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The Annotated MST - Angels Revenge
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Three easy steps to start your free trial subscription to Bible Gateway Plus. Create or log in to your Bible Gateway account. The end of ipso facto secular humanism. The dawning of a genuinely American political personality. Lane, seen previously on the London stage as Max Bialystock in The Producers , is magnetic as Cohn, creating a figure who is part predator, part patriarch but, above all, a victim of his own sad delusions about the significance of power.
Meanwhile, Garfield as Prior excellently combines a head-tossing, period-style camp with the desperate anguish of a man craving love in his hour of need. James McArdle has just the right guilt-ridden charisma as his defecting lover, Louis, while Russell Tovey as a closeted Mormon and Denise Gough as his tormented wife exactly convey the agonies of a marriage mired in lies and self-deception.
After this, the four-hour second play, Perestroika, seems wilder, stranger, more surreal. I have to admit that Kushner loses me when he introduces angels into the action, even if their function is to suggest that they have been deserted by God, are doomed to inertia and that it is up to mankind to sort out its problems. Elliott stages the idea of angelic intervention ingeniously, with Amanda Lawrence appearing with spreadeagled wings and supported by a group of spectral shadows.
But the writing gets woollier the further Kushner strays from the recognisable and the earth-bound. Both are threats to the tightrope-walker that Rilke represents as a poet. He completes an interior journey that Baudelaire commenced: Religion is subsumed by naked spirituality, and some of the trappings of religion become a means of expression for that spirituality without necessarily indicating conventional beliefs.
With Rilke, concept is always more important than external reality, and the idea which generates feeling and disturbs our depths more important than faith in some outward manifestation of it. Mind is more important for Rilke than the world, symbolic being than actual being, though he would have protested that on the contrary he was a world-lover not a world-rejecter.
His conceptualisation, complicated by poetic personification and empathetic fallacy, is a major risk to his message, since it may undermine the ideas being expressed by confusing the audience. To Rilke, I genuinely believe, it did not matter. What the concept of the Angel represented to him, and its effect on our human condition and aspirations, were and are much more important.
Religion is not his aim. Spirituality and reconciliation with life are. Because he was so threatened by modernity, by the real and philosophical fragility of our existence, and the nausea and terror which that fragile existence can generate, he sought through mind and poetry a view of life which might offset the pain.
The Elegies are that view. It is a view that he expressed in his beautiful-constructed poem, The Dove , and in a letter of To show this identity of terror and bliss, these two faces of the same immortal head, indeed this single face…this is the true significance and purpose of the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. He believed the true life to demand more from us than spiritual passivity in the face of the joyful and the terrible.
Rilke often expresses the feeling that his works were given to him and came from outside himself. Clearly, this is a common feeling among creative people that stems from the activities of the sub-conscious or supra-conscious mind, feeding on elements from the world around it. Concepts and symbols, ideas and things carry with them a vast weight of social and personal significance, and that weight is greater than the individual and yet within the individual.
As often with Rilke the feeling is valid and important, but the language may seem to slide away from modernity back into religiosity or a kind of anticipatory new-ageism. Yet the underlying vision in the Elegies is hard and penetrating. The words of the letters and some of the poems where his intensity was relaxed somewhat can seem artificial and shallow. He is never slight or uninteresting, but he can be his own worst enemy in stylistic self-indulgence.
Rilke is always self-centred, but always has wider relevance, is always personal but has claims to wider universality. He saw his constant task as transformation, of himself into another, of the world into the mind, of external phenomena into internal, things into thoughts, being into consciousness and becoming. That task can sometimes seem wearying in its lack of spontaneity. That seductive voice can seem the voice of the tempter, proclaiming as fact what is only surmise, and as truth what is only poetry.
The critical faculty, the refusal to grant acquiescence without reflection, is an essential quality in reading Rilke and the Elegies. The writing is often beautiful, but it is right to ask also, is it true? Sometimes he can seem to merely reflect a futility, a sterility of Western civilisation, affected by a world war, and decades of prior over-refinement. An antidote to too much reading, and too much Rilke, is to go out into nature, or talk and laugh with another human being. Nevertheless this hyper-conscious, subtle and semi-solipsistic work can reach out to us, when we are least expecting it, and persuade again, in its hypnotic tones, that the world of Ideas is not a lie, and that Symbols and Language can lead beyond event and temporality to a place from whose perspective all time is eternal, and all space seems internal.
Who , if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic. Rilke begins with an intense questioning cry. Yet still an ambiguous cry. Who among the Angels would hear so small and insignificant an entity as himself crying out, since the Angels both exist and comprehend all being, encompassing it inwardly?
Is that what he means? The external existence of such a consciousness is irrelevant to Rilke, since the idea of it, which is its spiritual existence, is within us as concept.
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The Angel is a conceit, a symbol of the non-existent superhuman consciousness. He is certainly not utilising the concepts of organised and traditional religion. For example, he said: In the first few lines of the opening Elegy, above, Rilke indicates the all-encompassing power of completed transformation, its stronger existence , and the terror it represents to us, the terror of eternity for finite beings, of a perspective beyond society for the social animal, and of a view of existence which stands on time rather than being of time.
In that terror Rilke finds a strange beauty, and then generalises that beauty itself is full of incipient terror because it draws us, without destroying us, into the orbit of that deeper perception where we see the transience, our limitations, our incapacity for transformation, and a depth and complexity beyond our grasp.
His generalisation is only partially valid. Beauty may equally be an indication of form with no designs on us, delight with no authority over us, and relationship without possession. Rilke has set a hidden goal here of movement towards the Angel, a goal perhaps of Western and Middle Eastern Civilisation but not necessarily that of the East. The Taoist way of life for example would suggest that rather than transformation of nature we can seek identification with nature, rather than goals we can seek spontaneity, rather than projecting ourselves onto the world we can accept its flow of energies with humility.
Here, in the Elegies, the Idea is also an Ideal, a complete consciousness in which life and death are absorbed, transformed and realised within.
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Is Rilke also revealing his own failures of relationship, his own desire for an escape from those failures, into a relationship where the Other is simply transformed into the Self, and is therefore a pure narcissism? Yet he at the same time recognises the impossibility the undesirability? Who then, he asks, can we make use of in our task of transformation, who can we turn to in our need for consolation and help?
Neither Angels, nor, says Rilke, human beings. Rilke seems to evade the human relationship, claiming that human beings cannot assist with the task of transformation. The resourceful and enduring creatures of the natural world, Rilke suggest, detect our uneasiness with the world of language and thought which we have created internally, our interpreted world. They are a part of nature without complex language-driven thought and therefore transformation, and so unable to console us or help because they lie on the pre-conscious side of reality, with things.
The contemporary assertion of a continuum of self-awareness and empathy extending through the animal realm and including the human species is clearly not envisioned or is significantly under-developed here. Rilke nevertheless expressed his own empathy with creatures in the New Poems, even while treating them generally as passive vessels driven by sensation and non-introspective thought and feeling. The eighth Elegy will develop his ideas regarding the creature-world further. Perhaps consolation remains in things, incapable of transformation and therefore soothing in their neutrality, in familiar places, and in the seeming loyalty of long-lasting habit and routine.
Night is the vast silent window onto the universe, from which a flow of energy comes that passes over our upturned faces. Here Night is given a female aspect. Intention-less and indifferent to humanity, the darkness remains, accessible to everyone. She is desired as a time and place of solace, gentle in her veiled aspects, disappointing in that she is careless of the individual and neutral in her favours, being ultimately purposeless and unable to satisfy our longings.
The solitary heart stands before her with difficulty since to face the universe is to face oneself, the hardest task of all. Rilke asks himself the ambiguous you in the Elegies may mean the reader or, rhetorically, the poet himself, frequently both whether the darkness and indifference of the universe, which makes no response to our cries, is alleviated by love for another human being? His answer is that love conceals the universe because lovers are turned towards each other hiding the great darkness.
The weight of being therefore becomes a temporary lightness, and fate is veiled by human intensity. The poet urges himself to hurl the emptiness that represents the absence of another loved human being into the air, so as to add to the breathable space, and perhaps cause the birds to fly with more fervour and passion. Other aspects of the world also remain and give consolation. Similarly a wave lifts towards us in memory, or is itself a wave of memory, prompting our recognition.
And the sound of a violin, almost independent of human agency, itself waves of pressure in air, takes on the aspect of a thing. Rilke elsewhere Der Nachbar identified the sound with the lonely wind-filled night, playing on a hundred instruments the music of consolation. He asks himself, and us, whether we are capable of taking on the task of transformation, whether we are vast enough to take these things inwards and transform them into consciousness, the hidden interior universe, and so fulfil their mission. Here, the reader must accept both the personification of things, and their being endowed with a kind of intent.
It is again an example of his style, a mode of speech, which asserts a position that the poet may not rationally hold. Was he an animist? The poetic expression highlights the passive yet, to the mind, seemingly expectant aspect of the outside world in certain moods.
But is that sufficient evidence to conclude that Rilke believed in the neutral universe possessing intention? Again addressing himself, the poet identifies his own longing and failed expectation of some deep response from the universe, a response which would be akin to the approach of a beloved person, and also his failed expectation of human love.
If the poet must yearn, then longing might lead him to the celebration of famous lovers, and thereby to carry out an interior transformation, an immortalisation of such feelings. But Rilke turns not to fulfilled relationship for his exemplars, but to unrequited lovers, those whose love was one-sided. Since the universe does not respond to our love for it, such lonely lovers more accurately exemplify our existential longing. Rilke in said: He argues that such love is heroic and infinite. It is equally valid however to consider it extreme, if not perverse, and so our own love for the universe might seem perverse and extreme.
Why then does it not, while such unrequited love for an object capable of responding may? Precisely because the universe is not capable of responding, and therefore our love for it is a gift, just as its beauty and complexity seems a gift to us. His argument is an example of how Rilke seduces, but may also distort. He takes an example from one sphere of our behaviour and feeling and applies it to another. The parallel seems seductive, but the argument may be invalid. Readers must decide for themselves. Note here also his view of the function of song. Singing is praising, and the theme of praise overt in the Sonnets to Orpheus, here secondary and muted, is vital to the Elegies also.
The poet is here to praise, see for example the poem Praise , and Sonnets to Orpheus I: Praising is a means of transformation, of taking the world inwards and also expressing it in timeless art. The Hero is another example of a human role in contact with a wider fate, and a possible exemplar, but the hero is already re-incarnated through time and human memory, and perpetuated in art.
The lovers however are forgotten, undifferentiated, victims of love. While the masks of Achilles and Hector identify them, and may be resurrected endlessly, the mask of Love hides an anonymous face, and yet each love is unique. It is easy however to think of counter-examples to this distinction, and it is perhaps rather unconvincing.
Gastara Stampa sufficiently yet, that any girl,. Gaspara Stampa, the sixteenth-century lover and poetess, is an example. Rilke argues here for a like acceptance of solitude, and one-sided love. He asserts that a more intense, perhaps purer love can exist when that love is not returned, and equally not fulfilled, as it apparently was for say Saint Theresa, in religious devotion. It is human love, within the non-religious realm he is talking about, and in Requiem he preaches even within human love the need to practice letting go, since holding on comes easily.
All companionship can comprise only the strengthening of two neighbouring solitudes, whereas all one calls giving oneself is harmful in nature to companionship. The poet would be equally incapable of withstanding the clasp of the angel or the voice of the deity. It is not clear whether Rilke believed in an objective correlative to the realm of death, other than as an echoing absence, but he wishes to make room within the universe of consciousness for death, which otherwise would be un-transformed and lie outside consciousness.
The reader must decide whether that is impossible for human beings or not and whether consciousness is or is not inevitably bounded by conception and death.
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Note the word imagined. And because he believes he sees that whole, he needs to work to remove the sense of injustice we feel when contemplating the early dead. It is helpful to visualise this as a process taking place within the collective human consciousness, a means of releasing us all from the thrall of death and seeing death as a process within the species. Rilke sets himself a daunting but, he believed, essential goal: He now goes on to investigate the second realm.
Rilke here tries to characterise and describe the state of being newly dead, as though it were a state of mind, of strangeness. They are in some strange state of consciousness which depends on processing the contents of memory, in order that they might transform themselves into a part of the timeless region. But, Rilke claims, this is a human error of perspective, because to the Angel, that concept of the completed consciousness, in which all has been processed and transformed into the invisible, there is no sharp distinction between life and death.
There is no need therefore to feel sorry for the early dead, they are weaned away from our life, and part of a greater whole. It is rather we who have need of them, as representatives from whom we can learn the double realm, and the wholeness of being, transforming it in consciousness, much as we need and feel contemporaneous with the minds of past ages, in our multi-faceted experience of reality.
Is it a meaningless story how once, in the grieving for Linos ,. Rilke finally ends this first Elegy by referring back to the myth of Linos, a youth, the greatest of early musicians, child of one of the Muses, in one variant of the myth a brother of Orpheus, killed by the god of music and the arts, Apollo, in a fit of jealousy. His death was remembered at Delphi with chanted dirges, the linoi , and the laments spread throughout Greece and even, according to Pausanias, to Egypt in the form of the dirges to Maneros, the Egyptian spirit of the harvest.
The myth suggests an ancient vegetation ritual, with later accretions. Rilke associates the death of Linos, in a further variant, with the invention of music itself, so that the emptiness of death became an empty space now filled with vibration, and death itself a second realm, resonating in harmony with the primary realm of the living.
To summarise, Rilke has introduced us, in the first Elegy, to the Angel, imagined as the perfect transformer of visible existence into the invisible. Human beings are much more limited and incapable of such complete insight and transformation, occupied as we are with our habitual lives, though troubled by longing. But we may find indications of our primary task in the existence and fate of unrequited lovers, heroes, and the early-dead, who point beyond our constrained life of habit towards infinity. It is possible we might free ourselves from our habitual pre-occupations and learn a new way of integrating both life and death, to give a clearer vision of the whole of being, which comprises both realms.
Where are the days of Tobias ,. And then the dangerous Archangel, from behind the stars, who in Christian mythology would be Michael, the commander of the army of God and therefore dangerous, the only one named as an Archangel in the canonical Biblical texts. Greater than we humans, what are the angels, Rilke asks, and proceeds to answer. They are pollen of flowering godhead , and there is a relevant statement of the open secret of Egyptian sculptures in a Letter of , their enigmatic mysteriousness which is nevertheless perfectly revealed in their solidity and assertive polished surfaces.
They are both inscrutable and revealing to the initiate. By contrast with the Angel, we human beings are transient and incomplete.
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We breathe away our existence like incense among embers, and in relationship our identity even if grasped for a moment is unstable and vanishes from the mind of the other. All appearance, even that of beauty, is evanescent and flows by, and our being evaporates like dew from the grass, or rises and dissipates like heat from a dish.
Rilke invokes the lovers, who hold an inward, in-turned reality between them. They might present a clue: We pass through everything, like a spiritual breath of air. Everything conceals us, the creatures mid-way between animal and angel, and therefore subjects of shame or hope. Lovers represent the extremes of material, sensual delight, the bliss of physical relationship, which in miniature we feel, in stimulation, when we touch our hands together or clasp our face between them, a slight sensation, but insufficient to justify existing.
Nevertheless, love itself is ritual and becomes process, and lovers fail to maintain the eternity of the initial relationship beyond the first, glance, desire, walk, kiss, sexual encounter. Physical love too is evanescent. The fleeting intuition of eternity slips away. Rilke recalls the restraint of the figures on Attic funeral monuments, the steles, where the gestures are light and constrained, weightless and gentle, and suggests that such restraint is more appropriate to us than sexual ecstasy because it can be sustained by our modest level of strength and power.
Yet we moderns, unlike the Greeks, cannot find adequate symbols outside us to reflect the conscious life within us. Our hearts, our longing, our capacity for feeling, memory and expectation, exceed our grasp, our ability to achieve, but we can no longer create Greek forms to soothe us nor believe in the gods as a visible example to us of classical restraint. The second Elegy has shown us our immediate limitations, our place in the spectrum of consciousness, and the inability of the physical, even in sexual delight, to reach the timeless, while the Classical examples of a more formal and moderate restraint have passed beyond us, and are no longer easily realisable in modernity.
The third Elegy sees Rilke delving deeper into the human condition, as he explores the themes of sub-conscious impulse, male sexuality and childhood. He considers what links us to our ancestors, and hints at the inescapable biological and genetic reality of human beings. To sing the beloved is one thing, another, oh,. What does he know, himself, of that lord of desire, her young lover, whom she knows distantly, who often out of his solitariness,. Beneath the relationship of love, lies the reality of sexuality, in particular here male sexuality.
The conscious mind even of the male lover is ignorant of the sub-conscious power of the instincts. The god within, the genetic basis of our being, is still powerful in our psyches, and capable of usurping reason and abolishing moderation, in favour of an intensity which is in itself terrifying, as it calls into question our habitual and stable selves, our familiar conscious world.
That cry rises to the stars which echo to us the purity and light which shines, for a lover, in the face of the beloved girl. The universe therefore inspires the human, and offsets instinct with permanence, the tempest with night and its feminine soothing calm. There are deeper things than visible experience beneath behaviour and being. Touch, sensation, leads us backwards into primeval arenas where the species once existed.
They exist behind and beneath, and also above rationality, in the spaces of the universe and of our selves. Sexuality, like birth and death, is one of the primitive experiences that we have sanitised, and even abused and exploited, but which still connects us to the origins of our existence. This straightforward passage depicts the mother shielding the child from the realities of adult existence. In childhood our fate is concealed, it is potent in that all possibilities are open, and can seem like a hiatus before a second birth into the wider world.
The external arc of childhood conceals the complex inner development of emotions and thought. Rilke gives an autobiographical sensation to this description, as if it were contemplating the childhood of this immensely inward and self-centred poet. Development in some sense recapitulates the early history of the species and the child in the inward world descends to the primeval roots of sensation, feeling and awareness, including our deepest fears and loathing.
Rilke wrote of the history of the species as: Rilke gives a touching description of the child bathed in the eternal smile of the maternal, as the embryo was bathed in just such a maternal flow in the womb. Rilke completes the image of the universal consciousness of the species as an ancient landscape that will re-appear in the tenth and last Elegy. He forges here the connection between the developing child and the generations of the dead, not merely the living and the unborn, but rather that immeasurable seething of all the generations past and to come. Note that the metaphor of dry river-beds echoes his poem Tombs of the Courtesans.
Thus, the child contains within itself the past and future potential of the species. Rilke creates the atmosphere of the double-realm by mingling the dead and the living. The emotions and responses of the dead are also ours. Our perceptions and feelings were, and, in the eternal moment of the whole, are also theirs. Rilke fuses both realms completely in the last phrase… Dead children wanted you …where the adjective places the living person addressed into the vanished moment of being of children now dead. Rilke stresses the need of man for woman, for her espousal of the confident daily task lovingly performed which she can demonstrate to him, or lead him to.
This at first sight seems a dated concept of the female role, though clearly such a role remains one dimension of female existence, but note how the last phrase Be in him, seeks to fuse male and female, the male absorbing a female element to achieve wholeness. It would certainly be wrong to write Rilke off as merely possessing a male view of life, rather he tries to get beyond the distinction and embrace the continuum of human experience.
He wrote in a letter: The third Elegy has exposed our deeper condition of being, our continuity with the past, and past consciousness, recapitulated in childhood development, and expressed later in sexuality where the feminine and masculine elements need to be fused to create the whole life. The fourth Elegy now returns to a theme touched on in the first Elegy, our innate inner conflicts, the divided nature of mind that feels the pull of irreconcilable goals and prevents us from resting absorbed in that between-world experienced in childhood, where the world and the toy or the world and the game fuse into pure play, and awareness is rapture.
We are out of harmony with instinctive life and therefore out of harmony with death also. O trees of life, O when are you wintering? We are trees of life , but we do not contain the reality of the seasons within us, the budding, flowering, leafing, shedding and over-wintering of the deciduous trees in nature. We lack the unity of the cyclical world, the instincts of migratory birds that urge them into congregation and flight.
We fail to recognise the signals of change and departure until too late and then throw ourselves into circumstances inappropriate to our inner selves. Our flowering and fading seem virtually simultaneous, both in our mental processes and also in our physical duration. Yet other creatures, lions for example, seem fully integrated into their lives, never foreseeing, in their splendour, their own illness or death, launching themselves into life fully rather than hanging back, in fear of it. Rilke goes on to diagnose the human condition, and its many limitations, as he sees it.
We humans have divided goals, and while trying to complete one task we are already thinking of another, our inability to possess both in the one moment causing a sense of loss and frustration. Lovers too while promising each other eternity and the boundlessness of a sense of space, pursuit and resolution physically in the sexual act but mentally in many other ways that the hunting creatures, like the lions, possess, also meet boundaries in each other formed by non-acceptance, unwillingness, difference and non-comprehension. And in fact we understand our feelings only by coming to see them as a result of the external forces which created them, as a contrasting background highlights a foreground contour.
In this sense emotions, like language are social rather than innate. We call forth the correct feeling or phrase from the repertoire of feelings and words we know in response to the social context. The background provokes our foreground reaction. Possessed by fear of the future, and of death, human beings wait to see the play of their own being acted out on the inner mental stage, Rilke suggests, perhaps betraying the nature of his own specific psyche, that of the observer and voyeur, gripped by a certain passivity in relationship to life and others.
And the play such a psyche sees will always be of scenes of departure because the moment is always slipping from our hands, our present is always vanishing beneath our feet into the past, and our future is present before we know it, and past before we can grasp it.
What appears on the stage however is the same habitual and conventional actor, who is our own self, rather than the something essential, fresh and eternal that we long to see as our destiny; our future: We seem only half-completed to ourselves. We fulfil roles, but badly, being inward and individual as well as outward and social.
A doll or puppet would be more complete, external. Even though mere shell and appearance it would fulfil the role more absolutely. So, frustrated by incompleteness, the poet waits, even if the waiting is a time of emptiness, even if the dead do not return to him within, as modes of his consciousness, not even beloved women, the feminine aspects of life, not even the early-dead, symbols of eternity, in this case Egon von Rilke, his cousin, who died in childhood at the age of seven, of whom Rilke wrote: Rilke invokes the shade of his anxious father, an inner spiritual companion, as witness to his vision, and the appropriateness of patience.
And he invokes beloved women, with whom he failed to establish deeper relationships because he saw only the infinite emptiness of cosmic space beyond them and through them until they ceased to exist for him. Here Rilke is confessing to his own self-centredness, his own solipsism as regards the world of other human beings, his own inability to be satisfied by the human:. By waiting he believes the Angel must arrive, that concept of the transforming powers.
By gazing, through thought and poetry, into the world he anticipates that his thought and art will be transformed to a higher plane, where the human will be mediated between the Angel and the Puppet, the more than human and the less than human, the wholly internal and the wholly external. Then the fragmented might become whole, the complete cycle of our changing life might be visible, and actual. The Angel, creative transforming consciousness, would then play with being, with our being also, in the way the dancing god Siva does in the religion of India, creating and destroying worlds, species, individuals, the phases of our life, moments even, in an endless rhythm, for the creative force in us manifests itself as play, on many levels.
When it is truly whole the intellect plays with life, beyond fear or hope, in the intensity of our gaze and our games. Here, Rilke condemns the seeming pointlessness of human activity, the pretexts that clothe our efforts, and their ultimate impermanence and therefore emptiness. This is close to the Buddhist concept of maya , the sea of perceptual illusion. Death, Rilke would maintain, gives life greater significance, because consciousness of it leads to whole vision, and complete transformation. The world of the child in contrast to that of adults has moments in eternity where the past and future are absent from consciousness in the intensity of gaze, or play.
The child exists in the space between world and plaything. And who then depicts a child as it really exists, truly places it within the eternity of cosmic space it inhabits for a while, and at the right depth or height relative to our adult world? It is easy to grasp the concept of murder, the destruction of a child and the life it represents, much harder to consciously realise that death is there from the start, even before life begins, and then in looking at the child, at its innocence, be able to hold that concept as it were in the cupped hands, softly and gently, without bitterness or anger at the human predicament.
In a conceptual sense to rehearse that thought within the mind is to commit a mental murder, to destroy the being the child represents, through the realisation of death, without intending destruction or even wishing harm. The adult destroys childhood with every breath, unintentionally, and without malice, merely through being what adulthood represents, and merely by the child being what it is, innocence and pure event. The fourth Elegy then has emphasised the divided nature of the adult consciousness, and contrasted it with childhood.
622: Angels Revenge
And Rilke has suggested that we need to see death within life, and life within death, as the double-realm, in order to understand what we are, and how we might become. The fifth Elegy finds another symbolic stage for human life, in the circus acrobats derived from a Picasso painting and his own life in Paris, and contemplates what it would take to make such activity as ours meaningful, perhaps in the person of lovers. But who are they, tell me, these Travellers , even more. They are versions of ourselves, we human beings, only they are even more transient wanderers, moving their act from square to square of the city, as we are driven on by some unfulfilled external expectation or eternally-disappointed will to perform our actions, on the threadbare carpet of our planet, lost in the universe, stuck-on here to the Earth, like some unfortunate wound rather than intrinsic or natural.
The spectators of our actions come and go, flower and un-flower, caught by a passing interest, yet fruiting only into a mild false-smile of polite disinterest. Our childhood repeats the species in recapitulation, time after time, from birth to the grave, from the leap of the child acrobat to his return to earth. And during our leap of life, our arc of being we sometimes look almost lovingly towards the Earth, our mother, as the little boy looks in the painting towards the woman at the right, our mother which is seldom kind to us, which stings our feet with gravity in our return from our efforts to evade it, and yet whose surface we continue to leap from again and again, driven on by the urge of development through adulthood towards old age, swallowing our sadness at our transience and embracing activity which only adds to our pain and sorrow.
Yet that loving look, that sly almost vanishing smile, directed at our mother, the Earth, at our deeper origins, is nevertheless precious:. And the nubile girl is also a performance, woman is also exhibited, in this same ritual display of human activity symbolised here by the circus acrobats. Where, Rilke, asks is the reality of our being which this facile, skilled display of habitual, ritual activity masks.
Where is the place where the striving of poetic effort, for example is still actual and vital and not mere empty performance? Where is the moment, among difficulties, those agents of reality, where the insufficient suddenly becomes sufficient, and yet before it reduces to stale repetition, hollow excess, dwindles to that place where the complex sum is resolved, and the calculation reduces to a mere zero? Reduces to the endless city squares where we, the acrobats, perform, reduces to the indifferent market-place where Madame Death decks us out in the artificial and transient fashions that decorate our trivial and worthless fates.
If only there was, somewhere, a place where the lovers who fail to achieve lasting inward transformation in life, who teeter on the ladders and towers of relationship, could master the flights of love, as the acrobats of the everyday, we humans, have mastered our empty performance. The suggestion, or hope, is that somehow there might be a way of uniting the realms of the dead and the living in a more fruitful, achieved performance than our habitual one, a greater wholeness.
The sixth Elegy returns to the Hero, mentioned in the first Elegy, who like the unrequited lovers, and the early-departed might offer a key to our internal transformation, to a greater and fuller life. These three groups, or four if we include the lovers of the previous elegy, stand at the edge of our external life, pointing towards the internal, and as aspects of the transient pointing towards the infinite. A note to the reader: That may have been his view, but he is much more interested in bringing both realms within, in a transformation of consciousness. Is Rilke religious in any conventional sense?
Does he believe in an objective after-life? A caution to the reader not to be too sure: Fig-tree , for such a long time now, there has been meaning for me,.