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

Footnotes

Introduction

(1) See Nietzsche’s poem “Hermit’s Longing” in Brunkhorst’s essay. A revised version of the poem with thenew title “From High Mountains. Aftersong” concludes Beyond Good and Evil. It was first translated into English in 1907 by L.A. Magus in the edition edited by Oscar Levy; the main text was translated by Helen Zimmern, but when her translation was first published it did not include the concluding poem. Kaufmann’s translation of the poem, as Magus’, neglects to include Nietzsche’s unique usage of two Gedankenstriche with a strong space between them. For two other translations of the poem, see James Luchte and Eva Leadon, The Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche (Llanybladder: Fire & Ice Publishing, 2003): 32-34, and my own translation in The Agonist, Vol. I, No. 2 (December 2008): 76-81.

(2) See Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters, translated and annotated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler (New York: Norton, 2008): 90, 369.

(3) For Angela Holzer’s review of Brunkhorst’s Verwandt-Verwandelt, see Hyperion, Vol. II, No. 4, December 2007. For Holzer’s interview with Brunkhorst, see Hyperion , Vol. III, No. 1, February 2008.

Essay

(1) All translations are my own.

(2) See his essay “Why poets?” in Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1980): 265-316.

(3) KGB III.1, 564-567. In a letter of 2 October 1915, Katharina Kippenberg wrote to Rilke of Heinrich von Stein as “that friend of Nietzsche’s, you know, who first had an inkling of him” (Briefwechsel, 140; my translation). Indeed, von Stein replied to Nietzsche on 7 December 1884: “Lately, we were referring to the artistic as the translation from the fullness of someone’s personality into that which transcends the personal. This made me think of you,
and I opined that you would have enjoyed that conversation [Kürzlich nannten wir das
Künstlerische die Ueberleitung aus der Fülle der Persönlichkeit zum Ueberpersönlichen. Hierbei gedachte ich Ihrer, und meinte, Sie würden an diesem Gespräch Freude gehabt haben]” (KGB III.2, 484).

(4) This song is over—longing’s dulcet cry
Died in my mouth:
A wizard did it, friend in time of drought,
The friend of noon—no! do not ask me who—
At noon it was that one turned into two ...

Sure of our victory, we celebrate
The feast of feasts:
Friend Zarathustra came, the guest of guests!
The world now laughs, rent are the drapes of fright,
The wedding is at hand of dark and light .....

Dies Lied ist aus, - der Sehnsucht süsser Schrei
Erstarb im Munde:
Ein Zaubrer that's, der Freund zur rechten Stunde,
Der Mittags-Freund - nein! fragt nicht, wer es sei -
Um Mittag war's, da wurde Eins zu Zwei...

Nun feiern wir, vereinten Siegs gewiss,
Das Fest der Feste:
Freund Zarathustra kam, der Gast der Gäste!

Nun lacht die Welt, der grause Vorhang riss,
Die Hochzeit kam für Licht und Finsterniss...

(5) In Die Entstehung des lyrischen Ich. Studien zum Motiv der Erhebung in der Lyrik (Berlin:
de Gruyter, 1970), Karl Pestalozzi lists numerous additional examples (n. 198).

(6) From a letter to Hofmannsthal—and not, as wrongly claimed by Meyer-Wendt (1973, 18),
from a letter by Hofmannsthal to Schnitzler—of 27 July 1891, in Briefwechsel, 9.

(7) From a letter to George written on 23 February 1911, quoted in Pestalozzi, n. 198.

(8) Originally entitled “Zarathustra’s Songs,” they render evident the secret analogy Nietzsche
had been drawing between Dionysus and Zarathustra all along. See further: Sprengel 1998, 641.

(9) Op. cit., see 201-208. Pestalozzi remarks “that in the second half of the nineteenth century,
the pull upwards is a dominant motif in art.” He sees “Einsiedlers Sehnsucht” in that tradition,
setting it in relation to Longfellow’s influential poem “Excelsior!” (1841), which Nietzsche
read in translation by Freiligrath (1846) in 1876 (104)—see also the aphorism of that name in
Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (KSA 3, 527), which thematizes the horrors, but also the
possibilities, of life without a god. “An interpretation of Rilke’s ‘Ausgesetzt auf den Bergen
des Herzens’ was intended” (xiii) but is sadly missing from Pestalozzi’s book.

(10) This is reminiscent of the “Brüderlichkeit” engendered “in the individuals’ retreating collectively into a shared background” in Rilke’s early notes “Zur Melodie der Dinge” (“on the melody of things”). See Mattenklott
(1988): 23.

(11) See Pestalozzi, 205.

(12) Another fragment from 1884, “In the German November,” reads: “This is autumn: it—will yet break your heart!” (KSA 11, 323), indicating the fruitlessness of Nietzsche’s good intentions expressed in “Einsiedlers Sehnsucht.” Rilke addressed his own heart in a similar fashion in 1914, in a context of isolation brought about by lack of understanding. However, in contrast to Nietzsche—who is saddened by his opacity to others—he laments the fact that others are inscrutable to him: “Whom will you complain to, heart? Ever more avoided/ your path struggles through the incomprehensible/ people” (SW II, 84). The result is the same in both cases: speechless isolation.

(13) Particularly, the first lines: “Desire transformation. O be aroused by the flame/ wherein the one thing that eludes you in change shines forth” (SW I, 758).

(14) See Podach, 36.

(15) This was February 1922.

(16) From a letter to Salomé of 20 June 1914, written the same day as the poem, in BW LAS, 329.

(17) In 1910, the two friends spent much time together in Paris, and after one of their conversations regarding Kassner’s project, The Elements of Human Greatness, he remarked of Rilke that “he devoured himself with inwardness,” and wrote down the sentence: “Whoever wants their inwardness to turn to greatness has to sacrifice oneself,” which Rilke, in turn, discovered in print a year later in the Neue Rundschau, realizing immediately it was about him (Klaus E. Bohnenkamp, “Kassner und Rilke im gegenseitigen Urteil” in Storck 1986, 127144; here: 131).

(18) “Überschreiten, aber kein Wohin,” in Neue deutsche Literatur. Zeitschrift für deutschsprachige Literatur 6
(1996): 49-53; here: 52f..

(19) In Lou Andreas-Salomé, Rainer Maria Rilke (Leipzig: Insel, 1929): 38.

(20) BW LAS, 35; and in two letters to Salomé, one, from 12 May 1904 (B I, 178; the other, from 10 August 1903 (B I, 156).

(21) Worpswede (Frankfurt/M.: Insel, 1987): 8.

(22) Whilst in “Der Wanderer” it was still valid (194), by the time of “Amongst Birds of Prey,”
this equation has been turned on its head: “Self-knowledge,” rather than self-forgetting, is
now associated with cognizance per se, and considered lethal.

(23) In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, Studienausgabe III, 235).

(24) Although Rilke had apparently unlearned this again by 1914, his reading of Nietzsche arguably had already taught him the cognitive superiority of emotion over that of the eye back in 1900, as his “Marginalien zu Nietzsche” demonstrate: “As Greek culture came to pass through the eye, ours is maturing with emotion” (SW VI 1165).

(25) In relation to this, see Nietzsche’s statement on language in the Nachla_: “The most intelligible factor in language is not the word itself, but the tong, strength, modulation, tempo with which a sequence of words is spoken—in brief, the music behind the words, the passions behind the music, the person behind these passions: everything, in other words, that cannot be written” (1881-1884).

(26) This, as well as the following quotes by Storck, are from “Poesie und Schweigen. Zum Enigmatischen in Rilkes später Lyrik” in Kunle, 111.

(27) See KSA 6, 390, where the autobiographical lyrical I addresses himself as “Selfexecutioner”; and KSA 4, 193: “I am a wanderer and a mountain-climber [...], it seems as though I cannot sit still for long.”

(28) It should be noted here that Nietzsche, in contrast, and particularly in his later poetry as discussed here, has the opposite problem, namely, too much emotion—a fact disguised only thinly by Ecce Homo’s grandiosity.

(29) It is of little importance here whether the “Du” is actually intended to be the reader, or Rilke, or somebody else; because the reader will respond to an appealing “Du,” anyway. In contrast, the “Du” in Nietzsche’s poetry unambigiously replaces the first person pronoun: more often than not, the poet-philosopher addresses himself.

(30) With regard to the “Chandos-Brief” and a letter written by Rilke to Salomé, Ferenc Szász sweepingly maintains, obviously unaware of Nietzsche’s actual, painful loneliness behind his mask of superhuman strength and holy “hermitdom”: “Both [Hofmannsthal and Rilke] passed through the school of Nietzsche, but do not know what to make of his ideas [...]. The lack of a consciousness of their identities renders loneliness, in contrast to Nietzsche, an unavoidable but painful sensation to them” (“Nur ein Brief? Rainer Maria Rilkes Brief an Lou Andreas-Salomé vom 25. Juli 1903,” in Schweikert and Schmidt 1999, 329-349; here: 343).

On a different note, Rilke expresses his belief in the “Unspeakable behind all languages” most unmistakably in a poem for Witold Hulewicz (SW III 259), in which he also emphasizes the existence of “a bright in common,” “ein heiter Gemeinsames,” independent of modes of speech, to all human beings. Otto Lorenz observes (138) that such poems have to have “a self-destructing gesticulation pointing beyond themselves.”

(31) I chose this particular meaning (over either “to take a break” or “to break”) because it leaves room for the connotations of both “Freiwilligkeit” and “Fremdeinwirken,” simultaneously.

(32) At this point, one is reminded of Nietzsche’s “Wille zur Zeugung” inherent in his cognizance, rendering it innocent.

(33) My translation of “Unangemessenheit des traditionellen Gegensatzdenkens,” in Gasser, 706.

(34) In modern man, “who had renounced his own basis in what she called the primal ground of
life or, later, narcissism,” Salomé located lack, envy, and need (for woman). See Martin, 5.

(35) I assume the reader to be familiar with Goethe’s poem of the same name.

(36) Lorenz (140) points out Rilke’s unpublished note on an envelope in which he calls the sixth, later to become the eighth, Elegie “die stille.”

(37) Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips, in SA III, 237.

(38) KSA 1, 248. See also 250: “[it is] always one thing by which happiness becomes happiness:
the ability to forget”; and: “All action requires forgetting.”

(39) From “Für Witold Hulewicz,” in SW II, 259.

(40) See Kleinbard’s (54) discussion on Winnicott, who comments that artists often experience both “the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found.”

(41) Jonathan Hufstader, Tongue of Water, Teeth of Stone. Northern Irish Poetry and Social Violence (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999): 20.

(42) Görner, in: Storck (1986): 164.

(43) Salomé / Freud, Briefwechsel, 182f.

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