Possibility and Loss in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

In his poem “You Who Never Arrived,” Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that we can mourn love as an unrealized possibility, and see this loss signified everywhere in the ordinary objects of the external world. In “Be Ahead of All Parting” (II.13 from his “Sonnets to Orpheus”), he seems to claim that poetry has the capacity to redeem such losses—and retrieve them, so to speak, from their underworld. Wes & Erin discuss these two classics, and whether—as Rilke suggests—death can be put in service of life, and suffering sourced as the principal wellspring of a joyful existence. Upcoming Episodes: Rebecca (1940), Dickinson. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: In his poem, you, who Never Arrived, Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that we can mourn love as an unrealized possibility and see this loss signified everywhere in the ordinary objects of the external world. In Be Ahead of all parting, section 2, number 13 from his sonnets to Orpheus, he seems to claim that poetry has the capacity to redeem such losses and retrieve them, so to speak, from their underworld. Today we discuss these two classics and whether, as Rilke suggests, death can be put in the service of life and suffering, sourced as the principal wellspring of a joyful existence. This is Wes Alwan, and this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I can't say I'm awfully familiar with the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. I did teach his letters to a young poet at some point to a freshman seminar at a small liberal arts school where I had been invited to teach and taught a class on. It was called why We Procrastinate, but it was really kind of a psychoanalysis in the arts class. It was about, but with a focus on creative blocks or really the psychology of creativity. It went over about as well as everything else I did in that class, which was not good because I hadn't taught in a long time. My teaching experience before that was mainly as a teaching assistant at the University of Texas. 1:56 Erin: I thought you were going to say you never actually got to the Rilke because you just kept putting it off and putting it off. 2:01 Wes: No, right. Exactly. What I did is I went through it very systematically. I was very impressed by that and hopefully we'll do that at some point on this show. I was so systematic I even created a PowerPoint to accompany my lecture, which is like a very. Seems very against the spirit of Rilke in general. So yeah, beyond teaching that class, I wasn't all that familiar with Rilke. In fact, I think for a long time as a youngster, I thought he was female, even though ironically, he changed his first name from René to Rainer at the behest of Lou Andreas-Salomé, who thought Rene was too feminine. So that's my level of expertise on this, and I Was hoping. Yeah, I was hoping. 2:44 Erin: Throw me under the bus. 2:45 Wes: You would. Yeah. So hoping you would be a guide. Whether you're a guide or not, I'm sure you know a lot more about Rilke than I do. And tell me about your experience with him. 2:55 Erin: I don't think I do. I read Letters to a Young Poet a long time ago. I don't even know when. Maybe high school, maybe college. I'm familiar with some of his greatest poems. I've read Sonnets to Orpheus. I've read some of the individual poems, but I don't think I've ever read or. And I have. I think I have a copy of his Book of Hours. I've not read his novel, though. I'm interested in reading the novels of poets. Yeah. Otherwise, in terms of, you know, I had a professor who really was a big fan of Rilke, and so that encouraged me to sort of read around in his Collected Works. Otherwise, as I told you before we recorded, I've been shredding. I've been shredding stuff to make more room, and I realized, oh, the file on Rilke, whatever I had in my brain is gone. I don't know if you know, SpongeBob. The. Yeah, the shredder imagery is something I keep returning to lately as I get ready to take my exams and something like 11 days. No, 10 days now. Oh, scary. Yeah. So, you know, he shreds everything but his name. 3:53 Wes: Or. 3:54 Erin: No, no, he threw out his name. He shreds fine dining. He shreds everything but fine dining and breathing in order to be the world's greatest waiter. So there's something. Something like that there. I. I just. I used to know a bit about Rilke, but it's either locked in somewhere deep or shredded. 4:10 Wes: All right, well, we'll have to rediscover it. 4:12 Erin: Yes. 4:13 Wes: We'll have to dredge it up and put the shreds back together, assemble them on the floor. You sent me a few different options for poems, and I thought to myself, I bet I'm going to pick the two ones that are her. That are Erin's favorites. 4:27 Erin: You just picked the one. You just picked one of the ones 4:30 Wes: that says the second one wasn't. The second one was one that. When I was in London recently, I was at someone's house at a party, and one of these people started reciting that poem. And I was very touched by it, and I was hoping it would be. I was just waiting to see. I didn't suggest it. I was waiting to see if you would Suggest it. And you did. So I thought that was very kismet. I was really happy that that was one of the ones. So, of course, I immediately picked that one. 4:55 Erin: It's a top five for me. But I thought you were gonna get one and two. But not that I have a detailed ranking system. 5:02 Wes: What was number two? 5:03 Erin: Archaic. Torso of Apollo. 5:05 Wes: Just the torso, not the rest. Just kidding. 5:07 Erin: Yeah. That's the whole point of the poem, Wes. 5:11 Wes: I did. I skimmed it. Everything else. Skimmed. 5:16 Erin: It is literally just the torso. 5:18 Wes: I do just the torso of reading each time. 5:22 Erin: Ah, that's right. 5:23 Wes: So, yeah. So you. You who never arrived, we'll do in part one and the sonnet to Orpheus, which I'll call Be Ahead of All Parting to. Is it part two? Yeah, part two. Number 13. Be Ahead of All Parting. That'll be what we'll do in part two of this episode. 5:39 Erin: Or as I like to call it, be a torso of all parting. Sorry. 5:44 Wes: Be a torso of some parts. Some parting. Of some parting. Yeah. You who Never arrived. So this is your favorite. 5:52 Erin: And. 5:52 Wes: Yeah. Tell me why that is. 5:54 Erin: The details in this, I don't know. They're very evocative to me. I hadn't reread it in a long time. And rereading it for this, I noticed that this has made its influence felt in a couple of my poems without me realizing it. I don't know if it's something that any reader would pick up on or if it's something that only I can see now. In hindsight. Yeah. But I love the idea. I think of elegy for an unrealized possibility. That kind of paradox is fascinating to me. But in the places in my own work where I see Rilke's influence are in the parts of my work which are elegy. And I would say, like, I write a lot of elegy. And so there's something very elegiac about this poem, even though it's for someone, of course, who he has not met yet, or at least that's my reading, that he's not met this person. I don't know if you can argue that he might have met them but lost them, but maybe. Maybe that's an argument that can be made. I don't know what. What you think about that. 6:54 Wes: Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. Now that you say that, I can see that there's several different ways to interpret this, but. Yeah, why don't you go ahead and read it and then we can discuss. 7:02 Erin: Okay. You who never arrived in my arms, beloved, who Were lost from the start. I don't even know what songs would please you. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment. All the immense images in me, the far off, deeply felt landscape, cities, towers and bridges and unsuspected turns in the path, and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods, all rise within me to mean you, who forever elude me, you, beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house, and you almost stepped out, pensive to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon, you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence, and startled, gave back my too sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate in the evening. 8:13 Wes: You know, it's funny, as you were reading that, I was reminded of Baudelaire's the Balcony, which I was incepted, I think, by the introduction to this edition we're using, where he mentions the influence of Baudelaire, I think. Who is the author? Do you remember? We're using the Penguin, or I might be getting that wrong. 8:34 Erin: No, we're using the Vintage. It's translated by Stephen Mitchell, which I think is the most beautiful translation. It's not the most accurate, but it's the most beautiful. So accurate, in a way. 8:45 Wes: And there's an essay called Looking for Rilke at the beginning, and that is by. 8:51 Erin: Oh, is that by Robert Hass? I did not read it. 8:55 Wes: Yes, that's by Robert Hass or Haas. 8:59 Erin: No one knows, possibly. 9:02 Wes: Yeah, so he mentions that. Yeah, that Baudelaire influence. But I think he's talking about the Duino elegies. And maybe I read it somewhere else. I'm not even sure I read it in that. That particular essay. But yeah, so you who never arrived in my arms, beloved, who were lost from the start. So I really like the way you put this as an elegy for an unrealized possibility. And then the question is, how unrealized? Is it Prufrock? Did he see her but never make a move? Or is he just imagining this person? Did he never even see her? Did he never even meet someone who he thought might fit the bill? Right. This could just be an idealization. It sounds like you were taking it like it might have been. The former would have been your initial interpretation. 9:46 Erin: Yeah. There's this really interesting dance, though, I think, between what constitutes unrealized possibility in the poem and whether or not he actually is Eulogizing it, because it seems that in the second stanza he is in fact keeping hope alive. And also that meeting this love that he trusts is out there and who represents something like certainty, right, that once you meet this perfect person, then things are going to look rather set, rather decided. The flip side of that is that that means the death of possibility, right? The death of the multiple possibilities of what's still out there waiting for you. So it's a strange thing because though he's lamenting possibility on the one hand, that is to say, the possibility of love with some particular person, he is at the same time opening himself up to possibilities sort of continually, it seems that's the theme, that possibilities are actually in fact, ever before him. Because he hasn't achieved this love that he desires or met this love that he desires. So it's sort of like possibility is foreclosed to him. And at the same time, possibility is the. It's the air he breathes, it's the realm he lives in. Everything is possibility. Everything is charged with this potential. 11:10 Wes: So lost from the start. 11:12 Erin: Yeah, lost is, I think, the fulcrum word there. Because that would imply, right, that something was taken away, that you had it in the first place and then it was taken away from you. 11:21 Wes: Right. Which I take to be ironic or. Yeah, so there's an internal contradiction between saying from the start and lost. So it's a question how she could be lost before she's found. Except, you know, insofar as it's in fantasy, I don't even know what songs would please you. So the movement there from the idea of losing or, you know, of having never had as a kind of loss to write, what songs would please you. It seems as if the idea there is courting or seducing, and so he's attributing it to failure of courtship. Although, again, it seems like courtship itself may never have even been a possibility. If this is just a fantasy. But it may also be the case that, you know, if we were to think about this realistically, if he doesn't have a fleshed out fantasy of what it is that he wants, of the kind of person that he wants, then he wouldn't be able to recognize her when he saw her, at least not in another person. We're going to get images of him recognizing her in a mirror, like in the distortion of his own image in the mirror or in an empty window or an empty street, things like that. But you can have a fantasy that's vague, that's projected onto absence, but not something, it seems to me, that he could project onto a particular person. But you know, here he doesn't say, I didn't know what I wanted, so I couldn't recognize the person if I happened to run into them. He's saying I didn't have the right, I didn't know how to court this person. So again, if we are in the realm of fantasy, it's almost like saying I didn't know how to negotiate with the fantasy. I don't know. I guess the two things go together. Being able to conceive of the one you want and being able to conceive of the procedure that you would use to win them over. I guess those two things are very closely related. 13:21 Erin: Going back for one second, this is recasting beloved who were lost from the start. You know, I wonder if that implies, is it the Platonic idea of the split souls, that we're two halves of one soul? 13:34 Wes: Well, this is from the Symposium. And in the Symposium it's Aristophanes idea, but it's a model of love that Socrates rejects in that dialogue in favor of a more dynamic idea. So the Aristophanes proposal in the Symposium, a bunch of people give their proposals before Socrates gives his and rejects each proposal in turn. Although one might argue that maybe he's picked up a piece of each account and used it in his own account. And this is actually very relevant. I'm glad you brought this up. Socrates doesn't like the merger, what I would call the merger theory of love. Oh, I found my soulmate. You complete me. Socrates is not a fan of that kind of love. And the myth for Aristophanes, right, is people were, in former times, they were joined at the back. So they were these four limbed creatures. And then the gods got angry at human beings and cut them down the back. Were they joined at the front? It makes more sense that they were joined at the front. Why have I never thought of this? This is copulation. You sort of restore the unity by copulation. Anyway, yeah, finding your other half, literally finding your other half or merging with someone, that's what Socrates doesn't like. Socrates thinks of love more as something that's essentially reproductive, including in the aesthetic sense. It's something about beauty. So beauty induces you into a kind of activity. That is what love is. But yeah. So why did you, why did you bring that up? 15:04 Erin: Just because this idea of someone being lost from the start, I think implies this soulmate model of relationship where that person is, if you haven't met Them, yet they're both known and unknown to you. Right? There's a level of knowing that is, I think, inherent to this idea of the soulmate. It's that recognition. When I see you, I will recognize you, or when I interact with you or, you know, whatever. And when we go on our third date and I look into your eyes, I will know, right? Oh, you were the one all along. Right? You were the soulmate. That knowing and then not having met them yet would line up with this idea of being lost from the start. I think that this is played out throughout the poem, this idea of like, oh, you were there. I know you were there. I know you were on that street, or you were just in front of those mirrors. But I just miss you, you know, I just missed the possibility of meeting you. So this implies someone who is kind of known on some level and yet who is unknown in the fact that, you know, he doesn't know what songs would please her. And so there's a specificity to this person and an anonymity at the same time. And I wonder if I don't know what songs would please you is also self criticism. I'm wondering too if this repeated theme of him looking at the sort of the frame of the open door in the country house or looking at himself in the mirror is the signal of his own. He's not actually oriented towards trying to. Which I think is a variation in what you're trying to say. Which is. Which is he's not really oriented towards her. He's not really oriented towards this idea of knowing finding the soulmate. He's kind of thrown up his hands and said, well, you know, because I've never met you, I don't know what songs would please you. That seems to me to be both a failure of imagination in terms of imagining what, as I think you suggested what his fantasy woman, you know, what kind of woman he wants, what she would be interested in. So sort of like failure of empathetic imagination to get into the mind of this person, even if they're imaginary. And also a failure of this soulmate theory, right? Because if she were your soulmate, wouldn't you know what song she would like? You know, it would come to you. You wouldn't be anxious about this at any point, perhaps, because, well, if you didn't know her, then maybe you wouldn't know what songs she would like. But the idea would be if you did know her, you would know because she's your. She's your other half, you know. So once you met her and you put it together, you would somehow be imbued with this knowledge. There's a failure on the known side and on the unknown side. I think that this is. This is him being very subtly self critical. 17:42 Wes: Yeah. I think we're warmed up enough now for me to talk about psychoanalysis. It's too early. 17:50 Erin: All right, let me drink my coffee. 17:51 Wes: Because the psychoanalyst would be chomping at the bit with this. Well, especially knowing that Rilke had some exposure to psychoanalysis because he was in a situationship, I guess, with Salome. 18:04 Erin: That's as close as it comes. They shared a meal once, you might say. 18:12 Wes: So let's talk about the original beloved. The original beloved, the love object. Or isn't, oh, no, what they like to call it. Is it going to be Mommy the object. Mommy is just the object in psychoanalysis. What a wonderful way to refer to Mommy. But it becomes everyone, of course. Well, to some extent it's Mommy and Daddy. Right. But it's both for everyone in different ways. But principally the maternal object, it's an object of desire. That's why the word object is. Is used. And in the beginning, it's someone who, as an infant, they're not another subject for you because you don't have a theory of mind yet. They have a kind of quasi divine quality. We can speculate, and they can feed you and love you and keep you alive and give you affection. So there's a purity to that. Finding out. It's kind of the Oedipus complex is really about finding out that someone, that the mother has a mind, is a subject, has her own interests outside of the infant. Right. It's not merely merger. What you find out is that it's not merely about merger and it's something that has to be mourned. The subjectivity of the other, of the mother and the other is something that has to be mourned. So the loss from the start in this sense is the loss inherent in the inevitable failure of the ideal. Now, some people don't ever get over this loss and they have manic defenses to preserve it. So, for instance, one way of dealing with it is to imbue one's ambitions, one's apparently sublimating activities, including being an artist with the quality of being connected to the maternal object. Right. So onto this idealized object. So, for instance, you know, if I'm a writer, it's not just that, oh, this is an enjoyable thing to do. I'm, you know, sublimating my libido into Something that feels good. It is. This is what reconnects me to that feeling of merger, that oceanic feeling, as Freud once called it. It can become grandiose. It can become. I am connected to this perfect being. I am this perfect being. Something like that. So those two things kind of go together. So in other words, what I'm trying to say is that love, in its mature form, incorporates this moment of mourning, the subjectivity of the other, and mourning what you mentioned, the merger theory, getting beyond that, because the other is an independent subject. This is, of course, something that socially is often not accomplished, which is how and why the subjection of women occurs. Putting someone in a veil, for instance. And I think what's implicated here is this relationship to the maternal and the idea that it has to be controlled and kept pure. Right. So women aren't allowed to have sexual desire. Women aren't allowed to have an interest in work, because that's an interest that takes away interest from me. The baby. 21:18 Erin: The baby, yeah. Yeah. 21:20 Wes: She has to be only interested in me. So there's loss from the. But if he, as an adult, is going to find someone, then he's not going to find them unless his desire is relieved of its need for purity. So there needs to be loss. There needs to be an incorporation of that loss. 21:42 Erin: So how, then. I don't want to skip over the surging wave of the next moment, which is such a great line, but how are the images in him, the landscapes, everything incorporated? I think this would be the natural place to then ask you how is that part of this psychoanalytic structure that he's writing from? The idea that even these disembodied, These landscapes are. I have a reading of this, but I'm guessing it's different. 22:06 Wes: Yeah, I want to hear your reading because I'm too corrupted by this, and so maybe I'm too quick to see this structure. But I will say when he starts talking about the landscape and cities and towers. So I think ambition, and this is the moment that is supposed to separate you from the maternal ideal. It's more associated with paternal identification, but it can incorporate, as I said, the maternal imago, or this connection to a grandiose ideal object and one's own grandiosity, thereby, it can be too charged with that. And this is why often people are stuck in their creative pursuits. This is often why they're blocked, because the stakes are way, way too high for what. What they're doing. So if you are finding. If what you're. You know, every ambitious project has the Significance of reunion, reunification with the perfect other. There are all sorts of dangers to that reunification, Right. Loss of self. It's fraught with all sorts of problems. So I thought it was quite significant that, you know, he looks at all these things which ought to separate him from her and give him enough distance, but it all. They all rise within me to mean you who forever elude me. And they elude him precisely because they mean. I mean, she eludes him precisely because they mean her. If they didn't mean her, she would be less elusive. You see what I'm saying? 23:30 Erin: Yeah, yeah. 23:31 Wes: I. You know, I feel like that's a bit cookie cutter, and I'm. I'm just too corrupted by a certain point of view. So I want to hear what you have to say about this. 23:40 Erin: Well, psychoanalysis is always, you know, with the mommy stuff is always a bit icky for me. So now I'm afraid. I'm afraid of going into it. You know, I'd like to keep this in the realm of romantic love, but. Yeah, I just. I mean, I know it is, technically, but it just. Yeah, it's hard for me to see those things being so closely intertwined. But, no, I just kind of charted. So, you know, the landscape versus the city is nature and society. I saw the tower, right, as the individual and the bridge as the collective, you know, the reaching out. And so it sort of encompassed all modes of human existence. In other words, that she's sort of. See, and this is very romantic when it's a woman, but, you know, she's sort of civilization. She's everything. I mean, and she's also. I mean, the deeply felt landscape, the vista conceived of for human enjoyment, I think is a landscape versus just whatever the landscape is, a kind of wilderness is different, I think. 24:44 Wes: Yeah. Well, when I look at this, I feel like I'm discussing a transcript of the patient with you now and trying to convince you that there's pathology. But the phrase immense images, right? 24:57 Erin: Oh, sure, sure. 24:58 Wes: He's thinking of something sublime and something grand and maybe grandiose. And then even at the point, at the very end, he's thinking of powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods. So he's explicitly making this reference to the divine, which I think is an important part of this, because that grandiose object with which I think arguably he's identifying, which is what keeps him alone. I'm gonna stop doing this. Don't worry. At certain point, stop pop. Psychoanalyzing this. But it's this sense of merger with the divine, which, by the way, as a therapist, you know, if you've worked in mental health with people who are psychotic and grandiose in the sense, the gods, so to speak, and their own, the divinity can often be very important. So people will often think that they are God. Right. So that just all comes out into the open. 25:48 Erin: I thought you weren't going to tell people that. Wes, thanks for outing me here. 25:53 Wes: Right. This is why I make these associations to ambition. So turns in the path. So it sounds almost like a hero going out on his voyage and he's in a mythological realm, the place where there was once pulsing with the life of gods, and he's in the landscape and he's in the city. And so it does sound like, oh, I went out to make my fortune, you know, and you start out in the fairy tale. I guess if it's a fairy tale, one or both parents are dead before they set out. I don't know. But anyway, the hero has set out to make his journey and what he's supposed to do is go kill the dragon and then rescue the princess. But instead the journey, the whole journey itself has the significance of meaning you, meaning her. They signify her. It's not this means ends type of thing where he can win her through accomplishment. Accomplishment just means her. There's no barrier between accomplishment and her 26:55 Erin: because she is poetry, it turns out. I finally got it. No, the end of the stanza. Really? Yeah. Opened that up for me. But, yeah, she's, you know, so she is aligned with, like, she is the God in the landscape. Right. Like she's the animating force behind the world for him. I can't believe it took me this long to see it, but I was fixated on the idea of the unsuspected turns in the path as being this, like, really funny joke in the middle of the stanza. And I kept tripping over the idea that there's this joke in the middle of the stanza. And then I realized, oh, the turn of the path, the unsuspected. So that it's. So that it's highlighted, broken up across the line. And you can see it in the German too, right? 27:38 Wes: Oh, that's interesting. 27:40 Erin: The unsuspected turn in the path. Of course, it's verse itself. It's the turn of the plough. It's the turn of the line. Right? It's by breaking up the word. 27:48 Wes: Oh, very good. 27:49 Erin: He calls attention to it. And of course, what would be the thing that integrates that? You know, what would be the thing that gives Meaning to everything he's ever seen. What would be the love object that eludes him, that all of his experiences add up to? It's poetry itself. Right. You don't even know what songs. I don't even know what songs would please you. You know, it's his muse. It's poetry. Right. This is, you know, all of experience, of course, added together becomes the fodder for your art. And so this whole thing could be read as a kind of. Its existence seems to fly in the face of the idea that he's suffering some sort of creative block. But perhaps it's the perfect poem, the ideal poem that he has yet to write, the thing that he wants everything to amount to, that he hasn't been able to achieve yet. 28:38 Wes: Yeah, very good. Yeah. It does seem almost like this could be in sonnets to Orpheus, if this were a sonnet. Yeah. Song, you know, Orpheus being the sort of first poet and songs being poems. Yeah. And poetry itself, though, is very. It's such a pure form of art in the sense that it's. It is closest, I think, to that merger theory of love. And I think it's closest to that because of metaphor. Where metaphor collapses these boundaries between different things, one thing can become another. You're speaking of one thing, but it is the other at the same time. And that's part, I think, of its power to be two things at once. So this is a good way of reading this as the you in this as being poetry. I think that's what you're saying, right? 29:25 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. And even, you know, I have given up a line we skipped over before, which is a good segue into stanza, too. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment. You know, the line breaks are being so cleverly played with here. I don't know if that line break is in the German, but Mitchell, anyway, is genius for doing it if it's his invention, you know, so we have this constant playing with the versification. It's a free verse poem, and it's using its line breaks, I think, to great effect. But this idea of I've given up, I've given up on this, of course, I think is repeatedly gone back on or betrayed in the poem itself. Right. In fact, everything is this next possibility. And maybe this, too, is related to the idea that the artist is always looking for the poem in the next moment. Right. Everything becomes fodder for the poetry. Everything you have, everything you do, becomes something that could be a poem. And you look for that all the time. So there's no rest in that. I was explaining to a kid the other day that being an artist means having homework for the rest of your life. Basically. You're always working, you're always doing something. So that surging wave of the next moment, there's no trough. Right. There's never any rest. Everything is imbued with possibility when you're seeing it through that kind of perspective. So therefore she, or poetry or whatever we want to call it, the object is everywhere and just. And just, you know, he's waiting just to find the opportunity to engage with her. I love the you who are all the gardens I've ever gazed at. Longing. An open window in a country house. I think he's following this garden thought. So I'm imagining that he's writing this, like in a yard. And he's looking at this. What are you. Oh, what's right in front of me? The garden. You know, the garden I'm looking at. And then his eyes sort of scan over to the house near the garden and she's suddenly. The open window in a country house next to the garden. You know what I mean? Like there's something kind of like he's almost creating a landscape out of these little pieces of description that he seems to be tracking with his eyes as he writes the stanza. And then he imagines she's going to come out pensive to meet me. Which. That word, pensive is really doing some interesting work in that line. 31:43 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting because it begins with gardens and then it goes to open window, which seems to suggest. Right. There's no thin. It's not like she's in the window. So there's an absence there. And the almost stepped out. Right. She doesn't. There's, you know, obviously absent. And then you had just walked down the street and vanished. Right. So normally, like, vanishing is an odd term because you might be walking down a street and see someone just vanish as they make a turn. Right. Right at the end of that street. But he never saw her. She had just done that. But it's very interesting. Or again, the mirror where he's presumably looking at himself, but they're giving back a too sudden image, presumably of himself again. Right. But it's something to do with the. There's a glitch in the suddenness of his image in the mirror or something else which is evocative of her. So that's a very. You're getting into pretty intense territory when you're reminded of your beloved Even when you're looking in the mirror, oh, it's me. No, but everything but the garden is really about absence. Right. So she's everywhere in absences, but the garden is more of a positive image. So she's presumably abundant and verdant, like the garden, and not absent. 33:09 Erin: Right. 33:09 Wes: And that seems to me to be the one positive image we get where she's not an absence. She's not something he can't recognize in the waves, lost from the start. 33:21 Erin: She's just an image. She isn't the landscape, the cities, the towers, the bridges. She's the images of those things in him. Yeah. So there's a mirror quality to that. 33:29 Wes: Yeah. 33:29 Erin: In other words, she's in his head. 33:31 Wes: Yeah. I guess I'm. You know. I guess I see what your point is, though. I mean. Yeah. Why don't. We might see those as kind of similar to the garden. I guess the way I was thinking of them is that. Yeah. They mean her. 33:45 Erin: Oh, and she's the gardens. All the gardens he's ever gazed at. So that, too, it's like, you know, it's almost like one of those diagrams of sight, you know, where they show, like, the eyeball, and it shows how it works, where the mind, you know, turns it or whatever, and it's, you know. So, like, it'll show, you know, a beam coming out from eyes, looking at a tree, and then it'll show how that tree ends up coming into your head, you know? So she's like the image of the tree in the diagram inside the head, not the tree on the outside in the world. Right. I think that's important to give, you know, if it gives credence to this idea that she's his art, his poetry. Right. She's the image in the mind of the thing. She's the experience recounted after the fact. Right. Not the tangible object in front of him. 34:30 Wes: Yeah. And you can. You know. You can on this reading. Yeah. This is like the writer who's going around living life and thinking, okay, yeah. This goes into the novel and starts narrating everything they're doing. 34:40 Erin: Exactly. 34:42 Wes: This is how I'm gonna use it in a poem. Right. So. Yeah. Then everything. Every guard. You don't just sit and enjoy the garden. You're thinking, oh, yeah, yeah. This is how it's gonna work in the next poem. 34:53 Erin: Exactly. There are lots of people like that. And there are lots of people that say stuff like that to me all the time, like, oh, this would be a good poem, Erin, you know, thank you. Thank you for Suggesting that I love the mirror thing. That startled. Gave back your image. Because that's my experience of, you know, you're ever in a store or something and you suddenly. You look up and you get startled because you didn't realize that the wall was a mirror. And suddenly you're looking at yourself and you're. You know. So that. That's just something that's familiar to me. 35:21 Wes: Who's that beautiful person? Oh, it's me. That's my experience. 35:27 Erin: There you go. 35:28 Wes: Or I think, who's that asshole standing so close to me? God. Oh, it's me. But then to, you know. And then to have that moment and to. Yeah. Turn it into the presence of the beloved is really interesting. 35:43 Erin: Yeah. Well, and it's in the middle of this. You know, the second stanza is just a cat and mouse game. Right. I mean, he's in hot pursuit and she's always one step ahead of him. And there's this fascinating interplay, I think, between accident and intention. So, you know, streets he chanced upon. He just chanced upon them. But she was there, it seems, deliberately eluding him. She's pensive, she's thought, she has mind. And yet she's featureless, characterless. Right. So there's something. Something in this. In this tension where the cat and mouse game seems to be integral to the idea that she's sort of a thought without a form, an intention without forethought. What's the. What am I trying to say? I don't know. He's searching after something much like me. He's searching after a point and finding. Finding it's out of grasp. But the thought that he's looking for is sort of intentionally eluding him, even if it is a thought in his own mind. I'm trying to think that through. 36:47 Wes: I like this phrase, cat and mouse that you're using. Right. Yeah. So he uses that word elude. So they mean her, the cities and the bridges and so on. But they mean her who eludes him. So they. Right. They're metaphors or signifiers for something else. But the thing signified cannot be grasped. It cannot be had in the concrete. Apparently. If we were to think of it as a woman, or if we're thinking of it as a woman, it cannot be grasped in the sense of fleshed out in any detail. As in, what kind of woman is this? He wouldn't recognize her. He doesn't know what songs would please her. So he can't say much about her, even though he sees her everywhere. If it's Poetry, everything means something else. And that's a poetic way of looking at things. And maybe it means poetry itself, but poetry is ever elusive, I guess, in the sense in which any art form in which one is engaged with is always elusive because it's never perfectible, maybe something like that. And because it never gets you exactly what you want, that's part of its supplementing character. Right. It's kind of a workaround to sex. No, that's what Freud. That's the Freudian idea. So cat and mouse everywhere, but nowhere. But in the end, we get. We get a kind of a new idea at the end. Right. A bird echoed through both of us. All right, so that's the first time we hear about her mind. This is why I was mentioning earlier. Right. The object is just there's no subject there. The subject doesn't have her own desire, and her desire is threatening. And now. Or maybe. Yeah, correct me if I'm wrong about this, because I'm. But now we hear about something, a way that she might be affected with the bird echoing through her. 38:43 Erin: I like that. I think that's right. I think this is the most form she gets, right. Is this idea that something can echo through. So now she finally has something like a body, something like a form. But first of all, it's cast a speculation on his part. So it's still just a figment of his imagination. Perhaps the same bird. Right. And of course, birds and their connection with poetry and the poet are something we've long talked about on the podcast. Okay, so the same poem is going through both of them. Well, if it is him and this is the poem, then that's right. I think pensive is still the closest we get to a characterization of her because it implies that she has a mind, that she has an intentionality in this cat and mouse game, that she has a subjectivity that he doesn't have access to. Right. She's pensive, she's thoughtful about something. But what her thoughts are, we don't know. We only know that she's eluding him, that she's always a step ahead of him in this cat and mouse game, whereas the bird echoing through us, I mean, it's a beautiful image. And it does seem to imply that there is a. Or state outright that there is a connection between them, that there is a. A body that she has and a body that he has and something that they both share. And yet, you know, pressing on that a bit, that is hollow. That's of necessity hollow. I mean, he's hollow. Too. Right. But if the bird echoed through them, that means that she's just a sort of empty form again, a hollow form for him to fill. So I think it's ultimately less. Giving her less of a subjectivity in this moment than the idea that she's pensive, that she has thoughts he doesn't have access to, and an intentional eluding of him, which implies that she's something that he doesn't. He can't possess. He can't have the bird echoing through both of them. Yes. It implies his hollowness, but also hers. I don't know. You know what I'm saying? I'm not. 40:29 Wes: Yeah. No, I do. Yeah. I missed that. That really is the first characterization of her subjectivity, of what's going on in her mind, her pensiveness. And it does go along with the elusiveness because you can, you know, you think of someone as kind of mute in their pensiveness and perhaps not able to communicate what they're thinking or unwilling, but their thoughts are to themselves. On the other hand, it does seem like a bit of a projection, although. Right. But at the very least, this is a fantasy of who it is she might be. And that's. It's much more fleshed out than what's come before. Although her character. Right. Is sort of predicated on absence. So when he does come up with a character trait for her, it pivots off of her elusiveness, I think. Pensiveness, Right. Arguably pivots off of elusiveness. So in a way, it's about her. Right. It's a character trait, but in a way, it's about his inability to imagine her. He can't get into her head. Exactly. She's got these thoughts that are closed off to him. And then. Yeah. So now you have me thinking about this last line where I thought. I saw it as a bit of a developmental advance. Right. Where he's. Because here he's thinking that, right. There's some third thing outside of them that might affect both of them. And so he's thinking of her as someone who might be affected, as someone to whom something might happen. It's not just about him seeing her everywhere, or it's not just about his point of view, what's happening in his mind, or how the world affects him. It's how the world might affect her, which I think is a movement, I think gets him a bit beyond the characterization of her as pensive. I think it's more maybe of a more mature standpoint in that sense. 42:18 Erin: I think that's totally Right. Yeah. 42:20 Wes: Okay. And then they share that. You know, it's important that they. It's an experience that they share. So it's the idea. Now there's something inner subjective going on. There's a bit of a theory of mind developing, and it's this phenomenon of joint attention where they can share an object which is enormously psychologically important and is related to mothering. And it's a certain developmental stage. This is something that never happens. For instance, in chimpanzees, we did this partially examined life episode on Tomasello and Origins of Language. So, for instance, if you have a mother sitting with a child in her lap and you're reading a book together, after a certain stage, the infant will often point to some picture on the page of the book and then turn their gaze up towards their mother to see that their mother is seeing it. Right. And to take pleasure in the idea that someone else is seeing this thing with me. And even if they raise. Even if you have human beings raise little chimp babies that. That you can get them interested in the book, but it will never occur to them that this is a shared experience. They will never do that thing where they look up at the mother's eyes to see that she's sharing the experience with them. So, anyway, I guess that's a. I'm a little bit off the beaten path here. No, but, yeah, so I. But I'm trying. So now. Yeah. To go to your reading, I'd like to retract that. 43:41 Erin: You've convinced me. I think you're right. And a word that you used, mute. You know, the fact that she's mute makes me think of, you know, theories of otherness. So the speaker is the speaking subject who sees. Right. And the other would be the mute object who is seen. This complicates that, of course, because she's not seen. Right. The elusiveness of the object is the theme. Right. But when they have this shared experience, I think that. I think that does represent an evolution because this is otherness overcome. The idea of a shared experience, this imaginative. Exactly what you're talking about with the chimpanzee example, this idea of being able to imagine another person's consciousness and experience independent of your projection upon them is really important. And so I think this is sort of the overcoming of otherness. The. The sense that they're not other to you anymore is important in the shared experience at the end. So you've convinced me. 44:45 Wes: So we get a glimmer of. We get a glimmer of hope. 44:47 Erin: I think yes. Yeah. 44:49 Wes: At the end. Okay. Shall we call it? 44:51 Erin: Yes. 44:52 Wes: All right, so in part two, we will discuss one of Rilke's sonnets to Orpheus 2.13. Right. Or you can wait a week and listen to it then. All right, thank you. 45:11 Erin: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook, subtextpodcast, and on Twitter enjoysubtext.