Innocence

 Icy, sodden snowbanks jigsawing around Farmington, making “outside” something the boys and I have to make it a point to do. But that’s the beauty of childhood, at least for an adult: all you’ve got to do is sit in dissatisfaction for a few minutes, and inevitably their attention begins to build, like bacteria in a petri dish, plumping into individual forts that then add battlements, and connect, until eventually you’re bombarding Bunker Hill. In his “Prayer for my Daughter”, Yeats remembers this world:

“Considering that, all hatred driven hence,

The soul recovers radical innocence

And learns at last that it is self-delighting,

Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,

And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will...”

That’s the dream, right? The Rousseauian wager, in which all we have to do is get rid of all this stuff (civilization to Rousseau, “hatred” to Yeats, material possessions to my parents and, who knows, maybe “distraction” to my generation), in order for the soul to return to something so pure and joyful that we recognize it as, if not heaven itself, then as close to heaven as we can get in a fallen world.

How much are we willing to sacrifice for this dream? Penelope Fitzgerald begins her novel innocence (punctuation from the Mariner edition cover, though the title page has it as Innocence) with a historical parable. The Ridolfis, a family of 16th century Italian midgets, creates a sort of enclosed garden, in which their only daughter, who is also a midget, might grow up without having to encounter the scorn of the outside world. Everything in this preserve is miniaturized, so as to give the young woman the illusion that she and her family are the same height as everyone else. At one point, the Ridolfis are able to acquire a young orphan named Gemma - who is also a midget - from a nearby town, to be a companion for their daughter. The problem of loneliness seems to be solved, for the girl is deaf and dumb and therefore the perfect playmate for a someone who is not allowed to hear anything about the outside world; but then twelve months or so, an unexpected thing happens: Gemma begins to grow! FItzgerald does not hold back:

“Meanwhile Gemma had taken to going up and down the wrong steps in the garden, the old flights of giant [i.e. “normal-sized”] steps which had been left here and there and should have been used only for occasional games. The little Rudolfi made a special intention, and prayed to be shown the way out of her difficulties. In a few weeks an answer suggested itself. Since Gemma must never know the increasing difference between herself and the rest of the world, she would be better off if she was blind - happier, that is, if her eyes were put out. And since there seemed no other way to stop her going up and down the wrong staircases, it would be better for her, surely, in the long run, if her legs were cut off at the knee.” (Innocence, p. 10-11)

*

“The sustenance of the comic strip is sheer continuity, the endurance of its daily, hypnotic present tense.” (204) So says Donald Phelps, in his majestic, terribly-edited (I found at least two-dozen typos and misspellings) Reading the Funnies. The book raises the question (among others) of what an “innocent” art might look like, since certainly it can’t look like me and my sons throwing snowballs. Figuring this out requires a certain amount of overlaying, since Phelps’s knotting, thinking-out-loud style rarely says things directly, at least not without immediately taking that direct statement as a starting point for another flight (echoes of Mandelstam’s metaphor for poetry as an airplane that somehow, mid-flight, builds another airplane). Still, two ideas I took from the book were, first, the consecration of day to day, “ordinary” life as a vital part of the greatest comic strips’ achievements, and two, the existence of style in these achievements as a sort of continual reckoning, “a device for keeping faith with the world, even as he keeps it at bay.” (p. 123 - this is Phelps on Harrison Cady’s style particularly). Both ideas are compelling to me, and seem to ring off Fitgerald insofar as they suggest the obvious: that is, that at the end of the day there is no innocent art, although there may be an art of innocence. An art about innocence - an art that wants to think about how “innocence”, such as it is, can be indicated, if only by pointing at the place where it would be, if we were really innocent. For Phelps, so far as I understand him, the American comics of the ‘30s and ‘40s - for all their frequent corniness, lameness, or just plain incomprehensibility to readers 80-years later - had a unique ability to do this; thus they managed the pretty inconceivable trick of being “Radical” in the Yeatsian sense while still being as ordinary as a walk in the snow. How they did this is one of the fascinating and useful histories that this book maps (one brief example, about Harold Gray, of Little Orphan Annie fame: “The attitude which can be inferred from a comic-strip is the operative factor, or, none at all; and Gray’s attitude, to any one-eyed reader using that single eye with minimal discretion, comprises the most profound (and very far from smug) distrust of even the latitude of the law…”). 

Finally Davenport, from that hidden poetics, II Timothy:

“If my writing, involved as it is with allegiances and sensualities, with its animosity towards meanness and smallness, has any redeeming value, it will be in its small vision (and smaller talent) that Christianity is still a force of great strength, imagination, and moral beauty if you can find it despite the churches and dogma.” 

For the record, I think he is only almost telling the truth here. He wants to put another word where “Christianity” is, but he either doesn’t know what that word is, or is afraid to use it. And thank god, since using it would very much deplete the power of his beautiful essay - not to mention its truth. 

Quieting

Woke up at around eleven o’clock in the middle of last night’s snowstorm to a sound that it took me a minute to identify: silence. Twelve years ago Layla introduced me to the practice of sleeping with a fan, or white noise machine, or really anything capable of blanketing us thoroughly. This being pre-kids, I still slept like a normal or at least normal-ish human being, and so adapted to it - adapted so thoroughly, as last night demonstrated, that the abnormal interruptions occasioned by, say, three-quarters of a foot of wet snow congealing to every...single...surface has the power to actually reach over the barrier between sleeping and waking and pull me out, or back in I guess. Like a rabbit being sucked back into its original hat.

This morning I think about it, as the neighbors and I all work our little plots of driveway with those modern New English equivalents of the original ox and plow, the snowblower. Noise is individual; but silence is communal, shared. That’s what makes it difficult to sleep in, to take for granted - at least if you’re not used to it. We are all in it, together, like children huddled in the same cave. So, listening to my wife breathe in the darkness, I can tell that she’s awake too. I can hear everybody, it seems, lying in the dark of our common power-out, listening to the listening. 

*

Two writers I’ve been abed with recently come to mind on the topic of silence. The first is somewhat obvious. As a sculptor of prose, Penelope Fitzgerald is pretty much unbeatable, not because her sentences are superb (although they are), but because, reading one of her chapters, or pages, I begin to realize that, really, novels aren’t made out language - or at least not any more than the David, for example, is made out of a mountain. Language is the space that a novel occupies, it’s ground; but the novel itself, that is, the part of the imaginative experience that the reader and writer inhabit together, listening and whispering to one another, like kindergarteners trading nursery rhymes, is the space that language creates: the empty place that it points to, sometimes subtly, sometimes insistently, and sometimes (Fitzgerald is like this) with a schoolmarmish eyebrow raise. Knausgaard:

“Literature is not primarily a place for truths, it is the space where truths play out. For the answer to the question - that I write because I am going to die - to have the intended effect, for it to strike one as truth, a space must first be created in which it can be said. That is what writing is: creating a space in which something can be said.” (Inadvertent, p.8-9)

One would not expect such over-explainer as Karl Ove to enter the mix here, but it is a strange truth of literature, I think, that a writer’s relationship to silence does not necessarily have anything to do with the amount of words she uses. It’s more about the cut - the amount that is left, not behind but on the table, between us, for us. Like an inexhaustible meal, or a battery, a current that must run, if it does, in the space between points. One way I like to get a handle on this in Fitzgerald’s work is the descriptions of people. These descriptions, for the most part, do not exist - but then how are the people there: how does the reader see them, says the MFA lizard-brain? Well, weirdly, by not seeing them, or by seeing them in action, or from the barest glimpse - the way a classical Chinese painting can make you see an entire landscape from a dripping branch.

“She was in appearance small, wispy and wiry, somewhat insignificant from the front view, and totally so from the back. She was not much talked about, not even in Hardborough, where everyone could be seen coming over the wide distances and everything seen was discussed. She made small seasonal changes in what she wore. Everybody knew her winter coat, which was the kind that might just be made to last another year.” (The Bookshop, p.8)

Spare, Defoe-like, and yet plaintive as Chekhov, this is the “everybody knows” of fiction - an everybody that is Fitzgerald’s whole project. We are the everybody. 

*

And yet there is so much snow to shovel, so much sheer wadded bulk to move from its current, blocking position to a different one, imperceptibly-torqued perhaps but then flooding us with so much sudden light and meaning that sometimes I feel that silence really is better served, in a weird and totally paradoxical way, by the maximalists. Or, because the term doesn’t really mean anything, by those writers for whom the shovelling is more the point than the finished sculpture, and who therefore do not skimp on showing their work. Here is Donald Phelps describing the “two cardinal images”, of transformation and fighting, used by the comic-book artist E.C. Segar, who invented Popeye in his long-running strip Thimble Theater:

“These two sets of images, dream-like transformation and bloody melee, share a common importance to Thimble Theater: the twin source of that gravity which converts humor into comedy, by investing it with the undertow of the world, and what Kafka called the weight of our own bodies. They represent the habitation within the world-at-large which, in the most notable comedy, and much other art, the imagination makes of itself. And their extremity, winging toward the poles of legerdemain and the savage sculpture of fight-to-the-finish, set off, by contrast, the marvelous kind of seriousness, the sense of reality being hard-by, which informs Thimble Theater through its thirty-six short seasons under Elzie Crysler Segar. Without my memories of such scenes, I could almost believe in the successful film adaptation.” (Reading the Funnies, p.41)

Here and again, and again in his essays, Phelps appears to want to say everything - and yet in a weird way, I find myself constantly feeling as I’m reading him that he is talking around something, a secret that he is leaving sitting there, as if his entire project were some sort of gigantic figure he were trampling in a lonely corn-field. He is respecting something, he cannot say it, and he knows he can’t say it, so he keeps saying, coming close but never hitting it directly. In this way he reminds me of Montaigne, which is to say that he reminds me of all the great essayists, up to and including Phelps’s own idol Manny Farber, who painted what was there as an accretion, rather than refutation, of what was not. A voice in the silence, which I guess is a way of saying a voice of silence. All of ours.

 

Stranded/Stranding

Jonah is Crusoe - or - a whale is an island that moves. This seems pretty obvious to me. But what about the opposite? An island is a sleeping whale...

Among the many, many beauties of fourth grade, the myth of Pangaea was perhaps the most startling to me. To think that the ground I was standing on, which felt so stable and hurt so much when I fell on it, was really just a hat in a swimming pool! I was crushed.

And yet: one of the great things about disasters is that they spur us into counter-movements. Currents don't just sweep away islands - they create them. Something gets stuck, like sand in an oyster, and then from that resistance a larger dream begins to happen, slowly at first, but then bigger and bigger, until finally the pearl has achieved an existence that turns the surrounding water into a sort of background.

A sentence is also an island, insofar as it is an agglutination of something (meaning) in a current of something else (language). And sometimes you can feel this happening. In the first paragraph of "Voice from the Chorus," for example, by the great Russian Crusoe, Andrei Sinyavsky:

"... a book which goes backwards and forwards, advances and retreats, sometimes moves close to the reader and at other times runs away from him and flows like a river through new countries, so that we sail along, the head starts to whirl from the sheer abundance of impressions, even though everything passes slowly enough before our eyes, allowing us to view it at leisure and then watch it till it drops out of sight; a book which has a number of themes but only one trunk, and grows like a tree, embracing space with the totality of its leaves and air, and - in the manner of the lungs which have the shape of an inverted tree - breathes by expanding almost infinitely, only to contract again down to a small point; a book whose meaning is as inscrutable as the soul in its innermost kernel."

Reading this is like spending a day at the beach: drive home, stop for soft serve, watch a movie, go to bed - and then just as your head hits the pillow feel that identical movement, revelation of your own  sea, which has caught and translated that movement without even realizing it. Language at that point is the tree that blooms - not outside us, but inside (echoes of Tarkovsky, that other imagistic border crossing, with his cathedrals full of snow).

I don't know how to write like this, but I think it must have something to do with trying to make language follow thought - or rather, to make language and thought follow one another, so that language darts ahead and says something and then thought thinks about what language has said, and then language says something about what thought has thought, over and over again until you have is a record of passage that you can go back over and pick apart and even participate in yourself (a generous idea, sure, but then what is this kind of writing but a sort of confidence - a "putting faith in the reader," a la Bachelard or Kiarostami or Mandelstam).

I don't know how to write like this. I certainly don't know how to live like this. But I dream about this kind of writing, the way that Sinyavsky in his prison cell must have dreamed of his magical book. And then isn't this another piece of optimism: that in dreaming a book we create it, as we create a reader ? Of course, and yet how else (and yet, and yet: "My blood was full of them/My brain bred islands." - Elizabeth Bishop, "Crusoe in England")? How are you supposed to resist the current and draw from it at the same time?

Ghosts and Machines

One of my favorite party stunts is to corner unsuspecting guests and "explain" the 1980s cult classic Goonies to them. In order to do this, you need to start with One-Eyed Willy, the main synechdoche of whom in the movie is a penis-shaped key that our hero and future Samwise Gamgee finds in his parents' attic, and then carries around with him through the long, dark, moist, weedy and dangerous tunnels that apparently exist under most pacific northwestern small towns. Queue the comically-repressing family of matriarch and mama-whipped sons; queue underground misunderstandings that occasionally end in a kiss. Queue most importantly Sloth, whose forehead is about as phallic as foreheads come outside of the Star Trek universe, and whose homosocial bravura leads to one of the greatest metaphor for pre-teen orgasm ever put to film: a fully rigged Spanish galleon exploding out of the side of a mountain...At which point whomever I'm talking to has probably started inching slowly towards the door.

Jon Negroni's Pixar Theory is superior to mine in every way; it is also different, in that it does not try to find a meaning behind the details, characters and events in the Pixar universe. On the contrary, one of the most fascinating things about Negroni's theory (to me at least) is how it continually, almost perversely resists this drive. In this way it is both perfect, and strangely innocent - like a reading of the New Testament that traces every use of fish imagery, but without asking itself why fish might have mattered to Jesus, or the writer of the New Testament, or even us.

The next logical step for someone delighted by something like this would naturally be to ask "But why?" - except, of course, that the question has already been answered, by the delight. "Only connect," said Forrester; but what was an ethics in the early 20th century becomes, in the 21st, something both more and less. A pragmatics, let's say, meaning a way to do things: connect this to that and you will receive pleasure. And because pleasure is itself an end, don't worry about thinking about why you're doing what you're doing.

God knows this is not a criticism. Okay, that's not true: it is a criticism. Finishing Negroni's article, I found myself scrolling down, down, searching for that last cathartic paragraph that explained why the connectedness of a particular aesthetic world should interest me. Because it reflects and "proves" (the only way art proves anything) the connectedness of the actual world? Or because it shows us how shrewdly Pixar (following, let's see, Marvel, Nintendo, Lucasfilm, and pretty much every other genius popular behemoth of the last twenty years) has learned to manipulate and extend our innately human desire to join discreet entities into superbeings? Or maybe the meaning is "love", which Negroni mentions with an audacity that reminds me of Simone Weil's "The Iliad as a Poem of Force", but which also emits the kitschy sproing of flowers pulled from a magician's hat.

Well, every physics both rejects and implicitly provokes a metaphysics, which is why I find myself thinking above all, as I read this piece, about Negroni's three suggestive categories: monsters, animals, and machines. Suggestive, as in "hey, that's cool that the many different characters that we see in these different movies can really be reduced to three basic categories, which makes me think that the universe is not just ordered but basically understandable. So, by reading about these categories I must be on my way to understanding something, right?"

The German writer Heinrich Kleist has this ur-text about marionettes, much cited but still very useful. It is, to my mind at least, essentially an essay about mastery and innocence - more specifically, about the way that an art that has become bored of its own ability has to then discover or manufacture a new set of limitations, a new way to be bad. In other words, art is not a matter of being objectively awesome of something - it's a matter of creating a theater in which people can watch you going from "no way" to "wow!" - of turning the grass of adversity (reality, as Goethe said, or "That which resists us") into the hay of art. Puppets are great at this, since what we love when we watch a puppet show (or - and here we come to the germane aspect of the article - a cartoon, a piece of artistic technology) is the way that puppeteers make this clumsy little doll remind us of something real - even, if the artist is very good, of ourselves.

Pixar has always been good at this, as you might expect of a company that essentially based its appeal on overcoming something people thought could never be overcome - that is, the limits inherent in using computers (the most artificial tool around) to try and depict the natural world (presumably, the most real thing one can dry and represent). People probably don't remember this, but the question of realism is one that the studio grappled with from its very beginnings. Sure, they could figure things out quickly, but how could machines create a realistic leaf, or more importantly capture that je ne sais quoi of realistic movement that a hand-drawing animator could? The assumption - the dogma, really - was that they couldn't. There was no way. Art was something that only the human hand could make. Reality was our province, ours to imitate and evoke.

Except that, lo and behold, the copying of the real world turned out to be exactly what Pixar was best at. First there was Woody (so close to an actual marionette that the Kleist estate probably should have sued); then water; then Sully's fur; then superheroes; then red hair, and so on. Each movie a Columbus-level rediscovery of reality in this medium that was supposed to be so cold but turned out to be, mysteriously, full of exactly the "love" that Negroni ascribes to it. The power to connect things, in other words, be they monster, animal, or machine - to make them all, essentially, look like us. So that dearest human emotion turns out to be, not generosity, but defense: a desire to domesticate and humanize the strange, inanimate, or bestial world. A desire so powerful that, so far at least, nothing has been able to resist it.

The one exception to this has turned out to be us, of course. Humans are notoriously tricky to make look real - to "render," as the terminology has it. Which is why I think both we and Pixar itself need Negroni's categories. An alibi-seeking species, we disguise our rapacious hunger for reality under myths of the status-quo: the world is all alive, a giant living room, and best of all it loves us back. Love, the Pixar kind of love at least, is beautiful. It is also powerful - so powerful a technology in fact that it can make everything, from the monsters under our bed to a streetlight to an ant, into something that reminds us of ourselves.

The Fattest Armor

Skinny poets last forever, but fat poets last only as long as the world  - just ask Joseph Brodsky. With his blue eyes and impeccable deadpan (which sounds in Russian like nothing else but in English like John Shade) he did not invent, but almost certainly did extend the role of the poet as tourist.

Poets have always been tourists, of course, but Brodsky made the pose cool or rather interesting: productive, at least of poetry. His best poems are basically just him walking around looking at stuff, and his best lines a combination of super-retweetable aphorisms and typically Russian mini-conversations with things that most people would assume to be voiceless - things like salt-shakers, picnic tables, beaches. Here, for example, from Lullaby of Cape Cod:

"A giant clock on a brick tower
rattles its scissors. The face is drenched with sweat.
The streetlamps glisten in the stifling weather,
formally spaced,
like white shirt buttons open to the waist."

(translation by Anthony Hecht and probably Brodsky himself too - see Daniel Weissbort's whiny but illuminating journal of a translator, From Russia with Love)

Now maybe it's the summer, which is after all a great season for walking around and looking at things, and then kind of transforming those things into other things or just picking them up and putting them in your pocket, but I love this kind of stuff. It's the Euro of poetry: a terminally uncool super-currency that lacks in specifics but nonetheless opens everything up, at least for a little while. Its ethics are pragmatic, which is boring but at least honest: what it promises is that everything can be interesting, the same way that the American Dream promises that everyone can be rich. I have a sense that it is doomed, not just because its various CEOs (some of my favorites: Derek Walcott, Les Murray, Seamus Heaney) have strip-mined their sources, but because there is a point where plentitude itself becomes a ponzi scheme and we have to blow the whole thing up. Why do we have to blow the whole thing up? I don't know. Maybe because you can only offer band-aids for so long until people start wanting a Rimbaud to come in and reinvent the universe. Maybe because we just have to.

 

As a Petersburger, meaning as a native of a city that was created, Brodsky had an intuitive grasp of apocalype. Things had a beginning, and we can remember that beginning therefore they would have an end, and we will see it. Here he is talking to Solomon Volkov:

"Once Susan Sontag said that a person's first reaction in the face of a catastrophe is basically to ask, 'Where did the mistake occur here? What should have been done to take this situation in hand? So that it doesn't happen again?' But there is another, alternate behavior, she says: to let the tragedy steamroll you, to let it crush you. As the Poles say, 'to lie down under it.' If you ever do manage to get back on your feet after that, then you rise up a different person. The phoenix principle, if you like." (Conversations with Joseph Brodsky, p. 45)

Brodsky's calm in the face of disaster helps explain his fatness, I think - explain and excuse it, since there's a subtle but important difference between Nero fiddling and the Wandering Jew. Both men know they're going down, both are slightly detached from the disaster going on around/within them; but the WJ has his eyes open. He understands himself as a witness, and the particular end really just one more version of a thing that has been happening over and over again, as it should. Recently I was arguing with a couple of Russian friends about this. I said that the same thing happened in the US, and that if you squinted you could still see the blue and grey uniforms on TV commentators and supreme court justices - but Svetlana stuck a finger down into the air between us as it were a gigantic cauldron she was stirring. History for Americans moves around, but up too, she said. A spiral. But in Russia it is only round and round.

One good thing about being strapped to a wheel of course is that it allows you to shake hands with your predecessors - in Brodsky's case, with the great amor fatist Alexander Pushkin. For me, Pushkin is the key to Brodsky - not to understanding him (Brodsky is not the kind of poet you have to "understand"), but to liking him. Read on its own, Lullaby of Cape Cod is good, but read as a sequel or fourth season to Eugene Onegin or the Journey to Arzrum it starts to feel like necromancy. It's like, Brodsky's saying "Watch me be Pushkin for a few minutes, meaning watch me try and reconcile myself to the brevity/limitedness of life by throwing language at everything. Because I'm honest, and because I'm a poet, it will not stick everywhere - it will not even stick in the places it did before, and this will be why watching me is worth your while, since by doing so you'll get some tips on which parts of the world are still poetic and thrilling and which parts have been exhausted for now."

The "for now" is an important part of it. In his brilliant biopic of Brodsky, the animator of genius Andrei Khrzhanovsky reminds us of the advantages a city dweller has when it comes to remembering: namely, that with a city, you can see the same relatively small space change, age, disappear, be reborn, in a way that, ok, may be possible for someone who grows up on a farm but is not really possible for someone who grows up all over the place. I have literally not seen the continents, let alone countries, I lived on between the ages of six and fourteen since I left them. So Brodsky's preference for time over space possesses a certain... fascination for me. Actually, it makes me jealous and a little suspicious of his "exile" - for is it really possible to be an exile when you consider the entire earth to be a single huge ship sailing through time? Or is it only possible then?

To put this another way: Oh America! Oh Olson, with his "I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America" - as if spelling it in Poundian caps makes ANY DIFFERENCE! I can hear Brodsky chuckling at our insistence that time needs to be dealt with only in its congealed form (like believing in air conditioners but not electricity). Maybe that's why we're so lonely, and so communal - for lacking any handshake with ancestors we cuddle in the boat, anxious for the brown-eyed handsome man to come and make experience not important any more, and the skinny man therefore king.

Cordelia - with Cats Now!

Imagine, if you will, that cultural history is neither progress nor regress but a sort of food court, in which the stories of our lives are played out and then resampled like so many Tiffany singles. Cats do this all the time. With front paw extended and head bowed for example our tubby Maine coon appears to be a natural courtier; but look closer and you'll see that he has really only refined the Friar Tuckishness of his even fatter older brother. Similarly Yuri, the youngest, takes the natural jitter of the skinny black cat about as far into art nouveau as one can go without lapsing into parody (which happens anyway, cats being hilarious). So watching all three together, we make a momentous and inarguable discovery: as cats age, they move back in time through the history of English literature.

Which brings us, naturally, to Cordelia. As seen "by herself" she's a riddle: a wormhole whose silence threatens to knock her play out of its tenuous psychological realism and into the allegorical strangeness of a Saturday morning cartoon. But then what if we don't see her by herself? What if, instead, we put her next to Jonah, and see the ways that the two of them get along, or rather don't, since for all their love and resemblance siblings are put on this earth for one reason and one reason only: to fight? 

Also stick up for one another, which is what I think Cordelia must be doing with her silence. Think about it: for however many hundreds of years, the Biblical prophets called out to a gradually-less-communicative God. Where had he gone? And why, when he reappeared, did he answer their very understandable questions with weird tasks and enigmas, instead of just coming out and addressing the problem? Get eaten by a whale! Spend a year in the desert! So that by the time we get to the Prophets (or parodies of prophets, which is what the book of Jonah really is), God has become something like a cross between a game show host and what I can only assume is the dashingly-dominant male character in 50 Shades of Gray. 

Sadism like this grinds us - and by "us" I mean all of us, "the prophets," or, if I can be slightly less self-aggrandizing, "those who would speak" - into a mixture of mealy obedience and gravelly Rebellion - which works for a while, I guess, except that really, don't you ever want to teach God a lesson?  Cordelia does, which is at least one of the reasons why she stops speaking - not because she doesn't love her father, but because she wants to teach him, and by teaching him turn the tables, and by turning the tables, presumably, turn the story, turn the world itself away from Simone Weil's famous wrathscape into a place so empty and meaningless that compassion has no choice but to seep in, as if following a sort of emotional/spiritual Second Law of Thermodynamics (and then writing this, I see that the understory here is basically Antigone's: when kings become unbearable, you appeal to the gods. When the gods are unbearable, bear them. See A Simple Heart, Breaking the Waves, maybe The Royal Tannenbaums).

Does it work? Absolutely not. She doesn't fix anything. Actually, she breaks the world. I mean that: shake a good paperback Lear and you can actually hear the pieces of world rattling around inside it like used matches that some asshole has decided to put back in an empty box. Because God always wins. And when we know that, I mean really know that,  our only recourse is to loose so big that His victory becomes embarrassing. Which is kind of the point, since in doing this, what such a stunt secretly hopes is that God can be embarrassed, and therefore change his mind (a hope that, depending on your own point of view may be heroic, or beautiful, or absurd). 

The Patient Rose

Other than Shel Silverstein, Bruce Springsteen and the immortal Gary Rosen/Bill Shontz combo Rosenshontz (if we're counting lyricists), Rilke was the first poet I fell in love with. It was late summer, 1998. After a high school career spent rigorously disguising myself, I was off to Moscow to spend three months marinating in the resultant loneliness - but not before my parents brought me to that heaven of adolescent book-buying, the Harvard Coop. Up to that point, my favorite author  had been Tim Robbins and my favorite book Microserfs; when I got back three months later I was reading Hemingway and Faulkner and Eliot. But for those three months in between I was nowhere, in Niemendsland, and Rilke was there with me:

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy

of being No-one's sleep under so many

Lids.

The letters, of course, had a lot to do with this. Though not technically addressed to me, they spoke so directly to my needs as a sensitive, ambitious, book-loving adolescent that I claimed them immediately. Within a few nights of landing in Russia they had assumed a regular spot under my pillow, from which they permeated my dreams with the cloying reek of incense and rosewater - a scent that became insufferable but in Moscow fit perfectly with the dishwater twilight of the room my host family had outfitted for me. My favorite item from this room? Difficult to say - for in the mixture of these two colors (and then isn't all of Rilke a similar tincture of pink and grey?) the dreary little cube was transformed into a shuffling, jingling tram-car. Books, mugs, pencils, shoes - even the slightly-ripped poster of a mid-scream Freddy Mercury all seemed to have their story to tell. Patient as a sage (like his fellow Czech Franz Kafka, he worshipped patience), Rilke showed me how I could place my loneliness against these objects like the bell of a stethoscope. Your loneliness is your gift, he said, twirling his mustache in a way that somehow seemed more earnest than creepy. Which was wonderful to hear since, at that point, loneliness was pretty much the only thing I felt. 

Almost fifteen years later, I should probably know better than to revisit this feeling. I've watched The Neverending Story (most of it, anyway) and returned to Microserfs - certain passages of which I can practically repeat verbatim. Time has ticked a heaven around the stars, and many of the things that I loved the most as a kid have not survived this. Those that have survived have been transformed, in a way that Rilke promised me they wouldn't, so that now I can't help but hear a strange under-note in his own great obsessions, Rodin and Cezanne. On a term used by the first of these maistres he observes:

Le modelé...I know what that means: it is the science of planes as distinct from contours, that which fills out all contours. It is the law governing the relationships between these planes. You see, for him there is only the modelé... on all things, on all bodies, he detaches it from them, and after he has learnt it from them he makes of it an independent entity, that is, a work of sculpture, a work of plastic art. (7)

"An independent entity"; which was what Rilke wanted to be, of course, not in literature (where it was harder) so much as in life. Free, empty; "to be unnoticed, unseesn, invisible" (58) And the reward? "Then you lose yourself no more" (12) (so different from Hart Crane's wonderful admonition to the young poet, that he "spends out himself again"). So the sly German secretary learned from his Balzacian host how the new aesthetics - the aesthetics of the impressionists and cubists, in which an object was not represented as in a photograph, but broken down into its component planes, colors, shapes, and then built back up in the second world of the painting - could be used to free oneself from, for example, a wife and child. One (or rather No-one) could make one's life into a painting of sorts, an aesthetic object.

Is this true? As Reverend Lovejoy might say, Short answer yes, with an if; long answer no, with a but. I've noted Rilke's interest in the Prodigal Son story before; and then, keeping this in mind, I find it hard to read the letters as anything less than a diary of guilty prodigality. "If only it could go on," he writes to his wife, Clara, "This being known by no-one." (54) Which means he knows that it can't - that it shouldn't, maybe. Similarly the poetry - itself a paragon of lyrical self-containedness - is shot through with images of fracture. Things are always breaking in Rilke - for example in the poem of his that everybody remembers, as they should, The Archaic Torso of Apollo. It ends:

                      :for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

These lines! They find you, don't they - catch you like mirrors and hold you like prongs, until you've seen that thing that's been following you all these years. Like all utterly unforgiving things, they are invigorating to read as a young person and perhaps slightly annoying to read as an older one - because jesus, I don't want to change my life! It's hard, and besides who are you who have nothing and are nothing to tell me that I'm not perfect? No shit I'm not, and you're not either, and this puritanical transcendentalist bullshit has gone far enough already. Life isn't about seeing imperfections; it's about accepting them. The country to which you journey may shame you initially; but within a few weeks, it'll just be your life. 

Reading Rilke now, I can see better than ever that there is something deeply insufferable about him. He rewrites the story, refusing to come home, but producing in his suffering music so beautiful that it makes us doubt our concessions to the world. It's like he knew the game in advance. But how did he know? Jonah leaves the whale because he thinks God is going to keep his side of the promise in exactly the way Jonah wants him to - but Rilke never makes this mistake. He speaks out of himself, perfect, unsuffering, insufferable.