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
