Abandoned on the Mountains of the Heart
Silence and the Cognitive Value of Art and Emotion in Nietzsche and Rilke
by Katja Brunkhorst
Introduction by Rainer J. Hanshe
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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, April 2009. Copyright © 2009 Katja Brunkhorst and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
LITERATURE
Page I
INTRODUCTION
Rainer J. Hanshe
This is a law of fate, that each shall know all others,
That when the silence returns there shall be a language too.
—Hölderlin, “Celebration of Peace”
One should speak only when one may not stay silent; and then only of that whichone has overcome—everything else is chatter, ‘literature,’ lack of breeding. Mywritings speak only of my overcomings: ‘I’ am in them, together with everythingthat was inimical to me, ego ipsissimus, indeed, if a yet prouder expression bepermitted, ego ipsissimum. —Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
. . . listen to the voice of the wind
and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence
—Rilke, Duino Elegies, “First Elegy”
In the midst of writing his monograph on Rodin, Rilke began recording in letters to sculptor Clara Westhof his encounter with Cézanne’s paintings in Paris in 1907. The painter had died the year before and Rilke attended in the month of October a memorial exhibition at the Salon d’Automne, which was to prove, as did his relationship with Rodin, a decisive experience for the poet. “Cézanne,” he revealed, “had the greatest influence on me.” Aside from cultivating a different mode of perceiving the world, one of the most momentous things Rilke learned from him was the necessity of the artist’s remaining in the center of his work and shunning because of devotion to one’s work all that may “interrupt and annihilate a disposition of mind and training that is by nature solitary.” To Rilke, such devotion keeps the artist’s work pure. When he learned that Cézanne didn’t attend his mother’s funeral because it would have meant not painting for an entire day, Rilke was struck as if by an arrow. The fact entered him he said like a “flaming arrow that, while it pierced my heart through, left it in a conflagration of clear sight.” Few artists Rilke thought possessed such devotion; those without it he asserted would always remain “at the periphery of art.”
The poet Hölderlin lived in the absolute center of his art. Rilke acknowledged that Hölderlin’s influence on him was “large and generous as only that of the richest and inwardly most powerful can be.” In a letter Rilke mentioned that reading Hölderlin’s poetry was a “comfort” and that his poems “live and reach to one’s heart through all the tangle of apprehension.” Joy, despair, silence, death, these preoccupations of Hölderlin’s, if not to say of all true poets, would become Rilke’s too, as did Hölderlin’s unreserved receptivity. In “The Poet’s Courage” Hölderlin speaks of fearing nothing in life and welcoming all that happens, declaring, let it “be blessed to you, be an adept in joy,” and that poetic principle deeply resonated with Rilke. In a letter to Andreas-Salome he spoke of being as open and receptive as an anemone, that he was “as irremediably turned outwards” as the plant he was shocked by in a garden in Rome. Even at night, the petals of the anemone remained open, “still avid to take in—into its frantically-wide-open chalice; swamped by the night above it—inexhaustible.” In the same letter, Rilke proclaimed to refuse nothing and to give himself up to everything, including disturbances, alleging even to become whatever he gave himself up to. “Since anything that is focused on stimulus wants to be stimulated, I clearly want to be disturbed, and am so, without end.” This unreserved sensitivity, if not even risking of the self to the world is expressed poetically in the fifth sonnet of the second part of the Sonnets to Orpheus. There, Rilke writes of the muscle of the anemone as possessing “infinite reception”:
muscle of infinite reception
tensed in the still star of the blossom,
sometimes so overmanned with abundance
that the sunset’s beckoning to rest
is scarcely able to give back to you
the wide-sprung petal-edges:
you, resolve and strength of how many worlds!
We, with our violence, are longer-lasting
But when, in which one of all lives,
Are we at last open and receivers?
—Sonnets to Orpheus, tr. M.D. Herter Norton
If the question of influence is today rife with anxiety, Rilke spoke without reservation of what he felt influenced him, of what he was unconditionally open and receptive to, yielding even to such an extremity that through becoming everything he gave himself up to, he put himself in peril. To do that though was to refuse the periphery, to embody the poet’s courage. If considering influences is theoretically or critically intractable, the poet was clearly impacted by things and found it important to register such impacts. He lived with and embodied the work of artists such as Cézanne, Hölderlin, and Rodin through continually revisiting and incorporating their work within himself, digesting it like a nutrient. In the conclusion to his monograph on Rodin, Rilke proclaimed that, “rather than dwelling, even if just periodically, in greatness, we must always carry around what is great in us.” Through his patient and disciplined act of silently ruminating on art, whether it be painting, poetry, or sculpture, Rilke beheld within himself everything that he thought was great.
Beholding and embodying things was of instrumental importance to Nietzsche as well, and his term for that praxis, and it is a praxis, is Einverleibung, incorporation. To digest and assimilate what is great is to permit oneself to change, to be transformed, to allow the malleable body (leib) to undergo transfiguration. Since philosophy itself for Nietzsche is the art of transfiguration, when declaring that only “changelings” can remain kin to him he is asserting a basic principle of his vision of life.(1) The proverbial transfiguration of humanity is at the heart of his philosophy and it is a central theme of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The titular figure of that book descends from a mountain to present to humanity a new meaning (Sinn) it must sense: “I want to teach humans the meaning of their Being: that is the Overhuman, the lightning from the dark cloud of the human.” When first presenting his teaching, Zarathustra pronounces that the Overhuman is also the sense of the earth, it is the sea, and that with the chaos that we possess within us, we will be able to give birth to dancing stars. Transfiguration is a central aspect of Rilke’s poetic vision, too, and it is exemplified most famously in the final line of his poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: Du mußt dein Leben ändern. With his art, Rilke sought to give life a new dimension, to keep it “open towards death,” which he conceives “as an altogether surpassing intensity.” This notion of surpassing is perhaps akin to what Nietzsche refers to as overcoming, which also entails going under, or a continual dying, for life to Nietzsche is in part continually shedding something that wants to die. In this openness to death, there is no morbidity, no derangement, that is, there is no descent into boundlessness, such as the yearning for immortality, which is the province of the believer, but the measuring of a sensible range. For Nietzsche the will to truth entails transforming everything into “what is humanly thinkable, humanly visible, humanly sensible!” Life as is commonly believed does not exclude death. Death is its proper limit. As Kerenyi observed in his book on Dionysos, “to a characteristic life belongs a characteristic death. This life is indeed characterized by the manner of its ceasing to be.” The one who dies “a characteristic death,” he notes, quoting Diodorus Siculus, “ends his life with his own death.” And that is precisely what Malte seeks as opposed to an impersonal death when he urges, “grant to each his own death, the dying which truly evolves from this life where he found love, meaning and distress.”
Out of such events, through intensely living such crises, both Nietzsche and Rilke gave birth to singular creations, forging works whose tempers were tragic and infused with knowledge born of their profound immersion in solitude and silence. The correlation between their work is compelling but it has long been thought that Rilke was not familiar with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The poet himself not only denied being influenced by Nietzsche but also claimed that he lacked knowledge of his works. In not one of Rilke’s letters is he mentioned, which in itself is peculiar and highly suspect, especially considering his extended relationship with Andreas-Salome. The former protégé’s letters to Rilke do not contain mention of Nietzsche either. In their edition of the Rilke and Andreas-Salome letters, Snow and Winkler presume that, when asking Andreas-Salome ‘how she remembers Rome,’ Rilke was alluding to the well-known triumvirate of Paul Rée, Andreas-Salome, and Nietzsche.(2) The legend of the time was that a ménage a trois occurred between the three figures in Rome. Andreas-Salome, with her prototypical furtiveness, evaded the question and mentioned neither man, speaking instead of mainly the architecture of the city and its sun—an allusion to Rée and Nietzsche? No. This total absence of the philosopher-poet in their correspondence certainly provokes the thought that a deliberate subterfuge was at work. The ashes of the numerous letters that they burnt might reveal something but, alas, those incinerated remains will keep their secret.
To date, critics have generally accepted Rilke’s denial and, even though numerous scholars have written on Nietzsche and Rilke, only one monograph devoted to examining the influence of Nietzsche upon Rilke exists. Recently, as some readers of Hyperion may be aware, scholar Katja Brunkhorst discovered with the aid of Hella Sieber-Rilke two copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the Rilke archive, thus unearthing conclusive evidence that shatters what Brunkhorst asserts was a carefully manufactured myth of Rilke’s. One edition of the book was his, the other Andreas-Salome’s. Both contain numerous reading traces and marginalia that bear out careful reading of the text. Other evidence, such as an essay Rilke wrote on Nietzsche in his youth, which has only been published in a scholarly edition of his work in German in 1966, as well as a copy of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science) in the Rilke Archive further verify that Rilke was in fact more than familiar with Nietzsche’s work.
If Rilke was forthright about many of what he himself referred to as his influences, his near total silence regarding Nietzsche could in fact signify the enormity of the impact the philosopher-poet had on him. It was perhaps more overwhelming than being struck by an arrow and therefore not communicable—it was instead something he sought to express poetically through a silent agonistic relationship with Nietzsche. If Rilke embodied and carried within himself whatever he thought was great, patiently incorporating it day after day, if he was as unguarded and yielding as an anemone and became whatever he gave himself up to, the carefully marked texts that Brunkhorst and Sieber-Rilke discovered testify to the poet’s profound silent communion with Nietzsche. “Rilke,” Brunkhorst states, “was not merely an interpreter as much as a productive transformer of Nietzsche’s thought” (78).
The essay that follows is a modified version of the epilogue to Brunkhorst’s ‘Verwandt-Verwandelt’: Nietzsche’s Presence in Rilke, and it concerns at large an analysis of one of Rilke’s transformations of Nietzsche’s thought. In particular, it focuses on Rilke’s poem “Ausgesetzt auf den Bergen des Herzens” (“Exposed on the Mountains of the Heart”), which is in part an incorporation and transformation of Nietzsche’s poem “Einsiedlers Sehnsucht” (“Hermit’s Longing”). The essay is also concerned with what Brunkhorst refers to as two poets in crisis and examines a few instances of how Nietzsche and Rilke lived with and transformed into art their solitude, loneliness, and silence. Brunkhorst is concerned with the cognitive value of art and emotion and stresses what she believes is a decisive turning point in Rilke’s creative life, a shift from vision to what the poet in “Wendung” (“Turning Point”) called heart-work. “The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.” What makes this essay of particular merit and warrants its publication in Hyperion is the indispensable contribution it makes to Rilke studies, disrupting a long-held myth propagated by the poet himself. Brunkhorst’s compelling study examines the careful, patient, and deep immersion in Nietzsche that Rilke actually engaged in throughout his life and poetic vocation. As Angela Holzer stated in her review of the book in a previous issue of Hyperion, it “opens a fertile field for subsequent theoretical discussions” of Nietzsche and Rilke.(3) Further, the sheer rarity of the text, which is only available through the publisher in Germany, predisposes it to relative oblivion and it demands greater recognition. “All art,” Rilke avowed, “is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity.” All along, Rilke possessed the very method he was in constant search of—incorporation. Through embodying and transforming everything he encountered, through risking himself in the very process, Rilke practiced the hazardous art of metamorphosis, transubstantiating everything he felt kin to into poetry.
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