Rilke, and "the Church Somewhere In The East"

 

Sometimes a man stands up during supper 

and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking

because of a church 

that stands somewhere in the East. 

And his children say blessings on him 

as if he were dead. 

And another man, 

who remains inside his own house, 

dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,

so that his children

have to go far out into the world

toward that same church

which he forgot.

 Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Robert Bly)

Sometime in the 1980's, someone gave me a collection of Rilke translated by Robert Bly, and I have carried it with me for all these years.  I find Bly is still my favorite translator of the German mystical poet. In graduate school I did a performance with synthesizer based on this beautiful poem, and a series I called "Landscapes from Rilke". 

Yesterday the poem popped into my head.   I had been thinking, while driving around on seemingly endless errands, that I have become too resigned, I have perhaps traded too much "mature realism" for the spiritual quest that used to animate my art and life.  In my previous post I have been thinking about Pilgrimage,  which can be a metaphor a well as a physical movement.  

Rilke's poem is about the call that can come to seek a deeper life.  To become a "source - eror". Not all people are called, but for some of those who do hear the sound of distant bells, the "church that lies somewhere in the east" may be a monastery, for others, a studio, or an orphanage, or a university, a ticket to a distant land, or a trail that leads into the silent cathedral of a canyon or a forest.   Sometimes the seemingly unmarked trail to that church can feel like delusion,  or great loss........there are not always "road signs" or certainties along the way.  Usually there are not, and always the unexpected occurs when we enter that liminal zone of Pilgrimage.  

What I love about this poem is the profound connectivity Rilke implies.  The man or woman  who "keeps on walking" is one who heeds the call of that spiritual calling because he feels he no longer has any other choice. He realizes that nothing else will matter if he remains. 

He is willing to abandon the life he has been leading, but not himself. Such was the legendary  beginning of Siddartha's quest to become the Buddha, leaving behind his responsibilities as a prince, father and husband, the quest that led to the birth of Buddhism.  Was it wrong to leave behind those responsibilities and the loved ones who depended upon him?  Yes.  Was it right to leave those responsibilities and the loved ones who depended upon him to pursue what became the birth of Buddhism?  Yes.  Morality is layered, and sometimes the answer in both cases is yes, and yes. 

The one who remains in Rilke's poem, "in the dishes and the glasses", who does not leave when called, is neither right or wrong. He has chosen to remain, to find meaning in the love and duties of family and social responsibility.  His labors (and domestic pleasures) have resulted in the lives and sustenance of his children.     But his choice to not take the spiritual journey to that "church somewhere in the east" at some point in his life, to forget, to close the door, leaves a residue that ghosts within the house of his life.   Thus, his children, or perhaps his grand children,  are left with a hidden destiny, which is  to fulfill the quest that  he did not.

Found Art, Rilke, Atwood, and Evanescent Time

Found in my files, probably from 1986. 
 The photos are of my mother.  The words in the sky say:
"Wait for me,  Wait for me"

"Who has turned us around like this, so that whatever we do

we find ourselves in the attitude of someone going away?

Just as that person on the last hill, 

which shows him 

his whole valley 

one last time,

turns, stops, lingers - so we live,

forever taking our leave."

Rainier Maria Rilke,  Duino Elegies

When I was in Graduate School in the mid 80's, I was absorbed in three things - New Age spiritual explorations, the poetry of Rainier Maria Rilke, and time, as so incomprehensively and evocatively was demonstrated by a box of old photos (from the 20's and 30's) that I had inherited from my mother.

Somehow, in retrospect, those three themes are not unrelated.  Rilke's poetry, for me, is always achingly full of an ungraspable, but longed for, "other realm" that, somehow, exists within the here and now.  That's the best I can do to explain the poignancy I so often found in both his poems (particularly from the Duino Elegies) and those photographs of a child, or a young woman, who was then in her 80's.  The stories behind those old black and white photos seemed so much more mysterious than the brief bits she had ever revealed to me about her life.  Now approaching my own mid 70's, my mother gone, most of my family gone, so many journeys made, treasured in my memory box, and never to be returned to now.......... yes, I find myself wondering how I also 

"turn, stop, linger - so we live,

forever taking our leave."

Here is another  photo, and poem, that fascinated me, a photo of my mother at the age of 9, riding a pony, in Griffith Park.  Mysterious, that photo, that "stamp on a postcard to Forever".  And here is the poem I found by Margaret Atwood, who also, at sometime, perhaps had the same encounter with Evanescent Time.

 

 

Poetry for a Winter Solstice

luminaria on Serpent Mound in Ohio

 

You, Darkness

 

You, darkness, that I come from

I love you more than all the fires

that fence in the world,

for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone

and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything –

shapes and fires, animals and myself,

how easily it gathers them! –

powers and people –

and it is possible 

a great presence is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

 

Rainer Maria Rilke

December Moon

 

Before going to bed

After a fall of snow

I look out on the field

Shining there in the moonlight

So calm, untouched and white

Snow silence fills my head

After I leave the window.

Hours later near dawn

When I look down again

The whole landscape has changed

The perfect surface gone

Criss-crossed and written on

Where the wild creatures ranged

While the moon rose and shone.

Why did my dog not bark?

Why did I hear no sound

There on the snow-locked ground

In the tumultuous dark?

How much can come, how much can go

When the December moon is bright,

What worlds of play we'll never know

Sleeping away the cold white night

After a fall of snow.

 

May Sarton

Pledge of Allegiance

 

I pledge allegiance to the soil

      of Turtle Island,

and to the beings who thereon dwell

      one ecosystem

      in diversity

      under the sun

With joyful interpenetration for all.

 

Gary Snyder