Ahead of All Parting (45 page)

First of all, a negative one: that it would never behave affectedly.… In addition, these puppets have the advantage that they are antigravitational. They know nothing of the inertia of matter, that quality which is most resistant to the dance: because the force that lifts them into the air is greater than the force that binds them to the earth.… Puppets need the ground only in order to touch it lightly, like elves, and reanimate the swing of their limbs through this momentary stop. We humans need it to rest on so that we can recover from the exertion of the dance. This moment of rest is clearly no dance in itself; the best we can do with it is to make it as inconspicuous as possible.

Beside this lady sat the small son of a female cousin, a boy about as old as I, but smaller and more delicate. His pale, slender neck rose out of a pleated ruff and disappeared beneath a long chin. His lips were thin and closed tightly, his nostrils trembled a bit, and only one of his beautiful dark-brown eyes was movable. It sometimes glanced peacefully and sadly in my direction, while the other eye remained pointed toward the same corner, as if it had been sold and was no longer being taken into account.

(
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
, p. 28)

As for myself, what has died for me has died, so to speak, into my own heart: when I looked for him, the person who vanished has collected
himself strangely and so surprisingly
in
me, and it was so moving to feel he was now
only
there that my enthusiasm for serving his new existence, for deepening and glorifying it, took the upper hand almost at the very moment when pain would otherwise have invaded and devastated the whole landscape of my spirit. When I remember how I—often with the utmost difficulty in understanding and accepting each other—loved my father! Often, in childhood, my mind became confused and my heart grew numb at the mere thought that someday he might no longer be; my existence seemed to me so wholly conditioned through him (my existence, which from the start was pointed in such a different direction!) that his departure was to my innermost self synonymous with my own destruction …, but
so
deeply is death rooted in the essence of love that (if only we are cognizant of death without letting ourselves be misled by the uglinesses and suspicions that have been attached to it) it nowhere contradicts love:
where
, after all, can it drive out someone whom we have carried unsay ably in our heart except into this very heart, where would the “idea” of this loved being exist, and his unceasing influence (: for
how
could
that
cease which even while he lived with us was more and more independent of his tangible presence)… where would this always secret influence be more secure than
in
us?! Where can we come closer to it, where more purely celebrate it, when obey it better, than when it appears combined with our own voices, as if our heart had learned a new language, a new song, a new strength!

(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, January 6, 1923)

no matter how cleverly he might present his paradoxes, he would never make me believe that a mechanical marionette could contain more grace than there is in the structure of the human body.

Herr C. replied that, in fact, it is impossible for a human being to be anywhere near as graceful as a marionette. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect. Here is the point where the two ends of the circular world meet.

I was more and more astonished, and didn’t know what I should say to such extraordinary assertions.

It seemed, he said, as he took a pinch of snuff, that I hadn’t read the third chapter of the Book of Genesis with sufficient attention; and
if a man wasn’t familiar with that first period of all human development, one could hardly expect to converse with him about later periods, and certainly not about the final ones.

I told him that I was well aware what disorders consciousness produces in the natural grace of a human being. [Here follow two anecdotes: the first about a young man who by becoming aware of his physical beauty loses it; the second about a pet bear who can easily parry the thrusts of the most accomplished swordsman.]

“Now, my dear fellow,” said Herr C., “you are in possession of everything you need in order to understand the point I am making. We see that in the world of Nature, the dimmer and weaker intellect grows, the more radiantly and imperiously grace emerges. But just as a section drawn through two lines, considered from one given point, after passing through infinity, suddenly arrives on the other side of that point; or as the image in a concave mirror, after vanishing into infinity, suddenly reappears right in front of us: so grace too returns when knowledge has, as it were, gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form in which consciousness is either nonexistent or infinite, i.e., in the marionette or in the god.”

“Does that mean,” I said, a bit bewildered, “that we must eat again of the Tree of Knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence?”

“Certainly,” he answered. “That is the last chapter in the history of the world.”

Extensive as the “external” world is, with all its sidereal distances it hardly bears comparison with the dimensions, the
depth-dimensions
, of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be, in itself, almost unlimited.… It seems to me more and more as though our ordinary consciousness inhabited the apex of a pyramid whose base in us (and, as it were, beneath us) broadens out to such an extent that the farther we are able to let ourselves down into it, the more completely do we appear to be included in the realities of earthly and, in the widest sense,
worldly
, existence, which are not dependent on time and space. From my earliest youth I have felt the
intuition (and have also, as far as I could, lived by it) that at some deeper cross-section of this pyramid of consciousness, mere
being
could become an event, the inviolable presence and simultaneity of everything that we, on the upper, “normal,” apex of self-consciousness, are permitted to experience only as entropy.

(To Nora Purtscher-Wydenbruck, August 11, 1924)

I had intended to make a copy of the other three Elegies for you today, since it is already Sunday again. But now—imagine!—in a radiant afterstorm, another Elegy has been added, the “Saltimbanques” [“Acrobats”]. It is the most wonderful completion; only now does the circle of the Elegies seem to me truly closed. It is not added on as the Eleventh, but will be inserted (as the Fifth) before the “Hero-Elegy.” Besides, the piece that previously stood there seemed to me, because of its different kind of structure, to be unjustified in that place, though beautiful as a poem. The new Elegy will replace it (and how!), and the supplanted poem will appear in the section of “Fragmentary Pieces” which, as a second part of the book of Elegies, will contain everything that is contemporaneous with them, all the poems that time, so to speak, destroyed before they could be born, or cut off in their development to such an extent that the broken edges show.—And so now the “Saltimbanques” too exist, who even from my very first year in Paris affected me so absolutely and have haunted me ever since.

(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, February 19, 1922)

As if it were the label on a druggist’s urn; abbreviation of
Subrisio Saltat(orum).
The labels on these receptacles almost always appear in abbreviated form.

(Ernst Zinn, “Mitteilungen zu R. M. Rilkes Ausgewählten
Werken,” in
Dichtung und Volkstum
40, p. 132)

the incomprehensible temple-world of Karnak, which I saw the very first evening, and again yesterday, under a moon just beginning to wane: saw, saw, saw—my God, you pull yourself together and with all your might you try to believe your two focused eyes—and yet it begins above them, reaches out everywhere above and beyond them (only a god can cultivate such a field of vision)…

(To Clara Rilke, January 18, 1911)

The bird is a creature that has a very special feeling of trust in the external world, as if she knew that she is one with its deepest mystery. That is why she sings in it as if she were singing within her own depths; that is why we so easily receive a birdcall into our own depths; we seem to be translating it without residue into our emotion; indeed, it can for a moment turn the whole world into inner space, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between her heart and the world’s.

(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, February 20, 1914)

Learn, inner man, to look on your inner woman,

the one attained from a thousand

natures …

(“Turning-point,”
this page
)

These Things, whose essential life you want to express, first ask you, “Are you free? Are you prepared to devote all your love to me, to lie with me as St. Julian the Hospitaller lay beside the leper, giving him the supreme embrace which no simple, fleeting love of one’s neighbor could accomplish, because its motive is love, the whole of love, all the love that exists on earth.” And if the Thing sees that you are otherwise occupied, with even a particle of your interest, it shuts itself off; it may perhaps give you some slight sign of friendship, a word or a nod, but it will never give you its heart, entrust you with its patient being, its sweet sidereal constancy, which makes it so like the constellations
in the sky. In order for a Thing to speak to you, you must regard it for a certain time as
the only one that exists
, as the one and only phenomenon, which through your laborious and exclusive love is now placed at the center of the universe, and which, in that incomparable place, is on that day attended by angels.

(To Baladine Klossowska, December 16, 1920)

What we call fate does not come to us from outside: it goes forth from within us.

(To Franz Xaver Kappus, August 12, 1904)

Woman has something of her very own, something suffered, accomplished, perfected. Man, who always had the excuse of being busy with more important matters, and who (let us say it frankly) was not at all adequately prepared for love, has not since antiquity (except for the saints) truly entered into love. The Troubadours knew very well how little they could risk, and Dante, in whom the need became great, only skirted around love with the huge arc of his gigantically evasive poem. Everything else is, in this sense, derivative and second-rate.… You see, after this very salutary interval I am expecting man, the man of the “new heartbeat,” who for the time being is getting nowhere, to take upon himself, for the next few thousand years, his own development into the lover—a long, difficult, and, for him, completely new development. As for the woman—withdrawn into the beautiful contour she has made for herself, she will probably find the composure to wait for this slow lover of hers, without getting bored and without too much irony, and, when he arrives, to welcome him.

(To Annette Kolb, January 23, 1912)