Hopkinson 1 Trish Hopkinson http://trishhopkinson.com/
The Angel Condition: The Poetics of Rilke’s Angels in the Duino Elegies “The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.” — George Elliot, Scenes of Clerical Life
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke offers stunning portrayals of angels in his series of poems entitled the Duino Elegies. These angelic characters have an uncanny resemblance to the history and longing of the human condition and can be interpreted many ways based on the reader’s personal experiences. There is something within the persona of these angels that make Rilke’s poems both intriguing and unsettling—the angels are nearly human; they are almost like us, but not quite. Many of Rilke’s poems express a similar theme―his dire invisible longing and the connection to angel characters represented in the Duino Elegies as well as in other poems. Specifically, his poem “Lament” ends with the lines “Loveliest in my invisible / landscape, you that made me more known / to the invisible angels” (137). In this essay, I suggest that Rilke’s angels are not only invisible, but that they personify human longing—they exist in pure experience, outside of any language, while humans are only allowed words for expression. Yet, the angels in Rilke’s poetry have their own “angel condition,” a realm of living simultaneously in both the present and the past and in the real and the unreal. This condition is terrifyingly a state of both life and death and does not allow the angels to reciprocate or have a voice. So the angels witness and long for the power of human poetry, while humans long to live outside the limits of language. Throughout the poems in the Duino Elegies, Rilke presents the relationship between humans and angels as if one cannot exist without witnessing the other and that as our human objectivity turns into transient memories and becomes invisible, the angels long to witness our attachment to tangible experience. In “The Ninth Elegy” he writes: Here is the time for the sayable: here is its homeland. Speak and bear witness. More than ever the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act. . . . Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one, you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe, where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him something simple which, formed over generations, lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze. (201)
Hopkinson 2 Additionally, Rilke describes this concept of the past becoming invisible in his letter to his translator and friend Withold von Hulewicz as “all the towers and palaces of the past are existent because they have long been invisible, and the still-standing towers and bridges of our reality are already invisible, although still (for us) physically lasting. . . . All the worlds in the universe are plunging into the invisible as into their next-deeper reality” (328). For Rilke, then, angels are everything that has existed and now is invisible or no longer exists. They represent the human past, all the thoughts and objects in human history. At the same time, the angels exist to take notice, to watch, so that the world can also exist―one cannot exist without the other. They are the inner witnesses (the witnesses to our witnessing) of our subconscious awareness. Our relationship with objects and the invisible form of the past is presented by Martin Buber as a similar concept in his book I and Thou, where he asserts that all relationships that have passed as objects, whether referring to the “I-Thou” or the “I-It” relationship. Buber notes that “in other words: insofar as a human being makes do with the things that he experiences and uses, he lives in the past, and his moment has no presence. He has nothing but objects; but objects consist in having been” (63-64). That is, once the present becomes the past, all encounters transform into objecthood and become “objects” or memories. Rilke’s angels seem to live in the realm of observing our I-Thou/I-It relationships and the transformation of the essential present to a past of objects. The difference between Rilke’s angels’ relationships with humans and our relationships with objects is that the angels cannot reciprocate like the I-Thou. Therefore, an I-Angel word pair cannot exist within Buber’s analogy since the angels are not only invisible, but also do not have the ability to reciprocate in their one-sided, yet still whole, relationship. That said, several binaries based on the differences between the human condition and the angel condition emerge from Rilke’s Duino Elegies. The angels appear to exist as the opposite of what is tangible, to be abstract so the rest of the world can be real. For example, some of the binaries between human and angel that arise from Duino Elegies include visibility/invisibility, tangibility/abstractness, noise/silence, real/unreal, and existing/non-existing. The angels never create cause or effect, but occur as binary opposites while still being the longing that connects them to or witnesses the human condition. Referring to this connection as “unity” in the same letter to Hulewicz noted earlier, Rilke suggests that “there is neither a this-world nor an otherworld, but only the great unity, in which the ‘angels,’ those beings who surpass us, are at home” (319). In this letter, Rilke mentions how the angels “surpass” us, which indicates that the angel condition is less flawed than the human condition. Rilke seems to give his angels an air of superiority, while still giving them their own longing. In other words, while humans lack the ability to detach themselves from objects, angels long to be able to attach, even though that attachment is the primary defect of human condition. The uniqueness of the Duino Elegies’ angel condition is further pronounced when compared to the angel characters in other literary texts. Specifically, the angels of Milton, Blake, and Rumi range from satanic followers to God’s servants with varying degrees of wisdom. For example, some of the angels represented in Milton’s Paradise Lost are mere followers, not thinking for themselves; some angels fall to Hell to become Satan’s angels. Blake’s angels are
Hopkinson 3 also quite different from Rilke’s in that they are vain and consider themselves wiser than Blake. For Blake, angels operate under their own system that they then use to try and manipulate humans. Blake also saw angels as flawed religious creatures. In contrast, Rumi’s angels appear to be based on his Muslim faith in that they are represented merely as messengers or servants or intermediaries, similar to the Christian conception of angels. He mentions that angels pray for those less fortunate and also that the Sufi masters are wiser than angels. Ultimately, all of these angels from other literary works have one thing in common: their main purpose is to serve as messengers. Unlike Rilke’s angels, which have no voice, these other angels speak and interact with humans and with God. In fact, Rilke doesn’t necessarily present the angels’ lack of voice as a weakness, but rather as a way to exist within their own silence, as listeners with an invisible response ability. Rilke describes the silent voices in “The First Elegy”: Voices. voices. Listen, my heart, as only saints have listened: until the gigantic call lifted them off the ground: yet they kept on, impossibly, kneeling and didn’t notice at all: so complete was their listening. Not that you could endure God’s voice—far from it. But listen to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence. (153) By way of comparison and to help define the impossibility of silence for humans, modern musician John Cage experimented with the idea of complete silence in an anechoic (echo-free) chamber at Harvard University. He found complete silence impossible to create due to the physicality of the human condition. He writes, “I . . . heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation” (8). The potential for complete silence is only imagined in the realm of Rilke’s angels. Therefore, this angel silence is not something humans can experience. These invisible angels are not messengers; they are soundless in their existence, and yet “every angel is terrifying,” writes Rilke in “The First Elegy” (151). These dire angels terrify humanity because of their astounding beauty, their complete detachment, and their relationship with death. The angels represent what is most beautiful, and in the presence of such beauty, change is forced upon humans, so for humans there is never any stability. The only stable thing is the present, which is fleeting and instantly turns invisible as soon as it has passed. Therefore, the angels encompass all that has previously existed and is no longer tangible, all that has turned invisible. For that reason, they are terrifying because everything is less beautiful than they are, including human beings. Hence, they represent a non-existence without tangibility—an invisible existence with nothing to attach to, no physicality, and are completely detached from all objects. Rilke believes that the human condition finds it terrifying and impossible to imagine a life with an unattached love or “objectless love” as mentions earlier in “The First Elegy” (153). Further, Rilke’s angels’ lack of physical form and their detachment from the tangible may lead us to
Hopkinson 4 discover that there is no such thing as resurrection, no need for a physical representation of our bodies once we are dead. Rilke’s angels are particularly horrifying in their associations with death. In “The First Elegy” Rilke claims, “Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead” (155). According to Rilke, angels appear to exist in both life and death. Since death is misunderstood by humans, angels too are misunderstood because a part of them is death, and death itself can be terrifying. What is misunderstood may also be feared. Again the angel condition is contrasted with the human condition. Death, according to Rilke, means to “no longer desire one’s desires” (155). Thus, death can become a concept that causes anxiety and fear in the minds of humans who tie the purpose of life to the attachment of other people and objects (I-Thou, I-It), whether those objects are tangible items, memories, or art forms, such as poetry. Rilke’s angels seem to embody object detachment, similar to words as signifiers; they seem to symbolize the unsayable words as described in the “The Ninth Elegy”: But later, among the stars, what good is it–they are better as they are: unsayable. For when the traveler 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. 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. (199-201) Rilke suggests poetry does not exist without a human to think the words. He also implies in “The Ninth Elegy” that the meaning of words is as invisible as angels, and angels need humans in order to witness the poetry, in order to listen. For Rilke, the words or thoughts of humans create the perception of reality that angels create for themselves via observation. The angels, to me it seems, then become the meaning of the words; they consume human thoughts in order to exist since they cannot create their own thoughts. For Rilke, angels are the longing that we cannot let go of, indicating that angels long to be tangible in the same way humans long to live forever. In Rilke’s poems, angels are both the opposite of and the same as us. Moreover, they are the emotions created by the feelings described in poetry, in that they long to be tangible in the way we long to live forever. For example, T.S. Eliot has described poetry as “an escape from emotion” and has argued that “the business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all” (17). To Eliot, the poem is tangible, like an object or a sculpture, and has the ability to stand on its own without being tied to the poet or creator. Perhaps this comparison provides an additional binary in that Rilke’s angels are the meanings of the poems in contrast to the tangible object of the poems
Hopkinson 5 themselves. Additionally, the idea that poetic verse transcends to the realm of Rilke’s angels correlates with Longinus’ sense of the sublime that suggests that language can elevate above emotions and create a moment of transport or ecstasy that is above the mundane. Relating sublime writing to a spiritual experience that takes us beyond material world, Longinus writes that “when a writer uses any other resource he shows himself to be a man; but the Sublime lifts him near to the great spirit of the Deity” (xxxvi). And as explained by Matthew Arnold in “The Study of Poetry,” poetry “interprets life for us” (2). To explain further, the following diagram visualizes the relationships between Rilke’s angels and humans, poetry and poets, and the concrete versus the abstract. The diagram also indicates that connections can be drawn between the concrete akin to the human condition versus the abstract akin to the angel condition.
In the Duino Elegies, Rilke carefully articulates profound longing as the key element that ties the angel/human relationship together. In turn, he creates an angel condition that greatly differs from the angel characterizations created by other poets. This angel condition is an existence that not only lacks the ability to reciprocate but acts as a binary for all that is human and all that is less beautiful. To Rilke, it seems, this longing is an essential aspect of being human and being an angel.
Hopkinson 6 Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. “The Study of Poetry.” Essays: English and American. Vol. XXVIII. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001. Web. 13 Oct. 2012. Blake, William. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. 2nd ed. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Waterman Kaufman. New York: Scribners and Sons, 1970. Print. Cage, John. Silence. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. Print. Eliot, Thomas Stearns “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921. Bartleby.com, 1996. Web. 28 Oct. 2012. Longinus. On the Sublime. Trans. H. L. Havell. The Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org, 2006. Web. 28 Oct. 2012. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. [Pub. City]: Dover Publications, 2005. Print. Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Trans. and ed. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House, 1982. Print. Rumi. The Essential Rumi. Trans. Coleman Barks. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Print.
