Roberta Bertozzi interno 38

Rainer Maria Rilke, between divinity and a stage
published in GRAPHIE
Quarterly review on art and literature
Year III, n.4

abstract

[...] The central position assumed by one’s being trained to loneliness becomes complete through the rejection of (this) world: leave-taking is thus Rilke’s vital space. Such dimension may translate itself into a biographical account: from Prague to Paris, all the places in Rilke’s life that have achieved a truly emotional depth of their own have been able to do so through the creation of a distance; the act of leave-taking may also transfigure itself into poetry, i.e. into a phenomenology of farewells that defines the act of saying goodbye as being both the only one bringing salvation and the unique answer to human absence. Exile is a man’s condition (“because no place has a respite within itself”, “thus we live constantly departing”); leave-taking is paradoxically the only cure capable of making one achieve a sense of belonging. The choice of drawing back while focusing on oneself aims at providing a response to a condition of existential emergency, one where man manages to locate himself, while being in a state of uneasiness “in the interpreted world”; man is thus some uprooted wandering being, because “living beings are wandering, all those, that can too clearly distinguish”. The exercise of reasoning sentences man to be an exiled on earth and to feel his own precariousness, transience and illegitimacy; any assessing practice destroys all form of grace, by affecting both the divinatory lightness and the unconscious depth assigned by Rilke to the conscious whole (angels) and to the void of conscience (the puppet). Man, the “half-full mask”, roams through the ways of reasoning, yet this wandering is a source of mistakes. He is guilty of being excessively aware, yet he never sins too much (“We are not a whole... overtaken, overdue, we force ourselves abruptly onto the wind and fall through onto some different pond”). Man finds himself in an approximate position, between two boundary entities that surpass him in so many respects: the angels, who stand as the absolute and self-sufficient spirits of awareness and who, similar to mirrors, ooze and master their greatness (“beauty that flows out from you is drawn back again in your faces”); and the puppets, “that wrapping of skin and thread and its face of appearance”), images that stand as symbols of absolute deprivation and, consequently, of absolute truth. These are expressions of a pureness generated both by a genuine distrust towards external senses and by a refusal towards any deceiving inner perception. The angel and the puppet are both characters of a crucial reality which man tries to imitate, yet of which he never reaches the climax. Both angel and puppet are the antipodes of the edge that man is straining to get to for all his life: the fullness that becomes emptiness and catharsis. Starting from here, Rilkean anthropology goes in for the irreducible fraction of mankind: its attempt to assimilate man to the farthest poles of perfection is constantly sought for through the practice of poetry and is determinedly attributed to the passage of death. Even love, which Rilke considers as the most intense experience that man can possibly embrace, does not escape from a merciless stripping off, thus revealing man’s vanity and inconsistency. Lovers “hide only, one with another, their own fate”. Lovers who “do not bump into each other always in limits, them who were waiting for space, hunting, fatherland?”.
The other’s presence is neither a means nor a completion: the other is a screen hiding our own precariousness; lovers are nothing but two monologues, two solitudes attempting a dialogue. The only way left is one of taking off, subtracting, carving out what is superfluous; the only challenge is one of abdication, of silence, a need to come back inside and to find again the place where human beings dwell. That place lies within the invisible fatherland that is made up of the inner duration, of the persistence of one memory incarnated in things and of what binds us to the world. We escape from what we know; we go back to what possesses us. As we return to the things, those belonging to the spirits of the Lares, to all habitual objects which are made stronger by this same habit of usage, we return to the things “in which they already would find the human and would accumulate empty indifferent things, appearances of things, shadows of life. The living and lived things, those aware of us, decline and can no longer be replaced”. [...]