Anatomy of the passions.

Wherein all the bolded sentences below come from a single paragraph in Francois Delaporte’s Anatomy of the Passions—

From “Living with Ghosts” in e-flux index, vol. 1

“By the frank laugh, a person expresses, without wanting to, something that he or she could never say.”

The “frank laugh” pins its star to the possibility of recognition—- the belief that one can identity “frankness” when it appears. The frank laugh, on this reading, is haunted by the unsayable thing.

Henrik Ibsen disliked the way his play’s title was translated to “Ghosts” in English.

The original title, Gengangere, can be translated as "again walkers", "ones who return", or "revenants". It has a double meaning of both "ghosts" and "events that repeat themselves.”

[Could never say. . . as in; every inhibition has its proscription.]

“A joyous behavior without any joy the case arising precisely from electrical simulation is doubly impossible, because the person does not command the contraction of the inferior palpebral orbicular, and because he cannot say what is, by its very essence, unsayable.”

Could never precisely or doubly ‘command the contraction.’

Could not say which smile is being performed without electric shock to LIGHT IT UP.

A lightbulb.

Henry David Thoreau and the Aeolian mode:

“At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. . . . The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.”

Speaking of Thoreau, as Charles Ives does in his essay on the fourth movement of Concord Sonata: "Throughout Walden, a text that he is always pounding out is ‘Time’." 

“A joyous behavior without any joy the case arising precisely from electrical simulation is doubly impossible . . . because he cannot say what is, by its very essence, unsayable.”

Esse es percepi: the baby blanket that doesn’t cover the legs of a fully-grown human.

Find a way to make the binkie amenable to the present body.

Or find another word for the contagious electric, the thing Danielle Dutton evokes in Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (Coffeehouse Press):

“There is always a silence at the center of this kiss, a peculiar moment when the paintings turn us back to the writing or the writing to the paintings with something left unsaid.”

The essence of the thing left unsaid is the unsayability. And Derrida is loving this.

“The springing forth of expressive force and its constraining character carry no symbolic determination.”

Shapelessness is so important to Duchenne’s theory of the smile and the expression. The unshaped is unsayable because it has no edges.

Charles Ives brings an apple to the circular gesture of aesthetics wherein preference is hitched to the beautiful, the terrific, the significant: “But personally, we prefer to go around in a circle than around in a parallelepipedon, for it seems cleaner and perhaps freer from mathematics; or for the same reason we prefer . . . a healthy to a rotten apple—probably not so much because it is more nutritious, but because we like its taste better.”

But what if we climb inside the parallelepipedon? Maybe it is “healthier.”

— Ives grows quite dear to me at this point in his rant:

We like the beautiful and don't like the ugly; therefore, what we like is beautiful, and what we don't like is ugly—and hence we are glad the beautiful is not ugly, for if it were we would like something we don't like. So having unsettled what beauty is, let us go on.

We like what we like and isn’t it lovely to circle ourselves liking it?

“Only reflex actions realize the mechanism of the expressive act.”

Mechanism is a form of familiarity: the machine of the body responds within given parameters as determined by normalcy. The regime of the normal includes an affective register that is part of the regimen.

In 1921, in an “Epilogue,” Charles Ives considered the future of American music in relation to the urge for definitiveness.

In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones-when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now°— perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man.

Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be a transcendental language in the most extravagant sense. Possibly the power of literally distinguishing these "shades of abstraction" — these attributes paralleled by "artistic intuitions" (call them what you will) — is ever to be denied man for the same reason that the beginning and end of a circle are to be denied.

For Ives, the question of sincerity was complicated by what we could not know. And he follows Emerson in this view that the limits of sincerity are set by language. The insincere is a manner of speaking rather than a condition of being.

In Emerson’s words:

How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the parties to know each other, although they use the same words!

My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation until all is said which words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption.

We don’t know much of each other—despite speech. Despite talking. Despite the increasingly-taut boundaries established by the social scripts of therapeutic discourse. We are just trying to fit in. To fit into it.

“Physiognomy presents an authentic expression when, and only when, the organism gives birth to the image of an emotion that it is impossible to mime.”

Giving birth.

A new time.

A new man.

Anew-ing . . . the newness.

“Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.” ― Nathaniel Hawthorne

The organism gives (which is to say, “gifts” or “offers”) birth to the image of an emotion that is impossible to mime.

The labor of “giving birth” is a gift; the assumption is gifted.

M asks why the mother of a friend is “getting paid to carry a baby”.

“She is carrying the baby for someone else,” I tell her. “She is carrying the fetus inside her body and the labor, in this case, is considered valuable enough to involve renumeration.”

M: “Is that natural?”

ME: “What is Nature?”

IVES: “The study of Nature may tend to make one dogmatic but the love of Nature surely does not.”

Cento notebook, 26 March 2024.

One night, when he was studying the course of the moon and its revolutions and was gazing open-mouthed at the heavens, a lizard crapped upon him from the top of the roof.

— Aristophanes, The Clouds

I never seemed to like the spring for what it was; I always loved it for what it might have been. In the head. In the heart of hearts. It is in my ability, I think, to love something fully only if I am naturally, compulsively, irrationally drawn to it.

—Anne Sexton, at some point

Sex has an x in it because the lovers cross just there and forever, and that letter, that character, has, in itself, no meaning, and no sympathy or mercy.

—Larry Levis in conversation with David Wojahn, 1982

Murderous parlor music.

Henrik Ibsen disliked the English title, Ghosts. The original title, Gengangere, can be literally translated as "again walkers", "ones who return", or "revenants". It has a double meaning of both "ghosts" and "events that repeat themselves.

OSWALD. He was one of the first doctors in Paris. I told him my symptoms; and then he set to work asking me a string of questions which I thought had nothing to do with the matter. I couldn't imagine what the man was after—

MRS. ALVING. Well?

OSWALD. At last he said: "There has been something worm-eaten in you from your birth." He used that very word—vermoulu.

MRS. ALVING. [Breathlessly.] What did he mean by that?

OSWALD. I didn't understand either, and begged him to explain himself more clearly. And then the old cynic said—[Clenching his fist] Oh—!

MRS. ALVING. What did he say?

OSWALD. He said, "The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children."

MRS. ALVING. [Rising slowly.] The sins of the fathers—!

OSWALD. I very nearly struck him in the face—

MRS. ALVING. [Walks away across the room.] The sins of the fathers—

OSWALD. [Smiles sadly.] Yes; what do you think of that? Of course I assured him that such a thing was out of the question. But do you think he gave in? No, he stuck to it; and it was only when I produced your letters and translated the passages relating to father—

MRS. ALVING. But then—?

OSWALD. Then of course he had to admit that he was on the wrong track; and so I learned the truth—the incomprehensible truth! I ought not to have taken part with my comrades in that lighthearted, glorious life of theirs. It had been too much for my strength. So I had brought it upon myself!

MRS. ALVING. Oswald! No, no; do not believe it!

OSWALD. No other explanation was possible, he said. That's the awful part of it. Incurably ruined for life—by my own heedlessness! All that I meant to have done in the world—I never dare think of it again—I'm not able to think of it. Oh! if I could only live over again, and undo all I have done! [He buries his face in the sofa.]

“From the piano part of Beethoven's Kreutzer sonata. This manuscript is at the Juilliard Library, and was made by 4 copyists with the collaboration of the composer.”

But how should we speak of the fathers in the murderous parlor?

OSWALD. [Impatiently.]Oh, "father,"—"father"! I never knew anything of father. I remember nothing about him, except that he once made me sick.

MRS. ALVING. This is terrible to think of! Ought not a son to love his father, whatever happens?

OSWALD. When a son has nothing to thank his father for? has never known him? Do you really cling to that old superstition?—you who are so enlightened in other ways?

MRS. ALVING. Can it be only a superstition—?

OSWALD. Yes; surely you can see that, mother. It's one of those notions that are current in the world, and so—

MRS. ALVING. [Deeply moved.] Ghosts!

OSWALD. [Crossing the room.] Yes; you may call them ghosts.

Larry Levis' first confession.

[What follows is a section from “Autobiography,” excerpted from Larry Levis’ essay collection, The Gazer Within. The entirety of the title essay,“Some Notes From the Gazer Within”, is available online thanks to Blackbird.]

“First confession”

My mother, whose maiden name was Carol Clement Mayo, was Irish. I was raised as a Catholic, which is to say, raised to believe that such terms as mystery, spirit, and the Holy Ghost were real presences rather than abstractions. To be raised as a Catholic is to grow up feeling guilty for something but not to know quite what it is. At seven, like other children, I went to my First Confession so that I could receive, afterward, my First Communion. Like other children, I had to make up sins on the way to my First Confession, mostly venial sins, like lying or having "bad thoughts." I had made up about ten little sins, but I felt I ought to confess to at least one big Mortal Sin, just to get it down somehow, from the start. A mortal sin was serious business. If you didn't confess, do penance, and gain absolution by Communion, you would go straight to hell in the next life without a lawyer made of air at your side, without even an arraignment or hearing. I looked at the list of the ten mortal sins and realized right away that I didn't qualify as a transgressor for nine of them. The only one left was a word I didn't understand, and so I thought that must be the sin that I had committed, the one that applied to me. And so, at the age of seven, after confessing my little, imaginary venial sins, I confessed to adultery, I did it in a casual, offhand way, "And uh . .. I committed adultery," I said. The priest stopped mumbling to himself in Latin. There was, in the shadowy, screened, small space of the confessional where I knelt, a silence, a pause. I could tell I'd made some sort of impression. He asked "How many times, my son?" "Just once," I replied. And then he asked, "How old are you?" "I'm seven, Father," I answered. And so he then explained what adultery was. And after he had finished, I said, "Oh no. I haven't done that?” And so it must have been something else that I had done that I wished to atone for, though I didn't know what it was. I still don't. But Catholicism works its shrewd miracle in the seven-year-old psyche, or soul, before the mind can question it.

You feel guilty for something or other you've done or just thought about doing, and you can't remember what it was or know what it was, and it keeps you in line, for a while at least, off the streets and out of trouble. Sometimes it works for ages. What else could have coerced peasants to lug huge stones up a hill for a cathedral except a hope to atone for the only sin they had all committed, the sin of being mortal, of being born and knowing they were flesh, and flesh must die. They didn't do it out of altruism. It doesn't exist. I was eight or nine when I realized this. I was loitering around by my father's abandoned chicken shed, a long, low building that still smelled vaguely of chicken dung. I was trying to pray without any self-interest. I couldn't do it. St. Augustine knew this long before I did.

Besides, it was a world with a chicken shed in it. My father once had a going egg business. He hated it. He hated chickens, and he finally grew to despise even their eggs. "What was the happiest day of your life?" I once asked him. "The day I got out of the chicken business," he answered; there was more to the world than belief, or disbelief.

I wasn't religious and never have been. The Mass was in Latin, and the incomprehensible sound of it had a beauty, but going to Mass always bored me. It seemed like a complete waste of time. And catechism classes were worse. The nuns longed for any opportunity to punish us. They watched as if we were a group of suspects the police had rounded up. They knew we were guilty of something.

The Catholic Church understood Freud's concept of the superego centuries before he articulated it in 1940. The cathedral on a hill is its palpable and visible representation, or, in Freud's simile, the superego is "like a garrison above a captured town." In the case of the church, it is a garrison so effective that it doesn't even need soldiers. Its windows are beautiful. Its frescoes and painting and sculptures, depicting absence in enormous detail, are priceless. It enabled Dante to imagine hell, and it was at least the stepmother to a ninety-year period of Italian art, a period of corruption, betrayal, incest, assassination, intrigue, and unsurpassable art. The church knew beauty and evil were sleeping together, and gave both allowances to do it. Two thousand years of stolid, industrious virtue and Swiss peace perfected the cuckoo clock and the dairy cow. I suspect the Swiss dairyman had a good deal of placid self-esteem. Michelangelo hated himself. And a later figure, Caravaggio, was mean-tempered, an inadvertent murderer whose self-portrait, as Goliath, is full of self-contempt and despair.

In the Age of Therapy, First Confessions could be seen as a ritualized form of child abuse, psychological in method, permanent in effect. But you can't take the Vatican to court. The painting on the chapel's ceiling doesn't respond to a summons and is tricky evidence.

In my case, I would lie awake as a child, full of vague yearnings which were sexual, which I did not know were entirely normal. I was never abused nor molested nor violated as a child. I simply felt that I was a violation, that I was guilty of being alive.

But if it was a violation, it was a pleasure. Besides, how guilty can anyone feel, at seven or eight? I was a boy like other boys. I didn't rebel against guilt, I forgot about it.

Before I was born, a priest drowned in our swimming pool. He had a weak heart and dove into cold, fresh water. My mother came out with a tray of glasses and ice tea and saw him bobbing there. She felt terrible about it. I always thought it was amazing. Priests were full of a mysterious divinity. They had a little bit of God in them. They weren't supposed to die like other people. This one was a young priest from Kings-burg. His lungs were full of water. His body was heavy. My mother pulled him out and tried to revive him with artificial respiration, but of course it didn't work. I always imagined him floating face down in a robe and vestments, dressed for saying the Mass, and asked my mother about it once when I was still a child. "No, silly," she said, "he had on bathing trunks." God died in his bathing trunks, I thought then, for priests were the form He took on earth. Did He really die, I wondered, or did He just do it to show that he could do it too, flick It into the pool water like a fourth of July sparkler burning too close to the hand? He did a lot of things just for effect, I thought: Yosemite National Park, for example.

Thinking about God made me tired. I had trouble believing in everlasting life. What did it look like? It seemed more likely that one just died in the end, and that was that, I had begun to think. If the spirit rose off you like a mist, so what? I'd hunted quail in thick ground fog that broke up and parted like mist when the sun burned it off. I hunted without a dog and entirely by intuition and always found quail. My senses grew alive and sharp when I hunted. The quail would burst up around me. I had a twenty-gauge shotgun and would usually bring down four or five by the time I'd finished. It felt real. It was pointless to think about God. Heaven made me feel tired, baffled, resigned, sad as when someone tells you a lie, and you know it's a lie, and wonder why he had to do so. When I cleaned the quail they were still warm inside. Their feathers gave off a pungent, wild smell that was like nothing else. I neglected to cut their feet off; it didn't seem important. My mother hated cooking them. I'd have to break the thin gray sticks of their legs off before she was willing to.

People now confess to all kinds of things, in public, on television. I have a feeling they too make up the things they confess to, just as we did, at seven. But they enjoy it, they like confessing to things. If they've done something that can still shock an audience, they even get paid for it, or make money later by confessing it in a book. They are absolved of their sins by the show's ratings and by book sales. We were supposed to feel embarrassment, shame, and contrition over what we had done. We were just kids. But we tried. We'd shut our eyes and concentrate and try to feel each one of those things. We couldn't, and we would feel sorry when we couldn't. They should have paid us money for it.

"But God comes to see without a bell."

Filters, faces, the expressivity of not saying.

“Total resistance to the grasp”

Faces are illegible to me now.

Re-reading Emmanuel Levinas’ “Ethics of the Face,” but feeling only chimera and failure.

The face resists possession, resists my powers. In its epiphany, in expression, the sensible still graspable, turns into total resistance to the grasp. This mutation can occur only by opening of a new dimension. ... (Levinas)

When ... it began to be forced upon men's unwilling belief that the style of the Pre-Raphaelites was true and was according to nature, the last forgery invented respecting them is, that they copy photographs. (John Ruskin)

Alleged “scene of flirtation,” per Duchenne:

“Sideways for ecstasy and sensual delirium”

Photographic art picked up from the expressive portrait painting and applied painterly precepts to composition.

This meant sketching an expression taken on the fly, drawing or painting a living model, and, by skillful composition, aiming for beauty without losing any of the truth of the subject. (Francois Delaporte, Anatomy of the Passions)

Delaporte on the “downward gaze for humility and sadness”:

Modifications of the gaze depend on the remnants of what surrounds it: the eye takes on the color of passion under the effect of muscular actions. The gaze becomes interrogative with the elevation of the frontals, menacing with the action of the pyramidals, and smiling with the contraction of the zygomatics major and the inferior palpebral orbiculars. Moreover, Duchenne had not omitted to indicate the direction of the eyeball axis in certain passions: for example, an oblique gaze upward and sideways for ecstasy and sensual delirium, a downward gaze for humility and sadness. But the most serious error of his opponents was to not have understood that the photographs are inscribed only within the scientific register.

The feminine bobs from oblique to downward and back, a pendulum that creates its own time and gives rise to expectation. Duchenne’s view that the eye takes on the color of passion under the effect of muscular actions…

Delaporte on what Duchenne saw and caricature: “In photos that fix the acme of a passion, he was seeing prototypes close to caricature. He did not understand that these images escape the genres of both portrait and caricature. Duchenne did not want to either attenuate or correct facial features, on the one hand, or to deform or emphasize one feature or another.”

Back to Arthur Rimbaud "Nocturne Vulgaire" . . .

— Ici, va-t-on siffler pour l'orage, et les Sodomes, — et les Solymes, — et les bêtes féroces et les armées, 

— (Postillon et bêtes de songe reprendront-ils sous les plus suffocantes futaies, pour m'enfoncer jusqu'aux yeux dans la source de soie).

The clinical alters the nature of palpation. To touch to is to be determined, defined, existing in relation to comparison.

Levinas again— with the facial ethics, the beholding he ultimately located in a political state, a theology: The face, still a thing among things, breaks through the form that nevertheless delimits it. This means concretely: the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised, be it enjoyment or knowledge.

In photography, the exhibition value starts to suppress the value of the ritual involved in creation, Walter Benjamin said. But the ritual value resists and “retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance,” to quote B: It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face.

“The expression the face introduces into the world doe not defy the feebleness of my powers, but my ability for power (mon pouvoir de pouvoir)?” (Levinas)

“By the frank laugh, a person expresses, without wanting to, something that he or she could never say. A joyous behavior without any joy the case arising precisely from electrical simulation is doubly impossible, because the person does not command the contraction of the inferior palpebral orbicular, and because he cannot say what is, by its very essence, unsayable. The springing forth of expressive force and its constraining character carry no symbolic determination Only reflex actions realize the mechanism of the expressive act. Physiognomy presents an authentic expression when, and only when, the organism gives birth to the image of an emotion that it is impossible to mime.” (Francois Delaporte, Anatomy of the Passions)

  A breath opens operatic breaches in the partitions, — blurs the pivot of crumbling roofs, — disperses the limits of the thresholds, — eclipses the casements. — Along the vine, I pressed my against a gargoyle, — and descended into this carriage, whose epoch is marked by convex windows (Rimbaud, vulgar nocturne)

(mon pouvoir de pouvoir)

I was drawn to these images shared by Maaike Dirkx (who maintains an excellent art history blog titled Rembrandt’s Room) as types of portraits, a formal possibility for portraits with exchangeable “filters” that existed in the 17th century. Dirkx describes them as “exchangeable overlays showing a variety of costumes and hairstyles became popular in the mid 17th century,” thus offering a glimpse at aspirational norms in Amsterdam then.

Selfie—- and the filter as expressive borrowing, creating a shared context.

Rembrandt’s Room / Maaike Dirkx: “This one has 20 surviving overlays in different design (there may or may not have been more originally) all worn from frequent use, yet still good fun!”

“While the paint layer is usually oil on copper,” Dirkx adds, “the overlays are cut from very brittle naturally forming transparent silicate minerals. Oil on metal and mica, c. 5 x 4 cm.”

See also Maike Dirkx’s “Sassetta: the quest for an altarpiece”

Isabella Hammad, “Things That Have Died By the Pool”

Reading Rilke's First Elegy with Bianca Stone.

A gust inside the god. A wind.

—-Rainer Maria Rilke, “Gesang ist Dasein”

They turn in the skeins of white clouds like trash in a puddle.

—-Czeslaw Milosz, “Artificer”

1 How it began

Rilke began the first Duino Elegy in 1912 while walking along the cliffs near Duino Castle in Trieste (the castle would be largely destroyed during WWI). Two years later, the poet would be separated from his family and from his home to which he would never return. He would be conscripted into military service, and would suffer from illness and depression; it took him ten more years to complete the cycle of ten poems.

—- Mark Wunderlich

Bianca Stone narrates a rich, evocative description of this moment.

We know it took Rilke ten years to complete the cycle of ten poems. A chronos in elegies. A cycle of selves and selvings. I am intrigued by the temporal rupture within his elegies—a rupture forced by circumstance, by life, by lived experience. The Rilke who wrote the first elegy is not the same body or mind that wrote the 7th. In between these elegies, Orpheus intervened. I think the role played by time is worth considering here. For time had changed. This creates interesting questions about how we consider the poet-self, and how we read the world in relation to language.

2 “First Elegy

The poem in its entirety: “First Elegy” as translated by Stephen Mitchell (PDF).

Here is Rilke’s first stanza as translated by Stephen Mitchell:

And now, for the sake of hearing and tasting the poem across its possibilities, I want to add more translation next to this one.

Here is Rilke’s “First Elegy” as translated by Edward Snow— and the first stanza replicated below:

A few immediate observations:

1. Mitchell and Snow occupy the field differently: where Mitchell’s translation stretches horizontally across the page, in relation to the horizon, Snow’s translation tumbles down the page and leaves an empty white margin. Absence and space is felt and perceived differently as a result.

2. Mitchell tears the first line away from the stanza and uses it as a frame above the poem’s threshold. The question is set apart from the poem visually. This set-apartness is emphasized and expanded by Mitchell.

3. Translations of the first line also reveal other differences in emphasis. Mitchell leaves the noun as abstract as possible. But something wants a proper noun, or an identified subject, in Snow’s translation.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies? (Mitchell)
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’ Orders? (Edward Snow)

Notice the difference between "hierarchies" and "Orders.” Notice the shift in the specificity of the subject: angels v. Angels.

The opening question is immense. This immenseness made Mitchell feel that it demanded spacing outside the rest of the poem. But the answer to this question (as Robert Hass noticed elsewhere) can only be :"No one." 

3 “No One” in Correspondence

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?

Rilke doesn’t answer this question directly in the elegy, but he also works tirelessly to convince the reader that ‘No one’ matters.

‘No one ‘is another way of figuring the statement: there is no single thing known as one. There are many Ones. (As there are many interlocutors.)

Perhaps there is something else as well, a None.

I believe that "No one" was central to Rilke's poetics as well as the relationship between eros, imagination, and writing for him. Just as Muzot became central to this poetic imaginary, he was buried there. He picked the churchyard site at Raron. He requested a small, plain gravestone like his father's.

And he composed the poem intended to rest above him forever: 

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one's sleep under so many
lids. 

When Rilke died on December 26, 1926, he was buried in this location. Beneath the words. He exists for eternity in relation to them.

For several years, I have (albeit carelessly) read the first elegy in relation to a poem by Paul Celan. There is, to me, a correspondence with Paul Celan's "Psalm”? Here is John Felstiner's translation:

No one kneads us again… —- this wrecks me still. I cannot read this first line without already having lost the rug that ties the artifice of my selfhood together.

No one. The echo of that hollow O. And the way the echo gestures towards “none” in English. The strange sonic energy between no one and none.

And here is how Hamburger and Joris translate the first three stanzas of the elegy:

No one molds us again. NoOne kneads us again. No one conjures our dust. Praised be your name, no one. Praised be thou, NoOne.

Where Hamburger leaves the abstract ‘no one’ open, Joris closes it somehow: a proper noun must be divine. It must be the “NoOne” God has become when he does not answer. And Joris’ use of “thou” plays further into this holy name. This pattern continues:

A nothing we were… A Nothing we were…. the nothing, the Nothing…the no one’s rose, the NoOnesRose. And this NoOnesRose is central to Joris’ Celan. I just wanted to note these differences, while acknowledging that I am less inclined to adjudicate between them and more inclined to learn from them as a dialogue. Since (again) there are many Ones. (As there are many interlocutors.)

4 Rilke as poet of desire

Bianca gave me a beautiful introduction on Rilke authored by Robert Hass. Reading it allowed me to reexamine my feeling that Rilke is a poet of desire, or a poet of desire in relation to the way desire exists to me. Hass makes a brief reference to Marina Tsvetaeva. Again—-to me—Tsvetaeva is Rilke’s kindred spirit. I think his intensity was hers, and vice versa. They understood desire similarly. Irrespective of other relationships in their lives, both poets felt most alive on the page, most lit in correspondence fueled by the velocity of mutually imagining each other. This particular correspondence between their personalities is erotic, as their epistolary correspondence is also erotic. Their letters are mutually uncommitted to the material facticity of the moment. The material is almost a profanation of the erotic energy in the letter. 

Rilke loved the absent more devotedly than he loved the present. Whether his wife, Clara, or Lou Andreas, the child Vera, or Paula—Rilke's women are cherished and tended on the page.

Hass quotes one of Rilke’s lovers as saying of him:

And so the question opens about how careless Rilke was—-and whether this carelessness was a form of “narcissism”. Given that this word is often defined differently, and given my own uncertainty as to whether I can sustain such a claim, I’d rather consider what can be said with what is given.

Rilke wasn't a womanizer. He couldn't really be Rodin. Much as he tried, he couldn’t objectify women in the flesh—-couldn’t impose that aura of mastery over them. Even if Rilke wanted to imitate Rodin, he was too cerebral, too haunted by his own fear of death, too touched by the pain and suffering of others as with the screams from the hospital in Paris.

And those who are beautiful, oh who can retain them? (Second Elegy)

5. Translations and interlocutory frisson

John Felstiner wrote about the relationship between Celan’s translation practice and his poetics in an essay for World Literature Today:

A gift to spend time with Bianca’s brilliant mind and spirit thinking through poetry. An absolute gift. Always.

For our own heart always exceeds us, as theirs did.
And we can no longer follow it,
gazing into images that soothe it or into the godlike bodies where,
measured more greatly, it achieves a greater repose.

—- Rainer Maria Rilke, “Second Elegy” (t. by Mitchell)

"My Story in a Late Style of Fire" by Larry Levis

“ At the recollection of a name, all the characters return with their costumes and their language to play their roles as they played them life and I can see them performing their actions in front of me like a God entertaining himself by gazing at the worlds he has created. One especially - the first love, which was never violent nor passionate, since erased by other desires but still remaining in the depths of my heart like an ancient Roman way traversed by a wretched railway carriage.”

— Gustave Flaubert, Memoirs of a Madman (translated by Andrew Brown)

“Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.”

― Nathaniel Hawthorne

And a poem by Larry Levis.