Letter 3:
Viareggio, near Pisa (Italy)
April 23, 1903
You gave me much pleasure, dear Sir, with your Easter letter; for it brought much good news of you, and the way you spoke about Jacobsen’s great and beloved art showed me that I was not wrong to guide your life and its many questions to this abundance.
Now Niels Lyhne will open to you, a book of splendors and depths; the more often one reads it, the more everything seems to be contained within it, from life’s most imperceptible fragrances to the full, enormous taste of its heaviest fruits. In it there is nothing that does not seem to have been understood, held, lived, and known in memory’s wavering echo; no experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others. You will experience the great happiness of reading this book for the first time, and will move through its numberless surprises as if you were in a new dream. But I can tell you that even later on one moves through these books, again and again, with the same astonishment and that they lose none of their wonderful power and relinquish none of the overwhelming enchantment that they had the first time one read them.
One just comes to enjoy them more and more, becomes more and more grateful, and somehow better and simpler in one’s vision, deeper in one’s faith in life, happier and greater in the way one lives.
And later on, you will have to read the wonderful book of the fate and yearning of Marie Grubbe, and Jacobsen’s letters and journals and fragments, and finally his verses which (even if they are just moderately well translated) live in infinite sound. (For this reason I would advise you to buy, when you can, the lovely Complete Edition of Jacobsen’s works, which contains all of these. It is in three volumes, well translated, published by Eugen Diederichs in Leipzig, and costs, I think, only five or six marks per volume.)
In your opinion of “Roses should have been here . . .” (that work of such incomparable delicacy and form) you are of course quite, quite incontestably right, as against the man who wrote the introduction. But let me make this request right away: Read as little as possible of literary criticism. Such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are clever word-games, in which one view wins , and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them. Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentation, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened.
Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.
In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!
Richard Dehmel: My experience with his books (and also, incidentally, with the man, whom I know slightly) is that whenever I have discovered one of his beautiful pages, I am always afraid that the next one will destroy the whole effect and change what is admirable into something unworthy. You have characterized him quite well with the phrase: “living and writing in heat.” And in fact the artist’s experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss. And if instead of “heat” one could say “sex”;- sex in the great, pure sense of the word, free of any sin attached to it by the Church, – then his art would be very great and infinitely important. His poetic power is great and as strong as a primal instinct; it has its own relentless rhythms in itself and explodes from him like a volcano.
But this power does not always seem completely straightforward and without pose. (But that is one of the most difficult tests for the creator: he must always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn’t want to rob them of their candor and innocence!) And then, when, thundering through his being, it arrives at the sexual, it finds someone who is not so pure as it needs him to be. Instead of a completely ripe and pure world of sexuality, it finds a world that is not human enough, that is only male, is heat, thunder, and restlessness, and burdened with the old prejudice and arrogance with which the male has always disfigured and burdened love. Because he loves only as a male, and not as a human being, there is something narrow in his sexual feeling, something that seems wild, malicious, time-bound, uneternal, which diminishes his art and makes it ambiguous and doubtful. It is not immaculate, it is marked by time and by passion, and little of it will endure. (But most art is like that!) Even so, one can deeply enjoy what is great in it, only one must not get lost in it and become a hanger-on of Dehmel’s world, which is so infinitely afraid, filled with adultery and confusion, and is far from the real fates, which make one suffer more than these time-bound afflictions do, but also give one more opportunity for greatness and more courage for eternity.
Finally, as to my own books, I wish I could send you any of them that might give you pleasure. But I am very poor, and my books, as soon as they are published, no longer belong to me. I can’t even afford them myself and, as I would so often like to, give them to those who would be kind to them.
So I am writing for you, on another slip of paper, the titles (and publishers) of my most recent books (the newest ones – all together I published perhaps 12 or 13), and must leave to you, dear Sir, to order one or two of them when you can.
I am glad that my books will be in your hands.
With best wishes,
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
_ _ _ _ _
Letter 4:
Worpswede, near Bremen
July 16, 1903
About ten days ago I left Paris, tired and quite sick, and traveled to this great northern plain, whose vastness and silence and sky ought to make me well again. But I arrived during a long period of rain; this is the first day it has begun to let up over the restlessly blowing landscape, and I am taking advantage of this moment of brightness to greet you, dear Sir.
My dear Mr. Kappus: I have left a letter from you unanswered for a long time; not because I had forgotten it – on the contrary: it is the kind that one reads again when one finds it among other letters, and I recognize you in it as if you were very near. It is your letter of May second, and I am sure you remember it. As I read it now, in the great silence of these distances, I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life, even more than when I was in Paris, where everything echoes and fades away differently because of the excessive noise that makes Things tremble. Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most articulate people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very delicate, is almost unsayable. But even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in Things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting upon. If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for that but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don’t hate anything. Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. If you just recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own talent and nature, out of your own experience and childhood and strength, to achieve a wholly individual relation to sex (one that is not influenced by convention and custom), then you will no longer have to be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your dearest possession.
Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with, which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge. And it is not our acceptance of it that is bad; what is bad is that most people misuse this learning and squander it and apply it as a stimulant on the tired places of their lives and as a distraction rather than as a way of gathering themselves for their highest moments. People have even made eating into something else: necessity on the one hand, excess on the other; have muddied the clarity of this need, and all the deep, simple needs in which life renews itself have become just as muddy. But the individual can make them clear for himself and live them clearly (not the individual who is dependent, but the solitary man).
He can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and yearning, and he can see the animal, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and multiplying and growing, not out of physical pleasure, not out of physical pain, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding. If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery which the world is filled with, even in its smallest Things, could bear it, endure it, more solemnly, feel how terribly heavy it is, instead of taking it lightly.
If only they could be more reverent toward their own fruitfulness, which is essentially one, whether it is manifested as mental or physical; for mental creation too arises from the physical, is of one nature with it and only like a softer, more enraptured and more eternal repetition of bodily delight.
“The thought of being a creator, of engendering, of shaping” is nothing without its continuous great confirmation and embodiment in the world, nothing without the thousand-fold assent from Things and animals – and our enjoyment of it is so indescribably beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the engendering and birthing of millions. In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love come to life again and fill it with majesty and exaltation. And those who come together in the nights and are entwined in rocking delight perform a solemn task and gather sweetness, depth, and strength for the song of some future poet, who will appear in order to say ecstasies that are unsayable. And they call forth the future; and even if they have made a mistake and embrace blindly, the future comes anyway, a new human being arises, and on the foundation of the accident that seems to be accomplished here, there awakens the law by which a strong, determined seed forces its way through to the egg cell that openly advances to meet it. Don’t be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law. And those who live the mystery falsely and badly (and they are very many) lose it only for themselves and nevertheless pass it on like a sealed letter, without knowing it. And don’t be puzzled by how many names there are and how complex each life seems. Perhaps above them all there is a great motherhood, in the form of a communal yearning. The beauty of the girl, a being who (as you so beautifully say) “has not yet achieved anything,” is motherhood that has a presentiment of itself and begins to prepare, becomes anxious, yearns. And the mother’s beauty is motherhood that serves, and in the old woman there is a great remembering. And in the man too there is motherhood, it seems to me, physical and mental; his engendering is also a kind of birthing, and it is birthing when he creates out of his innermost fullness. And perhaps the sexes are more akin than people think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in one phenomenon: that man and woman, freed from all mistaken feelings and aversions, will seek each other not a opposites but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to bear in common, simply, earnestly, and patiently, the heavy sex that has been laid upon them.
But everything that may someday be possible for many people, the solitary man can now, already, prepare and build with his own hands, which make fewer mistakes. Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.
For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust. Avoid providing material for the drama, that is always stretched tight between parent and children; it uses up much of the children’s strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn’t comprehend Don’t ask for any advice from them and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
It is good that you will soon be entering a profession that will make you independent and will put you completely on your own, in every sense. Wait patiently to see whether your innermost life feels hemmed in by the form this profession imposes. I myself consider it a very difficult and very exacting one, since it is burdened with enormous conventions and leaves very little room for a personal interpretation of its duties. But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths. All my good wishes are ready to accompany you, and my faith is with you.
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke
_ _ _ _ _
to be continued
I believe this book, or this collection of letters really hits its stride in Letter 4 and continues more or less until Letter 8 especially, or Letter 9. As such, I’ve attempted to really start the ‘visual’ fireworks on the design(s) in Letter 4. This is where my ideas start to become as clear as Rilke’s (for this project anyway, I don’t want to give the impression that my thoughts are on the level of Rilke’s).
Your love for this material is really astonishing and wonderful to behold. I can’t say I have much of a background with this work, but having these posts here permanently will serve as the most essential reference. I continue to look forward to your future posts on it!
Well then I’m glad you can now read this for the first time.
Letters 5 and 6 will appear tuesday (probably in the early morning as I may have to do it around my work schedule, or rather late monday night), then Letter 7 and 8 will get their own separate posts. Then the conclusion of Letters 9 and 10 will be together. So 6 posts for the entire book, not bad… and can be read rather quickly.
I agree that Letter 4 – certainly for yourself, and perhaps for Rilke as well – is the strongest so far. I have a few thoughts, provisional as I’ve never read these letters before, have only read your editions once, and still await the rest of the series (and also of course because I am reading them on a computer screen, and not in the intended form). I think that, until letter 4, I felt a bit too much of a struggle between the flow of the material and the imposition of effect – at times, particularly with the overlapping or closely placed columns, I felt effect got too far in the way. I also sensed a bit of tension between differing aims for the project – on the one hand, a conceptual art which uses the text as a starting-point only, and on the other hand an exercise in typography which must by nature service the text and not vice-versa. Until letter 4, it seemed that you were caught in a bit of no-man’s land between these two aims so that at times it was difficult to follow the text and yet your often imaginative designs still seemed too bound to it to truly break free. I think with the end here, you’ve found the right balance, as you yourself seem to recognize.
That said, I’ve a few observations to offer on letter 4, take as you will. (I’d also love to hear, perhaps after the series has ended so that until then you can let the work speak for itself, what you had in mind with certain decision. To a certain extent it’s instinct of course, as Rilke himself posits, but where you had a particular idea or effect in mind I’d be very interested to know more.)
I kind of wish page 20 was broken up into two pages – I think it would still achieve the block effect you’re going for in relation to page 19, but without stuffing too much together in one place. The slow slide of the words in the second passage would, I think, allow for placement on a second page without losing your desired aim. I quite like page 24’s newspaper effect and feel that it has been well-prepared for by then (part of the problem for me with 20, on which my mind started to wander as I came closer to the end, was that the transition was so sudden and dramatic).
Not sure about 21 – it’s a bit too chaotic perhaps, repeating the effect of some of the earlier letters before you hit your stride. I think 26 & 27 are excellent, with just the right amount of airiness and variability. I can’t commit to some of your more obvious effects yet, like the repitition of “repetition of bodily delight”. Potentially holds a certain charm, but for me on this reading it fell a little flat; still on another look I think it could definitely work for me. One of those risks perhaps worth taking.
I also commend you for the guts to put a creative work (and whatever its source, this is still creative work on your part) out there for all of us! Hopefully my own thoughts – the encouragement as well as the criticism which is meant in a constructive spirit – can help you with your work, either on this project, or – if you’ve moved on – on your next. After all, there’s no other purpose to feedback at this stage or in this venue – only whatever can help the creator. I’m sure Rilke would agree!
MovieMan, first of all two comments: (1) thank you for the comments, questions, and congrats you’ve clearly studied these and brought some interesting things to the table (of which I’ll tackle below, or at least begin too), (2) I’m glad this is your first time viewing and reading this work, if anything else I’ve now exposed you and Sam to it (and perhaps others), two people that will take the necessary time and let Rilke soak in.
Now, before I get into specific concern/thoughts, I will be somewhat cryptic as my intentions I believe will continue to reveal themselves as the piece unfolds so I hope you can remember these comments for the last post and we can do a more ‘wrap up’ type discussion. Also at that point the entire work (Rilke’s words I mean) will have been exposed to you. Now, without further ado: I must first say what the original intention was for this work, as I think it will begin shaping my answers to you: a few friends and I have been trying to start a design group and would do work pro-bono for causes be agree with/businesses we are sympathetic to. But the angle is that we will work for little/nothing, but we want creative control (more or less). So it’s equal parts doing work for some sort of greater good (what a graphic designer can do anyway) and satisfying a creative urge all creatives have that work as professionals in the ‘real world’ and these sort of things– the things we want to really do– are unable to be done (or done as we’d want to do them). (Funny or sarcastic enough we’ve named the group ‘courtesan’ as in a prostitute that services high ‘class’ clients). But to me the group is more about the designer being an integral part of the process–really the central piece actually, which is quite the opposite of most design in today’s world (whether it be graphic design, industrial design, interior design, etc)… so to get this group started we decided we needed to create a portfolio from scratch as using our old individual pieces is sort of counter to the whole ‘ground up, new’ mentality. So I, as a predominatly print person (design, illustration, and publishing), began thinking about doing a book, or books. So initially the work wasn’t going to be about any real ‘concept’ it was more about just showing off my type abilities, that and I am sympathetic with the school or thought that says ‘lack of legibility and lack of communication are two different things’, meaning something could be unreadable but it can still communicate something– which is any graphic communicators chief goal/responsibility (the same idea could be how I feel about art/films in our past discussions). Again, however, this runs counter to most accepted design thought (and with the exception of David Carson, probably always has). So from here, I had one chief goal: create a book where the pages could all stand alone, almost as ‘mini-posters’, any page could be ripped out, framed and hung on a wall completely devoid of any larger source material or meaning. From here comes the page breaks then, (a comment you touch on) they are completely expressionistic… they break where I choose when I feel a thought is finished, or should be thought about more then if the page where to continue. The physical act of the turned page working as a normal ‘extended comma’ would. Give pause to a thought. So when a page has to much information or looks tight, I approached reading the book blind, saying ‘this all should exist on one page’, and if it was a great deal of information, then it merely became a problem that needed a specific graphic solution.
At this point the story is virtually irrelevant, I could have done anything and really let myself roam (and I’ve done that in other work in the past), but here I made either a mistake or a great move and picked perhaps the book of my young life. I simply couldn’t render it’s beauty unreadable… certain times I definitely try (and generally for some reason the moments that are more chaotic are the parts I think are extra meaningful/beautiful so these are the passages that I want my input, my hand, to be extra apparent), but I’m always tied to some sort of mast that is Rilke. I am also tied to this thing still being a book, even though I don’t want it to be. So half of my concerns/thoughts on the piece have to do with Rilke, and his ideas, the other half are my thoughts on typography/print design as a whole. And the latter here is probably only really of interest to a designer (though I’m happy you’ve thought, or tried to think along these lines).
And for some of the tight qualities of the pages, I’m sure that’s do to the frame edges on the screen caps. In the book they do not exist, and rather are the live area which sits within a 2 inch or so white border. On the page even the tightest of designs have a light air quality to them.
I understand I’ve been sort of general here, but hopefully I’ve touched on enough, and left enough in play for later.
Wow, a great response and helps clarify some of your approaches without tipping your hand too much, as I understand you want us to see where the piece goes before drawing too many conclusions. I’ll probably reserve the majority of general observations till the series is over, but along the way hopefully I can offer some more responses – both to your work and Rilke’s ideas. In the end I’ll share my own reactions, for what they’re worth (take them as a layman’s response, albeit one with an appreciation of what you’re doing albeit from a more general creative perspective than particularly a design background; perhaps indicative of others like me who will encounter the work), and I’ll also try to give you separate feedback on how well I think you achieved your stated aims or goals (i.e. a subjective response and an attempt at a more objective, hopefully helpful, judgement). Glad my comments were appreciated; hopefully I can add more to that when all’s said and done. I’m really looking forward to the remainder of the project. Keep ’em coming…
I’m also interested in your overall continued estimation of Rilke, specifically his words here and in the coming letters. He says much that I think humans should talk about…
Jamie,
I like your use of page layout to capture the turmoil of an art work’s relation to conventional history, and the turmoil involved in coming to creative patience.
I recently saw the supplemental material on the Fat Girl DVD, and your work here reminds me of Catherine Breillat’s remarking that personally she is “naive” and fumbling, even though she understands the structures and importance of uncanny poise, which she endows to the film. Her concentration upon a sexual topspin of “desire” comes close to Rilke’s efforts here.
Your piece has a lot to do with contemporary filmmaking. Congratulations!
thank you… you’ve captured one of (my intended) hidden messages. So often two large masses (or copy or white space) collide into near incomprehension or tension (sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes not). That is supposed to mean me and Rilke, or Rilke and anyone, or me and anyone. The collision of personality or incomprehensible/impossible connection. It’s something he’s talking about, and I’m talking about. To me, this is the central fight of being a human being.