Liminal

" . . . you lift very slowly one black tree / and place it against the sky . . ."

Entrance

Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let go . . .

RAINER MARIA RILKE (From The Book Of Images translated by EDWARD SNOW)

The excellent Pilgrimpace featured this poem of Rilke's recently, and it struck me at once that there could be no better totem-poem for this new blog. "And you have made the world. And it is huge / and like a word which grows ripe in silence." I wasn't thinking of these lines at all when I gave my blog the title words and silence and when I chose to quote Rilke's idea of "the bees of the invisible" and his poem It Is All About Praising in my third post, Lodestones. All I can say is that mysterious things happen in the unconscious, and that our blog world is full of such synchronicities.

As to the meaning of this poem, I really don't want to diminish it by analysis — and Rilke does say in the last two lines: "And as your will seizes on its meaning, / tenderly your eyes let go . . ." (Letting go tenderly! That word "tenderly" here moves me so much, and I can't quite explain why.) I think the poem's about writing a poem, reading a poem, creation, birth, death, weariness, renunciation, acceptance, discovering the new, seeing the old through fresh eyes, embracing the unknown, letting go, seeking a deeper significance to life, exploring death while still alive. But all these interpretations reduce it to cyphers; the "meaning" is in the whole way it's created, in each word, in each space and silence between each word, in the manner each word and space and silence uniquely fit together. Words and silence . . .

Here are some more of Rilke's words, words about praise:

Say, poet, what it is you do. — I praise.
How can you look into the monster's gaze
And accept what has death in it? — I praise.
But, poet, the anonymous and those
With no name, how do you call on them? — I praise.
What right have you though, in each changed disguise,
In each new mask, to trust your truth? — I praise.
Both calm and violent things know you for theirs,
Both star and storm: how so? Because I praise.

RAINER MARIA RILKE (Translated by CLIVE WILMER)

Praise! Unwilled, spontaneous, inevitable, necessary. Perhaps our whole lives and the whole of creation depend upon it . . .

Are we able to leave the house of the familiar and enter the house of praise? Or are we still standing at the "worn-out threshold"?

All of this brings us back full circle to my third post again — and also to Ruth's praise-poem, which you can find here.

Lodestones

I'm intuitively undertaking this journey guided by two lodestones: an acknowledgement of, acceptance of and delight in mystery; and a recognition of the power and potential of the present moment. For me these must be givens, for we are all perpetual travellers through the great unknown, and this moment now is all we have.

So my — our — journey begins with the Rachel Naomi Remen's thoughts about mystery. As More Than Meets The I remarks in her comment on my first post, we are reminded here of the Keatsian notion of Negative Capability:  ". . . that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Remen writes about attunement to the mystery, acceptance of it, respect for it, its inherent potentialities. Going beyond Remen, I suggest that further responses to the mysterious unknown may be curiosity, then wonder, then awe — and finally praise. We can also be more proactive about this eternal mystery of origins and endings, of earth and nature, by interiorising it, by imaginatively recreating it, by preserving its essence within us. Indeed, it might be incumbent on us to do so. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke has written of such a process . . .

"We are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us . . . It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, 'invisibly', inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”

Collecting the honey of the finite, mysterious visible, and storing it in the golden hive of the infinite, mysterious invisible, is a way of connecting with and partaking in the mystery — for the artist, and for us all. It's a kind of alchemy, a distillation, a transformation of substance into essence. And out of listening,  acceptance and respect, out of awareness of possibility, out of curiosity, wonder and awe, out of all this — what else can we ultimately do but praise?

It Is All About Praising

It is all about praising.
Created to praise, his heart
is a winepress destined to break,
that makes for us an eternal wine.

His voice never chokes with dust
when words for the sacred come through.
All becomes vineyard. All becomes grape,
ripening in the southland of his being.

Nothing, not even the rot
in royal tombs, or the shadow cast by a god,
gives the lie to his praising.

He is ever the messenger,
venturing far through the doors of the dead,
bearing a bowl of fresh-picked fruit.

RAINER MARIA RILKE Sonnets to Orpheus I, 7

Our journey also begins with the now — right here, this instant, this moment which is constantly replenishing itself. Did not the Spanish poet Antonio Machado once write: "Wanderer, there is no road; the road is made by walking"? Just as the road's illusion is created by putting down small steps, one after the other, so time's illusion is created by living each single moment, one at a time. The one true reality is the visceral reality of each felt step and each lived moment. The road exists only in the here and now, created anew with every footfall. Time too — past, present and future — exists only in the here and now, newly created each second and with every breath, and pregnant with possibility.