Loving The Questions is back
'We who are human, intrigued yet bewildered by our existence.' Announcing a new-old feature for Restorative Writing subscribers.
Announcement!
Those of you who have been here in this space with me for a little while now - and for some of you that ‘little while’ is since 2006 – may remember a previous feature of several of my writing courses and memberships, which I called Loving the Questions.
It’s my homage to that very well-known piece of advice written in 1903 by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to 19-year-old student, Franz Xaver Kappus:
‘I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.’
I have always been inspired by Rilke’s understanding of the courage required to live a creative life (he spent most of his life scraping around for ways to fund his writing career), and his instinct for connection with the natural world around him as fuel for his writing. But there is another very particular reason that I’ve carried Rilke’s writing close to my heart for the past forty years.
As a sixteen-year-old in the north-east of England in the 1980s, I won a scholarship to the United World College of the Adriatic (at the time, a somewhat eccentric educational experiment) based in the little fishing village of Duino, up the coast from Trieste.
Rilke, I soon learned, had stayed in Duino Castle in the winter of 1912, as a guest of one of his patrons, the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis. It was here that, one morning in January, beset by anxieties, he was walking back and forth along the cliffs when he heard the first line of the Duino Elegies spoken to him on the wind:
‘Who if I cried out would hear me, among the angelic orders?’
This is the origin story of the great poem cycle that would come to obsess Rilke, on and off, for the next decade.
As a sixteen year old with many anxietes of my own, I walked ‘the Rilke Path’ whilst the violent Bora winds screamed in my ears and I felt Rilke’s poetry in every part of my body. I wondered about this great poet, whose writing was so beautiful and so mysterious to me. In the years since, I’ve continued to wonder.
David Young, in his introduction to his own translation of the Elegies, reflects that the story of Rilke’s experience has something important to tell us about the process of how poems get written:
‘a heightened awareness in which a voice that is and is not the poet’s begins to speak, almost as if a dramatic character were reciting a “part,” speaking both for himself and for all of us, as Hamlet and Lear seem to. No wonder the voice of the Elegies varies its pronouns so often, sometimes speaking for Rilke, sometimes to him, more often than not, speaking with mysterious force and urgency for and to each of us, we who are human, intrigued yet bewildered by our existence. We cannot read this great poem until we realise that it speaks in a voice at once deeply personal and piercingly impersonal: Rilke’s voice, Lear’s voice, the voice of the wind, my voice, your voice too. To have taken the individual self, communing with itself in profound and frightening isolation, and to have made its solitary voice the every-voice that seems to respond from within us as we read the poem, was a remarkable achievement.’ 1
I take strength in this idea - that the process of writing can be a way to give voice and character and form to our individual selves and to share all of this with one another: my voice, your voice, every-voice.
And isn’t this something of what we are doing here in this beautiful Restorative Writing community? Listening attentively to ourselves, hearing the voices on the wind that seem to come from both a place deep inside us and also a little outside us at the same time, voicing those parts of ourselves that feel profound and frightening and uncertain, as well as joyous and courageous and celebratory, sharing them in a space where we can be deeply heard?
Thirteen years after that day on the cliffs, Rilke was to write that the angel of the Elegies ‘has nothing to do with the angel of the Christian heaven…’ but instead is ‘that creature in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible, which we are accomplishing, already appears in its completion. We, let it be emphasized once more, we, in the sense of the Elegies, are these transformers of the earth; our whole existence, the flights and plunges of our love, everything qualifies us for this task (beside which there is, essentially, no other).’2
‘Who are you?’ Rilke asks - of the angel? of himself? - in the ‘Second Elegy’, and then conjures some suggestions:
Early successes, Creation’s pampered favourites,
mountain-ranges, peaks growing red in the dawn
of all Beginning, – pollen of the flowering godhead,
joints of pure light, corridors, stairways, thrones,
space formed from essence, shields made of ecstasy, storms
of emotion whirled into rapture, and suddenly, alone,
mirrors: which scoop up the beauty that has streamed from their face
and gather it back, into themselves, entire.’ 3
In the Elegies, I see Rilke loving the questions themselves, giving them a voice, a body, character, metaphor, wings.
And so we here are too. We who are human, intrigued yet bewildered by our existence.
We are finding ways to live and love the enormous questions of Rilke’s time and of ours: how to become ‘transformers of the earth,’ what to do with our creativity and joy as well as our despair, how to connect with and take care of one another whilst finding the quiet and solitude and calm that we each need.
My invitation to you, then, is to use Loving the Questions as a place to explore this together.