A Different Ground: Rilke on Surfaces and Depth        
                                                                   by David Need


I had barely sent off the first column before I started to hear back from the world. I'd said I didn’t know of an American poet who cited Rilke as a significant influence, and the next day I picked up Nancy Willard's testimony of the invisible man: William Carlos Williams, Francis Ponge, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda—in Denise Levertov's preface, she says Willard chose "three of the very ones I care most about among the writers who came to maturity in the early twentieth century: Williams, Rilke, Ponge" (though she does say she knew Rilke through his letters and not his poems).¹  And then there was Peter O'Leary recounting his version of the Berkeley Renaissance moment when Robert Duncan sat to write, "The Dreamers" taking Eliot's "What the Thunder Said" and Rilke's "Elegies" as his models because Jack Spicer had admired these.²

But I was thinking about a talk I'd given on Rilke at Chris Vitiello's house comparing the objectivist project of the New Poems (written in Paris 2005-2008) to later American objectivist projects, those great Ethical essays at saying the thing clean, saying the poem-thing, in which there is this troubling branching (I think it was Ken Rumble who said) or conflation of the thing and poem anyway. And I was saying later (rephrasing something Rob Sikorski had said about Adorno's dislike of gestalt philosophy) that the problem was that the metaphor was not extended far enough—to say that figure is found against ground is one thing, to say this is a whole is something else, since this is to name the ground's end as if it were a frame, as if it stopped There, when I'd say the background goes off in all directions in pleurisy surfaces and sheets, twining together and away. No thing's end to be clean.

But even there I wanted to be pointing past the art gallery arrangement of the New Poems (each poem a painting or sculpture, framed and set apart—the sonnet's end as lintel—with spaces to wander among) to the episodic music of the Sonnets to Orpheus where Rilke says:³

True singing is a different breath, about
nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.

And then ends the next Sonnet saying:⁴

Even the small trees you planted as children
have long since become too heavy; you could not
carry them now. But the winds… But the spaces…

Spaces that will become graves, roots (and trees), where "the earth bestows"⁵, what? The next sonnet—"Plump apple, smooth banana, melon, peach, gooseberry…"⁶.  Later breath (atmen) again, and mirrors (speigel, slanted "playing angels") that catch "the pure smiling image of girls as they test the morning" like a "hurried page"⁷ catches a brushstroke, and then again saying,⁸

Mirrors: no one has ever known how
to describe what you are in your inmost realm.
as if filled with nothing but sieve-holes, you
fathomless in-between spaces of time.

Or perhaps slumbering spaces like the coffin eye-lids Rilke names in his epitaph:⁹

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one's sleep under so many
lids.

The girl that slept the world in his ear, who later comes to a "different day", anonymous among Things, "all those silent companions in the winds of the meadows".

A surface then, but not a Cartesian ground opened out in coordinates, where Things are shallow atom-points without dimension (where depth is abject), but a going-out-away-space where things have (Augustinian?) depth (graves, roots, mirrors, girls, eye-lids, rose-hearts). Not the reflecting post-modern surface (underfacing, over-whelmed facet) but perhaps beneath-making or under-aspect (a smile or profile).

Rilke, writing on Rodin, speaks of the sculptor's discovery of surface:¹⁰

Rodin knew that the first indispensable factor was an unerring knowledge of the human body. Slowly, exploringly, he had moved from within outwards to its surface, and now a hand from without stretched forward and measured and limited this surface as exactly from without as from within…And ultimately, it was this surface which became the subject of his study. It consisted of innumerable effects of light falling upon the object, and it appeared that each of these effects was different and each remarkable. At one place the light seemed to be absorbed, at another to give a lingering greeting, at a third to pass coldly by; and there was no end to such surfaces and no surface where some effect did not take place. No part was blank.

And I was thinking the objectivist project so often over-emphasizes the visual object and the eye, and how this changes the relation to the thing. There's no sense of touching the visual object. It stands away, possible target. Whole and apart (abject) because it can be walked around or turned in the mind's hand, or held, whole. And the watcher away, apart, behind some glass, clean. Free to go. But the hand's object is different. The fingers tracing the book's cover drop at the spine and touch desk slide along desk to the stop and slight up and back curving of the coffee cup and off the lip into air. The surfaces continue, to be felt. And touch back, held inside me, the pressure-echo from my finger in brain-ghosting (a gust? a wind?). A more complicated relation because there is also no precise end to the body either. Everything possibly mixes or intrudes. One can meet at the fence like neighbors, mark boundary lines, the skin makes a shaping but then we slip across/are touched back where we lean against what? Surfaces that stretch out, sands, or sans, (without, with what's out there, nothing). Leak and seep.

Don't we know this? When we touch, isn't a home made for you here, under the skin of my arm, and over here, by my side, an Idaho I saw when I was twenty, and there in the foot, a cold night and stars looking and what else of me out there in you becoming what. (I am almost starting to make sex jokes) but seriously I know seriously what end of desire? Mansions inside skin outside in the open.

So I was saying no end to feeling but in death. Aristotle wrong to say a thing's end is the fruit/adult/whole (he says the narrative is a whole like the body is) because a thing's end is death (stop feeling). So the end, the point where we are whole, complete, where we are if we walk around our body.¹¹ Death. A part.

I was saying no refuge in language saying language is a surface apart a sheeting through, an eye/I (not lemur, but spectacle). The great spell-lie of the language turn, that language doesn’t touch, is a blind eye. (Dead fingers talk.) I was saying words are like Bakhtin says, a prism shot through with afternoon light (think cathedral, Grand Central Station), a space full of murmuring voices, not glyph hiding, but hiding because of our desire. What's hidden there we try to reach through.

I was thinking to say this thing, this body, or that other, cannot be clean once and for all, but only in episodes or gestures. And then I was saying a thing I'd heard badly, a fragment, about Derrida and the mimesis of repetition, where what's important to say is the repetition of things, and I was saying Andy Warhol's paintings are an objection of course (thanks Andy for the Velvets) to becoming commodities and say "we are becoming commodities" and can only say over and over and over (0101010101) and I was thinking not repetition but gesture, the echoing back.

Maybe like Rob says we in America read continental thought wrong anyway, reading it as analytic philosophy and focusing on the "is" and "is not" instead of on the shush of caesura. Derrida as poet. Derrida's long graceful, piled lines like layers of cloth. Surface like cloth, like quilt. Swatch from my dad's shirt, my mom's 1950s' dress. Feel the stitch.

Back to Rilke who says about this, about things that are graves and roots and girls and mirrors, that "praising is what matters" such that one holds "far into the doors of the dead a bowl with ripe fruit worthy of praise".¹² See? Watermelon. Berry. Pear flesh. What's it in your mouth?

And says it in versions, saying it again, each sonnet like a dance that goes out and back, not precisely to the same place. A spiel. Play. A plummeting ball underneath which a vanishing one steps.

I was saying Rilke says

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing waters say: I am.

Terrible scandal to say that? What if it's not to say "I am big king world" or "author of all desire" but quieter. I am here. I'll die. But here now. A talker. Alongside you.

And then, the first time I wrote this, I said, even in the beginning Rilke knew about circling, when he wrote,¹⁴

I've been circling for thousands of years
and I still don't know. Am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

And then Word froze. It did. The first time I wrote this, right at this point. Word froze. Nothing was saved. I had to write this again.

Remembered or not.
 

1 Nancy Willard, testimony of the invisible man: William Carlos Williams, Francis Ponge, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1970, p. ix.
2 Peter O'Leary, Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), p. 49.
3 Stephen Mitchell's translation in Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Stephen Mitchell, translator, (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), p. 415. In Warheit singen, ist ein ander Hauch./Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein When im Gott. Ein Wind. Mitchell's line break changes the pace of this a little:
       In true singing, there is another breath./A breath about nothing. A wending in the god. A wind.
His emphasizes "nothing" and hides the strophes of "ein" in the final line.
4 Mitchell, p. 417. Selbst die als Kinder ihr pflanztet, die Baume,/wurden zu schwer; ihr trüget sie nicht./Aber die Lüfte… aber die Räume…
5 Mitchell, p. 433. Die Erde schenkt.
6 Mitchell, p. 435. Voller Apfel, Birne und Banane,/Stachelbeere. (Mitchell adds a fruit and "smooth", and makes a pear a peach. Why? "Riper apple, banana and pear,/gooseberry…")
7 Mitchell, p. 465. So wie dem Meister manchmal das eilig/nähere Blatt den wirklichen Strich/abnimmt: so nehmen oft Spiegel das heilig/einzige Lächeln der Mädchen in sich,//wenn sie den Morgen erporben, allein,—"
8 Mitchell, p. 467. Spiegel: noch nie hat man wissend beschrieben,/was ihr in euerem Wesen seid./Ihr, wie mit lauter Löchern von Sieben/erfüllten Zwischenräume der Zeit.
9 Mitchell, p. 195. Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust,/Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel/Lidern.
10 Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Works, v. 1, Prose, C. Craig Houston, translator, (Norfolk VA: New Directions, 1960), pp. 100-101.
11 A dream: The eye of the dream is sweeping around a castley manse on rock scramble. Sweeps along shore behind manse, along ancestors who are fishermen, and the voice over goes, "The one thing your family does not not know how to do is funerals." Dream camera finishes sweep back around to front like bird landing & now a festival, like a wedding. People dancing. I am doing a circle hand to hand with 8 year old cousins or nieces in Sunday best and I look, and at the center of a broad plaza, we are circling around the clan elder or godfather. He's got a long sweeping black cape and Piped Piper hat pulled down as he swirls majestic. And I realize it is death. Bow to take the next hand.
12 Mitchell, p. 423. Rühmen, das iste! And Er ist einer der bleibenden Boten, /der noch weit in die Türen der Toten/Schalen mit rühmlichen Früchten hält. Praise (rühmen) and space (räum).
13 I stretch out the image of end one of my favorite sonnets. Mitchell, p. 477. Rilke, speaking of childhood says:

                Wheels rolled past us, we stood and stared at the acrriages;
                houses surrounded us, solid but untrue—and none
                of them ever knew us. What in that world was real?

                Nothing. Only the balls. Their magnificent arches.
                Not even the children… But sometimes on,
                oh,  a vanishing one, stepped under the plummeting ball.

Wagen umrollten uns fremd, vorübergezogen,/Hauser umstanden uns stark, aber unwahr,—und keines/kannte uns je. Was war wirklich im All?//Nichts. Nur die Bälle. Ihre herrlichen Bogen./Auch nicht die Kinder… Aber manchmal trat eines, ach ein vergehendes, unter den fallenden Ball.

14 Rainer Marie Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, translators, New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.

© David Need 2005-2006

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