Rilke and Mirroring

[DDurb33]

Hey everybody. I have been doing some interesting reading lately and had a few questions. I have been reading a poet named Rainer Maria Rilke, a German poet, and his writing is absolutely amazing. He delves incredibly deep into what it means to be a human, and really stirs emotions. It’s incredible.

Anyways, a recurring theme that occurs in his writing is human emptiness. Rilke was a sad man who was almost obsessed with this theory. He talked about how humans are incomplete, how we always yearn for this feeling of completeness, but we will never obtain it. Rilke was not a religious man in the sense that he went to church, but he was very spiritual and believed in God.

He goes on to say that what we feel is just a mirror, or a shadow of what is the thing actually is. Sort of like the allegory of the cave. We long for completeness and can feel this through love or joy. But they will never be perfect love or joy. They aren’t the real thing. The real thing can’t be felt on this earth. I thought this was a very interesting idea. And it makes sense. The only true love is God’s love, and the rest is our human imitation which cannot be perfect. We yearn for perfect love, not just to receive it but to give it. We yearn for completeness through perfect joy and perfect emotion, but we cannot feel these things because of our human limits. Just like how we can’t comprehend the mysteries of God, we can’t comprehend the mysteries of emotions and humanity until the afterlife.

He also talks about, even though humans are basically empty, they can be content with this because they don’t know anything else. Another interesting point is his view on romantic love. He describes it almost as a thing two people can latch on to together, so that they don’t have to feel so empty and lonely with the incompleteness of this world. In a sense, they are just using each other.

Long post, I’m sorry. But I was wondering if anyone had any view on how this related to the Catholic faith, if it something that should be taken seriously, and if it is, are there any bible verses related to this idea?

 

[Margarete_Faust]

Hey everybody. I have been doing some interesting reading lately and had a few questions. I have been reading a poet named Rainer Maria Rilke, a German poet, and his writing is absolutely amazing. He delves incredibly deep into what it means to be a human, and really stirs emotions. It’s incredible.

Anyways, a recurring theme that occurs in his writing is human emptiness. Rilke was a sad man who was almost obsessed with this theory. He talked about how humans are incomplete, how we always yearn for this feeling of completeness, but we will never obtain it. Rilke was not a religious man in the sense that he went to church, but he was very spiritual and believed in God.

He goes on to say that what we feel is just a mirror, or a shadow of what is the thing actually is. Sort of like the allegory of the cave. We long for completeness and can feel this through love or joy. But they will never be perfect love or joy. They aren’t the real thing. The real thing can’t be felt on this earth. I thought this was a very interesting idea. And it makes sense. The only true love is God’s love, and the rest is our human imitation which cannot be perfect. We yearn for perfect love, not just to receive it but to give it. We yearn for completeness through perfect joy and perfect emotion, but we cannot feel these things because of our human limits. Just like how we can’t comprehend the mysteries of God, we can’t comprehend the mysteries of emotions and humanity until the afterlife.

He also talks about, even though humans are basically empty, they can be content with this because they don’t know anything else. Another interesting point is his view on romantic love. He describes it almost as a thing two people can latch on to together, so that they don’t have to feel so empty and lonely with the incompleteness of this world. In a sense, they are just using each other.

Long post, I’m sorry. But I was wondering if anyone had any view on how this related to the Catholic faith, if it something that should be taken seriously, and if it is, are there any bible verses related to this idea?

I am a bit confused by your post. I am a German literature student and this is the first time I am hearing of mirroring in Rilke’s work by your definition. Perhaps I am misunderstanding the observation. What texts are you referring to? Can you give an example, perhaps?

The only clear examples I can think of mirroring by your definition are the parallels between the story “Frau Blaha’s Magd” (Frau Blaha’s Maid) and the essay “Puppen” (Dolls), but that has more of Rilke’s Freudian-esque identity crisis (how his mother essentially rejected him as a boy and dressed him in girl’s clothes, thereby murdering his true Self, just like Frau Blaha’s Magd kills her living baby and only treats the corpse like a doll).

I do think of “Der Panther” when you talk about some type of insufficiency in one’s reality (with the panther losing its sense of Self by its captivity in a zoo and eventually accepting its cage as its only reality in spite of the apathy associated with that reality), which does relate to your observation that humans are not happy because they do not know anything else. I suppose I just want to understand what texts you have in mind since I have not read all of Rilke’s works.

Rilke was officially Catholic, but he was not exactly an observing Catholic. In relation to Christianity, he does openly express that he saw Christ more as human than divine. This is very clear in the “Gescichten vom lieben Gott” (Stories of God), in which he calls God more of historical figure. He was spiritual, but I feel his spirituality was not tied to any particular thing. Rilke by no means expressed that God was the inner to the suffering associated with the human condition.

Sorry if I went off on a tangent. Your post touched the inner nerd in me.

 

[Dorothy]

Hey everybody. I have been doing some interesting reading lately and had a few questions. I have been reading a poet named Rainer Maria Rilke, a German poet, and his writing is absolutely amazing. He delves incredibly deep into what it means to be a human, and really stirs emotions. It’s incredible.

Anyways, a recurring theme that occurs in his writing is human emptiness. Rilke was a sad man who was almost obsessed with this theory. He talked about how humans are incomplete, how we always yearn for this feeling of completeness, but we will never obtain it. Rilke was not a religious man in the sense that he went to church, but he was very spiritual and believed in God.

He goes on to say that what we feel is just a mirror, or a shadow of what is the thing actually is. Sort of like the allegory of the cave. We long for completeness and can feel this through love or joy. But they will never be perfect love or joy. They aren’t the real thing. The real thing can’t be felt on this earth. I thought this was a very interesting idea. And it makes sense. The only true love is God’s love, and the rest is our human imitation which cannot be perfect. We yearn for perfect love, not just to receive it but to give it. We yearn for completeness through perfect joy and perfect emotion, but we cannot feel these things because of our human limits. Just like how we can’t comprehend the mysteries of God, we can’t comprehend the mysteries of emotions and humanity until the afterlife.

He also talks about, even though humans are basically empty, they can be content with this because they don’t know anything else. Another interesting point is his view on romantic love. He describes it almost as a thing two people can latch on to together, so that they don’t have to feel so empty and lonely with the incompleteness of this world. In a sense, they are just using each other.

Long post, I’m sorry. But I was wondering if anyone had any view on how this related to the Catholic faith, if it something that should be taken seriously, and if it is, are there any bible verses related to this idea?

I have never read anything by Rilke, but it sounds interesting. From what you described it seems to me (only my opinion) that Rilke was not aware of the value of suffering, (being conformed to our Lord Jesus Christ, and being sanctified by Christ to shine our Christ-Light to others),… and also the glorious joy of His Resurrection, which is what will happen to us if we follow Him.

 

[DDurb33]

@ Margarete: Okay, I probably got a little carried away with that idea. An obvious theme of Rilke is his thoughts on human emptiness and incompleteness, so I made that conclusion. A huge step I know but hear me out. In his Second Elegy, the lines "But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate, we/ breathe ourselves out and away; from moment to moment/ our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume. Though someone may tell us:/ “Yes, you’ve entered my bloodstream, the room, the whole springtime/ is filled with you…”-- what does it matter? he can’t contain us,/ we vanish inside him and around him. And those who are beautiful,/ oh who can retain them? Appearance ceaselessly rises/ in their face and is gone.

I may be wrong, but what I get out of it is he is contrasting humans with the angels the elegy is about. He talks about how limited humans are in comparison, but especially in the ability to love and feel delight. A person can say to another, “Oh, you’ve entered my bloodstream, springtime is filled with you,” but it doesn’t matter because they “can’t contain us, we vanish inside them”. They can’t truly feel love for us. “Who can retain them, appearance ceaselessly rises in their face and is gone.” We are not absorbed by them and consumed by them. We forget about them over time, and our emotions of happiness and love become duller. It seems to me that Rilke suggests there is a stronger form of this we aren’t feeling. Something that maybe the Angels have. And in this poem, I disagree with this by the way, because we cannot feel and give perfect love what is the point of love?

Also in the Archaic Torso of Apollo, I think one of the themes is that the sculpture is more real than the speaker of the poem, a human. I think some reasoning behind this is because the statue isn’t alive, it can’t feel emotions. Because it can’t feel these half-emotions that Rilke has described before, there is no emptiness inside of it. There is nothing more that it can feel, so even though it isn’t alive it is content. It has nothing to yearn for, or drive it crazy trying to feel.

I know Rilke never talks about mirroring or whatever I called it. I thought I heard that term before, but maybe I just made it up ha. Anyways, it is a leap to jump to that conclusion and my analysis of these poems may be wrong. I haven’t spent a lot of time on them and I’m just getting into Rilke, which of course I have to read translated anyways. So I don’t know, maybe my interpretations are just missing the point.

@Dorothy: Yes, I agree with that. From what I have read I think Rilke understood the importance of suffering, but when you talk about the joy of the Resurrection and reaching heaven, I think that could be something that supports the idea I had. The only true joy we will feel is through these things and Jesus. Nothing we can feel on earth will truly make us joyous like these. Maybe it isn’t a mirror, or a shadow like I put it though. Maybe the joy we feel on earth just pales in comparison to what we feel later, so if we just yearn for what we feel later we won’t appreciate what we can actually feel now.

 

[edwest2]

Hey everybody. I have been doing some interesting reading lately and had a few questions. I have been reading a poet named Rainer Maria Rilke, a German poet, and his writing is absolutely amazing. He delves incredibly deep into what it means to be a human, and really stirs emotions. It’s incredible.

Anyways, a recurring theme that occurs in his writing is human emptiness. Rilke was a sad man who was almost obsessed with this theory. He talked about how humans are incomplete, how we always yearn for this feeling of completeness, but we will never obtain it. Rilke was not a religious man in the sense that he went to church, but he was very spiritual and believed in God.

He goes on to say that what we feel is just a mirror, or a shadow of what is the thing actually is. Sort of like the allegory of the cave. We long for completeness and can feel this through love or joy. But they will never be perfect love or joy. They aren’t the real thing. The real thing can’t be felt on this earth. I thought this was a very interesting idea. And it makes sense. The only true love is God’s love, and the rest is our human imitation which cannot be perfect. We yearn for perfect love, not just to receive it but to give it. We yearn for completeness through perfect joy and perfect emotion, but we cannot feel these things because of our human limits. Just like how we can’t comprehend the mysteries of God, we can’t comprehend the mysteries of emotions and humanity until the afterlife.

He also talks about, even though humans are basically empty, they can be content with this because they don’t know anything else. Another interesting point is his view on romantic love. He describes it almost as a thing two people can latch on to together, so that they don’t have to feel so empty and lonely with the incompleteness of this world. In a sense, they are just using each other.

Long post, I’m sorry. But I was wondering if anyone had any view on how this related to the Catholic faith, if it something that should be taken seriously, and if it is, are there any bible verses related to this idea?

There are a lot of thinkers out there - poets and philosophers - who try to describe what it means to be human. I think the first thing to be aware of is that we can be spiritual and believe in God and that we are indeed empty or incomplete until we come into a personal relationship with Him.

Romantic love is not simply a substitute for something, it is a part of us. Not all of us will marry, but true romance activates, for those who understand their faith and maleness and femaleness, as God has given it to us, a sense of desire and understanding. For men, we see a woman as a part of us, and during romance, how she becomes not a stranger but the completion of what it means to be male and female. When we have a full and complete relationship with her as a whole person, we live, even for a short time, the mystery and beauty and wonder of love.

We can experience all of that, and more, now. We should. The Bible, the Catechism and certain teachings of the Church tell us that God has given us certain gifts and we are to use those gifts. To not read the Bible (even a page a day) is to be ignorant of Christ and His plan for human beings. That He came to call sinners to repentance.

Regarding our gifts, see Matthew 25:14 to 30.

We need to see Christ in everyone, since we are all made in the image and likeness of God. We are to be of service, even if it can be only a little, to others. Faith without works is dead. Here is a Bible verse that explains the idea:

bible.cc/james/2-18.htm

We can have joy and peace mixed with trials and hardships in this life, but for all of us, our end is God. Our lives in Heaven will be different from our lives on earth.

I am unfamiliar with this writer but the Bible contains the wisdom we all need to help us understand what it means to be human now.

Peace,
Ed