This book lives on my night stand, and when I am in between books, I reach for this slim volume of ten poems to re-read, contemplate, marvel at, and absorb. Sometimes I read them in order; most often I skip around, taking whatever elegy I open the book to.Started in 1912, but not completed until after the First World War, the ELEGIES are mournful and plaintive, like a traditional elegy. But there is also an anxiety present, a longing, a yearning, an élan toward… something. They are questioning, restless. The ELEGIES seem to be trying to find answers, searching for a truth about what is real—searching for a wider truth. They are searching for new ways of thinking and being.
When I first read the ELEGIES, I was struck by the dichotomy, the juxtaposition between their lofty references to classic figures and gods of antiquity (and allusions to Egyptian friezes, 16th century Italian poets, and apocryphal Books of the Bible) and the accessibility and immediacy of the anything-but-lofty words and nearly visceral ideas. It is as though Rilke used antiquity as a stepping stone: he honors what came before but is honest enough to leave behind what does not work, and take what does work for us into the present and the future. He shows the human psyche as trapped, longing for a way out, longing for a new paradigm, a new map of the universe.
The ELEGIES are woven with the contrast between angels and man. For Rilke, angels are not good; they are not a source of intimate comfort, but a universal power of such magnitude that were we to come face to face with one, we would perish. Both in the first and second elegies, he claims that all angels are terrifying. I understand that to mean that we can’t comprehend what transcends us. Possessed with such otherworldly beauty, and representing primal, cosmic forces of creation beyond our understanding, these angels would literally blow our minds, like being sucked into a black hole or looking into the flash of radiation from a dying star. Ultimate creation and destruction are not opposites—they are forms of the same thing. In this way, I am reminded of Kali, the Hindu goddess of creation and destruction who is considered to be the ultimate reality, merging creation and destruction, transcending both to a timeless state beyond such ideas. According to the ELEGIES, we do not last but angels stretch across our own lives, and across time itself. After we dissolve, they remain. This makes me think of the story arc of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play ANGELS IN AMERICA: we move but the angels, by their very immortal nature, are still—and they want us to be still too. But we can’t. We exist in a stream of time, in a flow of history. In a way, we are life and they are death. In the same way, the poor angels of Wim Wenders’ brilliant film WINGS OF DESIRE are caught in resin, unmoving, unchanging, untouched by time but also untouched by all that makes us human; and in seeing our lives, they long to feel. This is certainly what Rilke hungers for in the ELEGIES—for a state of Existence with a capital E, for a state that incorporates every moment and sensation of being human, a perspective that takes everything into account, a state of hyper-humanness. In fact, in two separate interviews (in 1988 for a North Carolina magazine called “Spectator” and in 1989 for a magazine called “Impulse” from Toronto) Wenders acknowledges that the angels of the DUINO ELEGIES influenced the angels in his film.
The elegies that speak to me most (currently at least) are the Eighth and Tenth Elegies.
The Eighth Elegy truly captures the difference between existence and Existence by exploring the perspective of an animal. Rilke shows that, as humans, we are trapped where we are because we are self-aware, we possess knowledge of time, of our beginning and our ending; almost as if thinking itself creates for us a type of prison. We know too much for our own good. But the animal looks out into the world and does not see “world”; instead the animal sees itself. When you are part of everything, there is no separation, no difference between “me” and “not-me.” This is, again, what Rilke strives for: to see ourselves “in everything, healed and whole, forever.” This is a breathtaking idea.
In 1990, I wrote a poem called "Some of these artifacts..." that expresses this very idea:
“Some of these artifacts
are so old,
they have no
universally recognized
names...”
the anthropologist said.
Objects from a culture so old,
we don’t know the language.
That something can exist
without a name
is chilling
and I think of
some swollen, dumb fish
swimming in a tributary
off the Amazon--
hearing
only
its heartbeat--
not calling itself anything,
no one else knowing it exists;
but if someone did,
they would surely name it
as soon as they saw
the scales, the huge jelly eyes
or fins with curious claws,
not realizing that it
ate, swam and shat
for millions of years,
even before the first
humanoid killed a gazelle,
without the benefit
of a name.
That everything exists
without a name,
vibrating at a
simple, blank rate
manifesting beyond
a name
is something we all forget.
I imagine cavemen--
thinking of themselves and others
as whole, not abstract--
killing a bear,
not calling it anything
and eating it
and digesting it
without calling it anything,
just calling it...
leaving the skull
and a bit of fur
on the ashes of
the cave fire
to call more,
to insure the return
of the creature without a name--
the creature that is the equivalent
of everything else
because all things
un-named are equal--
to insure the life
and return
and death
and resurrection
of all things
un-named.
©JEF 1990
All things un-named are equal.
Tenth Elegy: a journey or a journey’s end. Moving from life to death (from Pain City to the land of the Laments), but then beyond into something else, into another state, unfathomable, unknowable—into another journey that we cannot comprehend.
Recommend? Absolutely. Read it and then re-read it in a few months, then again after that…
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