consciousness