Rilke in Paris Read online

  Notes on the Melody of Things

  by Rainer Maria Rilke

  Introduction

  Notes on the Melody of Things is taken from the fifth volume of Rilke’s Collected Works, published by Insel (1965). It dates from the year 1898, when Rilke was just twenty-three years old. Few people are aware of its existence, and English translations are noticeably rare. I discovered the Notes myself through a German/French bilingual edition, published by Allia, Paris, in 2008, which I happened to review for the Times Literary Supplement. This little book was a popular choice on Allia’s list and, priced at a mere 3 euros, could hardly be passed by. Some of the information from my introduction here was sourced from the Allia book, specifically a ‘translator’s note’ by Bernard Pautrat.

  The year before Notes was written, Rilke had been following courses at the University of Munich in Germany and had there met the enigmatic Lou Andreas-Salomé for the first time. This deeply attractive, independent, formidably intellectual, well-travelled woman had relationships with a number of leading intellectual figures of the age, such as Wagner and Freud, but was most ardently pursued by Nietzsche, whose volley of marriage proposals only glanced off the armour of her strictly maintained independence, a bitter disappointment which could only hasten the troubled philosopher’s descent into self-loathing and mental chaos.

  When Rilke met Salomé in Munich she was fifteen years his senior. He quickly fell in love with her and they lived in close liaison, travelling widely, even with Salomé’s then husband, sharing their impressions and thoughts on mutually sustaining subjects. Salomé taught the young poet Russian, advised him to change his name to the more commanding ‘Rainer’ from the fey-sounding ‘René’, and became his chief advisor and confidante. It was she who began introducing him to intellectually minded members of the European aristocracy, initiating a system of patronage which was to remain absolutely crucial throughout Rilke’s working life. And, most tellingly, she talked of Nietzsche and their platonic yet intensely cerebral relationship, drawing Rilke closer to the personality of the most essential thinker of the modern age and his writings.

  In the spring of 1898 Rilke visited Italy to study Renaissance painting in Florence. In encountering the Italian masters, Rilke embarked on the first of a series of self-educating periods of artistic observation, which would continue later in Paris with the overwhelming lesson of Cézanne in 1907. But in 1898, he was only beginning his journey towards that distinctive poetry of inwardness that would make his name in the forthcoming century. Notes then appears to exhibit a double formation in a concentrated observation of the work of the Italian Primitive painters and the philosophy of Nietzsche, namely from the period of The Birth of Tragedy, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was twenty-eight. Elements of the framework of the Notes are to be found in the Greek model behind The Birth of Tragedy, such as the stage, the actors and the chorus. Other elements are taken from his reflection on Italian paintings viewed in the galleries of Florence, the foreground, the background and the isolated figures represented within a landscape. In this early work, The Birth of Tragedy, taking Greek culture and the perceived failure of a Socratic ideal as a template for the modern age, Nietzsche sought to sweep away the debris of a culture made decrepit by 2,000 years of Christianity, and reinstate a Dionysian one with the unrestrained and deliriously ‘unscientific’ music of Wagner as its figurehead. In the Dionysian culture Nietzsche glorified, the primordial unity of the world is achieved through the individual who only commits to the wider community by immersing himself in life in the ‘here and now’ fully, and by eschewing that vague appearance of existence which the Apollonian culture champions. To connect with this individual essence is to find new hope in a fully lived earthly existence, beyond the precarious promise of an afterlife. Such thoughts naturally appealed to Rilke, who abhorred the dogma of religion and did not care much for what he augured in the orthodox entrails of Christianity. In Notes, the constant ebb and flow between background and the foreground, solitude and community, choir and ‘the melody of things’, all implicitly echo Nietzschean preoccupations with the Apollonian and the Dionysian. And, like Nietzsche, Rilke is suggesting a reform of all values, a revolution of the scene, which will constitute an overthrowing of the current culture still fettered to outmoded thought and thus the construction of a whole new way of being. Rilke’s urge to have done with the petrifying properties of realism and harness a new way of seeing is also symptomatic of his age and is copiously reflected in the works of dramatist writers of the period, such as Maurice Maeterlinck, Konstantin Stanislavski and Max Reinhardt. What’s more, the symbolist period in art was all about suggestion, rather than slavishly depicting reality, looking beyond the obvious to hidden identities within objects and landscapes, which could only be accessed by patient contemplation and a willingness to transmogrify plastic elements into a necessarily elusive theatre of the senses. This preoccupation is also present in the Notes.

  But to reduce Notes to a simple manifesto for Nietzschean revolt or a radical text for the new theatre would be grossly over-simplistic. For it is a significant movement towards the poetry, which was as far as Rilke was concerned, only to begin properly a year later in 1899, with The Book of Hours. Notes is at once mysterious and enigmatic, tantalising and sometimes infuriating in the way it falls back like a wave from the sea wall of absolute clarity. It leads the reader into a labyrinth veiled with the most beautiful and artful webs that must catch on you as you pass. The reader should therefore harvest sublime moments such as: ‘You must extract the rhythm of the waves’ sound from the roaring tumult of the sea and from the tangled net of everyday conversation, somehow draw the one living line that bears the rest…’ or acknowledge the typically Rilkean aphorism of ‘Even when the root is ignorant of the fruits, it nourishes them nevertheless.’ It would be true to say that these Notes, miniature prose poems in a sense themselves, announce the great poetry to come. The particular attention paid to the complex relationship between the close at hand and the wider unknown immensity beyond, will always remain a recurring element of Rilke’s poetry. Solitude, the giving productive solitude that outruns loneliness for a time, will always constitute its main artery and, as Rilke reminds us from the lower rung of his maturity, ‘The more solitary a person is, the more solemn, moving and powerful their community.’

  Notes on the Melody of Things

  I

  We are right at the beginning, you see.

  As if before everything. With

  a thousand and one dreams behind us and

  without act.

  II

  I can think of no knowledge more sacred

  than this:

  That you must become one who begins.

  One who writes the first word behind

  a century-long

  dash.

  III

  It occurs to me: with this observation:

  that we still paint figures against a

  gold background, like the early Primitives.

  Before the indeterminate they stand.

  Sometimes of gold, sometimes of grey.

  Sometimes in the light and often with,

  behind them, an inscrutable darkness.

  IV

  That is understood. To know men

  one must isolate them. But after a long

  experience, it seems right to put back

  such isolated reflections into a relationship,

  with each other and with more ripened

  gaze accompany their broad gestures.

  V

  Compare just once the gold background of the

  Trecento, with the numerous later compositions

  of the old Italian masters, where the figures assemble

  for a Santa Conversazione before a radiant landscape

  in the light air of Umbria. The gold background

  isolates each figure. The landscape shines behind

  them like a common soul, from which they draw

  their smile
and their love.

  VI

  Then think on life itself. Remember that men

  have many inflated gestures and unimaginably

  grandiose words. If they were, if only for a time,

  as calm and as deep as the beautiful saints of Marco

  Basaiti, then behind them too you would find

  the landscape they have in common.

  VII

  And there are moments too where

  a man before you stands apart, clear and calm

  before his splendour. These are rare festivals

  that you will never forget. From that point on

  you love this man. That is to say, you trace

  with your own tender hands, the contours

  of his personality as you knew it in this hour.

  VIII

  Art does the same. It is, yes, the most ample,

  the most presumptuous love. It is God’s love. It

  cannot stop at the individual who is only the door

  to life. It must break through. It must never tire.

  To fulfil itself, it must labour where all – are a one.

  And when it gives to this one, then for all comes

  a richness without limit.

  IX

  How far art is from this can be seen

  on the stage, where it says or means to say

  how life is, not the individual in his ideal repose

  but the movement and interaction of the many.

  So the truth is, it simply places people

  side by side, as in the Trecento, and leaves them

  to forge closer relationships before the grey or

  gold of the background.

  X

  And that is what happens. They try to reach

  each other with words, with gestures. They almost

  dislocate their arms, for their gestures are too short.

  They make interminable efforts to launch syllables,

  but they are frankly bad players of the ball, who don’t

  know how to catch. So time passes in stooping and

  seeking – just as in life.

  XI

  And art has done nothing other than shown us

  the confusion in which we reside most of the time.

  It has worried us, instead of making us quiet and

  calm. It has proved that each lives on their island;

  only the islands are not distant enough that we might

  live peacefully and in solitude. One can disturb another

  or terrify them, or pursue them with spears – only

  no-one cannot help no-one.

  XII

  From island to island there is only one possibility:

  dangerous leaps, where one risks more than one’s legs.

  This means an eternal leaping back and forth,

  with accidents and absurdities; for if it happens that

  two people leap towards one another at the same moment,

  they meet each other only in mid-air

  and following this taxing exchange, they find themselves

  one from the other, as far apart as before.

  XIII

  This is not at all strange; for in reality the bridges

  that lead one to the other, over which you

  travel with beautiful solemn step, are not in us,

  but behind us, precisely as in the landscapes of

  Fra Bartolomeo or Leonardo. It is a fact that life

  really does reach a fine point in the individual.

  But from summit to summit the path runs through

  ever broadening valleys.

  XIV

  When two or three people are assembled,

  this does not mean they are properly together.

  They are like marionettes whose strings are

  in different hands. Only when one hand guides

  them all do they form a community which compels

  them to bow low or crash into each other.

  And the strength of the human, that too is there

  in the one sovereign hand that holds the strings.

  XV

  Now they find themselves in the common hour, in the

  common storm, in the one room where they find each

  other. Not until a background is raised behind them do

  they begin to consort with one another. For they must

  invoke the one homeland. They must at the same time

  show each other their accreditations, that they carry

  with them and which hold the word and seal of the

  same Prince.

  XVI

  Whether it be the singing of the lamp or the voice

  of the storm, whether it be the breath of evening,

  or the groan of the ocean that envelops you – always

  behind you an expanse of melody keeps watch, woven

  of a thousand voices, where only here and there

  is there room for your solo. To know ‘at what moment

  you must make your entrance’, that is the secret of

  your solitude: just as the art of genuine fellowship is

  to allow the lofty words to fall into the common melody.

  XVII

  If the saints of Marco Basaiti had something to confide to each

  other beyond their sacred nearness, one to the other, they

  would not reach out their thin, gentle hands to the foreground

  of the painting they inhabit. They would withdraw to the

  background, become quite small, and, deep in the listening

  countryside, come towards each other over tiny bridges.

  XVIII

  We in front are just the same, sanctifying yearnings. Our

  fulfilment takes place in the luminous backgrounds. Only there

  is momentum and will. Only there play out histories in which

  we are merely the dark headlines. Only there are our accords,

  our leave-takings, our consolation and our grief. It is there we

  are, while here in the foreground we come and go.

  XIX

  Recall the people you found gathered together who had barely

  shared an hour in common. For example, those relatives who

  meet in the death chamber of someone deeply loved. In that

  moment one is lost in her memory, another in his. Their words

  cross each other unawares. Their hands miss each other in the

  initial confusion. Until behind them the pain unfurls. They sit,

  incline their brows and keep silent. Over them a rustling like a

  forest. They are close to one another, as never before.

  XX

  Or else, when there is no deep pain to make people equally

  silent, one hears more, the other less, of the background’s

  powerful melody. Many never hear it at all. They are like trees

  which have forgotten their roots and now think that their

  strength and life force is the rustling of their branches. Many

  do not have time to listen. They do not wish for an hour to

  enclose them. These are the poor homeless ones who have lost

  the purpose of existence. They strike the keyboard of days and

  play the same monotonous diminishing note over and over.

  XXI

  If then we wish to be the initiates of life, we must consider two

  things. First the great melody, in which objects and scents,

  pasts, twilights and nostalgia, work together – and second: the

  individual voices, that consummate and accentuate the fullness

  of this choir. And for a work of art that means: an image of the

  deeper life, of existence that is not only of today, but always

  possible in all times, to place in perfect equilibrium the two

  voices, that of the lasting hour and that of the group of people

  who are reconciled within it.

&n
bsp; XXII

  To this end, you must distinguish the two elements of this

  melody of life in their primitive form; you must extract the

  rhythm of the waves’ sound from the roaring tumult of the sea

  and from the tangled net of everyday conversation, somehow

  draw the one living line that bears the rest. You must place the

  pure colours side by side to come to know their contrasts and

  affinities. You must have forgotten the many, for the sake of the

  most important.

  XXIII

  Two people, who are quiet to an equal degree, they should not

  converse about the melody of their hours. This melody is for

  them the element they have in common. Like a burning altar it

  stands between them and they feed the holy flame ardently,

  with their scattering of syllables. Now if I place these two

  people onto a stage, and artistically draw from their being, I do

  so with the intention of showing two lovers and explaining why

  they are so blessed. But in the scene, the altar is invisible and

  none can comprehend the gestures of sacrifice they are making.

  XXIV

  There are two ways out of this: Either the two must stand up