This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand this format, some or all of this message may not be legible. ------_=_NextPart_000_01BF3D90.E3121020 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > On Wednesday, December 01, 1999 10:40 AM The Laughing Man [the_laughing_man@hotmail.com] wrote: > ASPECTS ON A RILKE POEM > ...But I'm slow, my thoughts wander astray and I've more than once wished I had > that Twilight Zone gift of getting the rest of the world to Stop when I tell > it to, enabling me to catch up with it... Might I say, TLM, that it is posts like yours that make me glad that I am a member of this list. Thanks so much for responding. I'd hate to have missed it, just because of the late date. > ORPHEUS THE BLIND POET > > But something happened. The more I looked into the matter, the more I > thought about it, the more the circumstantial evidence gathered around me. > Orpheus the poet, the twister of words and sound: what did he know about > love? Isn't there an end to the use of his lyre? How many times can he > perform the same trick of playing to his audience, knowing they can't > resist? When does he start to listen as well? Yes, I can see what you're saying, and I don't know that I'd thought of it from that angle. I'm afraid that the importance of Orpheus's art was always secondary to the degree of his love for Eurydice for me. (I'm hopelessly romantic when it comes to certain things. It's my dirty little secret.) So I've never considered that Orpheus's art could be such a powerful motivator. > > Suddenly this poem, for me, is a tale of Eurydice's liberation from a man's > objectifying worship of her. Her cause was just even in my previous reading, > of course, but then it bore with it more of that sadness over love lost. Now > the only love lost was a false one... > That's a very good point, but I think that you have to take that thought a little further, and understand that Rilke would have felt that their relationship limited them both. Orpheus's poetry became more beautiful when faced with the loss of Eurydice, and Eurydice was now freed to explore the fullness of her death. To further illustrate my point, I want to toss out a few lines from another poem of Rilke's, "Requiem for a Friend." "Requiem" was written following the death of Paula Moderson-Becker, a great painter who married a man who led her to give up her art and have children. She died in childbirth, and Rilke blamed her earthly relationship for the destruction of her art: I have my dead, and I have let them go, and was amazed to see them so contented, so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful, so unlike their reputation. Only you return; brush past me, loiter, try to knock against something, so that the sound reveals your presence. Oh don't take from me what I am slowly learning. I'm sure you have gone astray if you are moved to homesickness for anything in this dimension. We transform these Things; they aren't real, they are only the reflections upon the polished surface of our being. (1-12) You have gone astray if you are homesick for anything back here, kid. Nothing here is real - only our own beings are real. So Eurydice, escaping the objectifying love of Orpheus, is saved. And losing Eurydice lets Orpheus explore his art to the fullest. The depth of his lament is so terrifyingly beautiful that they kill him just to stop it. Coincidentally, I've been working on a paper on elegy, which supports your viewpoint of Orpheus the "selfish bastard." (Quotes are mine.) According to Melissa Zeiger in her _Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy_, the death of Eurydice is "...the victory of Orpheus's art over death in the recovery of his dead spouse, Eurydice; the implicit sacrificial second loss of Eurydice; Eurydice's part in creating the greatness of Orpheus's poetry..." (8). She goes even further to suggest that "Tellingly, Eurydice's return to the underworld is no sad accident here; it is an active, ruthless condemnation performed in the guise of an anxious backward glance" (3). Yikes, Melissa. Not quite the same reading as what I'd give to Rilke's poem, but she does bring up something that is meaningful: the loss of Eurydice improves upon Orpheus's previously perfect poetry. It becomes so alarmingly beautiful that the maenads, in the midst of a Bacchic orgy, murder Orpheus to escape him, thus sending him back to Hades to be with his beloved. The victory of Poetry over Death. An idea that Rilke, I think, would have liked. > > DISAGREEING WITH CECILIA > That line is perhaps my favorite part of your post. Many disagree with me; none, however, have made it a heading in an essay. > I don't like what you're telling me here, Cecilia.... What does it mean, then, to be complete? To be - in another way of putting it - oneself? Exactly. Togetherness is limiting, in Rilke's view. Only in aloneness can a person achieve that fullness of self. Not a popular viewpoint, by any means, but one that he practiced faithfully. > Back to the Rilke poem. I do not want to read it the way Cecilia does. The > completeness of self excluding others is not the completeness of self that > make us human. That is not to be oneself. To find a positive definition > perhaps takes a life-time. So be it. /TLM > That's the beauty of this poem. You don't have to read it the way that I do... most would probably see it simply as a sad tale of love lost, as a matter of fact. There's so many layers of meaning, and the more that I look at it, the more my opinion changes. So maybe you'll soon have a third and a fourth and a five hundred thousandth reading by the time that we're through. Amen, Alleluia. Regards, Cecilia. ------_=_NextPart_000_01BF3D90.E3121020 Content-Type: application/ms-tnef Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 eJ8+Ih4NAQaQCAAEAAAAAAABAAEAAQeQBgAIAAAA5AQAAAAAAADoAAEIgAcAGAAAAElQTS5NaWNy b3NvZnQgTWFpbC5Ob3RlADEIAQSAAQA0AAAAUkU6IEFzcGVjdHMgb24gUmlsa2UncyBwb2VtIE9y cGhldXMgRXVyeWRpY2UgSGVybWVzACcSAQmAAQAhAAAAQUZDQTJDRkRCRUE4RDMxMUJEN0IwMDAw RjZCMzYyM0MAcQcBIIADAA4AAADPBwwAAwAHABIAHAAFAB8BAQWAAwAOAAAAzwcMAAIAFwACAAQA BAAFAQENgAQAAgAAAAIAAgABA5AGAGgUAAAvAAAACwACAAEAAAADAC4AAAAAAAIBMQABAAAA/QAA AFBDREZFQjA5AAEAAgBMAAAAAAAAADihuxAF5RAaobsIACsqVsIAAG1zcHN0LmRsbAAAAAAATklU Qfm/uAEAqgA32W4AAABDOlxXSU5ET1dTXG91dGxvb2sucHN0ABgAAAAAAAAAC/L6QaQ+0xG9ewAA 9rNiPMKBAAAYAAAAAAAAAAvy+kGkPtMRvXsAAPazYjxE4yEAGAAAAAAAAAAL8vpBpD7TEb17AAD2 s2I8woAAABAAAACvyiz9vqjTEb17AAD2s2I8NAAAAFJFOiBBc3BlY3RzIG9uIFJpbGtlJ3MgcG9l bSBPcnBoZXVzIEV1cnlkaWNlIEhlcm1lcwAAAABAADkAYLtgiks9vwEeAHAAAQAAADAAAABBc3Bl Y3RzIG9uIFJpbGtlJ3MgcG9lbSBPcnBoZXVzIEV1cnlkaWNlIEhlcm1lcwACAXEAAQAAABsAAAAB 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