Daniel O'Sullivan
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VI. The Poet. Oil. 50X40”
The painting portrays Rilke who interrupts his conversation to look away. He is listening to Count C.W. a revenant from an earlier era, who, Rilke half seriously wrote, had dictated some poems to him from a book that he, the Count, had written. Knowing Rilke’s preoccupation with the occult, I’m inclined to believe him. We only see the Count’s book and mask. The Count is expounding on the meaning of a dream; the cracked cup with the inscription, sitting on the back of a hand, were part of the dream and later a poem of Rilke’s about death. The theme of the elegy is the hero who rushes forward to his destiny, never turning aside to view the effect he is having and never looking back, unlike the statue of Orpheus, on his way to becoming a constellation.
VII. The Ascent. . Oil. 50X40”
The title refers to the elegy’s magnificent description of a lark’s song of ascent, step above step to glorious explosion of sound, like the “tall tree in the ear” of the Sonnets to Orpheus. The child on the stoop was suggested by Rilke’s assumption that even the blasted lives of the poorest children have had their moment of redemptive illumination. The angel with the sundial, a subject of one of his French poems, is linked to Rilke’s celebration in the elegy of monuments like Chartres. A soldier in WWI uniform lends a sharper context to the scene as his eyes meet the child’s.
VIII. The Open. Oil. 50X40”
This term refers to the state or realm that gives access to the timeless, to boundless metamorphosis, the land of the dead, of myth, of coexisting past and future. For Rilke, it is a place where the formal obstacles to real experience that condition us are dissolved, like time and space, cause and effect. Most particularly we are freed from the substantial persistence of the self, as are the unconstrained animals we encounter. Rilke could not really love the individual other, the Thou, for very long. He felt that the other was only there to awaken love which must pass through her or him to the beyond.
In a prose fragment “Erlebnis,” he describes his experience of “the open” on the grounds of Duino Castle, where he was a guest. He was leaning against a tree that he began to feel was replacing him. It suggested to me the myth of Apollo and Daphne, outlined on the tracing paper. (The smile of a laurel leaf is adverted to in the opening lines of the next elegy.) He felt introduced into another dimension where he could visit his own body. He sensed the presence of the dead around him, including young Polyxene, dead long before the owner of the castle, Princess Marie Taxis, had been born. The girl appears in the painting dressed in a sailor suit. The upper part of the figure of “Apeiron” (The Boundless) enacts its name. That’s Romano Guardini, the German theologian, by that statue. His book on the Elegies was very helpful to me.
IX. The Angel. Oil. 50X40”
Rilke’s angels hearken back to Neo-Platonic primordial emanations, or to the Sephiroth of the Hermetic Kabbalah, even perhaps to Assyrian reliefs. They are awesome, terrifying presences. In the Second Elegy they are not only manifestations of the descending stages of the Divine efflorescence, “pollen of blossoming Godhead” but the spaces between the stages, “hinges of light, corridors, stairways.” Here, a more traditional one, The Exterminating Angel, surveys the scene. The setting of the painting resembles the nave of a church but the sanctuary has been replaced with what Rilke claims we should truly venerate: the transformation of the visible--tower, bridge, house, gate-- into invisible interiority. There is a reversal of the Catholic rite where the invisible appears as transubstantiated bread and wine. Another angel is leading a figure out of the spell that Rilke’s imagery had cast.
X. The Flight Into Egypt Oil. 50X40”
The elegy describes a quest: the journey of a youth past the city of the dead, past the empty church and through the “real world,” an amusement park. Count C.W. lights him on his way in the painting. He will meet a young woman, a Lament, who would guide him up to the mountains of sorrow, the abode of her sister Laments, with its ruined towers and abandoned temples and Egyptian mystique. I painted the mountains as pyramids. Above would ride Rilke’s invented constellations. I chose a real one, the Constellation Draco.
Further forward in the painting are some figures related to Giorgione's painting ,"The Tempest." Some researchers believe that this painting has the iconographical hallmarks of a “Rest on the Flight into Egypt,” or what started out as such. Although the figure in the red jacket is usually described as a soldier or courtier in Giorgione’s painting, he might still be holding that staff of St. Joseph. But in my version the staff bears a banner with the Latin for “I, John,” and the nursing Virgin can become the Woman of Revelation, of an approaching apocalypse. Giorgione’s mysterious background has been lost and the Flight into Egypt has become a journey into cataclysm. Darkly foreshadowed, perhaps, in the cry the poet heard on those January nights of 1912, it had not yet finished with his Europe of 1922.
English Quotations from the poems are from Leishman and Spender’s translation of the elegies.