Reading Rilke Read Online Free Page A

Gerhart Hauptmann and attends a rehearsal of Michael Kramer , which impresses him. Rilke found distraction in the theater, as he frequently succeeded in doing during his early days, though his gifts were not suited to it. He was fascinated—in my terms—by the fake camaraderie of casts during the hubbub of rehearsals, by a play’s forceful and immediate impact on its audience, the way an actor’s voice could elevate the most puerile of feelings, the crude simplicities of theatrical scene setting, the art’s unapologetic melodramatic formulas. Another distraction: the blond painter visits and is tantalizing, although she will soon inform the poet of her impending marriage to Otto Modersohn, while being saddened herself by his own news, some weeks later, that he intends to marry “the dark-haired sculptress.” Clara? Lou Salomé is appalled. She then writes what biographers like to call her “Last Appeal.” Rilke’s depressions are symptoms of a sickness; his sicknesses make her sick as well; he is not to write or try to see her again; she releases him in order to release herself.
    The connection between Rilke and his mother/lover was a long time breaking, but his Worpswede friendships were quick-silvery and had as many degrees as a thermometer. The rapidity with which these relations were secured can be accounted for, in part, by the cruise ship atmosphere such colonies create, butprincipally by the way Rilke seems simply to have thrown himself into the air and cried, “Catch!”
    Clara Westhoff caught him; a cottage caught him; domesticity seemed to swaddle him, and protect him with its warmth. Love is always dreamed before it is performed, and Rilke imagined himself in soft lamplight standing before his stove preparing a simple supper for his beloved—perhaps a vegetable, he writes her, perhaps a bit of porridge. He envisions a dish of honey gleaming on the table, butter pale as ivory, a long narrow platter of Westphalian ham “larded with strips of white fat like an evening sky banded by clouds,” and wheat-colored tea in glasses, too, all standing on a Russian cloth. Huge lemons, reddish tangerines, silver saucers, are invited, and then long-stemmed roses, of course, to complete this picture of quiet unanxious sensuality. We need not describe the layer of boring chores, the clutter of mismated china, sticky pots, and soiled silver, annoying habits and nervous tics, which will cloud the rich cloth when reality arrives; and the bellowing of the baby, her repeated poops, the sighs of reproach, the pure passages of self-pity which will carom from one small room to another before disappearing out the door—a poor smell seeking to improve itself by flight and dissipation.
    He possesses his wife. How? By trying to make her life (as he endeavored to make his) into a sacred rite. Her friends observe it: how he has enthralled her. Whereas she first encompasses and then possesses the child. On the other hand, when the couple appears in public, the large and robust Clara seems to have her little Rilke beneath her arm (a few wrote) like a pet pooch. Routines take over. How in the world can three live as one?… in the same space with a pouty face, in the humorless boudoir, the barren pantry? Clara concentrates on Rilke, and her concentration compacts him. He feels himself growing hard, rind-like, remorseless.
    Ich liebe dich . No sentence pronounced by a judge could be more threatening. It means that you are about to receive a gift you may not want. It means that someone is making it very easy for you to injure them—if they are not making it inevitable—and in that way controlling your behavior. It means that someone wants you as an adjunct to their life. It means that they can survive, like mistletoe or moss, only on the side where the rib was removed. It means that one way or other they intend to own you. “Let me give you a hug. I have a hundred arms.” So has Siva.
    Alongside the life of recurrent symbols,