I read this book many years ago; it was my introduction to Roger Housden. After that I went back and bought as many of his "10 poems" books as possible because I really loved the essays that went along with them. They were each a meditation on the poem itself, on life...not in a lit crit way, but more, in a way that made it come alive and become personal for me. The way it was for him.
I couldn't get this particular poem out of my mind...and I want to finally share it with you today. All the times I was not doing this blog, I would find wonderful things to share, and then, forget about them.
So maybe that's why I've restarted it.
So I have a placeholder for all the good thoughts, the bits of wisdom, the beauty that I stumble upon day by day.
The miracles.
Over to you, Roger.
SONNETS TO ORPHEUS Part Two, XII
By Rainer Maria Rilke
Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
Where everything shines as it disappears,
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.
What locks itself in sameness has congealed,
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.
Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and with ending, begins.
Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne,
becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.
(translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
This is a beautiful translation of one of the poem's in Rilke's last, and many say his greatest, work,
Sonnets to Orpheus. Certainly, the
Sonnets have found their rightful place in the canon of great twentieth-century European literature; and this sonnet in particular has found its way into my own heart as a resounding call to new life after the eventual demise of my marriage with Maria, the same Maria I first met in a retreat centre in the middle of hay fields. That encounter was described in the original volume of
Ten Poems to Change Your Life. This sonnet signals for me the other end of the story.
The
Sonnets to Orpheus came about in a mysterious way. Before the First World War, Rilke had begun work on what he felt would be his most inspired work, the
Duino Elegies, but during the war he found it increasingly impossible to write, and only in 1921 did he find the peace of mind and also the place where the muse could speak to him again. In that year, funded by wealthy friends, Rilke moved to the thirteenth-century Chateau de Muzot, in Switzerland. In a seminal moment of serendipity, his lover at the time, Baladine Klossowska, left a postcard pinned above his desk, and then withdrew. It showed Orpheus under a tree with his lyre, singing to the animals.
For months Rilke wrote nothing but correspondence, and a lot of it, until suddenly, early in 1922, a great wave of poetry surged up within him and poured onto the pages in the form of a series of sonnets to Orpheus. In just over two weeks, fifty-five poems arrived complete, in the standard sonnet form of fourteen lines with end rhymes. They arrived with an astonishing speed and fluidity that seemed to suggest they had been dictated to him rather than having germinated in his mind. In between, the sonnets, he also wrote the seventh, the eight, the ninth, and the tenth
Duino Elegies, completing that series as well.
Now Orpheus was a god and a poet, and the sweetness of his voice would cause trees to walk and animals to draw near. When his beloved Eurydice died from a snake bite, he went down into the Underworld and enchanted its ruler, Hades, with his music, persuading him to allow him to return to Earth with Eurydice. Hades agreed on condition that Orpheus not turn to look at his beloved on the journey, though he did, of course, just before reaching the light; otherwise, there would have been no story. His punishment was to be torn to shreds by the Maenads, the female worshippers of Dionysus. They threw his head into the river Hebrus, and it floated, still singing, down to the sea. In this last detail, we have the perfect image for Rilke's insistence throughout his work that the poet be a praising person; that whatever his fate, his song is all, and will not perish.
Dismemberment is a theme in every religion -- from the ancient Egyptian god Osiris, through the Tibetan meditation practice called
chod (in which you visualise your own dismemberment), down to the Christian celebration of the Eucharist, "This is my body, broken for you."
In the sacrifice of the idea of the bodily self -- the identification of self with form -- lies the possibility of transcendence and of a new life. And if there was ever a poet who urged his readers to transform their lives in this way, it was Rilke. One of his best-known poems, the "Archaic Torso of Apollo," even ends with the lines
for there is no place at all
that isn't looking at yo. You must change your life.
In the sonnet before us here, he urges the change upon us in the very first line. For change happens in every moment. Not just the events of our lives, but the cells in our bodies, our memories, even our sense of who we are, all shift in a moment, often imperceptibly. We, on the other hand, tend to nurture a fixed idea of who we are and where we are going. We harbour notions of what is good for us and what is not, and try to organise and strategise accordingly.
Yet life, does what it does with scant concern for our preferences, so the poet is urging us to look beyond the parade of circumstances and events to the fundamental fact of change itself. In wanting the change, we are aligning ourselves with truth, with what is already happening anyway. We flow, rather than self-consciously make our own way. And in that flow the sense of who we are and where we are going becomes more malleable and fluid, more responsive to conditions around us instead of bound by fixed beliefs and agendas. In the flow of change, self-forgetting happens, and a deeper remembrance can emerge, the remembrance of being always and ever joined to a greater life -- not as another idea or elegant concept, but as a lived experience in the moment.
In another translation of this first line, Herter Norton renders it as
Will the transformation. Not just change from one appearance, one set of contingencies, to another, then, but transformation: a metamorphosis involving a different order, a different quality of being and seeing altogether. Not a horizontal shift from one room in the mind to another, but a vertical ascent into a quality beyond the original mindset altogether. (Is it merely by chance that Rilke spent many hours with Baladine -- his lover who pinned the postcard of Orpheus by his desk -- reading Ovid's
Metamorphoses?)
So Rilke is urging us to want the change that is happening, to embrace it, whatever it is. If we are in the middle of a divorce, let it be that; if we have lost our job, let it be that, and if we are dying, may it be so. Of course, it's not easy. Nobody willingly allows themselves to be dismembered, torn apart, crushed like a grape between fingers. The ego, our idea of who we think we are, will never assent to self-sacrifice. The impulse must come from something else in us, another organ of awareness, you might say, that knows somehow that, however much it hurts, however much we may be on the rack -- a sacrificial lamb, it may seem to us -- that what is happening is true, necessary, inevitable, and ultimately, therefore, good.
Easy enough to say, but it didn't quite feel like that for me when, at the beginning of 2006, eight years after first meeting her, I finally parted from my wife, Maria -- the same Maria I had met in near-mythic circumstances in what felt like a visitation from destiny. She was a muse for me, and her beauty and thoughtful calm inspired me till the end. Yet there were also deep incompatibilities, which for a while we both let the charisma, the magic of our togetherness, gloss over. But increasingly, over the space of a few years, it became evident that our lives had very different trajectories and priorities.
With hindsight, I can see that the end had been whispered in my ear from the very beginning. A week or two after we parted ways at the retreat house (Maria to return to her family in New Jersey, and I to a writer's cabin to continue working on a book, with no plans to make contact again), I was awoken early one morning with a start. I would not call this a dream, more of a visitation; three owls were sitting on a branch, all eyes on me. As I stared back at them, they flew one by one in front of me: their hooting filling, it seemed, the entire room. My mind was filled with two words:
Attention! Attention! Warning! Warning! That same afternoon, Maria e-mailed me for the first time. I didn't even know she had my address, since we had not exchanged any details when leaving the retreat centre. I knew this was the what the owls were telling me to pay attention to -- it was my choice to respond or not, and either way, it would be fateful. I went ahead and responded. Two years later, we were married.
Many things contribute to the end of a marriage, and there is no need for me to explore them here. Suffice it to say that when the time finally came for our parting, we were both more than ready for it due to our different reasons. But that doesn't mean it was easy, at least for me. It's one thing to know you need to part and start a new life; it's another to say good-bye and close the door on a crucial chapter in your life --
to want the change,
to will the transformation.
For the first time in my life, I was without a significant other to relate to. My three relationships had spanned thirty years, with almost no gap between them. To begin with, being alone was, and still is at times, a strange and sometimes disorienting sensation. Of necessity, my attention was returned to my own life, distinct from anyone else's. I saw how much energy and time I had given to concerning myself with the life of someone else. You might call it codependency, or simply an engagement in the joys and struggles of someone you love. It was probably a mixture of both.
In any event, over time. I have come to value myself as an individual, rather than as part of a couple, in a new way. I had always assumed myself to be well grounded in my own individuality, and in many ways I was. But it is only in the experience of having no external referent, either physical or imaginary, that I have come to feel both a deeper substance and also a deeper tenderness in my own life, which was allowed me to be more porous and open to the mystery of how everything unfolds, than I had before.
Intermittent loneliness, along with the grief of our parting, and the relief of knowing, despite everything, the rightness of it all, would often vie for my attention, as did the knowledge that a new life was beckoning me in California. I had made my first home there after arriving in the United States from England, and I had always felt more at home in that state than on the East Coast (where we had moved to be near Maria's children), with its more sombre weather and temperament. The day after I arrived in California, I wept for a long time in the arms of a dear friend, who held me like her child. It was all very humbling, a necessary dismembering, as I see it now to have been.
But the shift, the full surrender to the change that Rilke speaks to in this poem, actually occurred for me some time later, when I read another poem, called "The God Abandons Antony," by C.P. Cavafy. Or perhaps I should say it was articulated then, and was already present, unspoken, within me, waiting for the right words to give it birth. Astonishing poem! Antony and Cleopatra have lost their cherished city of Alexandria. Antony has also lost the protection of his personal god, Dionysus, god of wine and music. The poet commands him to go to the window and listen to the beautiful music of a procession as it passes in the street -- to listen, knowing that this is what he is losing. To listen
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria that you
are losing.
Reading those lines was like undoing the last button on a tight shirt. A few days later I visited Maria, sat down on the sofa with her, and read her this poem. I wanted her to know that I could feel the richness of what I was losing, that I would not wish to diminish our life together by suggesting she didn't matter to me, that I would always recognise and praise the gifts she had brought into my life. How could I not? And yet we were already gone from each other.
The sadness, and yes, sometimes the anger, would surface every now and then for a while after that, but essentially I was released from my own morbid preoccupations into a new life with new possibilities that were far more congruent with my natural inclinations than the life I had known with Maria could ever have allowed. And I know she would say the same.
A year or so later, I returned to New York for a friend's book party. There she was, and we fell into each other's arms, though only for two minutes -- that was enough for us both to know the love hadn't gone anywhere, even though our lives were now on very different tracks and in different time zones with no regrets.
This is exactly what it felt like when I first read this image in Rilke's poem:
... Be inspired by the flame
Where everything shines as it disappears.
This awakens in me the same clarify and sense of joy that I felt on reading Cavafy's lines. The love and the life I knew with Maria were never so bright as when I could fully acknowledge their leaving. It's like death in a way, the proximity of which can sharpen our vision and deepen our gratitude. A friend just told me that he has known for the last two weeks that he has prostate cancer. These two weeks, he said, have been the most alive in his life. Far from feeling fear or grief (perhaps these are still to come), every moment has had a clarity and sharpness he has hardly ever known. It's as if some deeper vision has been switched on, which enables him to see with great intensity the fullness of each moment.
I find the next image, owing as much to the translation as to Rilke, one of the most beautiful of all.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.
The image has made me appreciate with completely fresh eyes those nude figures turning away from the viewer that you can see in the work of so many artists throughout history, from Roman times to Picasso. It's not just a matter of perspective, but of the interplay of absence and presence, of an eye that can flow into the future even as it is happening in the present.
The next stanza warns us that the more we cling to a form, whether it be the form of a relationship, a career, or a belief system, the more prone we are to earthquakes and lightning bolts. The more hard and rigid something is, the more susceptible it is to the forces of change, both within and without. And since change is life, change will keep coming right up until the final big change. Which is why it is better, rather than protecting ourselves with some false sense of detachment, to allow what is happening, to flow with it like water, another life image.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and with ending, begins.
Life and time are a spiral, then, rather than merely a circle with its endless repetitions. T.S. Eliot, too, reminds us of this in "Little Gidding":
And the end of all exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
When Maria and I parted, she was once again living in New Jersey near her children, where she had been when I first met her; and I returned to the same town of Larkspur, California. We are both back where we started, and yet not, for everything is different, starting with ourselves. In the eight years we were together, we inspired each other in our work of writing and speaking. Maria helped me feel more at home in the world of the humdrum every day, less identified with some idea of my own specialness, and yes, more open to the invisible workings of grace in a life. Love always changes us, whatever the eventual outcome of the relationship is. And overall, the love and the life I have shared with Maria have allowed me to feel more at home in my own skin, more at peace with the way things are and with who I am.
There were times soon after our parting when I thought I would never love again; when I felt that if this love, which had started so auspiciously, and had so much of the flavour of grace about it, could end, then nothing could be believed in anymore. There were moments when I felt cheated by life, fooled by my own fate. I was wrong, of course. Like Daphne, the nymph who transformed herself into a laurel tree to outwit the designs of Apollo, we too, against all odds, can miraculously enter another life. We have only to bow to the inevitable and become the wind. Eventually, and not always without a struggle, the wind is what I became.
