Interval 3

This is the third interval and the focus is Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. And I'm going to try to put you into a position to understand why the Sonnets to Orpheus is so great and so important that it occupies the third interval. We have arranged the education so that there is a set which is made out of the phases of our education, and each phase of the education gives way to the next phase, but they are not contiguous. If they were contiguous, you would get a narrative line and the education would permanently stay in a myth mode, and it would be capable of being internalized and integrated, its meaning integrated in the mind. But it would stop there and it would stay there. So that there is a structural, strategic error in almost all systems of education, because they are made to register in the mind. Now, if you are. Living in the Middle Ages, or if you're living in some period of history where the culture is so stable and pervasive that you don't have to search outside of it. These kinds of episodes, in human experience are able to be addressed by this kind of a mind, a mental idea of education, but it is not possible for us in our lifetimes to acclimate ourselves to reality by staying within our minds, so that we cannot make use of an education that comes to rest in an idea form. And all educational experiences in universities and colleges around the planet. Everywhere in the world. You find this inappropriate strategy for education and it simply has exhausted itself. Some time back. So our education is radically different. Our education is the kind of education that you would have received if you had been in a wisdom tradition, generally passed on 1 to 1, you would have had not so much a guru, but you would have had a teacher who would have accepted you, not in terms of a subject matter or a degree In some subject area or in some testable line of development, but would have accepted you as a part of themselves, as a member of their family, as a personal son or daughter. Or if the age differential bothers you as a brother, as a sister would have been a family familial situation in a relationship. But very often in the wisdom tradition, in the past, those kinds of relationships were very difficult to navigate because someone who was mature enough, who is differentially conscious enough to be able to teach that way, is very difficult to approach. And the personal one on one was often a gamut of travail. Prevail. It was not an easy thing at all. No one in the history of the planet has ever tried to put a wisdom education into a large arena. No one has ever succeeded in doing that. So this is new, and it may or may not be successful, but at least it breaks the ice and sets the concourse for the future. So we cannot have a narrative line of development of our education that's unbroken. But to just break it up. Is tantamount to fracturing it, unless you do it with the classic term is with the Eye of a jewel cutter, so that one of the classic ways of understanding wisdom. Was called cutting the jewel. That the the student, the person that one on one was like a jewel in the rough. And the teacher was like a diamond cutter who knew the facets to carry the fracture so that instead of fracturing, what you got was a revelation of a new facet. And this process goes on for quite some duration and some time, and it takes a masterful sense of a differential gestalt to be able to bring a jewel out of its raw state, to cut any jewel, you have to know that particular jewel. A sapphire is different from diamond. What is characteristic of jewels is that they are all hard. Hard to do so that you can only cut them along facets that actually exist, that actually occur. And all of those facets occur because jewels are crystals, and crystals always have a lattice structure. And you must cut along those lattice lines, those lattice planes. Otherwise you fracture it. You get a flaw, you lose the jewel. We have a very peculiar kind of a lattice structure. We're a peculiar kind of a crystal, a peculiar kind of a jewel. And our scintillation. Our final cosmic capacity can only be revealed by a continual educational refinement, so that it is not a question of getting to a certain point after which you stop, but that it is a continuing process. What continues it, though, is that the diamond cutter shifts from the teacher to yourself so that you're being prepared to be prepared. You're being taught to be your own teacher. And so the facets of our education are the various lectures. Over the two years. There are about 104 of them. So I'm making 104 cuts, but I'm doing them in sets of eight, 12 cuts For each of the phases, the eight phases, and then a special kind of a cut, which is a burnishing cut, which is what the intervals are. That is that once the 12 lectures have been delivered and that particular design of facets has been achieved, there's a final go over which prepares for the next cut, the next phase. So when it comes to an interval lecture like today, it's very difficult for me vis a vis you to set the presentation exactly right. Because were you all on the same page where you all developed at the same pace and same time, it would be fairly easy. But frankly, as you probably know, you're all over the place. And because of situations in this particular life that I've had to leave, I'm all over the place too. So it's rather like a very curious situation of two wobbly things trying to come together and trying to come together not in terms of gravity, but in terms of an orbital outer space. And so you have to watch how you dock. And so my presenting to you is extraordinarily complex. So today's lecture has all kinds of aspects to it. And it is interval three which means it comes after the 12 Lectures on Myth and Myth was all about experience. The next 12 lectures are all about symbols. And symbols are all about what used to be called essence. It's about the mind. It's about how carried by language. As if language were like a salve. And that when you put that salve of language on your body, it carries the herbal qualities suspended in that salve into the body. And the herbal qualities that are carried into your body are the meaning. The meanings of the language, not just meanings in terms of etymological meanings of the words, but the feelings, the intelligence of feeling, the feeling toned qualities of experience as well as the meaning of the words. And in addition to that, further than that, and perhaps even more important than than that, we've seen that myth has a parallel flow to nature. And because nature is so mysterious, our own capacities for experience are coextensive with the mystery of nature. And so we have a very difficult quality when it comes to interiorized meaning and developing the mind. Our first response and our second response, and maybe the first 100 responses, is to think that somehow it's mine, that this is me and that sense of me, that sense of mine is the ego. And so the formation of the ego is very natural to have distilled out of experience an integral which gets the meaning is able to have ideas about the meaning and things that all those roads of meaning, because they happen for a moment to converge on me. That I'm the one, I'm the me. And this is very great error. This is a characteristic error, and most educational systems simply are unknowing of this. It's a naiveté. So our education is really what used to be called once upon a time, The high drama is a different thing, completely different. We're not concerned with stopping with the ego. We're not concerned with staying in the mind. There's as much harmonic resonance outside the mind as there is in the entire mystery of nature, so that there comes a point in humility where one can be differential enough and look upon one's own mind as a little tiny island, and be amazed that you once thought that you could scoop the entire world into that purview, to have the entire consideration of all meaning. Be in the Ken of that little disappearing speck. It's a really humbling point to come to that. It is so close to the experience of physiological death that there is a great. Kind of a template quality where one experiences the terror at further realization, as if it were really an impending death. And the ego must and will fight against that death against that realization. So we become our own worst enemy in terms of further learning from the resonances beyond the mind. And this is why most wisdom traditions take you through those transformations before you have a chance to become intelligent enough about it to put up a good fight. And so it's a very difficult thing. The way in which we break up the mythic narrative line, break up the sequencing in the phases of our education is through putting intervals in. It's like the interval thing, which allows for articulation. And it can't be overused because you would get into such a mobility that you would be unable, through inexperience with mobility, to function. If we put an interval between every lecture, every presentation, which would be perhaps the correct distribution in a really complete high drama, it would be almost impossible for us to naturally develop. There are cases where that was attempted. The most famous case was in Tibet. Milarepa, whose teacher was named Marpa, called Marpa, the translator. Marpa was very unusual. He was a married Yogi and he had a very humane wife. And when Marpa was training Milarepa, he trained him in a very radical way. Every time he would advance a step for him, he would break the step so that there was this kind of give and take away all the time, so that Milarepa was constantly being broken. Every single time that he grew and advanced. And instead of ending up as a crushed sack of dust, which you would normally do. Milarepa ended up as one of the most refined jewels of human consciousness on the planet That this planet ever produced. He once wrote a poem for every facet and wrote 100,000 poems, and then let it go at that, just to show that sometimes a jewel has so many facets that it becomes cosmic, that it has enough facets to show the range of the entire cosmos. And Milarepa, when he achieved that kind of equality, he used Mount Everest as his monastery. Now we're we're not in that kind of a situation. We're just having eight intervals, eight times where the narrative line of the phases of our presentation are interrupted by an interval, not as an interruption to produce a discontinuity, but an interruption to produce a channel of openness for articulation. And so this lecture today is between myth and symbol, between the 12 Lectures on Myth and the 12 Lectures on Symbol. And it's meant to be exemplary as a way of giving articulation to the massive way in which mythic experience in language interiorized us into meaning, which is then symbolized in the mind. This movement is all within the way in which nature works. The integral nature of nature allows for this to happen, and it comes as rather a surprise that the mind is natural. The development of a mind is natural. There's nothing supernatural about a mind, but consciousness is supernatural. Consciousness is supernatural in the sense that it goes against the way in which integration happens not polarized against, but in a complementarity to it, so that a polarization is like two hands trying to press against each other, or two hands that refuse to go together. But a complementarity allows for that. And so one of the universal forms of showing a complementarity is prayer, the mudra of prayer, which is international. It's this complementarity of consciousness and nature that, for the first time, begins to generate the resonances of the real one, begins to get a sense of reality in the sense that there is a context larger than oneself, and that this context has something intimately to do with the pattern which is finally integrated through your body, into your feelings, into your mind, and that this concentric target, this target of nature and ritual and myth and symbol, this target of integration When it is struck in just the right way, turns out to be a resonant gong, and that that entire target has resonances that go out. And as it does, it illuminates the fact that contextually, we are quite real within a reality that includes us, but is much more extensive than we are, and that the farthest reaches of those resonances are all the stars that one could ever see. The stars and galaxies, galaxies and quasars and all of that are a part of the resonances of ourselves. And that in that sense of larger and larger context, we are all interrelated because the larger resonances of all of us Crisscross and weave together, so that the actual physiological cosmos is a concurrence of all the sentient beings who live for real. And so we belong in something enormously beautiful. But in order to get there, we have to come to the brink of a quality of terror. Which the ego cannot cross because it will not cross. It finds reasons. It finds justifications, no matter how untrue they are, and sticks with that. And so, at various moments in the education and the development, everyone will come to that so that the discipline of just doing it is advisable as a yoga, because it just simply is the way to bridge over, to cross over those episodes, those moments. And it's only later, in retrospect, that one sees the deeper wisdom of that, the application of that. I'm taking Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus because Orpheus was one of the most poignant of all the mythological figures and the myth of Orpheus, one of the most poignant for our kind, our kind being not rational animals, but in fact humane spirits, because we are not only capable of having bodies that have a physicality and needs based on that physicality, existence and the needs of existence. Food and sex. Sleep. Shelter. All of those. And not only that, but experience. And not only that, but our sense of symbolic meanings in mind. But even further than that, all of us are capable of vision. All of us are capable of seeing a little bit beyond. Of getting some foresight, of getting some oversight, of getting the gist that there's something more. And that entirety, that square of attention that brings in ritual and myth and symbol and vision is the general area in which human culture has located itself. It's the general picture frame. It's the frame of reference where society happens where our culture happens. But one further step beyond vision is necessary for civilization. And that further step beyond vision is art. Civilization is not possible unless there is art. Art when it comes into play, when it joins the frame of reference, when it comes into play. Myth goes into a subconscious mode. It goes out of the square of attention. It fades back into not the unconscious, but it goes back out of play into the subconscious context, the background. So to the extent that art comes into play. Myth goes out of play in terms of attention so that civilization has a very, very, very difficult quality. Myth, symbol, vision and art would be stable, except that art develops a sense of person, and the sense of person develops a sense of history. And as history comes into play. Myth no longer is a part of the mix at all. Instead of it starting to fade from the square of attention, it just simply isn't there at all. So that myth and history have a polarity quality within their complementarity. They have an exclusion principle to the extent that one becomes historical consciously. To that extent you lose the sense of mythological and thus feeling toned experience as an essential part of your attention. And this is one of the great problems for our kind. Because the ego is made in that realm of experience, and it means that as history comes into play as a process, the ego cannot breathe that air. And so egos become the arch enemies of historical development. It's the field that is so peculiar. Because differentially conscious persons thrive in history, they make history, whereas culturally bound mythological persons lose traction in history. And so there is a need to make a symbolic structure. A symbolic structure, very often called an ideology, which does not permit history to develop, but which allows for the vision to be brought back in, for art to be brought back in and woven into the symbolic design. And the symbolic design has its ground in myth, and pulls vision and art into the service of making sure that the mythic organization and symbols is held there and not allowed to develop further consciousness in history. This is the source of empire. It's the source of tyrannies. It's the source of the Third Reich. It's the source of the Roman Empire. It's the source of the Han dynasty in China. It's the source of every great tyranny that has plagued civilization. It's a very deep problem. It's very vast. This education dissolves the very ground and very structures upon which that tendency and that capacity are based. It's not that it solves the problem so much as it prepares a population of people who will never reach that problem, because it won't occur. So instead of being a cure for a disease, it's the health that doesn't allow for the disease in the first place. So you don't need a cure. So it's a radically different scale of education. It's not meant to give you a degree In a subject area so you can get employment, or so that you can have peace of mind because you understand now this, that and the other and you've got it here. All those are excellent. All those are wonderful and they're necessary. But there's also a great deal more than that, a great deal beyond that. And so that's why all of this attention to strategic amphitheaters that are important, if you're ever going to be a person, if you're ever going to be able to participate in the full complementarity of processes, nature and myth, as well as vision and history, and all four of those can be brought into play together. They form a great complement and ritual and symbol and art, and something further called science Also form another great square, but not a square of continuity, like a square of attention, but something that we could perhaps label initially as a square of strategy. When you bring nature and myth and vision and history all together, you're bringing every other phase. You're not just making phases that are separated by an interval, but you're taking phases that are separated by whole phases. If you have nature and ritual, myth and symbol, vision and art, history and science, and you take every other one, you will get a square of strategy and you can do it either of two ways. There's a pair of ways you can do it through processes because nature is a process. Experience myth is a process. Vision is a process. Consciousness itself and vision is a process. It's not objective at all. It happens. History is not objective either. It happens, but it happens on a very high, differentially conscious level. It's like an energy level, and one doesn't see the results of a historical process so easily, because the energy required for it is of such a high level. There was a time at the beginning of the 20th century where, with the discovery of the electron, it was thought that we at last have one of the great pieces of the cosmic way in which atoms are made. And this is true, but some halfway through the 20th century, it was discovered that there is another form of the electron which is on a higher energy. It's called a meson, and that when the particles of meson were brought into play, what kaons were the first mesons that were brought into play in 1947? It was startling that here is the electron raised to a higher energy. So the meson weighed a lot more than an electron about 500 times as much. So it was really hefty is really powerful. And with that, the advent of nuclear physics went from looking at the atom is a very small family to looking at the atom is a very large extended family. And one realized that reality has orders of power at the electron can be stepped up to that higher power. And then in the 1980s, early 1980s, it was found that there's even a higher state, an even heavier electron, the tau, and that the tau very, very heavy, almost as heavy as a proton, but still an electron. It's that energy can be integrated. It collects in the mystery of nature. It has registry at exact quantities, exact registry moments, and that there are actually three energy states of the electron. And that it was found that each of those states has a complementary zero particle called the neutrino, that every electron has a hole that goes with it. We know so much about it now in the early 20th century, that great manufacturing technological feats are done by aligning on a plane the holes of electrons so that one gets a certain kinds of computer chips. We know enough now differentially conscious in science to be able to do that. We can arrange electron holes to help manufacture the computers that you use. But our educational system is still many hundreds of years out of date. It doesn't even understand that all of this has made an enormous difference. That in order for us to be real, we can no longer be tribal. That's not enough. We can be tribal and enjoy it. I have no trouble whatsoever either. Dancing with a men's hunting society or dancing with everyone in the tribe for the sun dance or whatever. Star dance. But I can also go to the cutting edge of science. And so this is an education meant to carry us all the way through to a maturity that's unbelievable, that the ego is happy when it's there because it realizes it doesn't have to die, it doesn't have to be dissipated. It just has to recognize that it has a part in a drama which is written by someone bigger in terms of energy, that the person is like the Amazon compared to the ego, and that beyond the person is a cosmic spiritual self, which is like the Tao particle. Don't you want to find out what your Heaviest energy weighing ego is like, it's very cosmic. It's. And that's why it's here. And so in the Sonnets to Orpheus, the third sonnets, sonnet to Orpheus reads like this I made this translation so that I can carry the the language through in a way in which I think is more appropriate to present Rilke. There are many good translations of Rilke, but I think that this will be a little bit more refined. A God can do. But how? Tell me, shall a man to follow through the narrow lyre? His mind is split and at shadowed cross heart ways stands no temple for Apollo. Song, as you do teach, is not desire nor wooing for the thing last achieved song is being for the God. It's easy. But when do we exist? And when spend he on our to be an earth and the stars? This is not using any old love. Although the voice then that mouths thrust open. Learn forget any sudden song that goes away. In reality singing is a different breath, a breath of nothing. An error in God, a wind. Let's take a break. The fourth of the sonnets to Orpheus. This is in Margaret Norton's translation follows the translation that I gave to end the first half. First part. There are two parts that came as a pair. Oh, you tender ones. Step now and then. Into the breath that takes no heed of you. Let it part as it touches your cheeks. It will quiver behind you. Unite it again. Oh, you who are blessed. Oh you who are whole. You who seem the beginning of hearts. Bows for the arrows and targets of arrows. Tear stained Your smile shines more everlasting. Fear not suffering the heaviness. Give it back to the weight of the earth. The mountains are heavy. The oceans heavy. Even the trees you planted as children long since grew too heavy. You could not sustain them. Ah, but the breezes are the spaces. The zeros are heaviest of all, because they're high energy. Indeed. I want to give you a portrait of Rilke in a nutshell, so that you can understand why the Sonnets to Orpheus was like a miracle. He was one of the most peculiar poets. One of just a handful of really great poets of the 20th century, like Yeats or Wallace Stevens. He was constantly challenged by a context that was so alien to him, eventually, that he almost didn't make it. He didn't. Rilke didn't have the occult genius of Yeats. Yeats was a natural telepath. When Yeats was a young boy, when he was an adolescent, he used to go out with one of his uncles, one of the Texans, and the uncle would walk up on the ridge, and Yeats would walk down the stream bed, and he would practice reading his thoughts. Once, when Yeats was a young man in London. He was still an older adolescent, still about 18 or 19. Gawky, odd. He went to visit Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, in her London apartment. Cigarette rolling occult genius, Madame Blavatsky. She was busy in the living room, talking to someone and in a contiguous waiting room. She had the young Yeats wait, and as he was waiting, he was looking at this old cuckoo clock that had never worked. And as he stood there, the cuckoo came out and chimed the hour. And Madame Blavatsky marked it, that this was a very unusual boy. So she had him to all her soirees, and she would caution all of these metaphysical social animals, saying, now leave him alone. He's very special. We don't know what he's like because he's odd. He's unusual. But Rilke didn't have that. He had a peculiar kind of approach, avoidance terror vis a vis himself, which he filled in by love. By the context of a woman. And he never found the right woman. So there were many women that flourished and faded, and some became friends. One of his great friends was the Princess Marie Thurn und taxis. She met him on Monday the 13th of December, 1909. She writes I was pleasantly surprised, but also slightly disappointed when I saw him, for I had pictured him quite differently to myself, not as so young. A man who looked almost like a child. He was 34. He was 54. Who looked almost like a child at the very first moment. I thought he was very ugly, but extremely sympathetic, very shy, but with excellent manners and a rare distinction. Almost immediately we were chatting like old friends. Later, much later, as a very mature woman, she sized him up. Exactly. Understood. She was always his friend. I am in perpetual anxiety about serafico, about Rocha, because he was like a poetic angel who was troubled. He was like that troubled angel and Albrecht Dürer's Great Renaissance print. We're surrounded by all the symbols of Renaissance command of life. The angel is worried because it has stepped outside of all the frames of reference and doesn't know what's going on. That man has engendered powers that are beyond the comprehension of the mind's farthest reaches to comprehend and understand, because the cosmos will always outstrip the mind and wander by an infinite margin. And if you stay in your mind out there, you will go mad. So I am in perpetual anxiety about serafico, she wrote in her journal at the time. Will they never leave him in peace? Will he never find the woman who loves him enough to understand what he needs and to live for him alone without thinking about her own needs, her own insignificant life. Poor Serafico. How anxiously he kept on asking if I did not believe that there must be a loving creature somewhere, ready to take a back seat whenever the voice of inspiration called him. He would be hot and cold at the same time. Loving deeply, needing desperately. But when the poetic muse called gone, then he would come back after the inspirational blizzard and be back there vacant. Needing, desiring, Wondering. The princess wrote the answer was difficult, for he is asking for nothing less than that. A woman should give him her whole heart and ask for nothing in return. The question would be very naive and egotistical if one did not recognize it in the masterful will of his destiny, which no power on earth can arrest. Why? Because he had stepped outside of nature far enough that he was afraid of losing his mythological foundation. I misstated in the first half about how art and myth display sits. Actually, art displaces ritual. The more that you become conscious and artistic about something, the more that you let the habitual slide, until finally it's the ritual that gets in the way of art. But what displaces myth is history, and the more that one becomes a historical person sees the historical context, the more that the mythic figures lose their hold. And for Rilke, that was an intolerable loss that he couldn't quite countenance. Because his art was founded on mythic experience, he was masterful at going from symbols to vision, from symbols, from the mind to consciousness. He could do that as good as anybody has ever done it, like a Milarepa. And he could make art, but his art was always split off from his person, so he would make art as a poet, but he never accepted it as a person. So as soon as his poetic muse came into play, he lost interest in whatever was good for him as railcar. And became the torrential mouthpiece for the inspiration, which ultimately had a mythic background, a mythic foundation. Because the myths that mythic foundation was the source of the symbols, and he counted on the symbols doing the fulcrum work in his art. And most great artists are like that, and it takes a tremendous maturity to transcend that, to go beyond that. Someone like a Homer went cosmic because he could do that. He let his cymbals go as the fulcrum for his art, and put the fulcrum for his art on the conscious presence in the person, so that what came out of that was a whole cosmic realm. Rilke couldn't do that. One of the qualities of our educational phases is to have a substrate that integrates all the way through the whole first year. And for that, we're using Homer's Odyssey, or we're using Melville's Moby Dick. Either one. And the reading for this particular week is the beginning of book 19. We're at the 39th week. We've had 39 presentations already this year. Book 19 in Homer. Homer, who was able to let symbols go so that they were not the fulcrum of his art, but to bring his art as a person into the place of where symbols would be. In book 19 of the Odyssey, Odysseus is trying to convey this in the Homeric way, trying to convey this to his son Telemachus, trying to mature Telemachus. Telemachus is just 21, and he is a young prince. But he doesn't yet understand. The iridescence of conscious power on level of a cosmos, doesn't have any personal experience with it, yet has never met anyone who could introduce him and Odysseus can. And so Homer writes it this way. At the beginning of book 19, Odysseus, after all of his ten years of fighting at Troy and ten years of wandering throughout the seas of the world trying to get home, finally has come home and has found his wife, who is still beautiful, still attractive, but is also the Queen and carries the whole kingdom with her prospect of marriage, and has 105 suitors for her hand. 105 arrogant princes eating out of house and home the patrimony of Telemachus, and seeking for the hand of Penelope. And she has come to the point where she has to give her hand. After 20 years she has come to understand that he's not coming home, ever. None of almost none of the others came home. Only two others ever made it back from the Trojan War. Old Nestor made it back because he was wise. And Menelaus made it back because he was indeed a great king. And Odysseus made it back last of all. So Odysseus is talking with Telemachus and saying to him now, great Odysseus still remaining in the hall, pondering how, with the help of Athena, he would murder the suitors. Presently he spoke in winged words to Telemachus. Winged words are magic language, visionary language, not mythic language, visionary language. Only someone who is spiritually a person can speak winged words. Winged words don't just go inside like the sound of brakes. They're able to fly in the transcendent atmosphere of consciousness so that winged words don't register in the mind. They fly beyond the thresholds of the mental objectivity into a visionary space like birds of the spirit. Those words go into vision because they're uttered by the spiritual person, not by the ego, not by the mythic sense of self, but by the conscious spirit of person. And so those winged words go beyond. Presently he spoke in winged words to Telemachus. Telemachus, we must have the weapons stored away inside the high chamber, usually in a castle. In ancient times there was always a portion of the castle architecturally called the keep, and in the keep you would put your ultimate weapons and provisions, because in defense of a castle, when all the various thresholds were breached, you would have your final keep, and very often a place was saved because they couldn't get in there like a tower. Yeats, in his maturity, lived in a tower, which was his psychic keep against the world. We must have the weapons stored away inside the high chamber. And when the suitors miss them and ask you about them, answer and beguile them with soft words, saying, I have stored them away out of the smoke, since they are no longer Like what Odysseus left behind when he went to Troy land, but are made foul with all the smoke of the fire upon them, and he goes on to say that he and Telemachus and one old servant will fight these suitors. There are 105 of them, and the son says, but, father, there are 105 of them. It's like the little boy in Shane saying, Shane, there are too many. The maids were tending the light, but you would not let them come out. Then the thoughtful Telemachus said in answer, this stranger, he doesn't know it's his father doesn't want to give out that this is his father. This is Odysseus. This stranger will. I will not suffer. A man who feeds from our stores and does not work even though he comes from far off. So he spoke and she had no winged words for an answer. Then Telemachus spoke a word to his father. Father, there is a great wonder that my eyes behold always it seems that the chamber walls, the handsome bases and roof timbers of fir and tall columns sustaining them, shine in my eyes as if a fire were blazing. There must surely be a God here, one of those who hold the high heaven. Telemachus begins to notice that there is a special magical sheen on everything that he looks at. It has a charismatic dustiness, a presence quality which is resonant because the master of the house is home Because the spiritual person is a resonance of spiritual energy, and when they are real, that energy radiates out and illuminates, illuminates. Rilke constantly needed to find his source in women to make sure that the illumination would be kindled in him because he couldn't do it alone. His first great volume of poems, The New Poems, has poems from especially 1906 and 1907. I want to give you two poems, one from August 1906 and one from August 1907, to show you what a tremendous leap in poetic capacity he had in one year. But what links them is his dependence on accepting the presence of a woman as a muse, to kindle his poetic inspiration, both a blessing and a curse. Same time. Not that women are blessings and curses. It's that that that dependence was. Here's August 1906. A part of the poem only within is nearer. All else is far. And this within crowded and day by day to filled with all. And what no words can say. The islands like a two exiguus star like exuding, which unperceived space without a word has shattered in unconscious frightfulness, so that it un illumined and unheard with no ambitiousness save that all this may somewhere find an end goes struggling on some self-discovered line in darkness, blindly out of the design wherein the planets, suns and systems went. Crowded psyche. August 1906 1907. One year later. It's entitled woman in love. That is my window ending softly. The dream I was in. Of being. On wings. Ascending. How far is my life extending? And where does the night begin? Everything I'm inclining. To think it's me all round. A crystal's deep through. Shining dark and without a sound. I could still let stars be filling the spaces in me. My heart seems so immense. So willing to let him depart again. Whom I perhaps have startled. To love to hold. Maybe. Strange and all. Uncharted. Seems my destiny. What, amid this unfailing endlessness am I? Though meadowy scent. Exhaling, swaying so to and fro. Calling and full of fear. Lest someone should hear my call. And fated to disappear in another. For good and for all. And within a few years, the maturity of August 1907 finds one of the great high marks in world poetry. The first of the Duino Elegies, his magnum opus. And it begins. Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders. And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence. Can you see the the ability to call out and the fear that you're going to be heard? At the same time. He began the Duino Elegies in a castle near Trieste and the Adriatic castle Arduino. Up on the crest. He was at that time with a woman that he gave her a name, Benvenuto Elizabeth Klossowska. This is her description of how she first came to Castle Duino with Rilke when he was starting the Duino Elegies. And you get the sense of this 1913 elegant Europe, right on the verge of a nightmare crash. It had begun to rain, the hood of the car was up, and we drove through a long avenue into the darkness. First I made out a small town with a church high up among the trees. Then the rain beat against the window and everything was lost behind veils of water. Piero will be disappointed, said Rilke, pointing to the servant sitting beside the chauffeur. He's always happy and happy to be able to explain things to guests when they come here for the first time. He's particularly fond of the rock with the Castle Vecchio, and tells strangers who are allowed to visit the castle one day a week that Dante sat among its masonry with a golden pencil in his hand, and wrote it in a big book, his canzoni antichi. The liberties he takes with the centuries only make his explanations more legendary. Everyone at Duino is fond of the old man. He has served the family for over 40 years. The car drove between ivy covered walls through what looked like a gate of a fortress, entered the inner courtyard of the castle and stopped at the great door. A grey haired lady of middle height was standing in the hall. She had bright, expressive eyes under dark, strongly marked brows and a smiling, intelligent face. Her hair was done in little ringlets over her forehead. She was wearing a white evening gown with a short train copper colored silk shoes. She really looked like one of those Renaissance princesses who patronized the arts and harbored poets. It was Princess Marie of Thurn and Taxis, his great friend. And so he began the Duino Elegies there just before the First World War hit. And he got his far as the fourth elegy. And he couldn't complete it, and he couldn't complete it in a year and another year and another year, and the years went by and he couldn't complete it. And he was tempted to just put them out as like an unfinished torso, like Michelangelo's last sculptures. And it was Princess Marie Thurn und taxis who said, you cannot do this. This will be your death. If you do this, you must finish those elegies. You must find Some woman some place to bring them out. This is how the fourth elegy that took years to complete. How it begins. Oh, trees of life. When will your winter come? Where? Never a single minded and perplexed. Like migratory birds. Outstripped in late. We suddenly thrust into the wind. And fall into unfeeling ponds. We comprehend. Flowering and fading simultaneously. And somewhere lions still roam. All unaware of being magnificent. And of any weakness. We though we're intent on. One thing can feel the cost and conquest of another. Hostilities. Our first response. And so he got frozen there for years. Benvenuto, whose descriptions of Duino we had gave way to another woman, not named Benvenuto. This one was named Merlin. And his letters to Merlin are famous. This one in particular. February 9th, 1922. He had gone from 1913 to 1922 and was finally working on completing the Duino Elegies when he experienced, in the midst of this blizzard of inspiration for the Duino Elegies, he was taken up in a whirlwind, a titanic, high energy whirlwind within a blizzard, and wrote the sonnets to Orpheus. Someone once said, the great white sail of the Duino Elegies is always complemented and paired with the little orange sail of the Sonnets to Orpheus, as if it were like the rising spiritual sun within the expanse of the vast clouds of the other sail. His Letter to Merlin, February 9th, 1922. After 150 pages of letters to her Merlin, I am saved. That which weighed upon and tortured me is accomplished, and I believe gloriously so. It took but a few days, but never within my heart and mind have I borne such a hurricane. I am still trembling from it to night. I was afraid of collapsing. But no, I overcame and I went out to caress this old muzzle just now in the moonlight, because he had gone from Castle Arduino to this Swiss alpine hermitage called Mozart, spelled m u t, but pronounced Mozart. Mozart. He had been with Merlin, looking for a new place. He was constantly settling in, putting down roots in places that people would give him, or would lend him or would rent for him, or buy so that he could stay for a while, and then he would move on. And he was looking for a place, and they were out in the Rhone Valley, out in the middle of Switzerland, about halfway between Geneva and Lake Como in Italy, and in that Rhone valley. They found an ad posted on a window of a barber shop to rent a place. This was mazunte, and it was there that he was able to write to bring the Duino Elegies in, and to endure the hurricane of the inspiration for the Sonnets to Orpheus. There is a deep quality in that experience, and in this letter to Princess Marie Thurn und On taxes from February 11th, two days after the letter to Merlin, he writes to her at last, Princess. At last the blessed. How blessed day when the completion, as far as I can see of the elegies can be announced to you. Ten. My hand is still trembling with the last great one continuing the beginning set down in Duino and the 10th elegy, the 10th of the Arduino Elegies, begins someday emerging at last from this terrifying vision. May I burst in jubilant praise to ascending angels. May not even one of the clear struck keys of the heart fail to respond through aligning on slack, or doleful or rendering strings. May a newfound splendor appear in my streaming face. May inconspicuous weeping flower. How dear you will be to me then you nights of affliction. Oh, why did I not inconsolable sisters, more bendingly kneel to receive you more loosely. Surrender myself to your loosened hair. We wasters of sorrow. He had learned to be real, to include suffering which the spirit can easily do. But the key to it was not the elijahs or their completion. The key to all of it was the sonnets to Orpheus, the ability not to carry through a long planned design of artistic strategy so much, but to open oneself like a spiritual prism to the overmastering light of a cosmic quality. And the Sonnets to Orpheus has that cosmic quality. The Sonnets to Orpheus has two parts, almost like a tuning fork. And the first poem of the second part in Margaret Norton's translation reads like this. Breathing, you invisible poem. World space constantly in pure interchange with our own being. Counterpoise wherein I rhythmically happen. Solitary wave like a solitary, solitary wave. Whose gradual see I am most sparing you of all possible seas. Winning of space. How many of these places in space have already been within me? Many. A wind is like a son to me. Do you know you air still full of places once mine you one time smooth rind ranger and leaf of my words. From pattern to context. From story to story teller. Recognizing that the very air that he breathes is the air that goes out and joins the winds of the world. And when he has really spoken his winged words in that way, they go out on that air and join the winds of the world. And this way sacred language becomes a part of the world. But that a really high level, high energy powered language can have winged words. That's not just on the electron level, but up there on the tau particle level. We haven't seen a technology yet that uses the holes of tau particles. We will be about 200 years from now. Then our language will be carried into interstellar spaces where winds never blow, but where our voice will have its own fructifying wind. This is a whole different thing. In Moby Dick, the reading at this particular 39th part is in the voyage where Ahab has seduced the entire crew to stop hunting whales and to start hunting only Moby Dick. And they all promised money, glory, something magical, something almost shamanically deep. He has had all the harpooners take their spears off the harpoons, and in the open part they have drunk rum to a toast, to an unholy ritual of death. To Moby Dick, no matter what. And if heaven gets in the way, it had better. God damn. Watch out! Ahab says one time to Starbuck. He says, man, I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. Why? Because, he says, also in that same speech he says, Starbuck, you think they come against me? We have played this episode out a billion years before these seas ever rolled. It's that ego inflating to pretend that it's cosmic. And does it know that it's within a mad mind that only there would allow that inflation to seem like it is a cosmos? The psychotic is at home In their anxiety, whereas a neurotic is not. Here everything is channeled by this instrument called the quadrant. The season for the line at length drew near. The line is the voyage part where one can tell where you're going to be on the sphere of the Earth, and as long as you keep to the line in its seasons, you know where you are. The season for the line at length drew near, and every day when Ahab, coming from the cabin, cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager mariners quickly run to the braces and would stand there with all their eyes centrally fixed upon the nailed doubloon, impatient for the order to point the ship's prow for the equator. Ahab's taken the Spanish doubloon and nailed it to the central mast of the Pequod. So it becomes the ego symbol of the sun. Whoever spots Moby Dick first shall have that Spanish doubloon. It's worth $16 in 1840 money. And of course, they're right on the verge of being caught up in the voyage that will end in their death. Because that kind of voyage, that kind of egotistical psychosis, can pull an entire civilization into the junkyard. It happened when I was a little boy. The Third Reich pulled the entire world into a junkyard. And just when it was climbing out, the Cold War pulled it back in and thrashed around long enough so that people thought that that's the way we need to live. Can you imagine the degradation? The 12th poem in the second part of the Sonnets to Orpheus, will transformation, O be enraptured with flame, wherein a thing eludes you that is boastful with changes, that projecting spirit which masters the earthly loves in the swing of the figure. Nothing so much as the point of inflection. What shuts itself into remaining already is starkness. Does it think itself safe in the shelter of inconspicuous gray? Beware. From afar a heartist comes warning the hard woe an absent hammer lifts. Who pours himself forth as a spring hymn. Cognizance knows, and she leads him enchanted through the realm of serene creation that often ends with beginning and with ending begins. A taste for the apocalyptic. If you want that, you can have it. There are poetries beyond that, and we're going into symbols next week, and we're going to take a man and a woman who went so far beyond the qualities of terror that frighten, frightened Rilke into a premature cosmos. One of them is Virginia Woolf, and the other is William Faulkner, and both of them came to terms with those transcendent challenges. Virginia Woolf with what if there are infinite resonances to a person? How then could I know who I am? And that's what To the Lighthouse is all about. And Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is, what about all those historical resonances of everyone? What if they are endlessly complicated and we can never finally know? How will we then live? And that's what that's all about. So get this pair of books and let's go with a man and a woman who, in the very time in which Rilke was coming to his premature death, he died in late December 1926, he was picking a rose in a garden and a rose. Thorn stuck his finger and he got infected. He got a blood infection and he died. About that time, Faulkner was beginning to write, and Virginia Woolf was mastering the capacity to express in a poetic prose that almost transcends poetry. To the lighthouse is really something. As I lay dying, really something. Try and joy reading those while we do the presentation. We'll see you next week.