O in-between land

13 December, at night

If every death (like every life) has been allotted a certain portion of time, then days like the last ones will have to be counted up and deducted by its sum. For they are days spent beneath the earth, days in dampness and decay. But that’s so Christian a stratagem: to turn everything unbearable into consolation, it’s the oldest philosophy in Christendom- and deep down I can’t subscribe to it. I fear that such days don’t belong to Death, just as they don’t belong to Life. They belong…O in-between land, if an in-between Spirit presides over you, an in-between God, then they belong to him, this concealed uncanny one. For this is what he wants. Such stretches of hopelessness, such gaspings of the soul. And should they once not recede, not come to an end, not cast away, not suddenly become untrue: if one had to name all this “I”, this unspeakably disconnected, helplessly isolated consciousness that, cut off from the voices of silence, falls into itself as into an empty well, as into the depths of a pool that contains stagnant water and animals gestating in muck. What is one then? Who knows how many afflicted with this in-between existence live in lunatic asylums and die there. And it is so frighteningly easy to die in this state. It is dying itself. The growing indifferent and the balancing with the weight of one’s own inertia an opposite pan full of doubts and putrescences. What good are the efforts one makes ever more sluggishly, ever more wearily, ever more laboriously, like voices of opposition growing fainter-won over by disgust? One’s will is there… but it is like a piece of conduit that has hit rock. One tries: uprisings, ascents, one wants to get moving, one stands for a while, and it all comes to this: one lies down, lies down and is content to lift one’s head just high enough to see what is standing nearby – people and things. One becomes ever so humble, humble to the point of baseness. Humble like a dog with a guilty conscience. Flat, without feeling and filled only with fear, fear of everything that does and does not happen, of what exists and of any change in what one can scarcely bear. Out of distrust one flatters. Crawls before every accident of the day, receives it like a guest one has been expecting for weeks, praises it, is disappointed by its scowl, seeks to hide the disappointment, seeks to erase it inside oneself, to deny it to oneself, deceives oneself, while one has already been deceived as it is, digs oneself deeper and deeper into confusions and lunacy, has dreams, wakens, wishes for an inheritance, a prince’s title, fame, poverty and omnipotence, all at the same time, judges the value of everything now like a child by its golden glitter, now like a whore by profit and pleasure and night-is invaded by everything that happens, is screamed at by all the trivialities and obscenities of the day as by drunken gendarmes, takes up with a riffraff of ideas, drinks, gets drunk on muck, rolls around on stones, goes soiled in the company of cherished memories, drips dirt on consecrated pathways, takes things piety has kept untouched into one’s sticky, sweaty, swollen hands, makes everything common, held in common, common fiat. Pasts fall into impure fire, futures consume themselves in the womb of ill-used hours, put up a struggle, die. And only the unspeakable happens. Deluge and sin’s malediction. And this again and again. And afterward living on again, undisturbed and not astonished? And no to think about the fact that it will all lie before you again the very moment you have overcome it…(no, not so proud a word as “overcome”), that the very moment it has grown shallow, has been left behind, and you start to feel the sand drying beneath your feet, it rises again and grows warm. God presides over Life and over Death. But he has no dominion over the in-between land, it exists in spite of his power and presence, has no space, no time, no eternity. Has only heartbeats of unspeakably sorrowful hearts suspended high up and frightened, unaware of one another, deprived of all relations and connections, switched off, without meaning, their beating possessing as little truth and reality as the royal proclamation delivered by a lunatic in a straightjacket before crassly laughing guards and frightened inmates…This had to be written as a sign of myself. God help me.

(Excerpt from Diaries of a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Edward Snow & Michael Winkler. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1998)

Fragments

I

THE way old royal houses are interwined
with all thrones in their vicinity,
we're anciently related to every Power,
even when we're tired, fearful, and cast out.
Infinitely many things pertain to us
that occur far away, to others:
a foreign girl, weighed down by sadness,
in an evening hour a song arose,
the night was mute, and a wall-clock struck
in a room beside a dead mother...
We feel all that and live through it
and grow heavy from it and feel a lightness
when that passed which likens us
to distant destiny, its song and day and death.

II

YOU sang: We saw
your voice
open up for us,
the deep silver minework of your soul.
The secluded room grew dark.
You were silent, a little out of breath.
We felt a greatness,-
still hearing what you sang.
Memories of things never experienced
filled us. And when we begged you: Sing,
we meant: Bestow on us times past,
place ancestors behind us, royal epochs,
create generations that flourish,
women in white and an abode in green
and a slim man in black clothes
and a park, a castle, and a battle,
a frenzied wrestling for a slender flag,
and evenings, figures by the alcove,
the white country house of a courtesan,
quietly repeated in a nearby pond,-
and a pounding at doors and hearts
by fleeting gleams from gold and crystal,
jasmine and roses, scents of summer weeks.
And outside the windows: night and nightingale.
And then again storm and downfall and decay.
Typhus wards, infirmaries, nurses
who teach strange men to accept their dying,
more strange men who fight death off,
torn between fear and longing,
feverish foreheads that distort the world,
greyhounds and great lords,
and everything as close as yesterday
and as distant as never yet:
such was your song.
You sang us epochs.
And with senses as yet unnamed,
and of which no one knows where they dwell,
we received longings
and sensations
we shall never lose.
We shall make gestures
that we have never made before.
And shall rest heavily
from struggles that weren't real.
But what is reality,
must it coincide with time?
The world is real.
And everything is world
that moves us, to great feeelings or to fear:
desire and solitude, death and song.

(Excerpt from Diaries of a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Edward Snow & Michael Winkler. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1998)

Diaries of a young poet (excerpt)

Saturday, 24 March 1900

DON'T be lured by those sounds
that fall to you out of the full wind;
wait, see if your strings
will attract hands that are eternal.

Those evolving are expelled by Time;
for Time is nothing but decay.
You can only grow in the Colossal,
only be solitary in the All.

(Excerpt from Diaries of a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Edward Snow & Michael Winkler. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1998)

Fragments from broken-off days

7 November

Like birds that get used to walking
and grow heavier and heavier, as in free-fall:
the earth sucks out of their long claws
the brave memory of every
great thing that happens high up,
and turns them almost into leaves that cling
thickly to the ground, -like plants that,
scarcely growing upward, cringe into the soil,
sink lightly and softly and wetly
into black clods and sicken there lifelessly,-
like mad children, like a face
in a coffin, like happy hands that
grow hesitant, because in the full chalice
things are mirrored that are not near,
like calls for help that in the evening wind
collide with many dark huge chimes,
like house plants that have dried for days,
like streets that are ill-framed, like curls
in which all jewels have grown blind,
like early morning in April
facing the hospital’s many windows:
the sick press up against the hall’s seam
and gaze: the grace of a new light
makes all the streets springtimelike and wide;
they see only the bright majesty
that makes each house young and full of laughter,-
and don’t know that all night long
a storm has ripped the garments from the skies,
a storm of waters sent from where the world is still frozen,
a storm that even now roars through the streets
and removes all burdens from the things’ shoulders,
that something outside is huge and incensed,
that outside Power stalks, a fist
that would strangle each one of the sick
in the midst of this brilliance, which they behold
and thrill to and believe in with racing hearts.

Like long nights in faded bowers
that have been ripped open on all sides
and are much too large to sit inside
with someone loved and weep together,
like naked girls, approaching over stones,
like drunkards in a birch grove,
like words that mean nothing definite
and yet fly, penetrate the ear, continue on
into the brain and secretly among the nerve-branches
through every limb try out leap after leap,
like old men who curse their race
and then die, so that the harm imposed
can never be annulled,
like full roses, artfully brought up
in the blue hothouse where the breezes lied,
and then from the exhilaration in great curves
strewn out upon the scattered snow,
like an earth that cannot orbit
because too many dead weigh on its feeling,
like a man killed and buried
whose hands are warding off roots,
like one of the tall, slim, red
midsummer flowers, which unredeemed
dies suddenly in its favourite meadow-wind
because below its root hits turquoise
in the earring corpse
and stops…

And many a day’s hours were like that.
As though my likeness, clay-gray, lay somewhere
in hands that tortured it dementedly.
I felt the sharp pricks of their playing.
As though a long rain fell on me
in which all things slowly changed.

(Excerpt from Diaries of a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Edward Snow & Michael Winkler. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1998)

Sound

THUS must you understand the hours:
grow and seldom be afraid.-
Be instead a sound:
then you'll glide across all chords.

(Excerpt from Diaries of a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Edward Snow & Michael Winkler. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1998)

It's possible

It is ridiculous. Here I sit in my little room, I, Brigge, who have grown to be twenty-eight years old and of whom no one knows. I sit here and am nothing. And nevertheless this nothing begins to think and thinks, five flights up, on a grey Parisian afternoon, thinks these thoughts:

Is it possible, it thinks, that one has not yet seen, known and said anything real or important? Is it possible that one has had millenia of time to observe, reflect and note down, and that one has let those millennia slip away, like a recess interval at school in which one eats one’s sandwich and an apple?

Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that despite discoveries and progress, despite culture, religion and world-wisdom, one has remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that one has even covered this surface, which might still have been something, with an incredibly uninteresting stuff which makes it look like the drawing-room furniture during summer holidays?

Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false, because one has always spoken of its masses just as though one were telling of a coming together of many human beings, instead of speaking of the individual around whom they stood because he was a stranger and was dying?

Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that one believed it necessary to retrieve what happened before one was born? Is it possible that one would have to remind every individual that he is indeed sprung from all who have gone before, has known this therefore and should not let himself be persuaded by others who knew otherwise?

Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that all these people know with perfect accuracy a past that has never existed? Is it possible that all realities are nothing to them; that their life is running down, unconnected with anything, like a clock in an empty room-?

Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that one knows nothing of young girls, who nevertheless live? Is it possible that one says "women", "children", "boys", not guessing (despite all one's culture, not guessing) that these words have long since had no plural, but only countless singulars?

Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and mean something they have in common?- Just take a couple of schoolboys: one buys a pocket knife and his companion buys another exactly like it on the same day. And after a week they compare knives and it turns out that there is now only a very distant resemblance between the two - so differently have they developed in different hands. ("Well", says the mother of one, "if you always must wear everything out immediately-") Ah, so: Is it possible to believe one could have a God without using Him?

Yes, it is possible.
But if all this is possible - has even no more than a semblance of possibility - then surely, for all the world’s sake, something must happen. The first comer, he who has had this disturbing thought, must begin to do some of the things that have been neglected; even if he is just anybody, by no means the most suitable person: there is no one else at hand. This young, insignificant foreigner, Brigge, will have to sit down in his room five flights up and write, day and night: yes, he will have to write; that is how it will end.

(Excerpt from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by M. D. Herter Norton. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1949)

Teaching

On the evening of 12 April 1900

WHEN you return from deserts, long off alone,
enriched by your silence's weight,-
it may be that you'll know yourself well
and feel: I am a teacher of mankind.
Yet nothing corrupts so much as this:
to approach people as instructor.
You stand at the edge of their looks
and read their hidden hatred.-
And you interpret it to your advantage.
But you're lying: they despise you.
And ever since that lie crept up on you,
you've grown devoid of mastery,
and your house is just like the others.
Whoever would truly master people,
let him go far away from them, quietly,
and let his serenity be unvoiced;
for no one can penetrate the workings
of his own time. To every sage
its fate, its sorrow, is an enigma.
All he experienced is that force
from which the times, departing quietly,
make their way toward mankind.
And forever branded by this knowledge,
he may not ever grasp the others.
That's why to this very day
no word of any triumph has arrived:
no teacher has ever kept silent,
and no wisdom has ever been attained
by this wavering one, by shame.-
Thus we became dreamy violinists
who softly step out of their doors
to make sure, before they pray,
that no neighbor eavesdrops on them.
Who only, when all people have dispersed,
behind the last sounds of evening
play the songs behind which-
like woods in the wind behind fountains-
the dark violin-case murmurs.
For voices are only worth anything
when silences accompany them;
when behind the speech of the strings
rushings remain as if from blood;
and unendurable are those times when
behind all the vanities and strutting masks
there is no ruling force that rests.-

Patience: the gentle clock hand circles,
and what was promised will come about;
we are the whisperers before the silent one,
we are the meadows before the wood;
they still resonate with a dark humming,-
voices everywhere and yet no choir-
and they help prepare us for the mute, deep,
everpresent holy groves...

On the same evening

AND if sometime you have to teach-
because you have a child, one who sits waiting,
or because in the evening a guest,
one dark with grime,
walks up to the edge of your lamp,
or because your stride
falters once
and you have to stay until daybreak
among strangers,
or because a friend from times past, one who feels
the long-ago friendship tottering,
implores you
to write him sometime soon-
that's when you'd better whisper to yourself
what "teaching" means:
with words that are at your call
to say: I am.
And then furthermore
what teaching doesn't mean: to lecture
every man on the tumble of times,
on the how and wherefore of their succesion;
teaching means: to ask of each person
what he feels closest to in silence...


(Excerpt from Diaries of a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Edward Snow & Michael Winkler. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1998)

Diaries of a young poet (excerpt)

...All of world history's great dramas of heroic ambition you can observe in a single evening sky, more festive and frightful than they ever came to pass. But if your soul does not feed on these things of the past, if it apprehends motion even where motion is not expressed as the jostiling of masses, then it has space and power to discern in each hour a pure, more elemental action in which solemn and calm forces enact selfless gestures without posture and pomp. It will observe that there are far deeper and more unsettling sensations than being reminded by a group of rushing clouds of Lutzow's Hussars or by a mighty river of a dark pirate ship, and it will feel clearly that such memories are signs of a certain immaturity and lack of independence. Why listen so intently to the breathing of yesterday and the day before - since both of them are sleeping and the present moment is awake? Is it any different from thinking, in the face of a mighty and proud granite rock, of the rain that washed over it yesterday?

In this way people betray themselves to be false aristocrats. They believe their wealth consists in celebrating and praising the memory of great ancestors. While all the time they could be so much richer if they celebrated and praised their own possibilities.

For those who talk about a great departed know nothing about him except anecdotes. But those in whom a great ancestor resurrects keep silent about him.

That is why every real one must feel himself to be a first one; for the world whose inception he is knows no history; the fathers and forebears from whom he receives culture and strength and style and aptitude are contemporaries of his soul and are at work in him, not before him. All the others, alas, lived on other stars and died on other stars!

As in general a history of the present would have to comprise whatever things of the past became productive and apparent in later fruitions. What belonged solely to one era gained significance solely for that era, and the so-called historical value is a collector's price not everyone is willing to pay...

(Excerpt from Diaries of a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Edward Snow & Michael Winkler. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1998)