Rilke's angels

He hears the voice in a howling wind on a cliff path above the Adriatic, and it gives him the first line of what becomes the Duino Elegies. 

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?

Who, among the orders of angels, would hear me if I cried out?

He warns at the end of the first verse that “every angel is terrifying”. He picks up that refrain at the start of the second elegy, where he calls the angels “almost deadly birds of the soul”.  He gives a longing glance at the gentler appearance of the angel in the apocryphal Book of Tobit, as a gentle, very human guide who escorted the boy Tobias along the road 

Where are the days of Tobias,
when one of your most radiant stood at that simple doorway,
 dressed for travel and no longer frightening…?” [1]

The author is Rainer Maria Rilke, who was born in Prague and is recognized as one of the greatest poets in the German language. His imagination was angel-struck, from his early poem about the angel of the sundial at Chartres to his ghost writing for the Angel of Death in the last lines he ever wrote. His angels rarely have much in common with the familiar figures of Jewish and Christian angelology. He told  Witold Hulewicz, his Polish translator, that he was more drawn to the angels of Islam. [2]

Before he arrived at Duino Castle, near Trieste, in 1912 as the guest of the Princess Maria von Thurn und Taxis, Rilke had wandered Andalusia with a Koran and a copy of a French biography of Muhammad in his book bag  He wrote a poem about Muhammad’s summoning.

The 96^th sura of the Quran (“Recitation”) corresponds to the night of January 12, 611, when Gabriel first appeared to Muhammad – who was sleeping in a cave in Hira -and ordered him to read. In the hadith Muhammad is roused by a blinding light. When his eyes adjust he is terrified by a radiant figure that spans the whole distance between heaven and earth. The angel lifts him by his hair (he feels no pain) and speaks to him in a voice that fills him with fear. In the name of the creator, the angel hands him a scroll and orders him to read. Muhammad protests that he cannot read.In some versions,the contents of the book enter his heart and three years later, on the orders of the angel, he starts to deliver them to others. 

When Muhammad reads, in Rilke’s elaboration,the angel submits.and bows to him.

The Angel bowed its head
before him, one from thenceforth who had read:
who knew, and carried out, and who decreed. [3]

From the birth of the Duino Elegies in the storm above the Adriatic, it took Rilke ten years to complete all ten, after the trauma of the Great War, in what he called a thunderstorm of the mind. Often, in these lovely, wild and mysterious verses,we fell the aching distance between the human condition and the untouchable beauty of the angelic realm. In a letter to his Polish translator Rilke explained that "the angel of the Elegies is that being that vouches for [our] being able to recognize a higher level of reality in [the realm of the] invisible than in the visible.” 

“You are the bird whose wings came/when I wakened in the night and called.”  This is how Rilke addressed the Guardian Angel (Der Schutzengel) in a poem with that title.

What shall I call you? Look, my lips are lame.
You are the beginning that gushes forth,
I am the slow and fearful Amen
that timidly concludes your beauty.
You have often snatched me out of dark rest
when sleep seemed like a grave to me
and like getting lost and fleeing, -
then you raised me out of heart-darknesses
and tried to hoist me onto all towers
like scarlet flags and bunting.[4]

In the last lines Rilke composed, in the unfinished poem that begins Komm du, du letzter ("Come on you, you last") the poet gives voice to an angel. This time it is Azrael, the Angel of Death. 

As I burned in spirit, I burn in you.
The wood that blazes held back for so long has aged;
now I feed it and burn in you. [5]

Rilke gave us a gentler version of human-angelic interaction in one of the many poems he composed in French. 

From “Vergers”(Orchards)

3

Reste tranquille, si soudain
l’Ange à sa table se décide:
efface doucement les quelques rides
qui fait la nappe sous ton pain.

Tu offriras ta rude nourriture,
pour qu’il en goûte à son tour,
et qu’il soulève à la lèvre pure
un simple verre de tous les jours.

3

Stay still, if the Angel
suddenly chooses your table;
gently smooth those few wrinkles
in the cloth beneath your bread.

Then offer him your own rough food
so that he can have his turn to taste,
so that he can raise to that pure lip
a simple, common glass.[6]

The hint that an everyday angel may sit down at our table brings shivers of recognition and hope. In these lockdown times, it's good to know we may have visitors who don't need to enter by the door or come masked. Also helpful to have guidance on the correct table manners to observe when the angel calls.

References

1. Rilke, Duino Elegies II trans. Stephen Mitchell
2. 1925 letter to Witold Hulewicz quoted in Karen J. Campbell, “Rilke's Duino Angels and the Angels of Islam” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics No. 23, Literature and the Sacred (2003) 191-211.
3.  Rilke, "Muhammad's Summoning", translated by Leonard Cottrell. https://dailypoetry.me/rilke/mohammeds-summoning/ 
4. Rilke, "The Guardian Angel" in  in The Book of Images translated by Edward Snow.
5. Adapted from an unsigned translation of “Komm du” published in the Times Literary Supplement in December 1975 accompanying an essay on Rilke by Walter Kaufmann, who is presumed to be the translator.
6. from "Vergers" (Orchards) trans. A. Poulin, Jr,, in Rilke, The Complete French Poems.

Image: Duino Castle,near Trieste, where Rilke composed the first of his Duino Elegies in 1912.

Fresh Words

The Inuit say that we need to entertain the spirits, including our own creative spirits, and that one of the best ways to do this is to produce “fresh words.”

   They help prevent our gods from becoming tired and dried up in the way that Rilke warned about in “Migration des Forces”, one of the poems he wrote in French:

Certains de nos dieux s’épuisent et se dessèchent,

arides, ankylosés;

dans d’autres, en murmurant, se jette la source fraiche

d’une divinité reposée.

My free version:

Some of our gods become tired and dried up,

sterile and stiff-jointed;

so into others, murmuring, rushes the fresh spring

of a refreshed divinity.

Drawing of Rilke I placed in my journal when I was 19.

    Among the Inuit, the strongest shamans are also the most gifted poets. One of the reasons their spirit helpers flock around them is that they are charmed and exhilarated by the angakok’s poetic improvisations. Inuit shamans have a language of their own, which is often impenetrable to other Eskimos. It is a language that is never still. It bubbles and eddies, opening a whirlpool way to the deep bosom of the Sea-goddess, or a cavernous passage into the hidden fires of Earth. 
    Our earliest poets were shamans. Today as in the earliest times, true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to teach and to heal. They understand that through the play of words, sung or spoken, the magic of the Real World comes dancing into the surface world. The right words open pathways between the worlds. The poetry of consciousness delights the spirits. It draws the gods and goddesses who wish to live through us closer.

    Yaminahua shamans in Peruvian Amazonia use complex, opaque metaphorical language in their power songs, which are their most important tools for journeying and opening an interactive space with the spirits – and for bringing energy and healing through. This is called, literally, “twisting-twisting words”. One shaman explains that with ordinary words, you’ll “crash” in this deeper reality; “twisting words” let you circle around and see.
    Wherever the old ways of dreaming and soul healing are still alive, poets of consciousness - those born and dreamed to be our shamans and Speakers - know what this means.We'll never be able to travel the song lines and the story lines into the space where worlds are made and can be recreated until we come up with our own fresh words.
    We need fresh and twisting words to change and twist the behavior of the body, in the direction of health, and to re-weave tangled or torn energy webs. We need to twist and shout our way out of the boxes, constructed by limited and self-limiting belief systems, that we sometimes mistake for home.

Photo at top: Fox Crossing on the Metuje River in Bohemia by RM

A breathing towards the First World

A short poem by Rilke addresses the theme of what becomes of the dreams of childhood and the child self that is the dreamer. It is titled "Imaginary Career" (Imaginärer Lebenslauf) .Stephen Mitchell's translation goes as follows:

At first a childhood, limitless and free

of any goals. Ah sweet unconsciousness.

Then sudden terror, schoolrooms, slavery.

the plunge into temptation and deep loss.

Defiance. The child bent becomes the bender,

inflicts on others what he once went through.

Loved, feared, rescuer, wrestler, victor,

he takes his vengeance, blow by blow.

And now in vast, cold, empty space, alone.

Yet hidden deep within the grown-up heart

a longing for the first world, the ancient one...

Then from his place of ambush, God leapt out.

Mitchell's version does not quite satisfy me. Lust, which he translates as unconsciousness, means so much more. Edward Snow does better, in his version in the bilingual edition of the Uncollected Poems, when he calls it "unthinking joy".

Snow also has a better and more literal translation of a key phrase in the third stanza, about what is hidden in the grown-up heart (literally, the "constructed form", der errichteten Gestalt):

    a breathing towards the First, the Ancient

 The German original for this line is 

    ein Atemholen nach dem Ersten, Alten...

And here we have the sense of soul, of the possibility of anamnesis, of remembering what the soul knows. And of bringing home the magical child who remembers his home star. A "breathing towards", ein Atemholen...

As I linger on these words, I feel someone deep in me, a boy with freckles and a wooden sword, a love of tigers and brown rivers, breathing towards a blue star. 

Art: "Boy with a Wooden Sword" by Edmund Rode

Frankfurt journal: Every angel is terrifying

Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany

I can't think of any financial district in the world that announces its dedication to money more flagrantly than in Frankfurt, where a huge neon Euro sign glows in front of the bank towers. One of the dreamers in my Frankfurt workshop shared a dream in which she watched from the roof of her seven-story apartment building, several kilometers a way, as the Deutsche Bank tower imploded and crumbled to dust, followed by all the high-rise towers of high finance around it. "I was safe and my building was untouched," she reported. "I felt my role was to be like a guardian angel and watch over people as they tried to cope with the collapse of their values and their normal structures." Speaking of those values, Frankfurt's downtown business district is cheek-to-cheek with its red light district. Maybe that's because they share the same moral codes.

Side by side on huge plasma screens in the lobby of the hotel where I am leading my workshop (the hotel that promises "Starry Dreams Every Time"): amazing images of (1) a dramatization of an inspection of Adolf Hitler's brain and (2) a documentary about the possible migration of extra-terrestrial life forms on ancient asteroids. Whoa. A nonordinary multidimensional history tutorial, running during the break in our group shamanic adventures in the multiverse.

No, that's not a smartphone. It's a shamanic headphone, one of the pair of ravens I helped members of my workshop for the Frankfurter Ring to invoke to help them track for each other, bringing back life guidance, glimpses of the future, and keys to healing. Odin, who was a shaman before he became a god, relied on a pair of ravens named Thought and Memory to bring him information, sending them out to travel wherever was required. Sometimes they flew so far that he became worried about their safe return. It is said that he was always more anxious to recover Memory than Thought. Another god who relied on ravens was Apollo; interesting that a god of light had black birds at home in dark places as his winged familiars. An ancient Hellenic shaman names Aristeas of Proconessus used to take flight from his mouth in the shape of a raven and was capable of showing up in two places, and two different times, in the same moment. I have dreamed of him too.

Jeder Engel ist schrecklich. That's what I wrote on a card I contributed to our Coincidence Deck in the game we played in the closing session. It's from Rilke, and I  translated this as "Every angel is terrifying." A more literal translation would be "terrible" in the sense in which C.S.Lewis wrote of Aslan: "he is terrible, but he is good". I took a little poetic license - and perhaps Rilke would approve - to make the point that on first contact non-Hallmark angels terrify, by driving us to wake up and step outside our comfort zone and the picket fences of daily ordinary mind.     The workshop member who drew my message from Rilke was originally from Turkey. She found it highly relevant to her intention, which was to find joy in her work and her current life. The deeper powers that are hunting us, seeking to help us recognize and life our life calling, require us to brave up. You'll find the rules of my Coincidence Card Game, and other games for getting life guidance through synchronicity, in my book The Three "Only" Things, published in German as Fingerzeige des Schicksals.

I took a German course as an undergraduate in order to read Rilke and Goethe in the original, but I was lazy about grammar, and regret that my spoken German is so limited. It may grow now that Active Dreaming is growing in Germany, and I have been invited back, and back. I did have the pleasure of learning how to offer my dreamer's wish in German, and of writing it on the flyleaf or title page of many copies of Traum-Heiler, the German edition of Dreaming the Soul Back Home.

 Mögen deine besten Träume Wirklichkeit werden!

"May your best dreams come true" (and may you remember them!)