The esoteric Rilke of the "Sonnets to Orpheus"

Composed in February 1922 as a funeral monument to Wera Ouckama Knoop, a young woman who passed away at the premature age of nineteen, the "Sonnets a Orpheus" by the Austrian poet of Bohemian origin Rainer Maria Rilke still speak to us today, after a century, in the "Language of eternity in which the dead make themselves a gift by nourishing the earth", revealing to us the indissoluble intertwining between death and life.

di Livia of Vona

Cover: James Barry, Orpheus, 1792

β€œSanatorium puzzle exercises”. Thus Giovanni Papini dismisses the verses of Rainer Maria Rilke, denouncing finding it unbearable and pretentious; ultimately to feel absolute repugnance for the Bohemian poet. The apparent inaccessibility of Rilkian poetry, which does not leave readers lukewarm - either it is loved or hated - has often given rise to a discourse around a more or less presumed esotericism. To clarify the meaning of this term, it helps us Furio Jesi in his essay Esotericism and mythological language. Studies on Reiner Maria Rilke. Rilke's creative activity must be understood in an esoteric sense not because it has a close connection with the history of religions, but because it pertains to a "secret" [1]. Jesi evaluates the temporal context of Rilkian poetry, which is not the time of history, we would say: profane. IS the time of the secret, however, not intended for a few. The Turin scholar coined the contradictory formula of universal esotericism: Rilke is esoteric but not occult, thus drawing a clear dividing line between the two attitudes [2]:

Esoteric by definition is, for Rilke, the story and the activity of the poet - so globally esoteric, such as to make us perceive so globally the essential presence of the secret in every component of reality, "in every particle of the air" (in German in text, ed.), to be opposed to any occult attitude, that is to any superficial, curious tendency, unwilling to limit the secret to certain singular manifestations: for example, to presumed relationships with "spirits", to mediumistic experiences, etc. For Rilke everything is occult, and for this reason Rilke - at least in the artistic proof - rejects occultism as partiality and error, while he affirms a sort of universal esotericism [...]

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)

Mystery permeates reality as a universal presence and every human being is called to participate in it; his unity cannot, nor must it, be broken, fragmented into chippings detached from everything. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the esoteric adjective must be understood not in a quantitative sense (accessible to a few), but in a qualitative sense. In the Rilkian esoteric poetic experience, the fact that the time of the secret and the historical time do not coincide is closely linked to another fact, that is, the impossibility of eliminating the will of the individual who participates in the secret; participating in the mystery of which all reality is imbued means not limiting oneself to being only a β€œblind and pure instrument”, dominated by a superior destiny from which one cannot escape.

On the contrary, and Jesi clarifies it very well even if resorting to a paradox, a residue of will survives in the individual - called slag - which is irrepressible and translates into the self-awareness of this participation in the mystery. But the mystery, as etymologically indicated by the Sanskrit root of the term, remains hidden. Here is revealed that condition of privilege and at the same time impairment of the willful dross of man. Privileged because he knows he is participating in the mystery, but (impairment) he does not know the mystery itself. Between strong-willed dross and those that Rilke defines "the secrets of the non-human elements of nature", A dialectical relationship is established that must lead to its overcoming, represented by that region in which" where we feel, we vanish. "

As regards the relationship with the myth, it must certainly be admitted that Rilke draws on it to re-establish it. His poetry is, therefore, mythopoeic in its turn. In the case of Sonnets to Orpheus, in which the Rilkian esotericism touches one of its peaks, together with the Duino Elegies which critics consider hermeneutically intertwined because concluded in the same period, the myth of Orpheus derives from Metamorphosis of Ovid, not following the original story. Composed in the castle of Muzot, in February 1922, they are divided into two parts and are born as funeral monument to Wera Ouckama Knoop, a young woman who passed away at the premature age of nineteen. According to Jesi, the fact that i Sonnets born as a funerary monument, expresses the true hermeneutic code of the same and that is the relationship between Orpheus talkative and Wera, who assumes the appearance of one in singing kore satisfactory. Furthermore, the Turin scholar shows that he radically refuses the reduction of Rilke to an Orphic poet, considering it almost a simplification from a vulgate.

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Orpheus and the Doppelbereich

What world does Orpheus come from? Rilke writes in the sonnet n.VI, first part: "[...] from both realms (beiden reichen; in the sonnet n.IX doppelbereich, that is double kingdom) his immense nature was generated " [3]. The Orphic song announces itself to the man unaware of death in the form of trees that rise in the ear; of temples founded in hearing [4].Β The Summoner; he who ate the poppy with the dead; a perennial messenger who offers bowls full of triumphal fruit; Orpheus is a god who when he sings, is. In the verses that make up the first part, the indissoluble intertwining of death and life is revealed to man, rendered poetically in a series of images that disclose that intermediate space - lo zwischenraum at night and stars [5] - where man (whose hearing becomes a temple to the song of the god) leans on the truth of being.Β 

Round apple, pear and banana,
gooseberries… All this speaks
life and death in the mouth ... I feel it ...
Read it in a child's face

who tastes them. It is a flavor that comes from afar.
Don't your names get tired, slow, in your mouth?
Where were words, now discovered they flow,
surprises, suddenly released from the pulp.

Try to express what you call apple.
This sweetness that first thickens
then to the taste, slowly, lightening,

become clear, awake and transparent,
of sun and earth, twofold, one thing down here -:
Oh experience, contact, joy - immense! [6]

The act of eating fruit, in the symbolist and esoteric Rilke, it is not simply an experience functional to nourishment. If the words that imprison the fruits we eat are discarded at the moment of the bite, it means that we access, through the sense of taste, an awareness free from the possession of things. Dissolved the words, unable to express what an orange really is, that is to penetrate the essence, all that remains is to dance it [7]. The dead become the sap of the earth that gives us the fruits. With Rilkian words [8]:

Even the peasant who works and worries where the seed turns into summer harvest, it is not he who does it. The earth donate.

Emil Neide, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1876

Everything that we enjoy in the light (flowers, fruits, branches, etc.) does not speak to us only the language of the year (son. n.XIV), that is the linear time of history, of our humanity wounded by the limit, which incinerates everything it touches. He speaks to us there language of eternity in which the dead make themselves a gift by feeding the earth on themselves. Ambivalent, that is, masters of what they give and slaves with theirs marrow they make the earth fertile; ambiguous substance of silent strength and kisses (son. n.XIV). It is perhaps at this point that - according to Jesi - I took part in the circle of the perennial [9], men remain stuck in the closed circle of a secret, unable to access the "beyond" [10]. In the essay by Heidegger To what poets?, the passage of a letter from Rilke written to Muzot, in 1925, on the task of poets is reported [11]:

… Our task is to impress this temporary, transient land so deeply, painfully and passionately that its essence is β€œinvisibly” resurrected in us. We are the bees of the Invisible. We forage incessantly the honey of the visible to accumulate it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.

Continuing with Heidegger, we can say that the music by Orpheus (and then the poet's song) takes the hand of the man who lives the poverty of his time, leading him on the trail of the sacred [12]:

[…] Time remains destitute not only because God is dead, but also because mortals hardly recognize their mortality anymore, nor are they any longer able to sustain it. Yet mortals are not in the property of their essence. Death escapes the enigmatic. The mystery of pain remains veiled. You don't learn to love. But mortals are. I am in that there is talk.

The saying of men, we read in Sonnets, it is a small thing. It testifies that we are, but when we bring to the mouth that fruit that was previously only a name, all the inadequacy of the word that makes things named objects at our disposal is revealed and we, liberated, we access the "double" and we can live as the animal and the flower (the Bohemian calls converted men who learn to live like flowers); occur, without subjecting to our will what does not depend on us, like the peasant who knows that the seed is transformed into harvest not only with his work (will), but also because the earth gives.

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Emile Levy, Death of Orpheus, 1866

Visible and invisible, beginning and end are not separate stages or moments or, worse, in opposition to each other: we proceed from one to the other in an always circular relationship. Double that becomes One, along the string of the lyre of Orpheus. The god will not be able to escape from the destructive fury of the Maenads: he will die to spread throughout the world as a trace, making men ears that listen, mouths of Nature [13]. Meanwhile, Rilke suggests that we not give in to the false sirens of technology: β€œHate the New, Lord, how does it shake and deafen the earth? Prophets rush to exalt him "(son. N. XVIII, first part) but," All that is hastening will soon be over, only what persists initiates us into being"(Son. No. XXII first part); we deluded ourselves into subduing what surrounds us, because "the car threatens every conquest as long as it dares to inhabit the spirit instead of obeying" (son. n. X, second part) and again "a roar of cars flowed around us incomprehensible, houses there they were around solid but not true - and no one knew us. What was real in the world? " (son. n. VIII, second part).

Nothing, he replies immediately. In the midst of a world of representations mistaken for truth in which not even children, despite their innocence, are saved from deception, a glimmer is offered by the perfect roundness of the game balls thrown into the air. Then they fall back, and into the shadow of these superb parables which return from the sky into childish hands, there is all the foreboding of a beyond. Heidegger also tells us that by objectifying the world, that is, by making it a thing for his own use and consumption, man does not longed in the world, but stands against it by closing in on Rilkian "Open", which is instead experienced by animals and flowers, as we have mentioned above, as a pure gift [14]. Dismembered in song in the kingdom of transience, Orpheus is a source from which to drink in the other kingdom, for the departed. And then the question is legitimate:Β 

Is there really time, the Destroyer?
When, on the still mountain, will he tear down the fortress?
When the Demiurge expels this heart
that infinitely belongs to the gods?

We are therefore so fearful and fragile
how does destiny make us believe?
And childhood deep of promise,
then dries up in the roots?

Ah the ghost of the Ephemeral
crosses as if it were smoke
who unwittingly welcomes it.

To drift, this is our essence,
yet, in the cycle of perennial forces,
what divine tools we make sense.

(son. n. XVII, second part)
Henry Martin, Orpheus in a Wood, 1895

Wera Ouckama Knoop

But now, Te that I knew like a flower whose name
I do not know yet A time Te I would like to remember
and to show you, to us kidnapped,
beautiful companion won by invincible clamor.

He danced; and suddenly, in his whole hesitating body
cast bronze statue of youth β€”
he stood sad, listening, and by the high powers
music then descended to his changed heart.

Near the evil. By now conquered by the shadows it was urgent darkΒ 
the blood, yet,Β 
as if barely touched by the omen,Β 
its natural spring was ripening.

Broken by collapses and darkness, it shone again each time
its earthly light, until it opened for her
after a hideous banging on the desolate door.Β 

(Son. XXV, first part)

Friend of the Rilke family, the young Wera it is a promise loaded with artistic gifts to the world. Permanent member of the ballet troupe of the Berlin Opera; she is a talented designer, pianist and poet. Her death captures her that she has just entered life, for a very insidious disease, a rare form of leukemia., The same disease from which the poet will die. The first hint of her is banal: on an ordinary day of rehearsals on the stage of the Opera, a thud on the ground due to an ankle pain announces the difficult days that await her. "You will be tired, come back tomorrow" the probable words of the teacher, but she will no longer tread the scene. Wera is done ground of contention between life and death; very proud warrior, she has to deal with an enemy who consumes her body and artistic skills little by little. Before her her legs, but she, the pianist, will play the music that she can no longer dance. Then her arms, and then her hands will draw and she will continue to compose poetry. Then her hands and only a faint voice will still resist to dictate a diary to her mother and sister. A succession of collapses and darkness and light. Then, the hideous banging of the desolate door and nothing more.

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In the sonnets, the figure of Wera renders perfectly the asynchrony between the time of secret and that of history: β€œFrom that distant hour came the movement and the slight amazement when a tree was slow to agree with you in that rhythm (son. N. XXVIII, second part). Since it was Orpheus who initiated Wera into pure listening to the lyre, his dance, in the realm of transience, was an attempt to "turn the path [...] to the fullness of the feast" (son. N. XXVIII cit.), That is, of the life. For Rilke, dancing is a figure, which originates from the same "unheard-of center": instead of listening to it, she danced it as long as she could. Dance has the function of subtracting everything ephemeral from the deaf order of Nature, for a short time (son. cit.); it is - let's say with Jesi - strong-willed slag. According to the Turin scholar, who reads the sonnets together with the elegies, Wera Knoop is not cultually dependent on Orpheus, but rather opposes it in the form of a kore: a dialectical relationship is established between them in which she is the winner: a glorious and "Symbol of reference for those who remain in the world of the living" [15]. And since the Sonnets ad Orfeo are addressed to those who remain in the ephemeral, to the risky, Rilke doesn't just say I'm for death. He announces that I am in life and death in a perennial cycle, in a continuous metamorphosis:

[…] What is your experience that hurts the most?
If drinking is bitter, make yourself wine.

[...] And if the world has forgotten you,
say to the still earth: I flow.
To rapid water repeat: I am.

(son. n. XXIX)
Catherine Adelaide Sparkes, Orpheus and Eurydice

Note:

[1] Furio Jesi, Esotericism and mythological language. Studies on Reiner Maria Rilke, Quodlibet, Macerata 2003, p. 52

[2] Ibi, pp. 132-133

[3] Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, Studio Tesi Editions, Pordenone 1990, p. 15

[4] ibi, p. 5

[5] Flavio Ermini, Rilke and the nature of darkness, Alboversorio, Milan 2015, p. 17

[6] Rilke, op. cit., Ibi, p. 29

[7] ibi, p. 33

[8] ibi, p. 27

[9] ibi, p. 47

[10] Yes, op. cit, P. 58

[11] Martin Heidegger, Holzwege Wandering paths in the forest, Bompiani Milan 2002, p. 363

[12] ibi, p. 323

[13] Rilke, op. cit., p. 55

[14] Heidegger, op. cit., p. 339

[15] Jesi, op. cit., pp. 173-174

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