6 posts tagged “rilke”
XXIX
Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath increases space.
In the woodwork of dark clockwork
let yourself resound. That which weakens you
becomes a strength through this nourishment.
In the transformation go out and in.
What is your saddest experience?
Is drinking bitter? Become wine.
Be in this night of weariness
magic at the intersection of your senses--
their selfsame meeting point.
And if the worldly forgets you,
to the still earth say: I flow.
To the rushing water say: I am.
~translated from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his inscrutable head
in which the pupils dilated. However
his torso still glows like a candelabra
in which are his displays, though infrequent
stopping and shining. Otherwise the bow
of his breast could not dazzle, and
in quiet turns of his loins, a quiver
could not go to every bliss-bearing center.
Otherwise this statue passed time distorted
and shortly, under the weight of a fall, glistened
not unlike the fur of a wild beast
and did not break out of his boundaries
like a star: because there is no place
that does not see you. You must
change your life.
--Translated by Renee Zepeda
Sein Blick ist vom Vorubergehn der Stabe
so mud geworden, dass er nichts mehr halt.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stabe gabe
und hinter tausend Staben keine Welt.
Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betaubt ein grosser Wille steht.
Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf--. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille--
und hort im Herzen auf zu sein.
[Im Jardin des Plantes, Paris, 1903]
*
His gaze is so restless, pacing behind bars,
he can't keep gazing.
To him it is as if a thousand bars existed
and behind a thousand bars no world.
The soft gait of supple-strong steps,
that turns him in ever smaller circles,
is like a dance of power around a center,
in which a larger will lies.
Sometimes an eyelid silently lifts--
then an image appears and rushes
through his tense limbs--
and stops in his heart.
--Translated by Renee Zepeda
*
Letters to a Poet
And even if you were in some prison
would you not then still have your childhood,
that treasure-house of memories?
Maybe this is my treasure-house: blank-faced dolls
At the door, venerable geishas from Tokyo
She forms her lips into a bow.
Stands.
Every inch assumes a shadow.
Every mirror deals cold lassitude.
Icy, she perks like spring tulips, feigns fusilier,
Never this precision of gesture.
Never this beneficence before.
The dolls topple over--
She strains to spy a glistening whiteness, silence
A stranger hovers, apparition in space
I am half who made her.
Look here, she floats at the level of the eye;
And with tiny blinks,
I hear footfalls, soldiers, bells.
She reads Rilke to mine for names.
Hers is a handmade museum...
Under icicles,
mountains and their trees
Freeze in the part of the dark her hand goes to.
How should it not be difficult for us? Do you remember
how your life yearned out of its childhood for the "great"?
Middle of middles, kernal of kernals
Almond, that encloses and sweetens
this Everything through all stars
is your fruit-flesh: you are greeted.
See, you feel, how nothing hangs on you anymore
in eternity is your soul
and there is the strong juice.
And from the outside comes a strand
because far above your suns
are becoming full and glowingly rotate.
Yes in you is already begun
what the suns watchover.
--Rilke, Paris, Summer 1908
|
The best thing about Debussy’s Clair de Lune is how it moves. It is the underwater flight of an angelfish or the languidly, deeply, swaying tendrils of a sea urchin. It is a white balloon floating slowly upward. I have rarely seen the being that Clair de Lune is. Is she a she, I wonder. I think perhaps it is a very gentle person, a graceful person, a ballerina perhaps, light enough to float into the air and gently float back down again. Is that how Maria Tallchief was? Or Pavlova? Renée Jeanmaire?
I never went en pointe. I decided I liked jazz better than ballet. But when I was twelve I loved ballet. I loved the tutus and I loved the soft pink shoes. I loved the music and I loved the teacher. I took lessons in New York City and my teacher was from the City Ballet. She was so pretty, all of the little girls wanted to be like her. Graceful and well mannered, yet chic and sturdy. Unbreakable.
I loved ballet so much that I asked for a Degas painting for my birthday. I still have it to this day; it has a lovely silver frame that my mother bought in Manhattan. The picture is a print of an oil painting that shows a young dark-haired ballerina in a completely white costume with a strand of pink and orange flowers around her waist. A dark-suited man waits in the wings, but his face is hidden. He is a mystery. Waiting for the ballerina to finish her dance so he can give her more flowers, roses, and something else.
Something the young ballerina wanted, wants. Love. Appreciation. Gentleness. Do such things still exist in the land? Yes, but they are so seldom. So rare, so undernourished. I am reminded of my college friend Dan playing Charlie Parker on his trombone while he waited for me to come home from work or Ken driving through the streets of Ann Arbor looking for me while he listens to Madeleine Peyroux’s violet-colored song… Rilke’s poem (translated by Stephen Mitchell)
His vision, from the passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else.
It seems to him there are a thousand bars;
and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly--.
An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
The poem is about energy restrained. Energy caught. A butterfly or cat or soul trapped in what the Buddhists call the Bardo, or transitional state. The state between death and rebirth. Retreat. Rejuvenation. Renai-ssance. Simone Weil believed it was woe to him whose death of the body preceded that of the spirit. Death from the outside or affliction. The French nun Margaret Porette said of those who are forlorn or slaves:
Their work enables them to attain to that state of being from which those who have become lost can no longer have any help. Those who go astray often ask the way from the one who knows it—that is, from the damsel of Knowledge. And so she shows them the King’s great highway through the land of Wishing for Nothing… For every state of being, whatever it may be, is nothing but a game of ball, a child’s sport, compared with the great state of Wishing for Nothing, in which the free dwell and from which they never move.
Oh to wish for nothing! If we don’t ask for any more wishes, is that the same as wishing for nothing? I think so. And yet wishes are important. The little boy in The Neverending Story wouldn’t have been able to save the kingdom without making wishes, without wishing for his favorite parts of the story back, in order to defeat The Nothing. So there is a distinction between wishing and wanting. Creating and envying. I think in that way, wishing and creating are the same. Dreaming and creating.
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