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
