On Beauty and Rainer Maria Rilke’s First Duino Elegy
Image from Diana Veerland’s Allure
The other day I was teaching my students Rilke’s First Elegy. (I’d teach all Rilke’s Elegies, but it’s a survey class, so we’re speeding by). I was talking to them first about longing, which is a theme they easily pick out on their own. I ask them what we long for, and they answer: Enlightenment, Eternal Life, Salvation, & Love. Then I try to link this line of discussion into the idea of what is invisible in the visible, with, for example, Beauty. What do we see when we see Beauty?
For Beauty’s nothing
but the beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear,
and why we adore it so is because it serenely
disdains to destroy us.
(Leishman’s Translation)
How and why does Beauty destroy us? What does Beauty seem to be “about”? What is beneath Beauty? Is it Truth, as Keats said, and if so what does he mean? And what does it illicit in you? For Rilke, Beauty elicits “terror”. Though we typically think that Beauty will elicit love.
At this point a student answered. I tend to feel a kind of love for all my students unconditionally, but I also tend to process them only within the context of the classroom. In the classroom, we’re on a mission — to enter the text, to imagine that if Rilke were sitting in the corner, he would be nodding, yes.
So after the question, “What does Beauty remind you of? What does it make you think of?” I was surprised to hear a whisper, “That I’m ugly.”
The student responsible for the comment is a sweet, quiet man, that I suddenly notice is not conventionally attractive. I pause for just a second, and then say, “Exactly. For all of us. Beauty reminds us of our inadequacies, of our mortality, of our limits. Beauty tells us of our short-comings, but also of what is possible.”
All, perhaps, true. And then, because he just proved that Beauty is not only about positive pleasures, I launched into a brief discussion of the Sublime. The Sublime “up to the lintel”, is specifically about terror, about a kind of confusion or collision of reason and aesthetics.
For Kant, Beauty takes us away from the here and now and thus transports us.
For (Edmund) Burke, Beauty inspires love, and the Sublime inspires terror.
In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, the Sublime was a feeling of agitation, a contradictory feeling of pleasure and pain. Since “the Fate of Beauty is always its end,” that is how Beauty reminds us of our mortality.
On my drive home, I started thinking about my own experiences of Beauty and how they actually worked in my life. Yes, looking at a Vogue Magazine can make me feel inadequate. But I seldom really even think of those women as beautiful, as much as just “perfect.” What I find beautiful is the crow riding a thermal off the mountain, the cottonwood leaves shimmering in the wind, bare tree branches against a streetlight, the happiness of my wiggling, circling dog when I enter the house, the light in my children’s eyes. I was awestruck once, by a small hawk gliding down the street at dusk. Never does that beauty make me feel inadequate, or mortal, in fact just the opposite, it makes me feel connected in to the greater possibilities of life, tapped into what I might call “the mystic” where you and the object of beauty are sharing the same wavelength, on the same electric path, “auras fused” as Emerson would say. Perhaps Beauty, real Beauty, is actually the opposite of feeling inadequate, it’s feeling full and accepted and part of the ever-present life refulgent around you.
For Lyotard, the Sublime is “kindled by the threat of nothing further happening.” The painter Barnett Barush Newman wrote an essay called,The Sublime is Now, near the same time he called one of his paintings,Now, and it is this idea that Lyotard pushes off from to discuss the Sublime, related to the Now, which is possibly “the site, the place { } given to the Unnamable.”
Is it not time that, in loving,
we freed ourselves from the loved one, and quivering, endured:
as the arrow endures the string, to become, in the gathering out-leap,
something more than itself? For staying is nowhere.
(Leishman’s Translation)
Love, like Beauty, is suppose to take you somewhere. It has the possibility (the promise?) of taking you closer to yourself, closer to God, closer to life, to Spirit, to Mystery. No matter what you are loving. (Earlier in the poem: “Yes, the Springs had need of you. Many a star/was waiting for you to espy it. { … } All this was a trust./But were you equal to it?/ Were you not always/distracted by expectation, as though all this/were announcing someone to love?”) The lover, takes you, “in the gathering out-leap” beyond who you were, so that you can be at one with yourself, with the world.
The next day I met my 11-year-old son and his friend downtown for a festival. I could live without the crowds, so I sat on the steps in front of a government building, just sitting, waiting for them, relaxing. Soon, from far down the street, they were walking, sharing one skateboard, one of them on the board, then off, up a curb, off. They looked much shorter and smaller than they always sound on the phone, with their authority and conviction, telling me of their plans to explore. I watched them come up the street. When they arrived, they took the skateboard up a ramp I hadn’t even noticed, then spent several minutes on and off the phone with other friends, deciding who was going to do what, all the while off and on the skateboard. On the walk back to the car, we passed a parking lot that sloped into a sidewalk.
“Oh! We have to down that.”
“Or ally it.”
They are suddenly doing fancy things, fancy to me at least, sliding down the ramp, off the curb and into the street, then flipping around, snapping the skateboard up into their hands.
I sat down on the base to a streetlight and waited. For some reason, I was in no hurry. It felt like an honor to watch them, and to watch the evening light slowly fade.
A woman walked by.
“Are you the mother?” she asked.
For ease of explanation, I said, “Yes.”
“So beautiful,” she said.
So, I thought, she saw it too, and they’re not her children. This Beauty of the ever-extending moment, which is indeed so rapidly fading, young boys soon to be men, thinking they already are, mellow in the evening light, taking their time placing the board, ramping down.
The beauty of that moment was the innocence of it, the easy and aimless Being of it. There was nothing else. But even within that moment, the light was going down, the cold wind picking up.
And Rilke, later:
Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living
they are moving among, or the dead.
(Mitchell’s translation)
Because “the eternal torrent/whirls all ages along in it/through both realms forever.” In other words, time is just a medium we’re passing through. The Now is ineffable, untouchable. You can be in it, you can be one with the Now, but you cannot grasp it. Beauty is related — you think if you get near to Beauty, it will touch you with its graces, or in a Duino Elegy, it will “serenely/distain to destroy.” To be touched by Beauty is to be destroyed. And to be destroyed, is to be reborn. Over and over again.
Lorca’s “Play and Theory of the Duende”
Image from a Spanish Newspaper with Graham Quote
A Dedication to and Dispatch from Another’s War Front — in Reference to Frederico Garcia Lorca’s “Play and Theory of the Duende”
What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
“Dedication” — Czeslaw Milosz
There are days, teaching, when I feel like I’ve done a good job — I somehow, subtly, honed in on the essence of a poem, or evoked the mood of the author’s philosophy, or brought the time period alive. Other days I’m only practical, I achieve, (I hope) in transferring some amount of information across. Today, I was terrible. I arrived unprepared. I was supposed to know the history of China, Japan, and Korea, at least in relation to several poets, and I was supposed to help the poems to shine, because they are poems that shine, brilliantly, especially if the right light falls on them. I didn’t do this. I spent the days I could have been preparing for class doing anything else. I was not preparing for class because I didn’t feel like it. A few days before, one of my students had committed suicide. This student was an intelligent, funny, gentle man just past his mid-twenties. He had broken up with his girlfriend several days before. What I didn’t know then, was that he also had PTSD from being in the Iraq war. The week before his suicide we had been “in” the Middle East, and all of those poems were about various wars. The most my student had ever spoken in class was about Adonis’ “The Diary of Beirut Under Siege, 1982.” The one we spent the most time on was Yehuda Amichai’s “Seven Laments for the War-Dead.” There are a lot of war poems in general — before the Middle East we were in Spain and Portugal, before that, Russia. Poem topics ranged from forced labor camps, starving children, and the ravages of war and love.
This blog was going to be about Lorca’s “Play and Theory of the Duende” in relation to Emerson’s “The Poet”. I liked the way they both talk about preparing the way to tap into a greater mystery and how and in what ways that reveals itself. Duende chooses you; you don’t choose it. But you can prepare the way, and wait, and if you are lucky, you may be overtaken with the energy of the deepest mysteries.
A bit more on my mind than this creative aliveness however, is the “double” within. According to psychoanalytic theory, in a traumatic situation, the inner “protector” will protect the “self” or “ego” but later, (say in the transition from childhood to adulthood), that “protector” can turn “evil”, so that the initial protector turns and attacks the “self” or the “ego”. My father used to attend AA meetings, and he told me that everyone knows something about that old hag that sat on his left shoulder for years, screaming: “You’re not good enough!” Many people have some version of an old hag on their shoulder. She can be especially vicious, prompting thoughts of suicide, or just a nuisance: sabotaging diets, work resolutions, etc.
Mine, I usually call The Viper. She’s shimmering, sexy, seductive, mean, occasionally evil, (not against others, just against me) and I decided one day to kill her. She essentially spent most of her time screaming about how I was already failing at whatever I happened to be doing. Or, her milder self was just about making my existence miserable. She likes to undermine my goals. I decide to write, she decides to stream net flick videos. I decide to diet, she decides to eat blueberry pie. I decide to dance, she decides my knee is injured and I have to sit around. What happened when I decided to kill her, however, is that she explained to me that she was the link to everything. She wasn’t able to be destroyed without destroying myself as well. She is the link to the chaos, the evil, the good, the Being or being human. She is not essentially evil but she is all things. She contains it all. There is no good without evil, on this plane, in this life. She is the void, the abyss — that which holds the place for duende, for spirit, for creativity, for life. In this way, she is a kind of Dionysian impulse. Not just a seeker of pleasure, but an impulse against reason, against order, against goals or accomplishment. She is LIFE, as messy as possible. It occurred to me that The Viper might be trying to trick me, but it made sense. So since then, I’ve tried to be at peace with her, to honor her without giving her too much power.
If you have ever watched Flamenco, you have seen how they prepare the way. Their preparation is beautiful. They clap, they sing, they play the drums and guitar. The musicians all watch and talk to each other through their instruments; they generate each others rise and fall of sounds, and the dancers come out, and they feel the music, and they move into the sound. There is an element of performance to the act, usually, they know the music, they know the dance. But there is an element of the unknown there too … they keep that open, you can feel that openness … they are waiting to see if duende will come. They might try to push it, they might try to fake it, they can move faster, build the music, but really, they are waiting, are preparing the way for duende to arrive. Preparing for takeover, preparing for flight.
And when it arrives? The audience then too, is as close to life and as close to death as they have ever been. That is the point. You can feel both, you are tapped in to the earth before you were born, and after you are gone. You are tapped into infinity. Lorca says you can see this in certain places on earth, certain rivers merging have duende, the singer who cares not about technique or perfect pitch, but who has let her voice open raw to life, she has to “rob herself of skill and security, send away her muse and become helpless, that her duende might come and deign to fight her hand to hand.”
“One must awaken the duende in the remotest mansions of the blood.”
“The duende wounds — the duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible.”
My student was a poet. He shouldn’t be defined as “my” student — I just don’t want to write his name, for the same reason I don’t really want to write about duende, or talk about God. I’m on sacred ground here — out of my element. I want to respect Lorca, and respect my student.
But I want to say that I thought poetry could save a Nation, or a person. This is an old-fashioned idea. No one believes this anymore. I read in Rolling Stone once that Mick Jagger said, “A record can’t start a revolution.” And yet, didn’t they? Many records started mini-revolutions, including his. I would like to say that I wish something in some poem somewhere had saved my student.
That moment when duende arrives — for as long as it lasts — the artist is manifesting their deepest internal self, and the deepest internal selves of all of us — because the “true fight is with the duende.” Meaning, the true fight, is the fight from within. The duende is a little like my Viper — the deepest root of all of life — and sometimes you glimpse it. It is beautiful, terrifying, contains death and loss, and love and beauty, reason and irrationality. There was a time when I thought The Viper would kill me. If not literally, then in my spirit. I could have given up. She would have liked that. But I fought, and I’m still here. This, from the TV show, Kung Fu: “You cannot conquer evil, except for the evil within yourself.”
When duende arrives, because duende is “deep song,” that is, the deepest recesses of who we are, it contains it all — death, life-force, beauty — and to dance in that, is to battle for this moment, to stay alive now, to Live Fully and Completely in this moment. When duende arrives you are untouchable, perfect, because you are all of life.
I don’t really mean to say that duende is a part of some deeper self. Lorca discusses duende as being outside of us — a visitor. But I was imagining that if we tap into our deepest, unfathomable origins — there, perhaps, also lies the origins of duende — and in that way, they meet.
Emerson speaks of the poet’s job in this way: “The condition of true naming, on the poet’s part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and accompanying that.” That is not dissimilar, in a New England sort of way, to Lorca’s duende.
To “resign” oneself to the “divine aura which breathes through forms,” to fight “hand to hand” against one’s duende — that is to be really present. I wish desperately that I could have given something to my student, a Native American, that would have saved him. His Nation lost him, and he lost himself. I hope he was fighting, in those last moments, and that even though he lost, he was feeling connected to a deep mystery, that he was himself, more than ever, filled with duende, and that his poems, his thoughts and feelings and words, will somehow find their way to his people, and give them strength and courage, life-force and beauty.
Duende, a kind of Janus, a goddess of doorways, is a passage into and out of your origins, your beginning and your end. Poetry is supposed to, if we agree with Emerson or Milosz, lead us there, to that threshold. Or once there, if you can stay there, every moment contains passageways into the interior, for as Jean Follian writes: “Everything is an event/for those who know how to tremble.”
First posted November, 2009 here: Lorca & Duende.