Читать книгу Broken English - Heather McHugh - Страница 7
ОглавлениеThe Store
“God knows what will happen, but permits himself to forget.”
—Anatole France
“My object is not what I'm looking for, but what I've found”
—Picasso
We come to acts of experience, in particular to acts of art, with a store of unexamined premises—time and space among them. At the moment we speak of a present, we create a past. (“Just now,” says an American, and means a certain moment in the past.) In the very act of language we incur the language's forethought and afterthought; and generally, to that extent, we abrogate for ourselves an independent or unpredictable present.
As a grammatical category, that is, as a taxonomic entity, the present operates as a range within the temporal field: accorded for its operations one third of the stretch, it works like the past and future, and is distinguished from them only by its operations’ imputed location-in-time. But even as we say it, we know a greater mystery is involved.
For the future feels inherently unpredictable to us; that unforeseenness is its essential incommensurability with the past, in this triad of wrongly-parallelized constructs. The present extends not even a split-second backward or a split-second forward, and has the feel of a constantly slipping location. It is enormous (we can never get out of it) and yet tiny (it can't for a second keep from becoming past) and seems, at times, to mark only the—split—border between past and future, and not a separate range at all. The space of time is thus, as phenomenal experience, suggestive of a very different kind of construction, with none of the divisibility or structural equitability of the tidy grammatical fields.1
For the writer, as for the photographer, the paradox of the attempt to capture the Now arises immediately and pointedly. In many senses, the finest feature of art is its raising this paradox to view, that it offers to the looker (the audience) the prospect of another looker (the artist) whose presence is both gone and going-on. The “store” which I take for my title here is, first and foremost, that store or warehouse of prescriptions or recapitulations we bring to the experience of a moment. For the present is both a monumental moment (from which we get the sense of the momentous) and a molten flow or constant loss, which breaks down unities and gives us the nomenclatures of seconds, always already split.
Though we sense these paradoxes, now and then, and must face them in the moment in the act of art, we operate as a practical matter in the world as if looking forward were symmetrical with looking back. We frame the moment in the economies and containabilities of the grammatical taxonomy, and forget that, framing our way of seeing, we've framed some possibilities out. For all our wish to cover and recover everything in language, still it turns out what's missing isn't nothing (we've covered nothing, too): something, not nothing, is missing in the way we see.
Asked where endlessness is located, what the realm or home of endlessness might be—the visible or the invisible—most of us would locate endlessness in the unseen; we'd do, that is, what we did as children, populate eternity with ghosts and say the sensible has the natural limits. But it is exactly that presumption, that prejudice, that blinds us. We cannot see all of the visible, ever; that is where the ache of the endless is greatest. We can't say all we do see, and, worst of all (because it needn't be) we're always missing much of what's in front of us, under our noses, before our eyes.
Our mythographies have always placed the past behind us, and reserved the space ahead for the future. I always loved the reminder that in some mythographies the past is construed to be ahead, where it's visible, and the future behind us, since it can't be seen. Such variances in the visualization of temporal space serve to remind us, with a shock of recognition, of the underlying power of our own fictions of construction. When Picasso says his object isn't what he's looking for, we have to rethrow our thinking about the jectified (jacere meant to throw, from the first). When Rilke studies a ball in air, he observes how it throws its handlers; when Robert Capa watches the watchers at an event, he sees subject and object not bordering but abounding-in each other. In studying a few pieces by these two, the poet Rilke2 and the photographer Capa, 3 I mean to consider what we hold in mind as mind moves over the landscape of an artwork; whether there is a stillness or idée fixe in the store of concepts we bring to moving experience; how the work of art refocuses our attention on our stillings (instillings, distillings) while moving us; and how the turns of the artistic moment replace the elements in a presumptive critical arrangement—unpacking what is stored in the way we look and locate, recovering for the reserved space or premises of time a certain illocability, and re-storing to the present (to the seeable present, that is) its real topos and subject, the unseen.
Robert Capa's photographic diptych “Tour de France” is also a tour d'adresse or sleight of hand, for it shows not the athletes we'd ordinarily consider to be the event, but rather two views of one row of bystanders or onlookers, occupying two moments one might call before and after the “event” (the bicyclists’ passing). We see the onlookers framing the event, looking forward and then looking afterward, in space and time, transitive and intransitive, turning (in a nice turn on the French tour) from anticipators to aftergazers.
The racers, the eponymous topic of the diptych, are present only as sketched in the figures that, craning, foresee and then, crouching, recall them. The onlookers become the language in which the event is transcribed for us, the second rank of onlookers, because superficially missing is something most conventionally central in our store of ideas about art: its subject.
What is still photography's relation to events in time? Whenever it addresses its object directly, it seizes it out of relation-in-time, it holds what was not holdable, it gives us time to study what in the usual stream of changes we could miss, but also it robs the studied object of change, in which it lived. (Even the high-jumper's foot was not so long in air as on the page, and the quality of the beloved's smile was in its waver, not its photo-fixity.) By displacing the camera's attention to the onlookers, Capa reminds us that the looking itself is his subject, and reminds us of the mind's takes (and mistakes) on things. Art takes for holdable what in experience will not stay put; and only to the extent that the artist confesses this violation (this fundamental failure of the represented to be the present, exactly because it adds a re-and an -ed to the present), only by keeping the infidelity to some degree his subject, does the artist suggest the depth of his understanding and of our quandary. Ambrose Bierce sorrowfully observed, the trouble with mind is it's all we have to know the mind with. The perennial problem of our being sunk in our limiting perspectives is engaged (not escaped) when the limitation itself is taken for object.
Tour de France, Pley ben, Brittany, July 1939. Photo by Robert Capa. Permission granted by Magnum Photos, Inc.
Tour de France, Pley ben, Brittany, July 1939. Photo by Robert Capa. Permission granted by Magnum Photos, Inc.
The problem of the subject is also, structurally, the problem of language. The subject of experience is the experiencer, but the subject of an essay is its object. The semantic difficulty goes deep, because subject and object are so hard to disentangle, even once one stabilizes one's philosophical terms. Capa's perspective branches into dilemma: in making the watchers his object, he directs our attention not only toward the missing object (the bicyclists toward whom THEIR attention is turned) but toward the missing subject: the viewers of the viewers, the audience we are, who gaze toward and back on our stand-ins, the French crowd. We, with the photographer, establish other presents from which the act of audience can be regarded. Thinking spatially of the spectacle at issue, we are located, vis à vis the crowd, where the race must have been when it was present in front of them. Looked at as seers, we take on the position of the (vanished) seen. At the moments these two photographs were taken, the race was not directly in front of the crowd, but the photographer was. By virtue of his intervention, we (the second audience) establish another before-and aftermath. These perplexities of subject and object, presence and disappearance, call our attention to the question of what it means to be vis à vis the artistic event or object.
In the unmarked field existing between us and the artist, other paradoxes crop up. In this nest of con-and de-centricities, this riddle of seers and scenes, is the photographer to be imagined as before or behind us? In this case the opposite of before isn't behind, most accurately, but after, since if he were before us in space, we'd see him, and if he were behind us in space, he'd more literally see us; the very thought of the photographer requires us to construct in our minds the probable scene on the near side of the street—another line of lookers, foremost among whom is the man with the camera. But the fiction of photography is the fiction of identity: we enter into a contract of faith through which we are an other; we see things through his eye and stand in his place. Time, rather than space, separates us most from the artist, and the circle this “tour” de France portrays is temporal as much as spatial. (In a sense, it is a portrait of the France that watches the races, invests so much of itself in them, and turns itself to them; it is, in other words, a picture of the “turning of France” to the Tour de France.)
The artist “in” his work always raises the paradoxical figure of a past that is in front of us. The artist's operation projected us in relation to its object; it foresees our act of seeing. We are the audience which is this diptych's object and yet we are outside it; we bear the relation to audience that we bear to language: we stand as if outside it to describe or define it, even to speak of it at all; and yet we can't escape the fact we're always speaking in it, when we speak. Watching the watchers, we watch what we are. Over the otherwise unbridgeable time-chasm, the photographer is out to get us (he is not only before us, but after us). And how we look is, after all, part of the spectacle's auspices, in the artist's eye: the future foreseen, the past looked after. Seeing is always going on, but by virtue of the still photograph, looking can stay awhile.
In the swirl of meanings of “subject” at issue in this Capa diptych, the conventionally primary one (the topic, the nominal performers of the “event,” the content of the piece as tided) is left out of the visual field. The bicyclists themselves, unmarked, are not however unremarked. Indeed, their having-been-there has left its traces not only in the slight wind of their after math (look at the newspaper held by a spectator! — events do leave their ring signatures, their eddies and wakes) but also in the excited postures of the lookers bent to what they've seen. Look at the boy whose sympathy turns his whole body, after his heroes have passed, toward the posture of a bicyclist. For it is their future that children are always practicing, and what has just passed in the form of a bicyclist is this child's image of his future, for the moment (the word ambition, too, has its etymological go-around in it). To judge by these two photographic shots events inscribe themselves not only in retrospect but in anticipation, too. Every object has a field of force (you could say it is the eventual field) affecting other objects (and subjects) from afar. Rilke's poem “The Ball” plays with such “actio in distans”; for the object of concentrated attention is not only invested, but invests again the ones around it, with responsible gesture. Here object partakes of event, and rearranges its subjects in forecast and consequence.
The Ball
You round one, who take the warmth from two hands
and pass it on in flight, above, blithely
as if it were your own; what's too unburdened
to remain in objects, not thing enough
and yet sufficiently a thing so that
it doesn't slip from all the outer grids
and glide invisibly into our being;
it glided into you, you between fall and flight
still the undecided: who, when you rise,
as if you had drawn it up with you,
abduct and liberate the throw—, and bend
and pause and suddenly from above
show those playing a new place,
arranging them as for a dance's turn,
in order then, awaited and desired by all,
swift, simple, artless, completely nature,
to fall into the cup of upstretched hands.
The poem interests me (as do so many of Rilke's poems) as a physical (object) study that turns into a metaphysical (subject) study. The last line's “fall into the cup of upstretched hands” suggests nothing so much as the answer to a prayer: but the answer is a downfall, back into the realm of earthly bonds; the answer is “completely nature.” Rilke's desire for an answer is also the desire (invested in the poem as metaphor) that the analogy overcome the difference between the physical throw (of a thing) and the intentional one (of a verbal construct: a prayer, a poem). Insofar as the poem is his sport, he thus secures the return, the reception, the touchdown, if you will. But insofar as it is spiritual yearning, I'm convinced that the suspension of the object in space, the pausing of the poem in that long moment between inclinations (past and future, “had drawn” and “to fall”), amounts to an example of spiritual presence: neither rising nor falling, bound by neither past nor future, being, like a point, dimensionless.
The ball will, we are assured, as “desired by all,” fall back into the cup of forces and uses. The answer in this case is “completely nature,” and this is Rilke's characteristic spiritual insistence: that animation rises out of (and will, we are sure, fall back into) nature. To the human underling, the inclination that is “too unburdened to remain in objects” looks rather like the sign of transcendental promise—but falls back, as a sphere of natural law, into the sphere of natural law, to be the answer to the “upstretched hands.” For the long moment of the poem, in a suspension of deepening disbelief (subjective genitive!), the object seems to have escaped the forces of our plans and planet. But still the answer to the praying hands will be what was in them in the first place.
The trail of gestures in the poem is worth tracking. First, motion itself seems to be drawn from people into the object of their attentions (Rilke calls this motion “warmth”; I call it “animation”; one could call it “life”— in which case the poem investigates the question of what we do with life, where we locate it, where it goes). Then the gesture in which the motion originated is “abducted and liberated” from its physical origins (this phase has its counterpart in the Capa after-photo, where a sympathy of gesture is swirled into the bystander—or swirled from him—by the by-passers). This is the moment in which the seers are themselves shaped by the seen, the maker by the made. The object's uncatchability is dwelled on, not its catchability; what the artistic gesture frames remains essentially unlimited. The poem moves into the present's stillness, a moment in which the poem has arranged its subjects, and thus set up about it what will persist as tracery. In Rilke it is the moment when, at its height, the ball arranges its catchers; they seem thrown under it, at that turn, rather than it thrown over them—a turn or tour de force of etymological project, disposing subject and object nicely in its field. The object will answer the subject's yearning by returning (bound from boundless) into grasp, but the poem persists as a moment of ungraspability.
We find ourselves in the position of the artist looking at people who are looking toward and after what will never be (for us) in sight, and is only fleetingly in sight for them. In time, the greater event comprises the eponymous event's anticipation, its perception, and its memory, and these parts indeed replace each other, successively, so that even within one viewer what is perceived changes as memory performs its operations on it. And several viewers will all remember differently in any case: this one's experience had the feather of a hat bobbing in and out of it, that one felt heartburn at the edges of the perceptual field, this one once had ridden bicycles himself in competition and so noticed details of style and equipment that had changed since his day; and so forth down the line of onlookers. The instability of the nominal “event” is part of what we see in the de-tour Capa inscribes in the space where we expected the “Tour” to be.
Absent are both the object innermost in and the subject outermost from the photographic range. (That is, both the bicyclists, moved and removed, and ourselves, moved and removed, who, as we look at the photograph, form the outermost circle of onlookers, outliving even the photographer himself.) Yet both the bicyclists and ourselves are powerfully evoked in the radiations of subject around object, object around object, subject around subject. We are thrown beyond ourselves like Rilke's gestural object, thrown out of the intender's will and into the future tense's will.
The bicyclists are thrown not only past but into their onlookers, through gesture, and the boy's body catches the bicyclist's posture. And this is how a self is thrown into us, or we into a self. Subject into object, back into forth, up into down, our being is, like language, as much nominal as verbal, as much gesture as thing, as much thrower as thrown, and as much unfixed in time as illocable in space. Art, producing nominally fixed things, must somehow intimate that other nature, which is motion's, casting sub-and object back and forth into relation.
This is the true thrust, I think, of Rilke's famous “Archaic Torso of Apollo”:
We never knew his head and all the light
that ripened in his fabled eyes. But
his torso still glows like a candelabra,
in which his gazing, turned down low,
holds fast and shines. Otherwise the surge
of the breast could not blind you, nor a smile
run through the slight twist of the loins
toward the center where procreation thrived.
Otherwise this stone would stand deformed and curt
under the shoulders’ invisible plunge
and not glisten just like wild beasts’ fur;
and not burst forth from all its contours
like a star: for there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
What we cannot see is very much the point here, not what the eyeless figure cannot see. The conventional locus of portraiture, the conventional object (that is, the figure's head and eyes) are missing. But seeing enters the seen everywhere, and this is the thrust of art and the thrust of the idea of god. Two seers or three are immediately evoked—the god, the artist, and ourselves. In the religious as well as the artistic mystery, the part becomes whole only insofar as what exceeds it enters it. In a way, the poem offers the statue, in a brilliant synechdochic move, as emblemmatic of the part entered by the whole: the human body (partial as truncated stone) occupied by (impartial) spirit. It glows, it moves in turns, it is furred with feeling. Exactly to the degree that life has entered this stone, in an act of art or grace, spirit enters us. Where we thought to find only broken stone (figure for ourselves without animation of spirit) there turns out to be starlight and animal elegance—attributes we'd have placed on the one hand above, on the other below, us. (Is the god's “fur” there to remind us of what Yeats called “uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor?”) We're never unaware, in Rilke, that the greatened gaze may be an unbearable one: we are perhaps, after all, as Dickinson suggests, creatures made only for slant truths and gradual dazzlements. But though it may not comprehend, it can (itself) shine; and the human form itself, inhabited by greatened gaze, turns out to be a compound of inseparable orders of star and wild animal, features visible in this act of art. And we spectators, unless we have a greatened gaze in us, turn out (despite our having heads and eyes) to have been blind.
Most contemporary American poets I've talked to interpret the poem as culminating in an ethical promise—that is, in the command to reunder-stand or reanimate one's life under that gaze, the gaze of fulfilled spirit in abbreviated body, its life extending beyond the limits of corporeal outline. But there is a bleaker view to be considered. One can understand the last line's “must” in a more threatening light—more a foreshadowing of necessity than an opportunity for will. Then it seems to require of us what we cannot choose or would not choose, insisting on fatality not freedom. In this reading, the “change” is not in life but of it: you must die, in other words, and thus change your life. This message would be the memento from the god (who looks like mere matter) that you are yourself only matter that looks, for a while, like a god. This bleaker reading, though less palatable to a solution-loving, heaven-craving, optimistic cultural taste, rather resembles the Nietzschean disciplines and severities of the Rilke who chose to record really horrifying realities in the object-studies of 1907 and 1908. Look at poems like “The Stylite” and “Corpse-Washing” in the New Poems, and you'll see how fiercely stripped of comfort he has trained his eye to be. Or take a poem like “The Beggars,” to understand how thorough-going is Rilke's intention to study—not to avert his gaze from—what might otherwise repel us, looking the object into some kind of subject-hood.
The Beggars
You didn't know what the heap
was made of. A foreigner found
beggars in it. They sell
the hollows from their hands.
They show the one who's journeyed here
their mouths full of muck,
and he may (he can afford it)
see how their leprosy eats.
In their weirdly devastated
eyes, his foreign face starts melting;
and they exult in his downfall
and spit when he speaks.
The poem is merciless in its description of the encounter between what we might take to be a (well-fed?) tourist and a huddle of beggars whose flesh itself is eaten away by disease. The brilliant interpenetration of conditions—the one who can eat, the one who is eaten; the one who can pay to “see how their leprosy eats,” the one whose poverty is all he has on hand to sell; the mouth that speaks, matched (or challenged—Rilke keeps it perfecdy undecidable) by the mouth that spits— all of this reiterates the savage vacancy in the premises of flesh. A nothing with holes in it—that is the view of the human body. The dichotomy suggested between foreigner and natives is complicated by the lepers’ “native” human estrangement: ostracized in all societies, their privilege as “natives” soon dissolves into their status as the ostracized; so each (self) in the poem is marked by otherness, with no non-other that could stand his own ground. “Natives” and foreigner enter into a kind of moral exchange, in which the former sing for their supper (that is, they beg: they open their mouths and the eaten-away mouth becomes, itself, the claim on the benefactor's mercy) and he pays for the trouble and insult they represent, the trouble and insult carnal suffering must enact on the human body. If their eyes leak, then he melts in their eyes; the melting is both a figure for his pity, and the hard evidence of their condition. If they spit, it is perhaps the only speaking available to a torn mouth; but he can't be sure they don't disdain him too, who stoops to distinguish himself from them, whose dropped coin can only redescribe the distance between them, materializing downwardness. The distaste is plainly recorded. Rilke doesn't flinch from the crudest possibility: that the gesture we'd most love to read as pity's boon and virtue's gift might also repoison the relationship; that the giver's gesture might only reinscribe his altitude; that neither party might act in generosity. The one won't give until he sees how low they are, the others wish of him a downfall (not only in coin but in his own come-down).
The poem zeroes in on relationships (starting with the odd and never-again-mentioned pronoun whose very presence, at the outset, suggests an absent “I” who'd so address a “you.”) The heap becomes people, but only when the foreigner comes by; the hands have something to sell: holes or hollows, the space where something should be. The bodies of the beggars are a patchwork of paucities—first with no life in them (the heap), then with hollows for hands, then with mouths full—but of muck (their disease eats them, and the muck may be the rot flesh itself falls into: here the line between the familiar and the alien is again transgressed, just as disturbingly as it was when the heap first turned out to be human). The benefactor falls into their eyes and in their eyes his face too gets distorted; the last line's alliterative sputtering (“and spit when he speaks” / “und speien, wenn er spricht”) makes the beggar and the bestower resemble each other, so speech is only a spitting, or spitting is only a speaking.Still, at some level we reserve a suspicion the exchange may be perversely conservative of their difference, whether or not to speak patronizingly was his fortune, or to spit without malice their misfortune.
There is a twist of opposition-in-identity at work here as elsewhere in Rilke. At every level this poem equally creates nothing-out-of-some-thing, and something-out-of-nothing. One feels the exchanges at issue in opposition and resemblance, presence and absence, subject turned object—and the essentially Rilkean uncontainability of being, whether in the truncated torso of stone or the oozing face of leprosy. And there is always the challenge to art itself in these constructions; for the question arises whether the speaking imitates or provokes the spitting, whether the artist or the god puts the spirit in the stone, so that what would otherwise be a “curt and deformed” mannikin becomes as unfathomable and spirited as starlight and beastsheen. Rilke's Eranna sings to Sappho, the singer: “O you…hurler! / Like a spear among other things / I lay among my kin. Your music / launched me far. I don't know where I am.” The animating and destabilizing of object in event is the very motion of poetry. Subversive of grammatical analysis, it finds its life in the object qua subject, through poetic passage.
Loss of definition (in from outside, self from other), the sense of overthrown outline, of Being full of what exceeds it—these effects permeate the poem “Eastern Aubade.”
Is this bed we're on not like a sea coast,
just a strip of coast on which we're stranded?
Nothing is certain except your high breasts,
which mounted dizzily beyond my feeling.
For this night, in which so much cried out,
in which beasts call and tear at one another,
does its strangeness not dismay us? And yet:
what's slowly starting up outside (they call it day) —
do we understand it any better?
We would have to lie as deeply intertwined
as flower petals around the stamen:
for the uncontained is everywhere,
and it gathers force and plunges toward us.
But while we're pressed against each other,
to keep from seeing how it closes in,
it may flare out of you, out of me:
for our souls live on treason.
Compare this poem with love poems of English literature, say Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach,” in which lover uses lover as a reinforcement in the battle to exclude the world, for comfort or forgetting. Rilke cannot settle for this consolation, this blind equation (you and I are one us) and opposition (us against them). For in the Rilke poem, just when the lovers most hope to use each other as protection from the overwhelming that is without them, that which is within them bursts forth. It is maybe one of the scariest evocations of orgasm in literature: the strangeness of the night (its dark, its bestiality) is in them, and then so is day, equally unknown, equally uncontainable. The uncontainable which seems so exactly equivalent with what's outside our outlines, the terrible uncontainable which seems to be plunging toward us from afar (where we like to place, and hope to keep, the unknown) suddenly is here inside us. A reader like de Man astutely remarks the reversals in Rilke's work— the sudden turning of out to in and subject to object, before to after, death to life, fiction to reality, and vice versa.4 But what de Man calls Rilke's “ambivalence” is, to my mind, in the nature of poetic language; indeed, art must raise and ratify this discomfort, this uneasiness, the play of the senses against what escapes them, or of language around what is unspeakable. Most poets seem to believe that consciousness is larger than language and many critics today seem to doubt that it is. For criticism, consciousness is co-extensive with language (indeed, critical theory might say, to say so is tautological); whereas the poet's art exists precisely in the refinement of language until it's able to suggest or trigger uncontainable or inexpressible experiences of consciousness, depths of presence. Rilke's art, like Emily Dickinson's, lies in making the constructions that best embody the paradox, or are most impressed, rhetorically, with the dilemma, and most inexhaustibly insist on the limits of reference. Such poems set up structures which operate like perpetual motion machines, enacting poised antinomies—opposites equally charged, abiding no exclusive resolution, and operating to create fields of force. The polarities or terminals, in other words, do not annihilate each other's meanings; and we live in the charged field between them, so instead of the vertigo of neither we can have the electricity of both. That is not, as some theorists would have it, the failure of language, but its power.
In “The Marble-Wagon” Rilke writes: “…the never-moved is changing…And keeps on / drawing near and makes everything stop dead.” Here the exchange (the interpenetration) of opposites is momentous: the never-moved is moving, and the daily commerces stop dead before it. These are almost already the terms of life as individuals experience it, if the never-moved is death, and the everything is the life we never thought would stop. In the “never-moved” we have the figure of monumental origin itself, the very grounds of being, the rock from which heroic figures are made—the Unmoved, the Ideal—that ultimate a careless reader might mistake for Rilke's privileged metaphysical notion. But it is a figure that, approaching the human scale of life, threatens it.
The Marble-Wagon
Parcelled out on seven drawing horses,
the never-moved is changing into paces;
for what dwells proudly in the marble's core
of age, resistance, and totality
comes forth among men. And look,
we recognize it, beneath whatever name:
just as the hero's sudden interruption
first makes clear to us the drama's thrust:
so it's coming through the day's congested
course, coming in full pomp and retinue,
as though a mighty conqueror were slowly
drawing near at last; and slowly before him
captives, heavy with his weight. And keeps on
drawing near and makes everything stop dead.
I think this poem reveals Rilke's fierce (almost Nietzschean) resistance to a comforting theology or moderating metaphysics. In this poem, the never-moved (surely that mountain exists only in the mind!) is being dragged around, some kind of modern god, the fallen kind, like Lenin's statue (footloose suddenly, its famously pointing finger turning aimless). A not inconsiderable irony of the revolutions in Russia and eastern Europe at the end of the twentieth century had to do with the replacement of the rocks of monumental ideology by the rock of popular music (a pattern of uncertain footings is the dance of democracy); and one feature of that depedestalization is the accession of youth culture politics and commerce's dehistoricization: the wall of immovability suddenly a collection of chips, eminently movable and marketable.
In the Rilke poem, the never-moved is not yet sculpted into any idol's shape. It is the source and not the end of monuments. This marble provides material from which we make our statues of heroes, and the hero's “thrust” is to interrupt the drama of the daily. The marble has the weight of priority itself; but its burden of totality is “parcelled out,” to go among people. In its presence, the people stop dead. Men may yearn to believe in, but cannot live by, the monolithic ground or Unmoved Mover. They can't stand up to the Ideal.
The German Abgrund (the abyss) is the absence of ground: it is toward the abyss that everything falls. One might have imagined the grounds of the ideal to be immaterial, the stuff of spirit; but Rilke makes that vacancy take on the greatest weight. Rilke knows the burden of God's word (one need only take a look at the poem “A Prophet” to see the stresses conferred by the sacred on the mortal). Embodied, the ideal must be made of the hardest stuff, marble, something to outlast time. The immortal gets figured, paradoxically, in the densest material.
Marble's story of origins has the same power for us as does the figure of the hero himself, whose shape will be made of marble's matter. The hero is always a synechdoche, meant to convey in his person the Whole (though the human figure is partial). In “A Prophet,” as we'll see, God's human spokesman, like Cassandra, bears the gift as a curse. He vomits God's truth like chunks of volcanic rock, with a splitting headache made literal, as the human forehead tries to contain the thought of God. Here, in the thought of God, the objective and subjective genitive, interpenetrating, become unbearable.
In “The Marble-Wagon” the drama is played on the stage of daily life, as if to conquer it. The victims of such burdens, those who have to bear the weight of the unformed stuff from which the heroic is to be carved, those who have to feel the constraints of such constructions, are present to give scale to the atrocity, to keep the Ideal ironized. The closer the enormity gets, the deader the commerces of human life become. The tyranny of history's impositions of ideals on the hapless individual human figure, flawed and vulnerable, is the bitter source of this poem—no unquestioning reverence for founding forms, Platonic or religious, can be said to inform this vision. The drama's thrust is toward the stopping-dead of life: that is what “dwells proudly in the marble's core.” For Rilke as for Nietzsche, the Christian church, its rock of the ideal, resembles nothing so much as an enormous gravestone. God will hurt and kill us, if life doesn't do it first. Who can read “A Prophet” and not feel that bitter belief at work?
A Prophet
Stretched wide by gigantic visions,
bright from the fire's glare from that course
of judgements, which never destroy him,—
are his eyes, gazing beneath thick
brows. And already in his inmost self
words are building up again,
not his own (for what would his amount to
and how benignly they'd go to waste)
but other, hard ones: chunks of iron, stones,
which he must melt down like a volcano
in order to throw them out in the outbreak
of his mouth, which curses and curses,
while his forehead, like a dog's forehead,
tries to bear that
which the Lord from his own forehead takes:
This God, This God, whom they would all find,
if they'd follow the huge pointing hands
that reveal Him as He is: enraged.
A stunningly brutal (one might say sacrilegious) view—based on God's wrath as inscribed in Old Testament accounts—but cruelly foreshortened, to expose its distorting pressure on the human figure. This God has volcanic force, hardness and heat, as if from the center of the earth (where Dante places hell). For man to bear THAT, to bear the inconceivable (which God is, if we take Christianity literally), he must be racked. Its power and its revelations come not from outside, but from his “inmost self,” just as destructive lava erupts from the inmost earth. Who can say which is the ground of which? Does the lava make the earth, or the earth the lava? Does the God inside make the man, or the man make the God inside? If this is spirituality, it will not turn away from the brutal lights of the material world. It recalls Nietzsche's saying, of the universe, “How could we reproach or praise (it)? Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things. It does not strive to imitate man. None of our aesthetic or moral judgments apply to it.”5
The voice of ordinary authority can handle the comprehensible, the graspable, the seizable; but with Rilke the soul does not seize God, the soul is seized into God. What is inmost and what is outermost are equally incomprehensible, and our lives are framed between.
The Rose Window
In there: the lazy pacing of their paws
creates a stillness that's almost dizzying;
and the way then suddenly one of the cats
takes the gaze that keeps straying from it
overpoweringly into its own great eye,—
and that gaze, as if seized by a whirlpool's
circle, stays afloat for a little while
and then sinks and knows itself no longer,
when this eye, which only seems to rest
opens and slams shut with a roar
and tears it all the way inside the blood—:
in the same way long ago the cathedrals’
great rose windows would seize a heart
from the darkness and tear it into God.
Here the gaze that wants to stray is ours, the onlookers’, and the eye that captures it is at once the eye of an animal and the eye of God. Rilke once again (as in “Archaic Torso of Apollo”) frames the missing human element between stone and star, between fire and fur. The statue's sensual surface in “Archaic Torso,” remember, was compared to everything but the human skin it represents. (Rilke surrounds his absent object the way Capa does—he captures its traces and effects on bystanders, on onlookers, on attendant human being.) In his object (that object so likely to slip into subject, as the statue does, and as the rose window will) we lose ourselves, in an annihilation intimately related to a death; that is why he invokes the wild animal, the dangerous whirlpool. And all of these figures are full of paradox—spirit and flesh, still and dizzying, seeing and seen—the spectator at the same moment seen, and the one reaching out at the same moment seized. All our daily inclination to be idle tourists, to be comfortable believers, our inclination to tame art or spirit or the unspeakable by comprehending it, turns on us. For the uncontainable is everywhere, as Rilke loves to tell us; it is even in ourselves.
That's why the poem “The Rose Interior” moves from expansion's question (“Where for this Inside is there / an Outside?”) to the poem's final contract (not contraction) of paradox (“until all of summer becomes / a room, a room within a dream”). We mean to keep the dream in its place, in the safety of a stored construct, the comfortable narrative we like to tell ourselves about our lives—it is, we console ourselves, all in our mind, in our sleep, in our night, in our room, in our house. But the dream has us, and not the other way around. The scales are reversed, the thing in us is larger than ourselves. To be seized is to be rapt. Its noun is rapture. We think we have experience in hand, in mind; but then everything we made secure is nothing, and nothing seizes us. This otherness is in us as the hollows are in the hands of the beggars.
It is for this discovery (the discovery that the true focus of the moment of art is not on an object but on a subject, that the missing center is not in the title but in the reader) that one loves the photographs of Robert Capa so much. One of his most terrible and eloquent photos is of a group of soldiers crossing a minefield. The field is ordinary, the shot is one of a thousand he would have taken and discarded in his life as a photographer on front lines everywhere. But this one is informed by what came after it. It was the last he ever took. It was shot a few hundred feet from the ground which would explode, killing him. That knowledge, coming from the future back into the photograph, informs it terribly for the viewer who knows Capa never saw it printed. As we live, as artists and sensitive readers of art, we cast our object ahead of us, as if it were seizable by will; but we must be seized, ourselves, must be inscribed as we inscribe. There is some at-onceness which is presence—partaking of past and future and something unlocatable, in time—at work in the work that moves us most. In it we recognize the inseparable claims of inward and outward, sayable and unsayable, seeable and unseen.
My greatest pleasure in studying the “Tour de France” diptych occurred on the edge of the unseen. It occurred in a glimpse that changed all the other moments for me and gave me the jolt of a revealed ideal, glimpse of the stilled thing, absence materialized. Within the rush of my seeing, with its busy intentions and connections, the noise of the before and after, breeze in newspapers, faces looking forward and then looking after, the speed with which presence has gone rushing by—within all that, there is, still, a sign of the presence that stays. In anticipation, you can't see it, though the anticipators have it in mind. Only after the actual bypassing of the bicyclists, only after the brush with the whoosh of the experienced, only, in other words, after THEY see them, can we see it: it was hidden by the postures of looking forward, and revealed by the turn to look after. These witnesses have their backs to the only form of the occasioning object we as readers could see: the stilled apparatus all this reference was about (“art is about something,” says Allen Grossman, “the way a cat's about the house”): image of pure potential, sign seized out of time. It was there all along, the mechanism of the missing subject/object, figure for the art itself, there all along in the photo's window. It is a kind of present for us; over against the occasion as passage, it does not pass. After we have registered the brimming breezes of the passage (subject always moving out of object), we see again, by virtue of still photography's medium, the sign of the mind's abiding occasion: a time that stays as idea, out of the stream of motions in time. Convinced we'd got the point (the object missed, but adumbrated in surroundings), were we, after all, the ones who failed to see?
One last look at a Rilkean passage, before we close.
Encounter in the Chestnut Avenue
He felt the entrance's green darkness
wrapped coolly around him like a silken cloak
that he was still accepting and arranging:
when at the opposite transparent end, far off,
through green sunlight, as through green windowpanes,
whitely a solitary shape
flared up, long remaining distant
and then finally, the downdriving light
boiling over it at every step,
bearing on itself a bright pulsation,
which in the blond ran shyly to the back.
But suddenly the shade was deep,
and nearby eyes lay gazing
from a clear new unselfconscious face,
which, as in a portrait, lived intensely
in the instant things split off again:
first there forever, and then not at all.
In the poem, as in the Capa diptych, the encounter is phenomenally exact, yet turns about an absence: this image of another figure entering the passage (in both pieces, the passage is of space as well as time) in which an orienting consciousness has paused, is touched with the Blendung which in German means at once dazzling vision and blinding vision. The figure of the Other has from afar something of the aspect of a ghost: it enters the passage from the far end, after all, and not the entrance, and boils, as sunlit figures seem to do when viewed from shady tunnels, with the light that seems to constitute its being and annihilate its features. As our vantage stays with the first and forward-going figure, this Other seems to move in time, from the future toward the present, until it approaches so close it too enters the shade of proximity: the deepest shade is nearest the self, and the new face, suddenly seen in detail, passes virtually into the self's own unseeability. (Remember how invisible the very near can be; at its limits it is as unseen as the very far-off is: we cannot see our own eyes). The moment when the object turns to subject—when the other and the self become indistinguishable, that moment which the sorting logics of an analytical language cannot register, when the lyrical recourse is paradox, that moment “as in a portrait,” Rilke tells us, (or, we might add, in the held present of a photograph), that time “lived intensely in the instant,” an instant in which “things split off.” It is a moment of birth, when inner is borne into outer, outer into inner; for self and other are born together, both at once, when as infant organisms we first distinguish ourselves. This moment has its own dark flash of insight, as if two times became simultaneous (the future entered the past), two became beings-at-once, as if (indeed) we could imagine birth at both extremes of existence's passage—all these temporal effects flash through this moment of encounter. The other enters and departs from the self, and the usual sense of life's passage (from nothing to something) is reversed: the other, like the self, is “first there forever, and then not at all.” Something timeless becomes nothing ever.
Look back at the “passage” Capa provides us, framing the stream of the bicyclists’ going-by, to show us how things looked before and after them. What of this occasion DON'T we see? The instrument of motion? The vehicle itself (which is, in some form, in art always “behind” performance)? It was present here all along—the spectators lining the street turn FROM its sign because they are drawn into its motion.
For what we didn't see isn't what is outside the frame. Most viewers are sophisticated enough to notice that missingness. We are sophisticated enough even to notice that two kinds of missing can go on—the missing before something's been seen, and the missing after: the bicyclists were at first anticipated, /unappeared; and then the bicyclists were remembered, disappeared. But the missing we do ourselves, when something's right before our eyes, that's the missing we miss (as viewers, not only as thinkers). If we watch the watchers closely, then their turning reveals something behind it all, resisting disappearance even now. Look into the lens of the window behind them: it is still there. It is still there. The storefront contains the stilled image of the missing (it's the store of the idea, not the action; and the idea is persistent). Look again, and you'll see! It delivers a gift, a hidden twist toward us, from the missing subject and the missing artist: its handlebars and gearshifts visible, the store is a bicycle store!
Tour de France, Pley ben, Brittany, July 1939. Photo by Robert Capa. Permission granted by Magnum Photos, Inc.
