The Orphic Voice, page 31
And requiems answered by the pulse that beats,
Devoutly, in life’s last retreats.
This is not fancy; this is imagination with a profound bearing on the epic biology of thought and its origins which we are trying to trace out. The origins of all our bodily and mental powers are in an exact sense with the dead, in heredity and tradition; thus the dead are not wholly dead here within the living body. The heart and center of the kingdom of the dead to which Orpheus goes in search of Eurydice is also the penetralia of the individual human life which pulsates and thinks (with the “beating mind” which Shakespeare and Wordsworth speak of).
An exploration of the labyrinth of body-and-mind, a field between living and dead with the poetic self as the instrument of investigation, as Orpheus’ lyre had the power to bring him through those dark passages—this is the maze we human beings run, in comparison with the rats of our experiments. It may have been run, on exactly these terms, since the beginning of human time. Anthropology suggests that the labyrinths of primitive man, the maze emblems and the real mazes of the caves, were capable also of being the body, and the site of a journey between the two worlds of living and dead.32 The Orphic search here goes past Orpheus back into immemorial antiquity. The search, or research, is as old as the hills or the caves in the hills, and the figures of its workings are changeless.
With Rilke we have something else. At first sight it seems as if we are on the same territory as Wordsworth; for the shorter Orpheus poem of Rilke’s which we are going to look at, the Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes33 of 1904, published in the Neue Gedichte in 1907, is apparently a straightforward and beautiful re-telling of this same second figure. At least it begins by picking up, in its wonderful opening lines, the image of the Orphic vision and task as we have so far found them in Wordsworth, the journey into and through the body which is at once the kingdom of the dead and of the living. (We badly need, one begins to see, a new vision in science and poetry that might elucidate these relations between dead and living.) It is good that there should be this reconfirmation, almost a hundred years later, of the nature of the Orphic research, for no matter how different the modes, the task is one. These are the first six lines of the poem (and as with Goethe’s poems, I will give a rough translation):
Das war der Seelen wunderliches Bergwerk.
Wie stille Silbererze gingen sie
als Adern durch sein Dunkel. Zwischen Wurzeln entsprang das Blut, das fortgeht zu den Menschen, und schwer wie Porphyr sah es aus im Dunkel.
Sonst war nichts Rotes.
(That was the wondrous mine-workings of souls.
Like unobtrusive silver-ore they travelled
as veins across its darkness. Between roots
sprang up the blood that issues in the living;
it looked as deep as porphyry in the darkness.
No other crimson.)
Yet as the poem advances, something begins to happen, something not entirely clear which calls up our close attention and a strange sense of reserve, for all the beauty. After this great opening there is a certain respite. Eight lines follow of description of the landscape into which those mine-workings open out, and then we are introduced to the characters. Orpheus comes first, as he must do, ahead of the other two. He has 26 lines, and he is beautiful, and ordinary, dowered with two or three lovely images which yet, as can often happen with this poet’s almost unrivaled gift for simile and metaphor, become pure ornament instead of inherent body in the poem. (This does not mean that they are not to be enjoyed, as ornament, for their own sake; no need to be puritanical in these things.) After him comes Hermes; then the being whom the god leads by his left hand. “Sie” it stands in the poem, in italics, and in the next line, “Die So-geliebte,” she, the so dearly beloved, making her entrance softly but emphatically at what is almost exactly the mathematical center of the poem, at the turn of the 46th to 47th line in a poem of 95. The numbers are relevant, for at first we may be almost more aware of the exquisite shape of the poem than of what is happening in it. For after that introduction there is a second landscape passage answering the first one, only here the landscape is called into being by Orpheus’ lamentation, a world and then a universe of mourning, “a sky of mourning with contorted stars.” And then Eurydice too, like Orpheus, is given 26 lines. But what a difference! “Sie aber” as that passage begins, but she, is something quite other. What does Rilke make of her when he has detached her from that world of Orpheus’ grief? This is part of how he presents her:
Sie aber ging an jenes Gottes Hand,
den Schritt beschränkt von langen Leichenbändern,
unsicher, sanft und ohne Ungeduld.
Sie war in sich wie Eine hoher Hoffnung,
und dachte nicht des Mannes, der voranging,
und nicht des Weges, der ins Leben aufstieg.
Sie war in sich. Und ihr Gestorbensein
erfüllte sie wie Fülle.
Wie eine Frucht von Süssigkeit und Dunkel,
So war sie voll von ihrem grossen Tode,
der also neu war, dass sie nichts begriff.
Sie war in einem neuen Mädchentum
und unberührbar; ihr Geschlecht war zu
wie eine junge Blume gegen Abend . . .
Sie war schon nicht mehr diese blonde Frau,
die in des Dichters Liedern manchmal anklang,
nicht mehr des breiten Bettes Duft und Eiland
und jenes Mannes Eigentum nicht mehr . . .
Sie war schon Wurzel.
(But she went forward at that god’s left hand,
her steps constrained by the long winding-bands,
hesitant, gentle, and without impatience.
She was self-folded, like one long expectant,
had no thought for the man that went before them,
none for the road ascending to the living.
She was self-folded. And her Being-dead
Fulfilled her into plenitude.
Like fruit filled out with sombre sweetness, she
was full of her own death, a thing so great
and still so new she comprehended nothing.
She was enclosed in new virginity,
inviolable; sex in her was closed
like a young flower towards evening . . .
No longer now was she that golden woman
who in the poet’s songs often resounded,
no longer the broad bed’s fragrance and island
and that man’s property not any longer . . .
Made root already.)
This is, unlike Wordsworth, no simple matter. It is full of ambivalences, and only when we have glimpsed the nature of these shall we be in a position to trust Rilke, in his turn, and to understand his kind of science. Let us see first of all the evidence given us by these lines.
First (though each point leads into the others), the identification of the poet not with the male, Orpheus, the likely self-image in the circumstances, but with the woman. There is no mistaking the sudden leap in power, intensity, sympathy, at the point at which she enters the poem. Beside her, Hermes and Orpheus are almost lay figures. Second, what I might call the long, loving, cherishing, utter rejection of sex and fertility. The language in which Eurydice is described suggests pregnancy; guter Hoffnung sein means to be expecting a child, and the “Fülle” of four lines later implies a rounding of the body as well as the idea of abundance. But the fruit within her is not life but death. Next she is moved back one stage, into an earlier order of creation, the plants, and their cycle of reproduction, and here too the poet inverts the normal sequence, for he makes her first fruit, then flower, finally, as culmination, root, as if to take her back, away from fruition into the earth, into the grave. Then comes the rejection of sex between man and woman in marriage, beginning quietly, rising to an unmistakable note of triumph in that third repetition of “nicht mehr”— “Und jenes Mannes Eigentum nicht mehr.” Rejection in favor of what? First, in favor of restored, insulated self-hood for the woman; for marriage is rejected not only as sex but also as relationship between one individual and another, of which it is the highest and closest type. Rilke almost abolishes her partner, for a little later in the poem when Hermes turns to her exclaiming, “He has looked round,” she is so self- and death-absorbed that she does not understand and asks “Who?”— Wer?, the one other italicized word in the poem besides the Sie, the only partner she is to have in the perfection of her isolation. Lastly, and closely connected with what has gone before, there is the apotheosis of death in this poem. Death is preferred to fertility, to relationship between people, to life; and the poem ends with Eurydice already started back, of her own accord, to the world of the dead from which she was being wooed away.
At first sight this seems to be a contradiction, point by point, of every note of postlogic, puzzling in any true poet, doubly so when it appears, as it does here, in direct connection with Orpheus himself. It is, moreover, no accident in Rilke’s work, but something essential to it. The figures of this poem—the identification with the woman rather than the man, the rejection of sex and fertility, of love and relationship, the apotheosis of death—are ratified time and again in Rilke’s poetry, including the Sonette an Orpheus, and not only there but in his letters and life as well.34 How are we to interpret this? Looking at those figures again, considering them in their relationship to the writer’s life, and living as we do in the mid-twentieth century, we are likely to make one answer to that question: Freud. The whole situation seems to direct us that way, and this is all to the good, provided we go carefully.
Over the last thirty years or so there has been so much appropriation of Freudian psychology by literary critics that it has come to seem almost a matter of course that that discipline has some prescriptive right over the interpretation of minds, including poetic ones. This shows how far our concept of poetry has fallen away from its true direction and purpose as an instrument of research into the natural world, including the mind. Abdicating from its responsibilities, criticism (which is at best and worst inseparable from poetry) went a-begging, asking to borrow from Freud and to a lesser extent from Jung the means of interpreting those structures which were poetry’s own province first and foremost, namely, myth and the working forms of the mind, for the investigation of which poetry is peculiarly adapted by virtue of its postlogical reflexiveness of method and subject matter, and its singular appropriation and development of one of the greatest of all human instruments of research, language. Only the Orphic poets have pressed on with poetry’s specific modern task, the development of a biology of thinking. Wordsworth was well launched on it by 1805—not even then as a novelty but as a conscious extension of the epic tradition, which means that it is practically immemorial.35 Rilke takes this up in allied yet rather different terms. In the Orpheus figure of each lies the clue to what is going on.
Wordsworth in his working figure gives us Orpheus at the beginning of his quest for Eurydice, entering upon the dark labyrinth. Rilke in this lyric of his which we are considering presents that same figure as already drawing to its close. Eurydice is here doubly lost, twice dead as it were by the time the poem finishes; and it is in her that the poet embodies the turn he is giving to the Orphic myth—the shift from life to death, the abdication from human relationships into a kind of scattered organic unity with nature at large (so Eurydice has become a root already and is compared elsewhere in the poem to fallen rain, “hingegeben wie gefallener Regen”), the withdrawal from marriage into a negation emphasized by the poet’s identification of himself with the woman and not with the man in the poem. In postlogic something else can be done with the notes of this Orphic poem than to regard them as clinical neurotic symptoms. They are marks of a metamorphosis taking place in the myth itself—that is, in the method of thinking. For all these notes belong not in the second Orphic figure, the quest for Eurydice, but in the third, where Orpheus meets his fearful death.
In the last figure of the Orpheus story, the poet is attacked and torn to pieces by the Thracian women or Maenads, “the rout that made the hideous roar,” who overwhelmed the song of Orpheus and thereby his power. One version of the story says that the reason for the attack was that he had been preaching the cult of Apollo against that of Dionysus; another says that he had been advocating love between man and man and not between man and woman. The broken body was scattered over the soil, the head and lyre thrown into the river, only to float down to the sea, singing as they went. The head comes to rest in an island cave, to prophesy and eventually to be buried. The lyre goes up to heaven to become one of the constellations.
What Rilke does is to offer us this third Orphic figure as the new figure of interpretation for the current work in the biology of thinking. (We have suggested above in Section 3, from other evidence, that it was in terms of this, the third Orphic figure, and not the second, that Rilke envisaged the Orphic journey and research.) The instrument is a shift of attention within the myth itself, moving us on to this difficult and dark stage of the story. We have not lost Freud and psychoanalysis in this metamorphosis, for the emphasis on, and the ambivalent attitude to, sex and death are right inside the story itself. What we seem to have done is gained a second name and discipline to accompany us. Dark rites, a bloody sacrifice which is to water the fields and to restore fertility in human beings —these suggest Frazer, The Golden Bough, and anthropology. We have met psychology and anthropology in conjunction already, as the two disciplines to which the professional study of myth has, in our modern period of mythological exhaustion, been consigned.
We found this Orpheus figure haunting Milton. Now it haunts Rilke, and it is interesting that Milton should in this way be as direct a forerunner of Rilke as he is, in another way, of Wordsworth. It looks almost as if preoccupation with this death figure of Orpheus betokens a period when the body of learning is torn apart. This is what has happened in the modern age. What might have been a common front of advance in the natural history of thinking, with biology, poetry, psychology, and anthropology all contributing, fell to pieces under the influence of a narrow and outmoded concept of the nature of science, inherent in Charles Darwin’s work but going back to Sprat and ultimately to the false side of Bacon. The result was the isolation of each of these disciplines from the others. We have just glanced at what happened to poetry; what happened to biology was in our minds as early as Part I. Freud, a true mythological thinker who had to work at inventing his myths of interpretation for his subject matter, was hampered by not recognizing that this was the nature of his task, myth and poetry being unacceptable in this era as scientific method.
(It takes a poet to recognize what Freud was doing. So W. H. Auden in his admirable poem in memory of Sigmund Freud includes Eros and Aphrodite among the household mourners for that great mind; in addition he speaks of Freud going down like Dante among the lost, so giving him epic as well as mythological status, and indicating the unity of the task.)36
Frazer in his turn adopted an equally rigid exclusive detached method of thought (like Levy-Bruhl but without the latter’s honorable uneasiness at what he saw himself as compelled to do), and therefore neither conforms to nor respects his subject matter.37 However grand The Golden Bough may be as a collection of material, it insulates itself from poetry and renders its author, in the terms of Salomon’s House in the New Atlantis, a Depredator rather than an Interpreter.
Nothing is to be gained by the isolation of these disciplines from one another. Once they are thought of as reunited in a common search for knowledge about man, mind, and nature, there need be no question of psychology or anthropology, who are latecomers in this field, explaining poetry or myth, though there is everything to be said for an interchange of interpretative methods and material between all these sciences or arts. Orpheus, who is poetry and myth and postlogic thinking about itself, is not subject to interpretation by other disciplines; he is himself interpretation, the specific instrument of the poet’s researches. Wordsworth moves into and through Orpheus to offer himself as subject matter. Rilke identifies himself more directly with Orpheus, commenting thus on the methodology. Each has the natural historian’s motive: clarity, and generality. To relegate these works to poetry, in isolation, is to miss their point. Wordsworth was at pains to emphasize it in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, “Among the qualities there enumerated as principally conducing to form a Poet, nothing is implied different in kind from other men, but only in degree.” Similarly, Holthusen, a writer on Rilke, has said that the Sonnets to Orpheus are not “I-Lyric but We-Lyric” (Rilkes Sonette an Orpheus, Munich, 1937, p. 36). The aim is general, as befits a discipline of investigation into the biology of thinking, a study of the development of the mind-body in the world of nature alive and dead. Of this The Prelude and the Sonette an Orpheus are textbooks, and in their thinking and validity akin to, and co-equal with, every branch of biology, in the widest possible sense including psychology and anthropology, having a similar aim and field.
5
what is a Thought but another word for “I thinking”?
IT IS GOOD and appropriate that we should possess two versions of The Prelude, of 1805 and 1850, with half a lifetime between them. The 1805 version is still embedded in that marvelous period at the start of the nineteenth century when European thought underwent one of its greatest revivifications, still to be fully profited from. The second, in 1850, is in English poetry a last note of the trumpet, the Orphic confidence and prophecy in it contrasting markedly with the other long poem published in that same year, In Memoriam, which exhibits the weakness resulting from the loss of Orpheus from our tradition for the time being, the timorous and negative relationship to the natural universe, science and religion, the paralysis of poetic and heuristic power. In this study we shall use in general the 1805 text of The Prelude, and quotations will be from that unless otherwise indicated.38 We need not, however, get involved in the strictures of editors and critics upon the second version, for its tampering with the integrity of the original record, the toning down of certain exuberant passages, the introduction of a more specifically Christian note into the later version. A genetic relation between two forms of one work dealing with the genetic development of a mind is part of the evidence, although we shall not be concerned directly with this.
