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
