Reading Rilke in America                           

He is passion's spokesman. He is a cold and calculating egoist, covering his selfishness with the royal robes of art. He's a poseur, a courtier, a migrant, a loner. He hates the United States for reactionary reasons: because he hates machines and commerce, and equality too. He is charming and sensitive and given to shows of concern that melt the heart. His soul is a knot of childhood resentments. He is a trifler. He is too continually serious—he thinks of himself as a creature of myth. He has all the moth-eaten arrogance of the self-taught, and sports a learning both quirky and full of holes, which he is proud of as a pup just trained to paper.

I'd like to argue with Gass about whether Rilke hated equality. (Equality is such a tricky trope. Does Gass mean justice? I'd say maybe Rilke hated a false leveling that did away with human differences.) But Gass also missed one I always hear: Rilke used women. He faked weakness to woo them. He lived off them, the deceiver.

            It is true enough that Rilke had several important women-patrons (though the largest block of his income came from a blind grant given by Ludwig Wittgenstein). And at least following his years in Paris, he was in and out of love, and seeking a companion. And some of these affairs were stormy and some stillborn and some purely epistolary. But whenever all this is harped upon (the scandalous aside)—and it's always a guy who says it—I find myself wondering. Is it just the schoolboy dislike of the gentle traitor who gets along with girls? Or is it a way of naming a troublesome, almost Christian weakness that is even more threatening?

            I say this because it amazes me that I cannot think of one major American poet—male or female—who has taken Rilke as a guide through modernity. Preferring whom? Fascist Pound? Melancholy, melancholy monstrous Olson? Eliot's serene wasp-distant funeral? The sublime no-exit of other utopio-etheric escape plans? Fragments and atoms?

            Part of it might be translation—the older ones are good enough, but it's only in the last decades that translators like Mitchell and Snow have wrinkled out the end rhymes so as to meet the pragmatic American eye. And his aesthetics are of an almost different era. But I wonder if it doesn't have more to do with the difficulty we Americans have with loss and the way masculinity is constructed here in relation to that. And I wonder if the radical individualism of America does not require that we imagine that the green fuse in our eye belongs to some castled space that is always apart, so that to imagine an openness that touches or construes is to violate a founding rule, or must, as Oppen suggests, occur just as "the absolute singular/the unearthly bonds of the singular/which is the bright light of the shipwreck"[ii]. Titanic, unreconciled Openness that is also always emptiness and anonymity, and impenetrable.

Rilke's work takes on so many of the problems of 20^th century poetry—the authorial relation to the object, the balance of language (music, plasticity, grapheme) and image, the search for what Creely calls the "this in which"[iii] that Rilke called "our own strip of fruit-bearing soil between river and rock"[iv]. Two decades before the Objectivist experiments, he would try to write poem-things that showed no sign of the human hand that made them. Given great lyric gifts, he would work against them, ambitiously, against himself. We admire this kind of effort in other writers. So why isn’t this noticed more?

            And so, the reasons: loss, masculinity and individualism, and maybe a third, related thing—that Rilke is a poet of depths and interiority instead of surfaces and brands. There is a long tradition in American poetry of suspicion about interiority that has progressed from a critique of the romantic subject through the contemporary critique of the author. And always for good enough reasons—in pursuit of a greater sincerity, because privacy is a tool of the rich, because the self is not unitary, because the world in its material fact still wants to be said.

            But I have also wondered if the denial of depth, so often done for egalitarian purpose, is not also part of the very scheme by which commerce extends its power. A space of ours we are denied so that it is a lack that wants that cannot be filled. Isn’t it true that we are creatures of surfaces and depths? Doubled and dreaming in terms of each? (My skin dreams flowers. I lift up the glass curtain of the tent and enter.) So isn't it a kind of harm if we imagine that depths cannot also touch?

            Of course, alongside any suspicion of depth, there have always been counter-steps—regionalism, or the current confessional, turned out to flaccid sincerity. But these feel so much like steam valves, because the larger order is not redressed, because the regional and confessional are, after all, brands, because we think we must be stars instead of openings and alleys.

            Didn't Adrienne Rich get it right when she spoke of diving into the wreck? When, saying "We are, I am, you are/by cowardice or courage/the one who find our way/back to this scene"[v] and by saying this, made a space of relation that was aesthetically fuller than the attenuated and terribly dry and vanishing spaces at the interstices of Hejinian's "Life".

            A brief digression: I remember when I was in high school in the 70's there was a rule that we should not be attached to people we loved/wanted to have sex with. The reasoning was that attachment interfered with a person's freedom. In hindsight it's easy to see both the duplicity and naiveté of this strange stuttering. We were, after all, up to our armpits in each other, no matter what. To me, the supposed "death of the subject" sounds like the same thing—it's tied to a hope for some kind of absolute, pure ethical/aesthetic position. I am always thinking of what they say about suicides, "the wrong person died".

Back to Rilke: one of the great and difficult things about his work is that it assumes loss (Spilling? Wound? Houses with broken roofs?) as its starting point. The solitary hero appears briefly as a possible stance to take to world, but—in both the prose work and his later poetry—it is tossed aside in favor of a kind of twining with things that becomes consolation. In the Eighth Elegy he writes:[vi]

            And we: spectators, always, everywhere,

            Turned towards the world of object, never outward.

            It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down.

            We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.

But also (later), anyway,[vii]

            Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,

            Just once. And never again. But to have been

            this once, completely, even if only once

            to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

Because his work strikes me as a path not taken through modernity, because I think there's a need to think through depth despite what lives there (because it lives in the surfaces too), I am going to use this column over the next year to look closely at Rilke's choices and claims as a way, more generally, to catch sight of something before the post-modern or linguistic turn that so captivates us. Not driven by nostalgia, but by the thought of paths not taken or even seen.