Heart Work (part one)

I am writing from a writing desk in my small room at Holy Cross monastery, where my intern program is visiting for the long weekend. The monastery perches atop a long slope above the Hudson river. In the morning, the water shines upwards as if it is raising the sunlight back up to the light's source.

The monks here observe The Great Silence from 8:30 at night until 8:30 in the morning, after breakfast. We join them. It is in the first few hours of the silence last night that I opened up my old friend, “The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke,” translated by Stephen Mitchell. The book was hands-down my favorite book for four years. The summer after high school I put Rilke down, and have not really paid it much attention for another four years.

The book falls naturally open, the binding splitting, at The Ninth Elegy. My brain recalls the half-forgotten words almost before I read them. I have read it three or four times in the past 24 hours. The translation is bulky (they all are) but somehow intensely personal to me.

Disclaimer: This is going to be a post in which I geek out more than normal.

The Ninth Elegy

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely

in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all

other green, with tiny waves on the edges

of every leave (like the smile of a breeze)--: why then

have to be human-- and, escaping from fate,

keep longing for fate?...

We are humans. As intellectual and emotional creatures, we are the most volatile life form. We run from death, we fear the future, and yet we are always thinking about what comes next, saying, 'Things will be better when....'

Rilke, in his particularly volatile existential distress, asks, Why be human? Why not live as something else, like a laurel tree? They have life and yet remain serene.

(In the Metamorphoses, a set of writings by Ovid, there is a story about how Apollo loved Daphne, who was afraid of him. She fled from him and thus Zeus turned her into a laurel tree so that she could no longer run and Apollo could love her. Daphne as a laurel with Apollo crawling all over her sounds alarming to me, not serene. But we'll assume that being a laurel is not some sort of human trafficking and let Rilke get on with it.)

He was asking, “Why be human?”

Oh not because happiness exists,

that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.

Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which

would exist in the laurel too...

For him, the purpose of being human can't just be to enjoy life. Happiness is fleeting, and superficial-- a feeling rather than a state, like joy. The purpose also can not just be to learn, or to practice for some afterlife. What is it, then?

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here

apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way

keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,

just once. And never again. But to have been

this once, completely, even if only once:

to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

This is where I start to really swoon. I love these words. To me, it brings meaning into a world without afterlife. Meaning is in the strange interrelation, the pull between human and outside world, which isn't really so outside at all. Just being part of it, feeling the force of that interrelation between human, animal, plant, earth, atmosphere, is so much.

We are witnesses in a way that animals and plants are not. Humans see the passing of time and the transience of things. And we recognize that we are transient too, that we will spend each moment once. Since we know this, we can place value upon those moments. And to create that value is worth it.

But, though we may try, it is rare to feel totally at one with the world, in the moment:

And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,

trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,

in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.

Trying to become it.

But then what? What's the outcome of trying to feel the world, trying to truly experience it? (asks the human, concerned with the future:)

– Whom can we give it to? We would

hold onto it all, forever... ah, but what can we take along

into that other realm? Not the art of looking,

which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.

The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness,

and the long experience of love,-- just what is wholly unsayable.

None of our physical skills will go on with us in death. The only thing that carries out of the physical world is that undefinable element: consciousness. (I would add: Maybe not our personal consciousness, with memories attached, but there's nothing to suggest that consciousness as a thing would not continue to exist without a physical world, or without souls or afterlife, even.)

So we can take “the unsayable” with us. But does the universe need us?

But later, among the stars,

what good is it-- they are better as they are: unsayable.

For when the traveller returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,

he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead

some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue gentian.

Nah, the universe doesn't need humans to feel one with it in order to function. It doesn't really benefit a rock to feel at one with it. But there is something that humans contribute beyond mere functioning. Words. Analysis. Writing about the world, art about the world, talking about the world-- in short: interpretation of the world.

Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,

bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window--

at most: column, tower...

But to say them, you must understand,

oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves

ever dreamed of existing.

We are deeply a part of the world. But what we bring to the world is our power to interpret it. Building meaning, giving an extra dimension to the universe, is our reason for living.

Such as: a child's favorite teddy bear is not just a stuffed animal to him. To anyone who has read Ovid, a laurel tree is not just a laurel. If it is someone we know, a sick woman is not just a sick woman. A flag is not just a flag. We assign depth and metaphor.

Rilke calls this meaning-making heart work. Once I knew to look for it, I realized that this heart work idea extends out of much of his writing, like an expansion upon an expansion of the world he writes about... what dimension does that even put him in at that point?

Whew. Rilke. We're only halfway through the elegy at this moment, but I suspect we all need rest. Perhaps I will pick up the second half on in a future Someday.