Because Beauty is Just the Beginning of Terror
                                                                                                               David Need 
 

      At Thanksgiving, the conversation turned, as if often does in my world, to the question of modernity and the supposed rupture marked by the Modern (and the subsequent ritual reproduction of that rupture in the gaps opened up as post-modern). I was going on about my suspicion of the strength of that rupture—I often think it is read as a modern day version of the Fall—and, in particular, citing the way the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky meditates on the haunting weight of the past (of the felt world). I was contrasting this to the way things like Kaprow's Happenings are, oddly, complicit in the kinds of erasure of the past/production of an endless present that allow for the endless commodification of value.

      A friend of mine offered the thoughts of a British art historian whose said that the rupture or shift that is marked as Modernism can be understood as the result of new ideas about sense perception. In particular, a new awareness of the degree to which sense is not patient or passive, like a mirror, but rather is an active answering back. More than echo. Shaping and not just shaped. The thought here then that the "human place" (made by the senses, in the body) is fashioned.

      The problem for Modernism then, according to this thought, is that this requires that we consider what desire might guide the hand or eye. That is, what is uncovered are the problems of violence and desire and the way we are implicated in these in sense. What Burroughs in Naked Lunch so nicely summarizes when he asks, "Wouldn't you?"

      There's too much to say about this. Nietzsche's unrelenting demand that we not dodge the issue. The inquiry begun by Freud into the nature of desire, and the later registers of that thought. Expressionist involvement. The effort to dodge into irony. Above all, the "death of the author" performed like San Francisco Mime Troup ritual, and now invoked like a rule. (Cause if we kill the author, maybe we can avoid being implicated in the violence and desire of sense. "It wasn't me, Boss. It was the Dead Author (my ancestor)." Or, as Patti Smith says in "Summer Cannibals", "Eat, Eat".

How's this relate to Rilke? So much of Rilke's work can be read as an exploration of the relation of expression and perception. And while, at first blush he appears to be one who hopes to evade the violence implicit in expression, that is a first move only, a move that ends with a turn when, after writing the supposedly objective New Poems, Rilke speaks of the need for "heart-work" (Mitchell, p. 129):

      For, there is a boundary to looking,
      And the world that is looked at so deeply
      wants to flourish in love.

What is forgotten?—that desire, in addition to being a possible violence, is also a loving. And thus the importance of care.

But, if the Duino Elegies are that "heart-work", then heart-work is not an afternoon swoon or the bathos of endearment. It is closer to grief, to a rending search for something more than the easy gestures of love. In fact, if anything, the Elegies tell us that "heart-work"—making places (heart, homes, refuges, cradles) for others—is more like a dance, a back and forth in which the self is endlessly divided and at risk.

Rilke begins the Elegies by asking how we answer the call of beauty (which "is nothing/but the beginning of terror). The world shows itself to us and we desire it, and, as Neibhur suggests, become aware of death, because to desire is to face loss. Rilke, aware that the image or symbol is a kind of fetish in which we say our desire, asks what images are really true images, He then lists a repertoire of possible images that might serve as refuge that is a short literary/art history as well as a list of prior moves ( Mitchell, p. 331):

      Perhaps there remains for us
       some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take
       into our vision; there remains for us yesterday's street
       and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
       when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
          Oh and night: there is a night, when a wind full of infinite
               space
       Gnaws at our face. Whom would it not remain for-that
               Longed-after
       mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart
       so often painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers?
       But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.

What image holds us (holds our desire)? Not the Romantic pastoral gesture of lifting up the tree (garden) solitary on the hillside (a double). Not the daily habit (the walk to the park, the round of errands, the café) and not the city-future either. Not forgetting the past (which is what habit is). And not in nihilism either or alienation or—already anticipating—existentialist courage. And not in pair-bonding either, not in the loved-other. (In the second elegy, Rilke returns more fiercely to this, as if he hadn’t said enough in the first, muttering (Mitchell, pp. 341-343): 

       Lovers, gratified in each other. I am asking you
       about us. You hold each other. Where is your proof?
       Look, sometimes I find that my hands have become aware
       of each other, or that my time-worn face
       shelters itself inside them. That gives me a slight
       sensation. But who would dare to exist, just for that?
       You though, who in the other's passion
       grow until overwhelmed, he begs you:
       "No more?"; you who beneath his hands
       swell with abundance, like autumn grapes;
       you who may disappear because the other has wholly
       emerged: I am asking you about us. I know
       you touch so blissfully because the caress preserves,
       because the place you so tenderly cover
       does not vanish; because underneath it
       you feel pure duration. So you promise eternity, almost.
       from the embrace. And yet, when you have survived
       the terror of the first glances, the longing at the window,
       and the first walk together, once only, through the garden:
       lovers, are you the same? When you lift ourselves up
       to each other's mouth and your lips join, drink against drink:
       oh how strangely each drinker slips away from his action.
 

Oh, not love either. No end to desire there. No shelter.)

None of these hold us (hold our desire). Not the tree, not the city of progress or a bourgeois habit, or existential rigor, or love. But aren’t these also the first names we try to give to desire? The first houses we try out for a feeling when we write a poem (or when the poem wants us)?  

Rilke will go on in the third elegy to admit to desire more fully, to name it and to ask that, somehow, he be "restrained"—but I'll leave that for another day. I want to dwell longer on the thought that, as poets, we search for images that can hold our desire and that, in this search, we follow a relatively well-worn path of shapes or tropes that have, in this sense, mattered.

The question to me is not so much whether these are banal—they can be—as whether we are aware of deploying these. Heart-work is precisely the process of search, consideration, and discard sketched out here. It doesn’t mean you will never use the trope of a tree, or that the tree is, after all, a bad home for your desire; it is that it is taken up as an option, selected again as a more consciously practiced gesture which could never be mistaken for home.

When I go now-a-days, to openings of contemporary art, I always find a large body of work that works with the cartoon and the logo—super-realist depictions of the Big Boy icon, or images that reference Saturday morning TV, or repetitions of the silhouettes of toy farm animals. In the terms Rilke proposes, these are not really homes either, are they? Or heart-work (since the point is never that a desire lived in these, but only that to desire these would be so silly or horrific)? It is true enough that commodity culture would have us bind our desires—having no other homes—to such things. It is true enough that, to some extent, our desires are, in fact, at least temporarily snared by the logo. There are even those who argue we have become nomad. But then the play with cartoon and logo would be the ritual enactment of such a world, and hardly resistance to it.

I know it is silly, but when I was a kid, I recall that, as I fell asleep, I would attempt to nurse my stuffed dog. There is a desire there that is simple enough to read. Wasn't the beautiful calling there? Didn’t we love a particular plastic farm animal, and doesn’t that still matter? Might not melancholy and nostalgia be forms of fidelity? There was, for instance, a velvet covered valentine's card I got in first grade that was my first pornographic fetish. Aren't we after all erotic?

This last weekend, when we were in Atlanta for the lucipo reading at Eyedrum, Jehanne and I got over to see a retrospective of Andrew Wyeth's paintings and watercolors. Simple winter brown fields. Dead crows. Occasional patches of Scandinavian blue skies. Painted in egg tempura like Russian icons. Best of all, the pictures made the people in the gallery rooms more beautiful and more colorful.

Isn't this what we'd hope to make out of our desire. To make something else, someone else, more beautiful? To steep a thing in beauty?

It is not Rilke, but in a poem called "Black Grasses", I end with a prayer for one of my inter-locutors, here, the sun-glass wearing hipster/hipster girl:

But later, when I come down to the edge
       of your brambling, the blackberry field,
wanting to bask in moonlight,
       the soft touch of a heart,
I find my body
       already seeks to place the vast
               star-heavened night grass of you
into itself
       as if stuffed into a bowl-
               the curve of a hand or a kiss just so.
But, what arm your murmuring night,
       what lip the red-lit horizons,
               what leg the long running into the darkness of you?
And if I cannot please your cold-dewed legs and hands with these gestures,
and if there is no place in my body large enough for its stories; if I am
only a small thing and a poor mirror,

Even then,

See me in your fields fallen
       in fields of moonlight,
shouting in a home suddenly split
       open
under a starry sky. But do not speak.
       I would not let you remain
Hidden. 

A few years back, there was a show in Washington DC on beauty. Because beauty has become such a betrayer, such a device, and yet maybe also to raise it as a value again, to feel out the possibility that we could deal in terms of beauty again. After all our best desire. A lot of the work was still fenced in theory or ironic; it is hard for the hipster to make a show (no matter how beautiful Lou Reed is, no matter how beautiful that Lamont Young derived drone). But I was thinking, its because beauty is still the beginning of terror, and we are held accountable (terrified) by the bright light of our desire. 

So how does one find a true image, an image that makes others beautiful? Especially since all terms of value (true, beauty, real) live under the dollar sign. Especially since our own desire currently lives under the Hollywood sign. We get caught in certain possibilities--hoping to be a rock-n-roll star, or the satisfactions of Home Depot --but dealing and exchange isn't the same kind of thing as gift and wound.  

[Written to Charles Mingus' "Black Saint and the Sinner Woman" and a tape I have of Pharoh Sanders and Sonny Sharrock. All quotes of Rilke from Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephan Mitchell (New York: Random House/Modern Library Editions, 1995).] 

© David Need 2005-2006