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say Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach,” in which lover uses lover as a reinforcement in the battle to exclude the world, for comfort or forgetting. Rilke cannot settle for this consolation, this blind equation (you and I are one us) and opposition (us against them). For in the Rilke poem, just when the lovers most hope to use each other as protection from the overwhelming that is without them, that which is within them bursts forth. It is maybe one of the scariest evocations of orgasm in literature: the strangeness of the night (its dark, its bestiality) is in them, and then so is day, equally unknown, equally uncontainable. The uncontainable which seems so exactly equivalent with what's outside our outlines, the terrible uncontainable which seems to be plunging toward us from afar (where we like to place, and hope to keep, the unknown) suddenly is here inside us. A reader like de Man astutely remarks the reversals in Rilke's work— the sudden turning of out to in and subject to object, before to after, death to life, fiction to reality, and vice versa.4 But what de Man calls Rilke's “ambivalence” is, to my mind, in the nature of poetic language; indeed, art must raise and ratify this discomfort, this uneasiness, the play of the senses against what escapes them, or of language around what is unspeakable. Most poets seem to believe that consciousness is larger than language and many critics today seem to doubt that it is. For criticism, consciousness is co-extensive with language (indeed, critical theory might say, to say so is tautological); whereas the poet's art exists precisely in the refinement of language until it's able to suggest or trigger uncontainable or inexpressible experiences of consciousness, depths of presence. Rilke's art, like Emily Dickinson's, lies in making the constructions that best embody the paradox, or are most impressed, rhetorically, with the dilemma, and most inexhaustibly insist on the limits of reference. Such poems set up structures which operate like perpetual motion machines, enacting poised antinomies—opposites equally charged, abiding no exclusive resolution, and operating to create fields of force. The polarities or terminals, in other words, do not annihilate each other's meanings; and we live in the charged field between them, so instead of the vertigo of neither we can have the electricity of both. That is not, as some theorists would have it, the failure of language, but its power.
In “The Marble-Wagon” Rilke writes: “…the never-moved is changing…And keeps on / drawing near and makes everything stop dead.” Here the exchange (the interpenetration) of opposites is momentous: the never-moved is moving, and the daily commerces stop dead before it. These are almost already the terms of life as individuals experience it, if the never-moved is death, and the everything is the life we never thought would stop. In the “never-moved” we have the figure of monumental origin itself, the very grounds of being, the rock from which heroic figures are made—the Unmoved, the Ideal—that ultimate a careless reader might mistake for Rilke's privileged metaphysical notion. But it is a figure that, approaching the human scale of life, threatens it.
The Marble-Wagon
Parcelled out on seven drawing horses,
the never-moved is changing into paces;
for what dwells proudly in the marble's core
of age, resistance, and totality
comes forth among men. And look,
we recognize it, beneath whatever name:
just as the hero's sudden interruption
first makes clear to us the drama's thrust:
so it's coming through the day's congested
course, coming in full pomp and retinue,
as though a mighty conqueror were slowly
drawing near at last; and slowly before him
captives, heavy with his weight. And keeps on
drawing near and makes everything stop dead.
I think this poem reveals Rilke's fierce (almost Nietzschean) resistance to a comforting theology or moderating metaphysics. In this poem, the never-moved (surely that mountain exists only in the mind!) is being dragged around, some kind of modern god, the fallen kind, like Lenin's statue (footloose suddenly, its famously pointing finger turning aimless). A not inconsiderable irony of the revolutions in Russia and eastern Europe at the end of the twentieth century had to do with the replacement of the rocks of monumental ideology by the rock of popular music (a pattern of uncertain footings is the dance of democracy); and one feature of that depedestalization is the accession of youth culture politics and commerce's dehistoricization: the wall of immovability suddenly a collection of chips, eminently movable and marketable.
In the Rilke poem, the never-moved is not yet sculpted into any idol's shape. It is the source and not the end of monuments. This marble provides material from which we make our statues of heroes, and the hero's “thrust” is to interrupt the drama of the daily. The marble has the weight of priority itself; but its burden of totality is “parcelled out,” to go among people. In its presence, the people stop dead. Men may yearn to believe in, but cannot live by, the monolithic ground or Unmoved Mover. They can't stand up to the Ideal.
The German Abgrund (the abyss) is the absence of ground: it is toward the abyss that everything falls. One might have imagined the grounds of the ideal to be immaterial, the stuff of spirit; but Rilke makes that vacancy take on the greatest weight. Rilke knows the burden of God's word (one need only take a look at the poem “A Prophet” to see the stresses conferred by the sacred on the mortal). Embodied, the ideal must be made of the hardest stuff, marble, something to outlast time. The immortal gets figured, paradoxically, in the densest material.
Marble's story of origins has the same power for us as does the figure of the hero himself, whose shape will be made of marble's matter. The hero is always a synechdoche, meant to convey in his person the Whole (though the human figure is partial). In “A Prophet,” as we'll see, God's human spokesman, like Cassandra, bears the gift as a curse. He vomits God's truth like chunks of volcanic rock, with a splitting headache made literal, as the human forehead tries to contain the thought of God. Here, in the thought of God, the objective and subjective genitive, interpenetrating, become unbearable.
In “The Marble-Wagon” the drama is played on the stage of daily life, as if to conquer it. The victims of such burdens, those who have to bear the weight of the unformed stuff from which the heroic is to be carved, those who have to feel the constraints of such constructions, are present to give scale to the atrocity, to keep the Ideal ironized. The closer the enormity gets, the deader the commerces of human life become. The tyranny of history's impositions of ideals on the hapless individual human figure, flawed and vulnerable, is the bitter source of this poem—no unquestioning reverence for founding forms, Platonic or religious, can be said to inform this vision. The drama's thrust is toward the stopping-dead of life: that is what “dwells proudly in the marble's core.” For Rilke as for Nietzsche, the Christian church, its rock of the ideal, resembles nothing so much as an enormous gravestone. God will hurt and kill us, if life doesn't do it first. Who can read “A Prophet” and not feel that bitter belief at work?
A Prophet
Stretched wide by gigantic visions,
bright from the fire's glare from that course
of judgements, which never destroy him,—
are his eyes, gazing beneath thick
brows. And already in his inmost self
words are building up again,
not his own (for what would his amount to
and how benignly they'd go to waste)
but other, hard ones: chunks of iron, stones,
which he must melt down like a volcano
in order to throw them out in the outbreak
of his mouth, which curses and curses,
while his forehead, like a dog's forehead,
tries to bear that
which