vanitas and freeform nothing

I think we are in rats’ alley 
Where the dead men lost their bones. 

“What is that noise?” 
                      The wind under the door. 
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?” 
                      Nothing again nothing. 
                                              “Do 
You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember 
Nothing?” 
        I remember 
                Those are pearls that were his eyes. 
“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?” 
                                                         But 
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— 
It’s so elegant 
So intelligent

Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career
Of laughing with a sigh?--a note infallible
Of breaking honesty--horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?
Hours, minutes? noon, midnight? and all eyes
Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only,
That would unseen be wicked? is this nothing?
Why, then the world and all that's in't is nothing;
The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing;
My wife is nothing; nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.

"On Margate Sands. 
I can connect 
Nothing with nothing. 
The broken finger-nails of dirty hands. 
My people humble people who expect 
Nothing.” 

      la la 

To Carthage then I came 

Burning burning burning burning 
O Lord Thou pluckest me out 
O Lord Thou pluckest 

burning

You are the last I recognize; return,
pain beyond help that sears the body’s cells:
as I burnt in the spirit, see, I burn
in you; the wood, that for so long rebels
against the flame you kindle, comes of age;
behold, I nourish you and burn in you.
My earthly mildness changes in your rage
into a rage of hell I never knew.

Quite pure, quite planless, of all future free,
I climbed the stake of suffering, resolute
not to acquire what is still to be
to clad this heart whose stores had become mute.
Is it still I that burns there all alone?
Unrecognizable? memories denied?

O life, o life: being outside.
And I in flames—no one is left—unknown.

Vanitas still life with portrait; David Bailly (1650), Naked Lunch, Wasteland, Winter's Tale, Wasteland, Komm du, du Letzter; Rilke.

Does the infinite space we dissolve into, taste of us then?

Pasolini's Teorema

The Second Elegy, trans. Stephen Mitchell


Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas, I invoke you,

almost deadly birds of the soul, knowing about you.
Where are the days of Tobias, when one of you, veiling his radiance, 

stood at the front door, slightly disguised for the journey, no longer appalling;

(a young man like the one who curiously peeked through the window).
But if the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars took even one step down toward us:

our own heart, beating higher and higher, would beat us to death.
Who are you?

Early successes, Creation's pampered favorites,

mountain-ranges, peaks growing red in the dawn of all beginning,--

pollen of the flowering godhead, joints of pure light, 

corridors, stairways, thrones, space formed from essence,

shields made of ecstasy, storms of emotion whirled into rapture, and suddenly alone:

mirrors, which scoop up the beauty that has streamed from their face

and gather it back, into themselves, entire.

But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we breathe ourselves out and away; 

from moment to moment our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume.
Though someone may tell us: "Yes, you've entered my bloodstream, the room,

the whole springtime is filled with you . . . "--what does it matter? he can't contain us, 

we vanish inside him and around him.
And those who are beautiful, oh who can retain them?
Appearance ceaselessly rises in their face, and is gone.
Like dew from the morning grass, what is ours floats into the air, like steam from a dish of hot food.
O smile, where are you going?
O upturned glance: new warm receding wave on the sea of the heart . . .

alas, but that is what we are.
Does the infinite space we dissolve into, taste of us then?
Do the angels really reabsorb only the radiance that streamed out from themselves,

or sometimes, as if by an oversight, is there a trace of our essence in it as well?
Are we mixed in with their features even as slightly as that vague look

in the faces of pregnant women?
They do not notice it (how could they notice) in their swirling return to themselves.Lovers, if they knew how, might utter strange, marvelous words in the night air.
For it seems that everything hides us.
Look: trees do exist; the houses that we live in still stand.
We alone fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind.
And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.

Lovers, gratified in each other, I am asking you about us.
You hold each other. Where is your proof?
Look, sometimes I find that my hands have become aware of each other,

or that my time-worn face shelters itself inside them.
That gives me a slight sensation.
But who would dare to exist, just for that?
You, though, who in the other's passion grow until, overwhelmed, he begs you:
"No more . . . "; you who beneath his hands swell with abundance,

like autumn grapes; you who may disappear because the other has wholly emerged:
I am asking you about us.
I know, you touch so blissfully because the caress preserves, 

because the place you so tenderly cover does not vanish;

because underneath it you feel pure duration.
So you promise eternity, almost, from the embrace.
And yet, when you have survived the terror of the first glances, 

the longing at the window, and the first walk together, once only, through the garden:

lovers, are you the same?
When you lift yourselves up to each other's mouth and your lips join,

drink against drink: oh how strangely each drinker seeps away from his action.

Weren't you astonished by the caution of human gestures on Attic gravestones?
Wasn't love and departure placed so gently on shoulders 

that it seemed to be made of a different substance than in our world?
Remember the hands, how weightlessly they rest, though there is power in the torsos.
These self-mastered figures know: "We can go this far,

this is ours, to touch one another this lightly; the gods can press down harder upon us.
But that is the gods' affair."

If only we too could discover a pure, contained, human place,

our own strip of fruit-bearing soil between river and rock.
For our own heart always exceeds us, as theirs did.
And we can no longer follow it, 

gazing into images that soothe it or into the godlike bodies where,

measured more greatly, it achieves a greater repose.

Orpheus and the Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors; Rilke & Sergei Parajanov

The Kill

Far-conquering man . . . You’ve written, since you first
turned hunter, many a level new death-rule
of trap or net. Though I know the strip of sail
they hung into the caverns of the Karst,

so softly, like the flag of peace, or ceasefire . . .
Then, from the cave-mouth, a boy gave it a jerk
and tumbling dayward out of the cave-dark
came a handful of pale doves. This too is fair.

No one could take pity on their breath,
Least of all those men who raised their sights
and in that wakeful moment understood:

Our wandering sorrow takes the shape of death.
The spirit fallen into quietude
Knows that what befalls it must be right.

Don Paterson, a Scot and one of the greatest poets alive today, has created 'versions' of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, of which The Kill is one. They are not strict translations, but new structures built of what Paterson calls the 'vernacular architecture' of the originals. Rilke often suffers in English, and his translators are often criticised for making him wordy and cold, descriptives of his work not familiar to native German speakers. The sonnets were written over three weeks in 1922, whilst Rilke was at work on the Duino Elegies. 'They are,' he wrote later, 'perhaps most mysterious even to me, in the manner in which they arrived and imposed themselves on me - the most puzzling dictation I have ever received and taken down.' Sergei Parajanov's highly symbolic 1964 film, alternatively titled Wild Horses of Fire, portrays the mythology and struggles of the Ukrainian Hutsuls through the love story of Ivan and Marichka. Hallucinatory and penetrating, the film is utterly delightful; it slows the blood.

primal sound... Rilke playing skulls, probing space.. !!!

it must have been when i was a boy at school that the phonograph was invented. at any rate it was at that time a chief object of public wonder; this was probably the reason why our science master, a man given to busying himself with all kinds of handiwork, encouraged us to try our skill in making one of these instruments from the material that lay nearest to hand. nothing more was needed than a piece of pliable cardboard bent to the shape of a funnel, on the narrower round orifice of which was stuck a piece of impermeable paper of the kind used to seal bottled fruit. this provided a vibrating membrane, in the middle of which we then stuck a bristle from a coarse clothes brush at right angles to its surface. with these few things one part of the mysterious machine was made, receiver and reproducer were complete. it now only remained to construct the receiving cylinder, which could be moved close to the needle marking the sounds by means of a small rotating handle. i do not now remember what we made it of; there was some kind of cylinder which we covered with a thin coating of candle wax to the best of our ability. our impatience, brought to a pitch by the excitement of sticking and fitting the parts, as we jostled one another over it, was such that the wax had scarcely cooled and hardened before we put our work to the test.

how this was done can easily be imagined. when someone spoke or sang into the funnel, the needle in the parchment transferred the sound-waves to the receptive surface of the roll turning slowly beneath it, and then, when the moving needle was made to retrace its path (which had been fixed in the meantime with a coat of varnish), the sound which had been ours came back to us tremblingly, haltingly from the paper funnel, uncertain, infinitely soft and hesitating and fading out altogether in places. each time the effect was complete. our class was not exactly one of the quietest, and there can have been few moments in its history when it had been able as a body to achieve such a degree of silence. the phenomenon, on every repetition of it, remained astonishing, indeed positively staggering. we were confronting, as it were, a new and infinitely delicate point in the texture of reality, from which something far greater than ourselves, yet indescribably immature, seemed to be appealing to us as if seeking help. at the time and all through the intervening years i believed that that independent sound, taken from us and preserved outside us, would be unforgettable. that it turned out otherwise is the cause of my writing the present account. as will be seen, what impressed itself on my memory most deeply was not the sound from the funnel but the markings traced on the cylinder; these made a most definite impression.

i first became aware of this some fourteen or fifteen years after my school-days were past. it was during my first stay in paris. at that time i was attending the anatomy lectures in the école des beaux-arts with considerable enthusiasm. it was not so much the manifold interlacing of the muscles and sinews nor the complete agreement of the inner organs one with another that appealed to me, but rather the bare skeleton, the restrained energy and elasticity of which i had already noticed when studying the drawings of leonardo. however much i puzzled over the structure of the whole, it was more than i could deal with; my attention always reverted to the study of the skull, which seemed to me to constitute the utmost achievement, as it were, of which this chalky element was capable; it was as if it had been persuaded to make just in this part a special effort to render a decisive service by providing a most solid protection for the most daring feature of all, for something which, although itself narrowly confined, had a field of activity which was boundless. the fascination which this particular structure had for me reached such a pitch finally, that i procured a skull in order to spend many hours of the night with it; and, as always happens with me and things, it was not only the moments of deliberate attention which made this ambiguous object really mine: i owe my familiarity with it, beyond doubt, in part to that passing glance, with which we involuntarily examine and perceive our daily environment, when there exists any relationship at all between it and us. it was a passing glance of this kind which i suddenly checked in its course, making it exact and attentive. by candlelight– which is often so peculiarly alive and challenging–the coronal suture had become strikingly visible, and i knew at once what it reminded me of: one of those unforgotten grooves, which had been scratched in a little wax cylinder by the point of a bristle!

suffering's tangled, criss-crossed pyre... Komm du

...Quite pure of forethought, futureless and free
I mounted suffering’s tangled, criss-crossed pyre,
so sure there was no purchase to acquire
for this heart’s future, all its store now silent.
What burns there, so transmuted? Is that I?
Into this fire I drag no memory.
To be alive, alive: to be outside.
And I ablaze. With no one who knows me.


Rilke’s Last Encounter With an Angel; Scott Horton in Harper's Bazaar (2007)


History knows several tales concerning great artists on their death beds, straining with superhuman strength to complete a final last work, a work filled with pathos and a great sense of mortality. The best known of these, perhaps, is the tale of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor, KV 626. In the Romantic era, the circumstances surrounding the creation of this work were mystified. Death, it was said, paid a call to Mozart to commission it, and Mozart fully understood the circumstances. He was, it was said, writing his own requiem. Of course, spoil-sport academics have since documented that the piece was commissioned by Count Franz von Walsegg, who wanted to pass it off as his own, and who had used a series of cloaked intermediaries to disguise the fact that he was the patron. The Requiem is, nonetheless, a magnificent work, one of Mozart’s greatest. It would have that position with or without the legend. And notwithstanding Count von Walsegg and his artifices, one does have a great sense of reconciliation to death in this work. It is extraordinary in that respect, much like Bach’s great cantata “Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit” (Actus Tragicus, BWV 106).

One has to wonder about Rilke’s last poem, “Komm du” in much the same way. This was found as the last entry in his last notebook. It is accordingly unclear whether Rilke considered the poem to be a finished work or merely something in progress. In fact, there is a notation at the end which may be taken as a note Rilke scribbled to himself:

Verzicht. Das ist nicht so wie Krankheit war
einst in der Kindheit. Aufschub. Vorwand um
größer zu werden. Alles rief und raunte.
Misch nicht in dieses was dich früh erstaunte

Relinquishment. It’s not the way sickness was
once in childhood. Procrastination. A pretense
in order to be greater. Cries and murmurs.
Don’t mix into this the things that surprised you early on.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 511.

So I don’t take it as a given that the work was brought to fruition in Rilke’s mind. Nevertheless, this poem is amazing. It is one of the greatest poems in the German language, or in any other. And it has the distinctive character of finality about it, not in the sense of being completed, but rather of being a last work. It does not reach to being completed. To the contrary, it aims to be and is transitional, passing from one state to another. That indeed appears in the very first words, “Komm du, du letzter”: a voice summons or beckons. This poem wears the lack of finality like a sort of accomplishment in itself.

for here there is no place that does not see you...

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,


gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could 
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.


Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:


would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.




Archaic Torso of Apollo, Rainer Maria Rilke

Waiting for the Restoration (Rapture), Paris, 2010

your birth in my body... the act & the word

Ah, the sweet unhistorical, the sweet act. I venerate you. From your birth in my body, your bursting into my mind & soul, I forget you, but that is what you want, what you require of me. You are mine only when I do not know you are here, for knowing would drive you out. Thinking you would force you to stand still as the 'the possible act' amongst many others, and here, I know, contrary to those who revere thinking, you are only a shadow of yourself. Isn't love the highest of all; swirlingly here, giddyingly present?


My words do venerate you, sweet unhistorical, but they know that they cannot compete with you. They consecrate, but cannot act, cannot love. They historicise and memorialise, but nostalgia is the only memory that can really re-live and it does so because it is speechless. It acts upon you; it simply is, lived without consent or thought. Movement! it passes over and through you. You are surprised. Why? Because the historical, memory, has been made unhistorical. It has been made to live. This is its pleasure and its pain. I will not agree with our cultural fellows who cheapen it by saying that its pain is a wanting to return  to history, to the 'good old days'. They make it pathetic and turn us into a gutless bunch, unable to face the future, clinging desperately to something unattainably past.

No, sweet unhistorical. I know that nostalgia's pain is precisely that pre-linguistic knowledge that one cannot re-live the reliving; it acts upon you, you cannot enact it. Ah, we somehow know what is un-articulable, we know it as soon as it hits us - that it will play through and be gone. It is only sweet because it is so. We are mourning the ending as we are loving the living. Who said? "my God, if any of it could be shared! But would it be then, would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude."

Hark, how the night grows fluted and hollowed... da Vinci, Duino Elegies, the Kantian sublime

Da Vinci's The Annunciation shows the angel Gabriel speaking the divine will to the Virgin Mary. As the exemplar of Rilke's mother figure, she touches the noumenal and phenomenal worlds, both communing with something sacred beyond and protecting from the terror that lies there. The terror of the eternal, the terror of the night, the seduction of its horror, the sublimity therein. Taking a Kantian notion of the sublime, we are getting close to Rilke's night-time world, growing fluted and hollow. For Kant the sublime had to be overwhelming, but only intimate terror, rather than actually embody it. To be in a situation of real fear or danger would render impossible a true feeling of sublimity, wherein our imagination is subordinated to our supersensible faculty of reason. 


The third stanza gives a distinctly Rilkean sublime, though its universality and eternality are made quite clear. Loved his interior world...that primal forest within... where his tiny birth was already outlived... descended, lovingly, into the older blood... And every terror knew him.... Yes, Horror smiled at him... immemorial sap mounts in our arms... That our interior world has already outlived our personal history, our tiny birth, gives us a sense of the Kantian forest within. Within our faculties, we border a world that transcends our sensuous existence. We can never know it objectively, but we can feel it, sense it. It is terror and delight, the holiest kind of pleasure that moves us into the beyond. We are protected from it in various ways; the safety of childhood, of the mother, who forms a sort of blanket of comfort, whose movements are our most familiar. Too, without courage, we can fear, but it is never a sublime fear, it never reaches, branches out, touches the eternal. That lesser fear is destructive only; it neither liberates us nor extends itself - rather, is an inhibitive loop that weakens our souls, our capacity for movement. It is selfish in its circularity, its single-mindedness. It revolves around us, and us alone. We posit ourselves at the centre of a solar system and are crushed by the burden of our own metaphysical weight. We are Dostoevsky's Underground Man; actionless, neutered. Such a great burden to be the prime focus of the world! And yet, in the sublime we recognise something greater, some transcendent universality, and, at the same time, our place within it, for the experience is ours. Ah, we are liberated from ourselves! We realise that we are not so very important, but that we are sublime; we are freed. 


In the Kantian mathematical sublime, we are overwhelmed by our imagination's inability to comprehend the infinite, though our reason, as a totalising faculty, steps in and allows us to grasp the infinite as a totality, though a kind of unfulfilled one. The fact that we can hold as a totality what is objectively impossible to grasp is an indication of our higher calling as rational beings. We are in touch with both a humanity that is universal and our ability to transcend sensuous experience. The dynamical sublime is the confrontation of nature as might, which gives us a sense of our physical destructibility. As long as we are not in real physical danger, we can feel an overwhelming fear at the power of nature that is not tied to our immediate physical situation but to our concept of our sensible selves as insignificant compared to it. Immediately (or in a kind of whirring oscillation) we seem to sense something higher in ourselves, indeed a kind of humanity, a transcending of the physical world by our supersensible faculty. That we are in touch with some kind of eternal essence, whether (as it was for Kant) God or (for the atheists) a sense of rising above the individual self to feel a part of a universal humanity, indicates a higher vocation, that of our rational moral selves.

Leonardo da Vinci; The Annunciation, c. 1472-5

And why not? A face is a face... Rilke, Sokurov, Nietzsche, Noh

Alexander Sokurov - Hubert Robert; A Fortunate Life (1996)

Slowly, quietly. The smallness of silence pierces the world of noise, of largesse. The bold and fast, whose hurried movements expand and fill the air, leaving no gap, no hollow, no reprieve - are suddenly, quietly pierced. The pure surface of noise is not a sheet, nor a blanket. It does not cover, for it does not leave a hollow, an underneath. It permeates; it is atmosphere. It is in the air, it amplifies itself through vapour, through clouds. It is not broken by the moving interstices of human bodies, but uses them as second skins, stirring over their surfaces and through their bones. Pierced by the quiet, we are stilled. It is only now that we enter. There is not something behind the surface of noise, no special essence. We are terrified, it is infinite. We are in ekstasis, standing outside ourselves. Noise holds and holds in; surrounds, comforts. And yet in silence we are home.

16.03.12

Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It's still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time.

For example, it never occurred to me before how many faces there are. There are multitudes of people, but there are so many more faces, because each person has several of them. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during a long journey. They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; they never change it, never even have it cleaned. It's good enough, they say, and who can convince them of the contrary? Of course, since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do with the other ones. They keep them in storage. Their children wear them. But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them. And why not? A face is a face.

Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.

But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands. It was on the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I began to walk quietly as soon as I saw her. When poor people are thinking, they shouldn't be disturbed. Perhaps their idea will still occur to them.

The street was too empty; its emptiness had gotten bored and pulled my steps out from under my feet and clattered around in them, all over the street, as if they were wooden clogs. The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, to violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from the Diary of Malte Laurids Brigge

whole before an immense sky... Bergman, Rilke, Bloom

A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole before an immense sky.

Rainer Maria Rilke


I sometimes suspect that we really do not listen to one
another because Shakespeare's friends and lovers never

quite hear what the other is saying, which is part of the

ironical truth that Shakespeare largely invented us.


Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence