And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is —
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.

— Rilke, Book of Images

At the corner she ran into old Mrs. Chalmers returning from the grave. The old woman looked down at the dead flowers she was carrying and cut her. The women in the cottages with the red geraniums always did that. She was an outcast. Nature had somehow set her apart from her kind. Yet she had scribbled in the margin of her manuscript: “I am the slave of my audience.”

— Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

(The angel speaks)

I stretched my wings wide
and became incredibly vast.
Now your narrow dwelling
overflows with my robes.
Yet you are alone as never before,
and barely look at me.
I could be just a breeze in the grove.
You, though, are the tree.

Never was there such longing,
so great and so uncertain.
Maybe something is soon to occur
that has come to you in dreams.
I greet you, for my soul sees now
that you have ripened and are ready.
You are a high and awesome gate
and soon you will open.
You are the ear my song is seeking,
the forest in which my word is lost.

So I came and made real
what you dared so long to dream.
God looked right at me, it was blinding . . .

You, though, are the tree.

— Rilke, Book of Images

(The angel speaks)

It’s not that you are closer to God than we;
We are all far from God.
But your hands seem to me
so wonderfully blessed,
made ready as no other woman’s.
They are almost radiant.
I am the day, I am the dew.
You, though, are the tree.

I am tired now, I have traveled a long way.
Forgive me, but I have forgotten
what He, enthroned in gold like the sun,
wanted me to tell you, quiet one.
All that space made me dizzy.
But I am just the beginning.
You, though, are the tree.

— Rilke, Book of Images

Any angel is frightening.
Yet, because I know you,
I invoke you in spite of myself,
you lethal birds of the soul.

Fated to be happy from the beginning of time,
creation’s spoiled immortal darlings,
summits of the cosmos shining at dawn,
pollen from heavy blossoms, limbs of light,
hallways, stairs, thrones carved from existence,
shields of ecstasy, shrines for delight —
and suddenly, each one, mirror:
where our own evanescent beauty
is gathered into an enduring countenance.

— Rilke, From the Second Duino Elegy

What will you do, God, when I die?

I am your pitcher (when I shatter?)
I am your drink (when I go bitter?)
I, your garment; I, your craft.
Without me what reason have you?

Without me what house
where intimate words await you?
I, velvet sandal that falls from your foot.
I, cloak dropping from your shoulder.

What will you do, God? It troubles me.

— Rilke, From The Book of Hours I, 36

While I sit here analyzing myself a sudden doubt assails me: did I really love cigarettes so much because I was able to throw all the responsibility for my own incompetence on them? Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one’s own latent greatness. I only put this forward as a possible explanation of my youthful weakness, but without any very great conviction.

— Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno

Since I’ve learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me. I am thinking of a summer on the Baltic when I was a child: how talkative I was to sea and forest; how, filled with unaccustomed exuberance, I tried to leap over all limits with the hasty excitement of my words. And how, as I had to take my leave on a morning in September, I saw that we never give utterance to what is final and most blessed, and that all my rhapsodic Table d’hote conversations did not approach either my inchoate feelings or the ocean’s eternal self-revelation.

— Rilke, Early Journals

Spring! And Earth is like a child
who has learned many poems by heart.
For the trouble of that long learning
she wins the prize.

Her teacher was strict. We loved the white
of the old man’s beard. Now we can ask her
the many names of green, of blue,
and she knows them, she knows them!

Earth, school is out now. You’re free
to play with the children. We’ll catch you,
joyous earth. The happiest will catch you!

All that the teacher taught her — the many thoughts
pressed now into roots and long
tough stems: she sings! She sings!

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 21

When I was young I asked my father what the highest number was. He said, in that fatherly way: “Twenty is the highest number, my son. Not here, nor in the furthest reaches of the land, is there any number higher.” I was satisfied, I walked proud with my new knowledge and assurance.

Till I came of age, at twenty one.

I went to our village doctor, to tell him I had a Numerical Tumor in my age; that somehow I had grown an additional one on my twenty. He informed me there was no cure. Fortunately, the tumor was benign, although it would continue to grow.

I was fascinated by the knowledge of this learned man of science, and sought anew the answer to my question, ‘What is the highest number?’ The doctor regaled me with a scientific instrument, the abacus, and showed me that it could count as many as a hundred things. “But surely,” I asked, “if one had one hundred abacuses, one could use yet another abacus to count those hundred abacuses, and yet each of these could count a hundred more things. What, indeed, if there are yet more numbers, beyond the reach of this fine tool?”

The Doctor was all a-fluster, and told me in stern terms that any number that had not been counted on the abacus was not worth considering, and indeed could hardly be said to exist at all. He spoke of a man named William of Occam, and of something called the Least Hypothesis. But what use was all this to me, if the highest number was always the last number to which I had counted? Is it useful to know where the end of the earth is only after you have stepped over it?

I asked around the village for answers until they tired of my interrogations and told me to seek out the priest — a well-studied man, possessed, they said, of an answer for everything.

I soon learnt that the priest did have an answer for everything. The reason for this was that he didn’t waste very much time in finding them. He was a meek man, and did not need the fancy expensive answers so beloved of academics: he would make due with older answers, even if they were a tad worn out. The priest would see an old answer lying about, and say to himself, “Ahh, that would fit the question I have perfectly.” Whether or not the answer was right seemed to his mind a somewhat indulgent concern: “Oh no,” he mocked me, “My trousers are not the right trousers; my car is not right the car; and oh, my answers are not the right answers.” And through guffaws he said, “if the answer fits, it does the job.”

He told me that the highest number was Jesus Christ, and sent me on my way.

In desperation, I sought out the village idiot, and asked him what he believed the highest number to be.

“Austria,” said the idiot.

In his small way he had granted me wisdom, for I came to realise that if there was an answer to my question, I would not find it in my little village. So against the protests of my parents, I went out into the world in search of that elusive goal, The Highest Number In The Universe.

Many were the lands to which I travelled, and many were the experts I met. I know, for I counted them all. But not one of them could give me the answer I sought so dearly. Nobody could help me. Till I came upon the Mountain.

The peasants of the lower village told me that at the Mount’s summit lived a hermit, the wisest man living in this world or any other, and that if my answer existed, then surely he must know it.

So I climbed.

And there was a cave.

And in the cave was a hermit.

There was a sign at the entrance: “You don’t have to be enlightened to work here… but it helps!!!” The hermit sat within, heating beans in a rusty pan over a small fire.

I wasted no time, and silhouetted in the cave’s entrance, I asked, “What is the highest number?”

But the hermit only laughed and said, “Kid, you don’t wanna know,” and not a word more.

For three days I sat outside his cave, in blistering cold and through haunted nights. After three days he came out to me. “Look kid, it ain’t what you think… you can still just go home,” he said.

But I would not move, and so the hermit sighed and said, “Very well… The highest number is… gazillionty-seven.”

I looked at he. He looked at me, and grinned impishly. But I would not be bought off so easily, and so out-loud I counted: gazillionty-five, gazillionty-six, gazillionty-seven, gazillionty-ei… and blacked out.

When I awoke some time later, his wrinkled face was staring at me from above: “Told you so kid. You can’t go any higher.” Then his face took on a dark hue, and he whispered, “Here’s the thing, kid: there’s only gazillionty-six things in the whole universe.”

“Even if you count a pair of trousers as two things?” I asked.

“Even so,” he said. And then he just laughed and laughed and laughed, and pointed to the ceiling of his cave, where he had scrawled in red letters three feet wide:

Oh look at me you Wise Men
Sitting on my Mountain
With all the numbers in the world
And nothing to be countin’

I never go anywhere that’s more than twenty feet above sea-level anymore.

.

— Sam Morris (Published in Philosophy Now, February/March 2010)

From infinite longings
finite deeds arise . . .

But in these dancing tears,
what is often withheld can be found:
our strength.

— Rilke, Book of Images

When I lean over the chasm of myself —
it seems
my God is dark
and like a web: a hundred roots
silently drinking.

This is the ferment I grow out of.

— From The Book of Hours I, 3

Nowhere, Beloved, will the world exist, but within us.
Our lives are constant transformations. The external
grows ever smaller. Where a solid house once stood,
now a mental image takes its place,
almost as if it were all in the imagination.
Our era has created vast reservoirs of power,
as formless as the currents of energy they transmit.
Temples are no longer known. In our hearts
these can be secretly saved. Where one survives —
a Thing once prayed to, worshipped, knelt before —
its true nature seems already to have passed
into the Invisible. Many no longer take it for real,
and do not seize the chance to build it
inwardly, and yet more vividly, with all its pillars and statues.

— Rilke, From the Seventh Duino Elegy

In alleyways I sweep myself up
out of garbage and broken glass.
With my half-mouth I stammer you,
who are eternal in your symmetry.
I lift to you my half-hands
in wordless beseeching, that I may find again
the eyes with which I once beheld you.

I am a city by the sea
sinking into a toxic tide.
I am strange to myself, as though someone unknown
had poisoned my mother as she carried me.

It’s here in all the pieces of my shame
that now I find myself again.

— Rilke, From The Book of Hours II, 2

….1

Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art. Zola: “Every proper artist is more or less a realist according to his own eyes.” Braque’s goal: “To get as close as I could to reality.” E.g., Chekhov’s diaries, E. M. Forster’s Commonplace Book, Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up (much his best book), Cheever’s posthumously published journals (same), Edward Hoagland’s journals, Alan Bennett’s Writing Home. So, too, every artistic movement or moment needs a credo: Horace’s Ars Poetica, Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie, André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto,” Dogme 95’s “Vow of Chasity.” My intent is to write the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists in a multitude of forms and media (lyric essay, prose poem, collage novel, visual art, film, television, radio, performance art, rap, stand-up comedy, graffiti) who are breaking larger and larger chunks of “reality” into their work. (Reality, as Nabokov never got tired of reminding us, is the one word that is meaningless without quotation marks.)

….2

Jeff Crouse’s plug-in Delete City. The quasi–home movie Open Water. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Joe Frank’s radio show In the Dark. The depilation scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Lynn Shelton’s unscripted film Humpday (“All the writing takes place in the editing room”). Nicholas Barker’s “real-life feature” Unmade Beds, in which actors speak from a script based on interviews they conducted with Barker; the structure is that of a documentary, but a small percentage of the material is made up. Todd Haynes’s Superstar—a biopic of Karen Carpenter that uses Barbie dolls as the principal actors and is available now only as a bootleg video. Curb Your Enthusiasm, which—characteristic of this genre, this ungenre, this antigenre—relies on viewer awareness of the creator’s self-conscious, wobbly manipulation of the gap between person and persona. The Eminem Show, in which Marshall Mathers struggles to metabolize his fame and work through “family of origin” issues (life and/or art?). The Museum of (fictional) Jurassic Technology, which actually exists in Culver City. The (completely fictional) International Necronautical Society’s (utterly serious) “Declaration of Inauthenticity.” So, too, public-access TV, karaoke nights, VH1’s Behind the Music series, “behind-the-scenes” interviews running parallel to the “real” action on reality television shows, rap artists taking a slice of an existing song and building an entirely new song on top of it, DVDs of feature films that inevitably include a documentary on the “making of the movie.” The Bachelor tells us more about the state of unions than any romantic comedy could dream of telling us. The appeal of Billy Collins is that compared with the frequently hieroglyphic obscurantism of his colleagues, his poems sound like they were tossed off in a couple of hours while he drank scotch and listened to jazz late at night (they weren’t; this is an illusion). A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was full of the same self-conscious apparatus that had bored everyone silly until it got tethered to what felt like someone’s “real life” (even if the author constantly reminded us how fictionalized that life was). At once desperate for authenticity and in love with artifice, I know all the moments are “moments”: staged and theatrical, shaped and thematized. I find I can listen to talk radio in a way that I can’t abide the network news—the sound of human voices waking before they drown.

….3

An artistic movement, albeit an organic and as-yet-unstated one, is forming. What are its key components? A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. (What, in the last half century, has been more influential than Abraham Zapruder’s Super-8 film of the Kennedy assassination?) Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real.

….4

In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.

….5

It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel (minus the novel).

….6

I need say nothing, only exhibit.
.

— David Shields, Reality Hunger