A friend writes: "If you can find a positive way in Rilke, please let me know what it is--I
see him leading to orphic silence, luxurious melancholy and a kind of stellar voice that
few are capable of." I take up my friend's word, "positive," and bobble it before me in
amusement. How much we want our ironies (Rilke claimed no civilization could be
built on irony!), and how little we want them to cost us. In the last twenty years, we've
built our ironies around discourse and "language," on their duplicity and on their power
to impose, and that, I presume, is what makes for something "positive." During this
time, we've thought little or at best, indelicately, about the word as emanating from a
carnal being though perhaps with the appearance of Bakhtin's work and with Elaine
Scarry's The Body of Pain a balance is being restored. In this new atmosphere,
Rilke's work ought to be reconsidered, and I can think of no better place to begin than in
this collection, Letters on Cezanne. The volume consists of letters and extracts of
letters written from Paris mainly in the fall of 1907 to Rilke's wife, the painter, Clara
Westhoff.
Rilke, it is true--to respond to my friend's comments--in the quest for Western
art's sense of presence, its quest for "being," walked the last linguistic mile, so to speak.
He imagined, against any situation in which a verbal act, let alone the poem, took place, a
world of silences, of muted existence. It is this orphism, with its seemingly abstracted
pain, its metaphysical hunger, that we tend to dismiss in Rilke's enterprise. Further,
Rilke's admixture of extremis and care- fulness, the exactitude with which these marked
his poetic trail, appeals neither to dionysians nor apollonians. Finally, that he is not easy,
not "humorous," not frameable by theory, leads,as well, to the charge that he is not
positive.
Still, as I have written elsewhere, Rilke represents a fruitful direction, one which
since Pound we have been reluctant to take up. Thus, my reading here is an attempt to
understand Rilke not as a historical figure but as a potentiating force for contemporary
poetry.
**
In late May of 1907, after a ten-months' absence, Rilke returned to Paris in a
curious and feverishly receptive state of mind, a state which continued into the fall. In
October, the annual Salon d'Automne exhibition opened with two rooms dedicated to the
paintings of Cezanne, who had died only the year before. Rilke's letters to his wife of
this period show not only the agitations of his mind but testify also to an atmosphere of
psychological vulnerability where, as he put it, seeing and working were "almost one and
the same." Before his eyes, the world seemed to be reforming itself as a kind of benison:
"All the things of the past rearrange themselves, line up in rows, as if someone were
standing there giving out orders; and whatever is present is utterly and urgently present,
as if prostrate on its knees and praying for you." (LOC 3) These words are not
fanciful, especially if we consider that they issue from one of Europe's great workers in
homelessness, a poet whose reputation in large measure was built on rootlessness and
alienated consciousness. What they suggest is an unusual psychological climate in Rilke,
an alteration of his characteristic dis-ease with surroundings.
For Rilke, artistic creation was less a matter of learning than of unlearning, of
foreswearing intellectual or psychological certainty by making some sort of radical leap.
"Surely," he writes a month after his return to Paris, "all art is the result of one's having
been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no
one can go any further..." "Therein," he continues, "lies the enormous aid the work of
art brings to the life of the one who must make it,--: that it is his epitome; the knot in the
rosary at which his life recites a prayer." (LOC 4) The religious tone is
instructive. Homelessness, Rilke's artistic donnée, is set aside, and the world is
perceived as animated and, more importantly for Rilke, uncharacteristically welcoming
and beneficent. Suddenly, the work of art is not so much an alienated jewel in the
world's crown but a tutelary device, a way for entering and participating.
For Rilke, the encounter with Cezanne's paintings in the months immediately
after his arrival, marked, what he called, "a turning point." In part, the drama of the
Cezanne encounter, a muted subtext throughout the letters, is the difficulty of
"assimilating" Cezanne's work which, as it turns out, becomes the most useful demand
ever placed upon the poet.
Rilke through the course of his life sensed himself a kind of laborer in beginnings,
in unending preparations for work still to come. This attitude was an essential part of his
openness and receptivity; it colored his life and work with a certain tentativeness. And
yet, it also brought with it a thirst for great precision. Heinrich Petzet, in his introduction
to the Letters on Cezanne, writes about Rilke's concern for "the smallest units of
language" by which entire areas of experience could be illuminated. Rilke scoured the
moment-- the very point at which something caught his attention-- for every detail and
nuance, for every psychological, historical or aesthetic implication. One finds, despite
its metaphysical vastness, little dreaminess or vagueness to Rilke's work. Its much
criticized "incompleteness" may be, all things considered, less the product of the work
than testimony that the human psyche itself, which the poetry so completely investigates,
operates by virtue of an active incompleteness. This incompleteness (an inadequate
word) is, in Rilke, the very basis for exchange and dialogue, for change and growth.
And, in a very powerful sense, Cezanne does not give to Rilke something which might
complete the poet. The painter's life and work are instead a kind of pressure: to
contemplate the radical nature of Cezanne's work, to view the paintings, is to put oneself
"in danger." This is the supreme value one artist has for another.
Rilke's work, the poems and prose, the entire corpus of his letters, are best seen as
way-stations toward some unfinished and unfinishable project. The all-pervasive sense of
incompleteness is a tidal swell on which the texts float, which at times bouys them up, at
times pulls them under. For Rilke, the poem records at best only a momentary feeling of
completeness, a simultaneous if fleeting instant when the work of art and the life are
mutually realized. For that moment, a kind of totality is achieved, but it always seems to
point forward to an ideal goal or condition. The poem never acquires the status of a
thing, nor does it degenerate into an ornament and thereby become a bourgeois object in
the usual sense. For Rilke, the artist's function is to catch this moment of
being/non-being. One of his best-known poems of the period, "The Panther," is nearly a
textbook example of this moment. In it, the poet and the object of the poem seem so
completely interanimated that "An image enters/ and pierces the long restrained limbs/
and stops being within the heart." (TRMR 158) The aim of the poem can hardly
be to paint a picture of the panther. Rather, the ambiguity of the passage, especially the
way "being" can be read as both verb and noun, recreates the dissolution of the border
between the poet and the object of his attention. Rilke calls such a work a "thing-poem,"
but the poem deconstructs even as it constructs. The poetics here are indirectly related to
those of the imagist and objectivist poetry of American and English poets who came
later.
Rilke believed himself able at last to see Cezanne's paintings because, as
he put it, "I had just reached it [the turning point] in my own work or had at least come
close to it somehow, after having been ready for a long time, for the one thing which so
much depends upon." (LOC 164) What caught Rilke up was that he could sense
in Cezanne things he most earnestly desired to do himself. There was first, as Petzet's
introduction relates, a desire to resolve an "inner war" against representation, against the
all too sentimental and easy stylization of the visible which had become the artistic coin
of the day. What Rilke admired in the painter was the difficulties he had set for himself.
"Cezanne," Rilke noted, "had to start over again, from the bottom." (LOC 43)
Still, Rilke could not envision poetic form without closure. For Rilke, the act of
closure has a formal structure: it is that which signals the death of an older form as the
very ground of new creation. (One finds a similar parallel concerning closure in
Bakhtin's notions of "the limits of utterance," limits which are deeply connected to
semantic interaction, communal awareness and the dictates of genre.) Rilke could not
conceive of any break in artistic tradition which did not somehow value that which it had
broken from. Tradition, writ large, was not to be abolished but conserved, particularly at
the very moment when its latest instancing was about to be surpassed. Thus, form and
closure are nearly always spoken of in Rilke, through the metaphor of death. And yet the
poem, like the death of an actual person or thing, always leaves a residue of memories
and of its marks upon the earth. The new form is best viewed as a kind of resurrection, a
rebirth of the old but secreted within the new.
Rilke, as one of the important letters show, mused on the fact that Cezanne's
favorite poem was Baudelaire's "La Charogne" ("Carrion"), where dead flesh is made
beautiful, not in the conventional sense, but in Baudelaire's ability to raise carrion out of
the conventional formats and value structures which had left its beauty unarticulated. If,
in Cezanne, painting allows that which was formerly unseen to be seen, "La Charogne"
allows that which was formerly inarticulate to be heard. The completion of the poem is
the moment of truth because it is the point where the poet surrenders mind, ego,
world-view, to the necessities of the perception. At this point, he is no longer a maker
but an element in the equation of the poem. The perception, the poem-work, like the
countryside around Cezanne's house or the face before the painter, is an otherness which
imposes its demand. Closure recognizes the other as other by carrying the art work to it
but never fully arriving there. Someone writes a poem about the moon but the moon is
still in the sky when the act of poetic "defamiliarization" ends, and she will have to take
up the moon again. Thus, for Rilke, learning from Cezanne, poetic "defamiliarization"
was not in itself sufficient to create great art. What would be necessary--instead of
novelty erasing novelty--would be "the wrestling with, rather than abolishing, of
memory."
Modern and contemporary poetry's concern for "the new" has perhaps obscured
the revolutionary nature of the challenge Cezanne posed to Rilke. In these letters, the
"wrestling" between memory and the present is no simple thing, for it does not take
place at the level of convention or morality but at the much deeper level of the nature of
psycho-physical reality. And yet, because of that depth, it cannot help but irradiate the
social and cultural realms as well. Let me try to explain this challenge by referring to
one of the most evocative works ever written about the painter, Merleau-Ponty's
magnificent essay, "Cezanne's Doubt." (MP 9-25) Merleau-Ponty writes that
"Cezanne makes a basic distinction not between 'the senses' and 'the understanding' but
rather between the spontaneous organization of the things we perceive and the
human organization of Ideas and Sciences." (my emphasis) Cezanne, as
Merleau-Ponty views him, prompts in the viewer a way of perceiving and being that are
initially alien to him. The paintings thrust the viewer, as they did Rilke, into the terra
incognita of artistic creation where biases, ideologies and methodologies lose their hold.
Echoing Rilke's comment about having to "start over," Merleau-Ponty tells us that
"Cezanne's difficulties are those of the first word." They are difficulties, however,
precisely because they must come to terms with memory, particularly that aspect of
memory exemplified by tradition.
For Rilke--and this is the heart of the transmittal from Cezanne--"reality" is a
habit of the mind, a "tradition" deeper than all the other traditions, neither true nor false,
but an anchor by which one holds fast against the new or the troubling. A break with the
"real" can never be merely a matter of technique or even philosophical stance, since the
stance itself is already a form of conceptualization. Technique and stance by themselves
are but aspects of the rigor mortis we name reality. What Cezanne could teach Rilke, in
Merleau-Ponty's words, was the example of one who "abandons himself to the chaos of
sensations," not that sensations themselves are more 'real' but that by the central act of
abandonment one also drives a wedge into one's own propensities for methodologies and
the seeking after pre-determined effects. In this regard, the Cezanne letters articulate a
kind of Dantean passage from confusion to knowledge. For Rilke, Cezanne was a
way of crossing Limbo, a way of preparing himself for the late work of the Sonnets to
Orpheus and of completing the Elegies already begun in this period.
Cezanne's work is, among other things, a personal quarrel with the Enlightenment
tendencies of craftsmanship, with the Old Masters who, he wrote, "replaced reality by
imagination and by the abstraction which accompanies it." It was necessary to return to
the real, but not as to an object which would then be put back into the work where it
would lose its potency (as a controlled act of representation, for example). The 'real'
would have to exist en face before the artist and the artwork, where, as Rilke
noted of Cezanne's blues, they would no longer have any "secondary significance."
Craftsmanship here is redirected away from producing effects or knowingly manipulating
the viewer or reader of the poem and towards making possible and articulating
discoveries.
Still, as Rilke remarks, "memory must be wrestled with," not merely abolished.
What Cezanne gives to Rilke is a way to use the past. Rilke's letters speak of our usual
relationship to the past as one of comfort, of sentimentality and nostalgia; our identity,
our sense of the world is all part and parcel with the 'real.' His metaphors and
personifications of the past all carry with them the warmth of familiarity. Struggling
with his own bourgeois heritage, Rilke, in the Cezanne letters, attempts to see into the
past with the same clarity he would bring to the present. The problems are co-terminous.
The past is a "palace" rich in decor and memories. Yet, he remarks in a memorable
passage, "even someone who had such palaces to utter would have to approach them
innocently and in poverty, and not as someone who could be seduced by them."
Elsewhere he writes that one must reject "the interpretative bias even of vague emotional
memories, prejudices and predilections transmitted as part of one's heritage, taking
instead whatever strength, admiration or desire emerges with them and applying it,
nameless and new, to one's own tasks. One has to be poor unto the tenth generation."
(LOC 73)
The hold the past has on Rilke is likened to an old "grand' mère" whom
one visits partly out of duty and partly out of genuine affection. The decisive moment for
him, half-real and half imagined, comes as he wanders past some noble houses on his
way to the Salon. A servant at one of them, about to close the gate, turns and gazes at
Rilke "carefully and thoughtfully." Rilke meditates "at the same moment it seemed to
me that it would have taken only a very slight shift in the pattern of things at some time
in order for him to recognize me and step back and hold open the door." Within dwells
the "grand' mère" who would receive him, and there, walking about such a
house with its beautiful furnishings, Rilke would "feel the presence of all the interrelated
things: the gaze of portraits, the dials of musical clocks and the contents of mirrors in
which the clear essence of twilight is preserved." (LOC 25-27)
The image is marvelous for both its richness and ability to signify the poet's
relationship to the past, that "clear essence of twilight" which has had such a nostalgic
hold on him. The grand' mère, "the old lady in violet and white," is described in
enigmatic terms, very much as Pater described the Mona Lisa, in that she can barely be
pictured in the mind's eye "from one time to the next because she is made up of so many
things..." This old woman has great but unbending dignity, and he wonders what he
could tell her of the exhibit he is going to see. One thing is clear: "Cezanne is no longer
possible for the old lady." (LOC 27) The passage is full of claustrophobia and
secreted ambivalences, for in it the poet is striving to break into open ground, to
acknowledge, as Merleau-Ponty says of Cezanne, that "the meaning of what the artist is
going to say does not exist anywhere." (MP 19)
Rilke found himself in deep affinity with Cezanne precisely on the above point.
An art which could dispel the "essence of twilight" would be an art of perceptual faith, of
bringing to the fore not conception but the act of attention. Thus Rilke was delighted
when the painter Matilde Vollmoeller, accompanying him to the Cezanne exhibit,
remarked that Cezanne was "like a dog, he sat there in front of it [the thing to be painted]
and simply looked, without any nervousness or irrelevant speculations." (LOC
46)
Cezanne moved Rilke in a way the Impressionists could not. He saw in
Impressionist work a struggle to convince the viewer of how much "they loved" what
they painted. Their paintings, he wrote, "judged instead of saying." Cezanne
had shown him how to move beyond such considerations, even "beyond love," to what
the thing itself revealed.
Cezanne's work was the painterly form of the "thing-poem," and the ambiguities
it gave rise to--the kind Rilke felt were essential to his own poetry--were psychological
and ethical: to return the world to the possibility of a not-as-yet conditioned response.
On this level, Cezanne and Rilke seem involved in rescuing the world from the
mechanistic scientism of their day. To rescue an object in art does not mean to give it
scientific or objective status, but to break it free of its role as part of some prescribed
conceptual scheme. A like moment can be discerned in contemporary poetics, in, for
example, that of the Objectivist poets, whose aim was never to make the poem
scientifically "objective," but to free the poem from the claims of scientism and so
re-animate it by refusing the reductions which science and philosophy would impose on
our perceptions of the world. Such a search for freedom in the act of poetic composition
necessarily began with the break from Imagism and its strategies, which were, by the time
of Zukofsky, a literary version of scientistic principles.
Rilke sought to keep the question of existence open. The ambiguous flavor which
steeps his work is in no way the result of some procedural indeterminacy. Rather, what
he learned from Cezanne was that there was a way of attending to the world which can
apply pressure and so expose to the looker the bias and ideology with which his or her
gaze is infected. Rilke could then go beyond the simple-minded poetry of rendering or
representation toward a poetry in which precision and uncertainty were inextricably
united. It was this unity which for Rilke demonstrated that consciousness is never
co-terminous with either world or language. Not only other's words but silences
surrounded the poetic act; therefore, he sensed that being a poet only incidentally
involved the production of texts. Much deeper was a "devotion" to perception which
"without ever boasting of it, approaches everything, unaccompanied, inconspicuous,
wordless." (LOC 68) Without this devotion, he noted, everything said or written
was only "hearsay." In some regards, his work stands, not with, but against many of the
'experiments' of the twentieth-century modernists, and by implication, against many
tendencies in the Anglo-American line of Pound and Lewis, and even Eliot. The great
danger in reading Rilke is that the uncertainty will be taken as vagueness, sentimentality
or existential ennui. The letters on Cezanne show us how ill-founded is that charge. But
they are also about less understood matters: utterance and voice. Rilke sought a nearly
impossible goal, but a noble and liberating one. As he put it after studying Cezanne:
"One has to be able at every moment to place one's hand on the earth like the first
human being."
(1989)