Chekhov's Mistress
Intimate Spaces
I do not consider myself to be a Rilke fan. I have not read enough of his poetry to lay claim to such a description. Three of his books are on my shelves, all given to me by a dear writer friend in NYC who expressed shock, several years ago, that I had never heard Rilke before. Yet, there is no logic to my system of deciding which poets I am a fan of. Writers like Tennyson, Lorna Goodison and Irving Layton gained such enviable kudos on the strength of single works. They wrote, at their best, the kind of poem that made my head do a 360 degree turn, that tightened my stomach, that made me softly gasp, or left my jaw open for a few seconds.
Rilke evokes a less outrageous response. His poems make me brood, even the more romantic ones. It takes up space and remains behind like an odour that I breathe in and out, trying to discern and absorb each poem’s singular essence. I can rarely keep steady favourites. Each time I go a little further into Ahead of All Parting, a former favourite seems paler, while a new one glows on the force of a connection to a new experience, or recalls an older one.
I saw the Perseid meteor shower in August, my first, and so Rilke had a ‘new’ poem for the occasion, translated by Stephen Mitchell.
Ignorant before the heavens of my life,
I stand and gaze in wonder. Oh the vastness
of the stars. Their rising and descent. How still.
As if I didn’t exist. Do I have any
share in this? Have I somehow dispensed with
their pure effect? Does my blood’s ebb and flow
change with their changes? Let me put aside
every desire, every relationship
except this one, so that my heart grows used to
its farthest spaces. Better that it live
fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than
as if protected, soothed by what is near.
A much older memory was a night in Montego Bay, when I was much younger, maybe ten or so. Sumfest (an annual reggae music festival) was in progress on the other side of the harbour, not too far away, so I could I could sit on the steps outside and listen to Beres Hammond sing my favourite songs. Often, I would look up at the stars and the moon, profound thoughts quite beyond me, and wish that I could lose myself in the sight somehow, and that I could identify constellations, something all the smart characters in my books could do.
The Rilke poems that always move me are the ones based on or inspired by classical figures like Orpheus and Eurydice or Alcestis and King Admetus. (I’m a sucker for that kind of thing.) Death is a familiar theme in Rilke’s poetry. I like it best when he pushes right up against life in his poems; and I’m at the very least fond of good poems that tell stories.
I recently read Louise Glück’s Averno, and a similarity in the aforementioned poems and some of hers like ‘Persephone the Wanderer’ is how death is portrayed as a relief from life. In ‘Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes’ and ‘Persephone’ life, in the persons of Orpheus and Demeter, are greedy, selfish, shortsighted. They aren’t entirely bad but neither is death; in fact it might just be the better outcome for all those involved. This appeals to me because of the present ubiquitous obsession with youth and the myriad and pitiable ways we cling to it. It’s a comfort, or at least a welcoming difference, to see Orpheus in a little less sympathetic light than usual, as an ‘impatient man’ devouring the path from the underworld in ‘large, greedy, unchewed bites’, worrying about ruining ‘this entire work’. How calming, how right to see, when his patience overwhelms him and he looks back, Eurydice
already walking back along the path,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
I’m a reader of Rilke. Maybe one day I’ll read enough to deserve a promotion.
comments
It’s very unwise to read anything that induces 360 degree head spinning.
– Andrew (11/15 at 05:43 PM)
Page 1 of 1 pages of comments
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