RILKE ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, (1875-1926) "On Love & Other Difficulties" and "Letters to a Young Poet"

RILKE

Hi, ya'all ~  Rilke’s Great, Huh -- Here's a copy of The LOVE Daylong Retreat Readings at ATS this past Saturday + some more of Rilke's confrontive thoughts that we just didn't get to... Please forward this to all the sweet retreat meditators who came and anyone else....I for one, am so happy we sat Heart meditation together, breathing together, and had some Good Loving Wisdom Dharma-conversation....Together   ~A~    

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~ Rainer Maria Rilke, (1875-1926) the world-renown German existential philosopher, poet and author of "On Love & Other Difficulties" and "Letters to a Young Poet"--- A cache of highly mature, sobering letters and poems on Love - show Rilke's profound understanding of men and women and his ardent spirituality. His radical books, were written over ninety years ago in the modernism Avant grade' bohemian Paris of Picasso. Rilke introduces the contradictory concept of solitude as a blessing. He seems to have this way of reaching into your inner-soul and grabbing ahold of 'your reality' and making you face it, in a tone of controlled urgency, in an exhorting, passionate sort of way. Experimental openness to experience, on comprehending what is most difficult - and turning what is most alien into that which we can most trust. 

 ~ John J. L. Mood
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Excerpts from "ON LOVE & OTHER DIFFICULTIES"

(1908 ) by Rainer Rilke some deep comprehension-reading ~

certainly not for lovers of the naive ...a Rilke fan favorite…

" The point of marital or any relationship is not to create 

a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries -

on the contrary, a good relationship is one in which

each partner anoints the other to be the guardian

of their solitude, and in this they show each other

the greatest possible trust. This I hold to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. 

For, since it lies in the nature of indifference or insecurity of the common crowd to recognize no solitude – then love and friendship are specifically there for the purpose of continually providing the ‘opportunity’ for solitude. And only love and friendship are the “true sharing’s” which do rhythmically interrupt our individual periods of deep solitary emotion.  

A merging, a true and absolute togetherness between two people is an impossibility –and where it does seem to exist nevertheless – it IS still a narrowing, a hemming-in, a mutually-compromised-consent – that really does limit one party or both of their fullest freedom and development. 

But once the realization is accepted - that even between the closest people, infinite distance continues to exist – a wonderful living side-by-side can then grow up for them - IF they succeed in loving the expanse, loving the distance between them – which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole being before an immense wide sky ! "

On Love & Other Difficulties" ~ the above was adapted, added to, and edited by Akasa Levi from Translations and Considerations of Rainier Maria Rilke by John Mood; W.W. Norton, 1975 and The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke by Stephen Mitchell & Robert Hass; Vintage, 1989 - both as translated from Rilke’s original German editions.

~ and most famously avant garde’ Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet" (1903-1908)   " Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your own heart. Try to love the 'Questions' themselves - like locked rooms and like books that are written in a foreign language.   Do not right now, seek for the Answers. The 'Answers' which cannot now be given to you --  Because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything -- Experiencing everything !    At present, you need to live the Questions. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, live along some  distant day into the true Answer. Your answer."

 

Of course –– If you want some more Rilke – read further on ~

" Love is the only sane

and satisfactory answer

to the problem of

human existence."  ~ Erich Fromm

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......more Rilke on personal Solitude

 … and Love being so Difficult. 

Full with Immature Expectations 

                    =equally= 

    Discouraging Disappointments

 <> People have, with the sad help of naïve

common 'conventions', totally oriented

all their solutions toward the easy,
and toward the easiest side of the easy--

but it is so painfully clear today that -- 

We just must relate to what is difficult.

It is mature to be solitary, alone ---

for solitude is enticingly difficult. 

That something is difficult must

be a reason the more for us to do it.  

<> To Love is Good - Love being so difficult. For one human being to love another - that is perhaps the most difficult of all our life-tasks – the 'Ultimate Work' for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet 'know' love: they have to learn it. To practice it. With their whole being, with all their vital forces, gathered close in around their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But 'learning-time' is also always a long, secluded alone-time. So being 'loving' is solitude itself - for a long while ahead and far into life – it is an intensified and deepened loving-aloneness for she or he who Loves. 

<> Love is at first not anything that means 'merging', giving over and uniting with another - for what would an authentic ‘union’ be of something unclarified and unfinished?  Love is a high inducement to the individual to fully ripen, to become 'whole' for themselves for another's sake. Love is a great exacting claim upon you, something that chooses you out and calls you to vast things. Only by the task of working on themselves - might young people use the love that is given them. Merging, surrendering and every kind of communion is not yet for them - who must save and gather-in for a long, long time still.

<> Whoever looks seriously at 'Love', finds that love and other difficulties of the heart, haven't any explanation, any solution, any hint of a ‘way’ yet to be discerned. Love is a ‘problem’ that we carry wrapped up & hand on without opening - and as beginners we are not up to it. Instead of losing ourselves in love, in all the light and frivolous play - behind which people have hidden from their existences - but instead, we must hold off and take this Love upon us as an apprenticeship.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke   

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Rilke in 1905, a very early

'feminist-male' thinker,

went on to say ~

. . . But this is what 'young people' are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing – they ( who by their very nature are impatient ) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. . . And what can happen then?  What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their 'communion' and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? 

 . . . And so each of them loses himself or herself for the sake of the 'other' person – and loses the other, and then many others who still wanted to come.  And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come. Nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many 'conventions' that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are 'live-preservers' of the most varied invention, boats and water wings. Society has been able to create refuges of every sort -- for since it preferred to take the "Love-Life" as an amusement – it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as popular public amusements are.
 ( Britney, Paris )

<> It is true that many young people who "love falsely" for instance simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude. The average person will of course, always go on doing that. And feel oppressed by their own failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way.  For their nature tells them that the Questions of 'Love' - even more than everything else that is important – cannot be resolved publicly and according to this or that agreement.

<> That there are 'Questions', intimate questions from one human being to another - which in any case require a new, special, wholly personal answer.  But How can they, who have already flung themselves together - and can no longer tell whose outlines are whose?  Who thus no longer possess anything of their own. How can they find a way 'out of themselves', out of the depths of their already buried solitude? 

<> They act out of 'mutual helplessness', and then if, whit the best of intentions, they try to escape the 'conventions' that are approaching them ( marriage, for example ), they fall into the clutches of some less obvious but just as deadly conventional solution. For then, everything around them ~ is convention. Wherever people act out of a prematurely fused, muddy communion, every 'action' is conventional. Every 'relation' that such confusion leads to - has its own convention, however unusual in the ordinary sense of immoral it may be. Even 'separating' would be a conventional step, an impersonal, accidental decision without strength and without fruit.

<> Whoever looks seriously will find that ~ neither for 'Death', which is difficult, nor for 'Difficult Love'    has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a Path been perceived. And for both these tasks – which we carry wrapped up and hand-on without opening, there is not a general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered. But in the same measure in which we begin to test Life as 'individuals' – these Great Things will come to meet us, the individuals, with greater intimacy. The claims that the "Difficult Work of Love" makes 'upon our development are greater than life' - and we, as beginners, are just not equal to them. 
<> But if we nevertheless Endure and take this Love upon us as 'Burden' and 'Apprenticeship' - instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their Being. Then "a small advance" and a "lightening" will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.

<> We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of One Individual to a Second Individual 'objectively' and without prejudice. And our attempts to "live such relationships" have no model before them. And yet in the changes that Time has brought about - there are already many things that can now help our timid novitiate.

The Girl and the Woman, in their new, individual unfolding - will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions.
<> After the 'uncertainty' of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those - often ridiculous – 'disguises' just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the male-sex. Women, in whom "Life" itself lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths…

~ Rainer Maria Rilke