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)

 

 

 

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