The Hammock Papers: Seeking.

23 December 2011

Seeking.

Westhoff, Rilke, 1902

The terrible thing about Art is that the further you progress in it the more it saddles you with the extreme, the all-but-impossible. One does not achieve a degree of inwardness and then stay there. Seeking must be repeatedly be risked. Vulnerability must be risked.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

"Learning by heart" is something specific to poetry. That process itself comments upon how singularly embodied (taken deep into one's being) reading poetry is or can be. Poetry is the form of writing most like music, and not because in its debilitated forms it depends on rhymes and the predictable rhythms that come with rhymes. That Rilke is now read so relatively widely and enthusiastically in English is a testament to Dante's "motion of spirit" and the willingness of some of Rilke's translators to embrace that. Rilke's focus is not authoritative "truth." That is far too static. Rather, it is motion toward truth, a quest for the real with all the ambiguity such a word implies.

- Stephanie Dowrick, from In the Company of Rilke

No comments:

Post a Comment

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL