In the Company of Rilke

So I said I’d write more about the Sydney Writer’s Festival. The first event of the day that I actually went to was called Stephanie Dowrick: In the Company of Rilke. I’ve never read a Stephanie Dowrick book, and in truth I thought this event, and most of her work, sounded like a prime suspect for vague, spiritualistic “waffle”, but in a sense that was the point of me going – to see what exactly it is in Rilke’s (Austrian poet who died in 1926) work that so draws these people to it. This was the event blurb:

Can visionary poetry save the world - or merely change your life? What are poets for in these destitute times? Are there inward questions that can only be answered by poetry? Stephanie Dowrick speaks to Blanche d'Alpuget about her latest book ‘In the Company of Rilke’, and how this 20th-century poet speaks to our yearning for inwardness, beauty and spiritual connection.

“Yearning for inwardness” is suitably ambiguous. But Rilke is the poet for the Sehnsucht, as in the poem posted here, which was half my interest. Stephanie Dowrick claims that she wrote this book looking at Rilke’s spiritual perspective because that is where readers were coming from, and because they were looking for a sense of meaning in the poetry. As she discussed this idea she did so with more substance and intelligence than I was expecting from the woman behind little boxes of cards called “Daily Acts of Love”. However, the talk contained the usual exasperations with phrases like “Rilke refused to make a thing of God or put God in a box ...” and the implications that anyone who defines anything at all about God, or holds to a “conservative religion”, is simply afraid of mystery. (No. We simply believe that God has actually revealed certain truths about himself, and that if he is indeed our creator who has revealed himself then taking him at his word is far more the humble position than making him a figment of your own imagination, as you decide him to be. For indeed, much as people like Dowrick claim they haven’t got God in a box it becomes extremely obvious that even so they’ve given him characteristics they’d like him to have.) One of the lines I wrote down is “the experience of yearning is more attractive than abstracted theology”. But I think CS Lewis could help her, and the rest of us, out there in showing the God (who may be studied in theology) his yearning led him to. Stephanie also quoted someone as saying “we live in an age bereft of transcendental assurances”. That is true, but I don’t think the assurance is found in the experience of yearning as the end.

Stephanie then said that Rilke writes about the “inspiration that comes from attunement to the transcendent – something else available to us – only meet in extreme moments of anguish or bliss. Something comes through the defenses of the cognitive mind – richer, sometimes more consoling or comforting than the linear ... So we do God a tremendous disservice when reduce him to linear or literal”. (And again, I couldn’t help but think that we also do God a tremendous disservice when we don’t let God decide, and tell us, who he is – which all comes back to the question of whether or not you believe he has revealed himself in history in specific ways or not – but that also, whatever is meant by this "inspiration", that is not necessarily mutually exclusive of the God of the bible.) As you can see there was a lot of material for exasperated disagreement.

I’ve got lots more notes that pertain more particularly to Rilke, but at the end Stephanie was asked “What are the poets for?” and her answer was along the lines of “this sensibility transforms our view, our stubborn narrow view, then we appreciate life so much that we are no longer careless of it. Are we willing to engage with the deeper meaning of our existence?”. That’s not a bad purpose for poetry, but poetry alone isn’t equal to it.

I flicked through her actual book In the Company of Rilke and put it back because I’m not sure I could read it without wanting to tear every second page out of it, but it does perhaps contain some interesting quotes and material from Rilke and others. If you’ve never read Rilke, here is another example of his poetry. Today it would seem to be read as essentially giving us all license to invent our own God, but I’m not entirely convinced that that was Rilke’s original intent (though he's done so by writing as God himself).

God Speaks to Each of Us

God speaks to each of us before we are,

Before he's formed us -- then, in cloudy speech,

But only then, he speaks these words to each

And silently walks with us from the dark:

Driven by your senses, dare

To the edge of longing. Grow

Like a fire's shadowcasting glare

Behind assembled things, so you can spread

Their shapes on me as clothes.

Don't leave me bare.

Let it all happen to you: beauty and dread.

Simply go - no feeling is too much -

And only this way can we stay in touch.

Near here is the land

That they call Life.

You'll know when you arrive

By how real it is.

Give me your hand.

Rainer Maria Rilke