Nietzsche in Turin, Rilke in Paris.
[In the second part of this I'll try and write on Chamberlain’s book on Rilke, The Last Inward Man, but for now: Nietzsche in Turin].
They stayed right here, as if left behind
by a flood that had washed their forms
free from the rock.
The waters receding erased some details,
but their hands are generous
and grasp at nothing.
They stayed, distinguished from their native rock
only by a halo or a bishop's mitre,
and sometimes by a tranquil smile
kept it alive in a face
where it lasts forever.
They retreat now into the shadowed doorway
that could be the shell of a listening ear
which captures every moan of a city in pain.
— Rilke.
It's great to live only by the spirit, to testify day by day, for eternity, to the spiritual side of people. But sometimes I get fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel there's some weight to me. To end my eternity, and bind me to earth. At each step, at each gust of wind, I'd like to be able to say: 'Now! Now! and Now!' And no longer say: 'Since always' and 'Forever.' To sit in the empty seat at a card table, and be greeted, if only by a nod.... And to drink and eat.... [i]t would be quite something to come home after a long day, like Philip Marlowe, and feed the cat. To have a fever. To have blackened fingers from the newspaper.... To feel your skeleton moving along as you walk. Finally to suspect, instead of forever knowing all. To be able to say 'Ah!' and 'Oh!' and 'Hey!' instead of 'Yes' and 'Amen'
—Wings of Desire.
Western man is stuck in 'la'. Nietzsche mistook the stepping stone for a place of rest.
Notes from Lesley Chamberlain's book and Heller's The Disinherited Mind:
'Yet he still saw the world as essentially illusory'
How to live, then? Art and imagination as a substitute for Tradition, a way of creating one's own world. 'The noble soul has reverence for itself'. The dissociation of faith from knowledge, faith from sensibility. If Tradition is invalid then there is only the world of absolute immanence. And after Auschwitz, the Trenches, does he, Man, still affirm? What, indeed, is there left to affirm? Are we, instead, left with the unenviable fate of constant negation, a permanent critical attitude? Thus the rigidity and predictability of the moderns.
Nietzsche: "He who no longer finds what is great in God will find it nowhere-he must either deny or create it."
[Is this another way of saying human beings are now destined to remain homeless? Our inability to build a dwelling in which we might be content. St the end of time Man finds himself out of time; there is no place for him to rest his head].
Rilke's Tuscan Diary: "We need eternity; for only eternity provide space for our gestures. Yet we know that we live in narrow finiteness. Thus it is our task to create infinity within these boundaries, for we no longer believe in the unbounded." We can no longer be sure we love the lovable. Life in the cave, without a sun. The glass of your house’s windows thickens, becomes more opaque. We look out and out but nothing comes to us, nothing meets the gaze which has become cold and abstract with time.
I hear you're looking for something out there to love.
—Nick Cave
“The battle in his soul with the southern light; high style against northern restlessness; pleasure and ease against a brooding, shifting inwardness. Isaiah Berlin: Verdi marks the end of naivete.
'With their [Wagner's , Schopenhaeur's] embodiment of the restless will, the creative life which enjoys wildly, gluts itself on excess and longs for metamorphosis..they offered an intoxicating vision of life which might entrance but never lead to a this-worldly, healthy, Greek kind of happiness. A rejection of the intense, glittery life but also the flat, prosaic one that required such intoxicants. The nervous excitement of the Romantics was never his style; they placed happiness outside of themselves, outside of life.
The South: self-assurance, resilience, serenity and calm joy..the willed lightness of being -as opposed to the heavy Nordic pessimism (D.H. Lawrence: the brown-eyed and the blue-eyed)…Light feet, humour, grace and freedom; the tremor of southern light; the smooth sea perfection. Is there a space in which the body might finally be free of guilt? Matisse’s swimmers [how much of Rilke’s sensibility us related to his sexuality?]
The collapse of benevolent certainties, the emergence of an edgy, rootless spirit..and the eventual emergence of a hypnotic and instinctual popular music ("trance"!). a music that is beyond the rational versus a music that is all tunefulness, in the right key, on the right wavelength.
The divided self: “German fascination with asceticism and mystical delivery from it.” Mass intoxication, the seduction of the spectacle, the relinquishing of the soul, of individual responsibility in favour of the Father(land).
How to live confidently after the death of God? Only with strength and courage: “Man is the creature who must constantly overcome himself to live fully.” To accept one's fate and from it create a life..an art of living. But in a decadent culture, 'mankind would simply run out of energy and individuals would fail to find their own tragic strength.
A collapse of the common world, of the cultural world and its rituals, customary consciousness and norms. Bourgeois uncertainties undermined. From now on one would have to find this strength on one's own, new forms which the spirit might inhabit.
'Nietzsche wanted only some kind of music to lead the modern heart back , or on, to a summer, more open..searching to lose urban nervous tension and northern formality in a glorious blaze of colour and light..and the simple life.' [Not the only one: Van Gogh, Gauguin..Matisse: The Dance]
Neither from nor towards; at the
still point,
there the dance is
But neither arrest nor movement.
---T.S. Eliot.
Never trust a god who doesn't dance.
Demythologisation: the body is mere body, the symbol mere sign.
A kiss is just a kiss, a smile is just a smile...
“He was most at home where there was least 'reality'-in music. The music of modern Europe is the one and only art in which it surpassed the achievement of former ages. This is no accident. It is the speechless triumph of the spirit in a world of words without deeds and deeds without words.”
The sun-drenched art of the early 20th century. The new primitivism, masks. Colour replaces sense and meaning after the death of God. For Van Gogh: the sun is presence, is god.
The power of light to transform, and especially the moment of transformation, fascinated Claude, as it did Nietzsche.
[There is something sacred about thresholds, transitions, moving from one space to another; the human search for weightlessness].
'For something to shed its veil one requires patience and hospitality. 'The act of knowing involved an act of laughter, an act of mourning, and an act of cursing' (Spinoza).
There remains , perhaps
Some tree on a slope, to be looked at day after day;
There remains for us yesterday's road...
----Rilke.
“The portraitist of this situation is Van Gogh. He painted the tree of Rilke's elegy, the sunflower, the chair and the boots that are chance receptacles of all the homeless energy of the spirit..It is a mere moment of explosion that separates Van Gogh's objects from the distorted fragments of surrealism...the absence from our lives of common accepted symbols to represent and house our deepest feelings. And so these invade the empty shells of fragmentary memories, hermit-crabs in a sea of uncertain meaning.”
From now on: the life of man: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
The great difficulty of residing in the modern epoch lies, paradoxically, in the triviality that nothing could be easier.
----Rosenzweig.
'The people keep indoors and stare for hours
at crooked mirrors showing exotic things
among familiar objects on their dressers.
What lives within is near. All else lies far
away. The things within, so busy, overfull
and everyday, stay inexpressible.
It is as if the island were a star
too small and Space, fiercely dispassionate,
had crushed it unaware. It circles on
and unilluminated and unheard
proceeds alone
through darkness in an orbit of its own
intent on making end to all of this,
continuing blindly and outside the course
of other galaxies, of other stars or suns.
—Rilke.
Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting
still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.
When something's let go of, it circles ; and though we are
rarely the centre
of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous
curve.
—Rilke, (trans. Stephen Mitchell).
..and now it is as though my heart had moved miles away.'
--Rilke.
Who lives there now?
"They're taking better care of the flowers than us," said the swami as we drove past the open gate of what was formerly our home.
It is hard to imagine that we used to live there. So much time has passed that there's a dreamlike, ephemeral quality to your life right now, as if we were wandering through a landscape in which the mist was up to our knees and our steps tentative, our whole stance to the world questionable; we are unsure of our footing, our bearings all awry. There is no order in this hour, just minutes passing.
A few of the old ones are left; most have left or are dead or struggling with cancer. Some sit in their rooms and think of children who have long left the nest for a more glamorous life, a life freer of thought and memories.
We return and are like ghosts. Some people "vaguely" remember us or remember someone talking about us. A young teenage girl clutches a clipboard to her chest and thinks to herself: how old and strange are these people. She probably thanks God that her own mother, plumpish and decked out, still has a lot of anger in her voice, is still in the ascendancy. "God, not yet".
The swami still speaks in the old way, when words were kind, when time was gentler. It's as if we're living on the frontier now. We meet A, in her eighties, as tough as an ox, headstrong and fiercely independent, though now hobbling on crutches. She lives in dark rooms with a maid who has become her eyes and hands. Lots of dark wood furniture, a call to prayer (that goes unheard). There are some people who are so strong that they outlive their own deaths...
What mechanisms of the mind, what inner resources are available, to detect the workings of time, measureless time, implicit in our gestures?
'And what's new within? Like the fine-hair thread of a galvanometer' that registers your bewilderment with fine precision, the skilled amplification of your estrangement. Time; so that everything doesn't happen at once. In the fullness of time there will be more space to be ourselves and everyone will be granted a glimpse of what they nearly were, but not yet, not now.
I give a note written in a beautiful and clear script to the vegetable seller. Shuffle around amidst all this accumulated dust. "I'm looking to sell..". For a moment I think about paying the man 200 RS to deliver the message to the property dealer but think better of it. Not to close the deal but to open it, to first find the parcel of land and clear the accounts, get the documents in order, tie them up in a a bundle with a single piece of string, undo the mistakes and years of neglect.
On the way back, past the green-tiled old shrine, you stop off at old Affers' place to visit his restaurant. We discuss meat for twenty minutes, gulp down hot milky tea and talk about the failing marriages of other friends. Disease and divorce being the staple items of our conversations nowadays.
Drive back through the din of a city that you no longer recognize. Keep to familiar roads and drown it all out with John Luther Adams. The music seems to have no beginning or end. No, that's not quite right. The beginning and the end sound the same.
My heart is not the same. And now it is as though it had moved miles away. Who lives there now?
{lines by Holub}
or homesick for the earth...
darkness stored/
becomes a star.
---Menashe.
'Cities often feel things in anticipation, a paleness in the light, an unexpected softness in the shadows, a gleam in the windows...only Paris and (in a naive way) Moscow absorbs the whole nature of spring into them as if they were a landscape.'
---Rilke.
~~~
Many years have passed and many things have been forgotten. Some words endure, as if by chance, because spoken at a particular moment, in some specific place. Time slows you down, throws its hat into the ring, fudges, glosses, blurs. Doubt unfolds, disrupts, keeps the gaze lingering on broken things. Despite everything-or maybe because everything really wasn't everything- there is this incredible capacity to reflect the world, to frame the old questions without grasping for any answer.
The old, dank, long cellar in which we kept unused cartons and used bottles, malt vinegar and presents. The coldest room in South Wales, humanly cold. Under the stairs another dark room in which you kept chestnuts, growing them hard in brown paper bags, knuckle-like nobbliness or thin-wedged chisels.
Despite the years that have gone, something is retained, even if it is only a distant image now. The windows' dark winter mind in November; you collecting money as you pulled your Guy Fawkes on a wooden trolley through the streets. The faint smell of sparklers, the burning in some open allotment, the early closing of the shops in preparation...
The world, the narrowing down of vision, the distorted images, the weary faces. And yet, still this tentative holding on to things that last, to things that change: sky and tree, wind and star.
And we, spectators always, everywhere
Looking at , never out of, everything.
It fills us. We arrange it. It decays.
We re-arrange it, and decay ourselves.
---Rilke.
W.Whitman: I do not doubt that interiors have their interiors, and exteriors have their exteriors, and that eyesight has another eyesight.
The door: a place-as well as a symbol- of transition, of transactions, between the inner and outer. The silent passageway, barzakh, between the inner life and the world, between one person and another.
For there’s a limit to gazing.
And the gazed-at world
Wants to blossom in love.
---Rilke.