RILKE, Ranier M.
(1875-1926) – FROM HIS WRITINGS
·
I don’t want the
demons taken away because they’re going to take my angels too. (Quote from Hillman and Ventura
– ‘We’ve Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and The World’s Getting Worse’)
·
Speaking of death and
return to earth life, he wrote “Perhaps one only seeks a homecoming and
welcome, pursues it, til the circle rounds, back to that home, feeling with a
strange certainty, dreamlike and sad, that he had lost it once before.”
·
I want to be with
those who know secret things, or else alone. (Quoted by Matthew Fox
‘Confessions’ and Robert Bly ‘Iron
John’)
·
Somewhere there is an
ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. (Selected Poetry of
----)
·
Sometimes a man stand
up during supper
and
walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because
of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And
his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.
And
another man, who remains inside his house,
dies
there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so
that his children have to go far out into the world
toward
that same church, which he forgot.
(From Selected Poems of
RM Rilke, translated by Robert Bly – quoted by James Hillman “Souls Code’)
·
“Transiency hurls itself
everywhere into a deep state of being. And therefore all forms of this our
world are not only to be used in a time-bound or time-limited sense, but should
be included in those phenomena of superior significance in which we
participate, or of which we are a part. However, it is not in the Christian
sense, but in the purely earthly, profoundly earthly, joyfully earthly
consciousness, that we should introduce what we have seen and touched HERE,
into the widest circumference. Not into a “beyond” whose shadow darkens the
earth, but into the whole, into the universe.
Nature,
the things of our daily contact and use, all these are preliminaries and
transiencies: however, they are, as long as we are here, our possessions, our
friendships, participants of our pain and pleasure, in the same way as they
were the trusted friends of our ancestors. Therefore, we should not only
refrain from vilifying and depreciating all that belongs to this our world, but
on the contrary - on account of its very preliminary nature which it shares
with us - these phenomena and things should be understood and transformed by us
in the innermost sense. Transformed? – Yes, because it is our task to impress
upon ourselves this preliminary, transient earth in so deep, so painful, so
passionate a manner, that its essential nature is “invisibly” resurrected
within us. WITHIN us alone can this intimate and constant transformation of the
visible into the invisible take place. (Source: Letters
From Muzat – Quoted by Lama Govinda -
‘The Way of Completeness’)
Already
the ripening barberries are red
and the old asters hardly breathe in their beds.
The
man who is not rich now as summer goes
will
wait and wait and never be himself.
The
man who cannot quietly close his eyes
certain
that there is vision after vision inside,
simply
waiting for nighttime
to
rise all around him in darkness –
it’s
all over for him, he’s like an old man.
Nothing
else will come; no more days will open
and
everything that does happen will cheat him.
Even
You, my God. And You are like a stone
that
draws him daily deeper into the depths.
(Source:
Selected Poems)
October Day
Oh
Lord, it’s time, it’s time. It was a great summer.
Lay
Your shadow now on the sundials,
And
on the open fields let the winds go!
Give
the tardy fruits the hint to fill;
give
them two more Mediterranean days,
drive
them on into their greatness, and press
the
final sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever
has no house by now will not build.
Whoever
is alone now will remain alone,
will
wait up, read, write long letters,
and
walk along sidewalks under large trees,
not
going home, as the leaves fall and blow away.
(ibid)
Imaginary Biography
First
childhood, no limits, no renunciations,
no
goals. Such unthinking joy.
Then
abruptly terror, schoolrooms, boundaries, captivity,
and
a plunge into temptation and deep loss.
Defiance.
The one crushed will be the crusher now,
and
he avenges his defeats no others.
Loved,
feared, he rescues, wrestles, wins,
and
overpowers others, act by act.
And
then all alone in space, in lightness, in cold.
But
deep in the shape he has made to stand erect,
he
takes a breath, as if reaching for the First, Primitive - - -
The
God explodes from his hiding place.
(ibid)
·
… everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps
calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
(Quoted: Mirabai
Bush/Ram Dass - ‘Compassion in Action’)
·
Let us be honest
about it, then; we do not possess a theatre, anymore than we posses a God: for this,
communion is needed. Every man has his own particular ideas and fears, and he
allows another to see as much of them as is useful for him and as suits him. We
continually spin out our faculty of understanding, that it may suffice us,
instead of crying out to the icon-wall of our common misery, behind which the
Inscrutable would have time to gather itself, and put forth all its strength. (Source: The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge)
·
God is only a direction
given to love, not its object. (ibid)
·
To be loved means to
be consumed. To love means to radiate with the inexhaustible light. To be loved
is to pass away; to love is to endure. (ibid)
- - - - - -
·
It will be difficult to persuade me that
the story of the Prodigal Son is not the legend of
one who did not want to be loved. When he was a child, everybody in the house
loved him. He grew up knowing nothing else, and as a child he became accustomed
to their tenderness.
But as a growing boy he sought to lay aside these
habits. He could not put it into words, but when he wandered about outside the
whole day and did not even want to take the dogs with him, it was because they
too loved him; because he could read in their eyes obedience, expectancy,
participation and solicitude; because even in their presence he could do
nothing without pleasing or giving pain. But what he then desired was that
inner indifference of spirit, which sometimes, of an early morning in the
fields, seized him so unalloyed that he began to run, that he might have
neither time nor breath to be more than a transient moment in which the
morning becomes conscious of itself.
The
secret of that life of his which never yet had been, spread out before him. Involuntarily
he forsook the footpath and ran on across the fields, with arms outstretched as
if by that breadth of reach he could make himself master of several directions
at once. And then he would throw himself down behind some hedge, and no one
cared what became of him. He peeled a willow-branch to make himself a flute,
flung a stone at some little wild animal, leaned forward to make a beetle turn
around: in all this there was no hint of fate, and the heavens passed over him
as over the world of nature. At last came afternoon with all its suggestions.
He was a buccaneer on the island of Tortuga, but he was not obliged to be that;
he besieged Campêche or took Vera Cruz by storm; he could be a whole army, or a
general on horseback, or a ship on the ocean, according to his humour. But if
it entered his head to kneel, then swiftly he became Deodatus of Gozon, and
slew the dragon, and, hot with vexation, learned that this was the heroism of
pride, not of obedience; for he
spared
himself nothing that was part of the game. But, however numerous his imaginary
adventures might be, there was always time in between to be only a bird, if
uncertain what kind. Only then came the return home.
Heavens, how much there was then to cast off and
forget! For it was necessary to forget thoroughly; otherwise you betrayed
yourself when they insisted on knowing. However you lingered and looked about,
the gable of the house always appeared at last. The first window in the upper
row kept its eye on you; someone might be standing there. The dogs, who had
been waiting with growing eagerness all day, rushed at you through the bushes,
and drove you back into the person they believed you to be. And the house did
the rest. Once you entered into its full odor, most things were already decided.
Details might still be changed, but in the main you were the person for whom
they took you there; the person for whom, out of his brief past and their own
desires, they had long fashioned a life, the common life, which lay day and
night under the influence of their love, between their hope and their
suspicion, before their praise or their blame.
Useless
for such a person to go upstairs with indescribable precaution. They will all
be in the sitting-room, and if the door merely opens they will look in his
direction. He remains in the dark; he will await their questioning. But then
the worst happens. They take him by the hand and draw him towards the table;
and all of them, as many as are present, gather inquisitively before the lamp.
They have the best of it; they keep in the shadow, while on him alone falls,
with the light, all the shame of having a face.
Shall he stay and pretend to live the sort of life
they ascribe to him, and grow to resemble them in his whole appearance? Shall
he divide himself between the delicate sincerity of his will and the gross
deceit that spoils it even for him? Shall he give up the attempt to become
something which might hurt those of his family whose spirits are but feeble?
No,
he will go away. When, for example, they are all busy setting out on his
birthday table those badly chosen gifts meant, once again, to compensate for
everything. Go away for ever. Not until long afterwards is he to realize how
firmly he had then resolved never to love, in order not to put anyone in the
terrible position of being loved. Years later he remembers this, and, like
other projects, this too became impossible. For he had loved and loved again in
his solitude, each time with wasteful expenditure of his whole nature and with
unspeakable fear for the liberty of the other. Slowly he learned to penetrate
the beloved object with the rays of his passion, instead of consuming it in
them. And he was spoiled by the fascination of recognizing through the ever
more transparent form of his beloved, the distances opened to his desire for
unending possession.
How he would weep for whole nights with the longing
to be himself shot through with such rays! But a woman loved, who yields, is
still far from being a woman who loves. 0 nights without consolation, when his
overflowing gifts came back to him piece-meal, and heavy with transience! How
often he thought then of the troubadours who feared nothing more than to be
granted what they asked! He gave all his possessions, inherited and acquired,
not to have this experience. He wounded women with his gross payments, fearing
from day to day lest they try to respond to his love. For he no longer had the
hope of meeting the lover who should penetrate him utterly.
Even
at the time when poverty terrified him every day with new hardships, when his
head was the darling of misery and utterly worn bare, when ulcers opened all
over his body like auxiliary eyes against the blackness of his tribulation,
when he shuddered at the offal to which men had abandoned him because he was of
the same nature with it; still even then, when he reflected, his greatest
terror was lest anyone should respond to him. What were all these afflictions
compared to the intense sadness of those embraces in which all was lost? Did
one not wake with the feeling that no future remained? Did one not go about
void of significance, without a right to danger? Had not one had to promise a
hundred times not to die? Perhaps it was the stubbornness of this bitter
memory, which came and came again and always kept itself a place, that enabled
his life to endure amidst the filth. Finally he was found again. And not till
then, not till the years of his shepherd's life, was his crowded past appeased.
Who
shall describe what befell him then? What poet has the persuasive gift to
reconcile the length of the days he now lived through with the brevity of life?
What art is great enough to evoke simultaneously his thin, cloaked figure and
the whole high spaciousness of his gigantic nights?
That
was the time which began with his feeling himself a part of the universe and
anonymous, like a lingering convalescent. He did not love, unless it were that
he loved to live. The lowly affection of his sheep did not weigh upon him; like
light falling through clouds it dispersed itself about him and gleamed softly
on the meadows. In the innocent track of their hunger he strode silently across
the pastures of the world. Strangers saw him on the Acropolis; and perhaps he
was for a long time one of the shepherds in Les Baux, and saw the petrified age
outlast that lofty race which, despite all its acquisition of sevens and
threes, could not master the sixteen rays of its star. Or should I imagine him
at Orange, leaning on the rustic triumphal arch? Should I see him in the
spirit-haunted shade of Aliscamps as, among graves that stand open like the
graves of those who have risen from the dead, his eyes pursue a dragon-fly?
It
matters little, I see more than himself: I see his being which then began the
long way of love to God - that silent, aimless labour. For he who had wanted to
hold himself back forever was once more dominated by his heart's increasing
inability to be other than it was. And this time he hoped for a response. His
whole nature, grown prescient and unerring in the long solitude, assured him
that He of whom he now thought, knew how to love with a penetrating, radiant
love. But while he longed to be loved at last so masterfully, his senses,
accustomed to far distances, grasped the extreme remoteness of God. Nights came
when he thought of flinging himself at Him through space; hours full of
discovery, when he felt himself strong enough to plunge back to the earth and
snatch it up on the stormy flood of his heart. He was like one who hears a
noble language and feverishly undertakes to write in it. He had still to
experience the dismay of discovering how difficult this language was. He was
unwilling to believe at first that a long life might pass in learning to form the
first short phrases of senseless exercises. He flung himself into this study
like a runner in a race; but the density of what he had to master made him
slacken his pace. Nothing more humiliating could be imagined than this
apprenticeship. He had found the philosopher's stone, and now he was compelled
ceaselessly to transmute the swiftly made gold of his happiness back again
into the gross lead of patience. He who had come to be at home in universal
space crawled like a worm in tortuous passages without outlet or direction. Now
that he learned to love through so much labour and sorrow, it was shown him how
negligible and unworthy all the love had been which he thought he had accomplished;
how nothing could have come of it, since he had not begun to work at it and
make it real.
During
those years great changes took place in him. He almost forgot God in the hard
task of drawing near Him, and all that he hoped perhaps to obtain from Him was
‘sa patience de supporter une âme’. Long ago he had detached himself
from the accidents of fate to which men cling, but now even whatever of
pleasure and pain were necessary lost their spicy aftertaste and became pure
and nourishing to him. From the roots of his being there sprang the sturdy,
evergreen plant of a fertile joy. He was wholly engrossed in learning to
handle what constituted his inner life; he wanted to omit nothing, for he
doubted not that his love dwelt and grew in all this. Indeed, his inward
serenity went so far that he resolved to overtake the most important of those
things which he had hitherto been unable to accomplish, the things he had
simply allowed to slip past while he waited. Above all he thought of his
childhood, which, the calmer his reflection, seemed to him more and more to
have been unfulfilled; all its memories had about them the vagueness of
premonitions, and that they were reckoned as past, made them almost part of the
future. And to take all this once more, and this time in reality, upon himself
- this was the reason he, estranged, turned home. We know not whether he
remained; we only know that he returned.
Those
who have told the story try at this point to remind us of the house as it
looked then; for there only a short time has passed, a period easily reckoned;
everyone in the house can say how long. The dogs have grown old, but they are
still alive. It is said that one of them howled. The whole day's work is interrupted.
Faces appear at the windows, faces that have aged and faces that have grown up,
touchingly resembling one another. And in one quite old face, gone suddenly
pale, recognition flashes. Recognition? Really only recognition? -
Forgiveness? Forgiveness for what? -
Love! My God, love!
But
he, the person recognized, was so preoccupied that he had not been thinking of
love, whether it might still exist. It is easy to understand how, of all that
happened then, only this has been transmitted to us: his gesture, an
unprecedented gesture that had never before been seen - the gesture of
supplication, with which he threw himself at their feet, imploring them not to
love him. Terrified and uncertain, they lifted him up. They interpreted his
outburst in their own fashion, forgiving him. It must have been an indescribable
relief to him that they all misunderstood him despite the desperate evidence of
his attitude. Probably he was able to remain. For he recognized more clearly
from day to day that the love of which they were so vain, and to which they
secretly encouraged one another, did not concern him. He almost had to smile
at their endeavors, and it was evident how little they could be thinking about
him.
What
did they know of him? He was now terribly difficult to love, and he felt that
One alone was capable of loving him. But He was not yet willing.
[Later
manuscript margin notes]- ‘I believe that the strength of his transformation
consisted in his no longer being the son of anyone in particular’. ‘This, in
the end, is the strength of all young people who have gone away.’
(Source:
The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge)
-
- - - - - - -
We
say release, and radiance, and roses,
and
echo upon everything that's known;
and yet, behind
the world our names enclose is
the nameless:
our true archetype and home.
(Source: Quoted by Stephen Mitchell in ‘The
Enlightened Mind’)
AN
EXPERIENCE:
It
could have been little more than a year ago that, in the castle garden which
sloped down quite steeply to the sea, something strange happened to him.
Walking back and forth with a book, as was his custom, he had happened to
recline into the more or less shoulder-high fork of a shrub like tree, and in
this position he immediately felt himself so pleasurably supported and so
deeply soothed that he remained as he was, without reading, completely
absorbed into Nature, in a nearly unconscious contemplation.
Little
by little his attention awakened to a feeling he had never known before: it
was as if almost unnoticeable pulsations were passing into him from the inside
of the tree; he explained this to himself quite easily by supposing that an
otherwise invisible wind, perhaps blowing down the slope close to the ground,
was making itself felt in the wood, though he had to acknowledge that the trunk
seemed too thick to be moved so forcibly by such a mild breeze.
What
concerned him, however, was not to pass any kind of judgment; rather, he was
more and more surprised, indeed astonished, by the effect of this pulsation
which kept ceaselessly passing over into him; it seemed to him that he had
never been filled by more delicate movements; his body was being treated, so to
speak, like a soul, and made capable of absorbing a degree of influence which,
in the usual distinctness of physical conditions, wouldn't really have been
sensed at all.
Nor
could he correctly determine, during the first few moments, which of his senses
it was through which he was receiving so delicate and extended a
communication; moreover, the condition it had created in him was so perfect and
continuous, different from all others, but so impossible to describe by the
intensification of anything experienced before, that for all its exquisiteness
he couldn't think of calling it a pleasure.
Nevertheless,
concerned as he always was to account for precisely the subtlest impressions,
he asked himself insistently what was happening to him, and almost immediately
found an expression that satisfied him as he said it aloud: he had passed over
to the other side of Nature. As happens sometimes in a dream, this phrase now
gave him joy, and he considered it almost completely apt. Everywhere and more
and more regularly filled with this impulse which kept recurring in strangely
interior intervals, his body became indescribably touching to him and of no
further use than to be purely and cautiously present in, just as a ghost,
already dwelling elsewhere, sadly enters what was tenderly laid aside, in order
to belong once again, even if inattentively, to this once so indispensable
world.
Slowly
looking around himself, without otherwise shifting his position, he recognized
everything, remembered it, smiled at it with a kind of distant affection, let
it be, as if it were something which had once, in circumstances long since
vanished, taken part in his life. A bird flew through his gaze, a shadow
engrossed him, the very path, the way it continued and was lost, filled him
with a contemplative insight, which seemed to him all the more pure in that he
knew he was independent of it.
Where his usual dwelling place was he couldn't have
conceived, but that he was only returning
to all this here, that he was standing in this body as if in the recess of
an abandoned window, looking out: - of this he was for a
few seconds so thoroughly convinced that the sudden apparition of one of his
friends from the house would have shocked him in the most excruciating way;
whereas he truly, deep inside himself, was prepared to see Polyxène or
Raimondine or some other long-dead inhabitant of the house step forth from the
path's turn.
He
understood the quiet superabundance of these Things; he was allowed,
intimately, to see these ephemeral earthly forms used in such an absolute way
that their harmony drove out of him everything else he had learned; he was
sure that if he were to move in their midst he wouldn't seem strange to them. A
periwinkle that stood near him and whose blue gaze he had already met a number
of times, touched him now from a more spiritual distance, but with so
inexhaustible a meaning that it seemed as if there were nothing more that could
be concealed.
Altogether,
he was able to observe how all objects yielded themselves to him more distantly
and, at the same time, somehow more truly; this might have been due to his own
vision, which was no longer directed forward and diluted in empty space; he was
looking, as if over his shoulder, backward
at Things, and their now completed existence took on a bold, sweet
aftertaste, as though everything had been spiced with a trace of the blossom of
parting. - Saying to himself from time to time that this
couldn't last, he nevertheless wasn't afraid that the extraordinary condition
would suddenly break off, as if he could only expect from it, as from music, a
conclusion that would be in infinite conformity to its own law.
All
at once his position began to be uncomfortable, he could feel the trunk, the
fatigue of the book in his hand, and emerged. An obvious wind was blowing now
in the leaves, it came from the sea, the bushes up the slope were tossing
together. (ibid)
·
Being an artist
means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn't
force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that
afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are
patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent
and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful
for: patience is everything! (ibid)
·
I would like to beg
you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions
themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign
language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because
you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then,
someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live
your way into the answer. (ibid)
·
Don't be confused by
surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law. (ibid)
·
What is necessary,
after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself
and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain.
(ibid)
·
For one human being
to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has
been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for
which all other work is merely preparation. (ibid)
·
The future stands
still, but we move in infinite space. (ibid)
·
What we call fate
does not come to us from outside: it goes forth from within us.
(ibid)
·
Only someone who is
ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most
incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something
alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. For if we imagine
this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that
most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the
window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain
security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous insecurity that drives
those prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons
and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells.
We,
however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and
there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life
as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through
thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that
when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated
from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against
our world, for it is not against us. If
it has terrors, they are our terrors;
if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must
try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the
principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what
now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted
experience.
How
could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races,
the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses?
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see
us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens
us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. (ibid)
·
I began with Things,
which were the true confidants of my lonely childhood, and it was already a
great achievement that, without any outside help, I managed to get as far as
animals. But then Russia opened itself to me and granted me the brotherliness
and the darkness of God, in whom alone there is community. That was what I named him then, the God who had broken
in upon me, and for a long time I lived in the antechamber of his name, on my
knees.
Now, you would
hardly ever hear me name him; there is an indescribable discretion between us,
and where nearness and penetration once were, now distances stretch forth, as
in the atom, which the new science conceives of as a universe in miniature. The
comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns
relationship, and there arises a namelessness that must begin once more in our
relations with God if we are to be complete and without evasion. The experience
of feeling him recedes behind an infinite delight in everything that can be
felt; all attributes are taken away from God, who is no longer sayable, and
fall back into creation, into love and death. It is perhaps only this that
again and again took place in certain passages in the Book of Hours, this
ascent of God out of the breathing heart - so that the sky was covered with him
- and his falling to earth as rain. But saying even that is already too much. (ibid)
·
Extensive as the
“external” world is - with all its sidereal distances - it hardly bears
comparison with the dimensions, the depth-dimensions,
of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the
universe to be, in itself, almost unlimited. It seems to me more and more as
though our ordinary consciousness inhabited the apex of a pyramid whose base in
us - and, as it were, beneath us - broadens out to such an extent that the
farther we are able to let ourselves down into it, the more completely do we
appear to be included in the realities of earthly and, in the widest sense, worldly, existence, which are not
dependent on time and space. From my earliest youth I have felt the intuition
that at some deeper cross-section of this pyramid of consciousness, mere being could become an event, the
inviolable presence and simultaneity of everything that we, on the upper,
"normal," apex of self-consciousness, are permitted to experience
only as entropy. (ibid)
Keith and Marnie
Elliott’s “REMEDY” Site
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