Rilke - Containing life and death

I've been rereading some of Rilke's poems lately. Here are the opening and closing stanzas of The Fourth Elegy, as translated by Stephen Mitchell:

O trees of life, when does your winter come?
We are not in harmony, our blood does not forewarn us
like migratory birds'. Late, overtaken,
we force ourselves abruptly onto the wind
and fall to earth at some iced-over lake.
Flowering and fading come to us both at once.
And somewhere lions still roam and never know,
in their majestic power, of any weakness.

...

Who shows a child as he really is? Who sets him
in his constellation and puts the measuring-rod
of distance in his hand? Who makes his death
out of gray beard, which hardens - or leaves it there
inside his round mouth, jagged as the core
of a sweet apple? . . . . . Murderers are easy
to understand. But this: that one can contain
death, the whole of death, even before
life has begun, can hold it to one's heart
gently, and not refuse to go on living,
is inexpressible.

***

"...But this: that one can contain
death, the whole of death, even before
life has begun, can hold it to one's heart
gently, and not refuse to go on living,
is inexpressible."

When one suffers from a chronic illness, especially one that has the potential to be fatal, death is always right there with you, whether you acknowledge or not. Even if all it is is fatigue of unexplained origin, something you hope will simply go into remission since there seems to be no cure - even then, death is right there.

Rilke hits it on the head when he addresses all of humanity, not just the ill and aged, and says that from the very beginning of even your potential for life, you contained death. "Your parents handed to you - your life just handed to you, to be lived right through to the end." That's from the key scene in the movie version of Mrs. Dalloway when Clarissa wanders away from her party to reflect on the suicide of the young man mentioned by one of her guests. You are handed parents just as your parents are handed you. And you are forced to live your life right through to the end, no matter what form or at what age that death may come. Old age, suicide, murder, illness, accident. You have been forced to take on life, and you will be forced to die.

"Force " is a strong word. Life is a gift, after all. But it's a gift one doesn't get to refuse at the outset when it is first given.

Some people believe that one can, in fact, choose one's parents in one form of belief about reincarnation. I have a friend who believes that it a person chooses horrible parents, let's say, for a particular need for a particular life lesson. I am not comfortable with this view of things. At the same time, many people try to make sense of bad luck by referring to "karma." Sometimes they mean this this within the span of a single lifetime - you beat up your little brother when you were young, so now you feel you must atone for the sin or else be visited by bad karma. Boy, can you get your theology mixed up! It's a sort of "A Christmas Carol" theology. And it has widespread appeal. What really sealed it for Scrooge was not the past or present - it was looking into a ghastly, disgraceful end to his life, with the vultures descending upon his few material things, that persuaded Scrooge to swear to change his ways.

Scrooge didn't begin to live life fully again until he could hold death to his heart gently and refuse to give up living. I mean, he could have given in to despair. So perhaps Dickens was not so far from Rilke, in some odd way. Those two hit upon the edges of a universal truth, coming at them from different cultures and backgrounds. Carl C.G. Jung would say that they tapped into the collective unconscious.

" Flowering and fading come to us both at once," says Rilke. So all one can do is live fully in each moment. A common phrase used is "I've had my moments" when looking back to one's past and recalling the more notable times. Why have just a few moments? Every nanosecond presents you with the moment to act or rest or listen or speak or make love or watch a falling star (the Perseids meteor shower just hit its peak two mornings ago). I am deeply Romantic about the possibilities of life if one opens one's eyes and heart and brain to the moment.

"You only live once."
"There's no time like the present."
"A stitch in time saves nine."

It's been said before in so many ways - cute aphorisms, theological texts, scriptures of all stripes, self-help slogans. Why don't we listen for more than just that one moment? Why don't we hold onto the lesson? Why is it so difficult? Repetition of the message doesn't seem to work. We're lucky if we have enough moments to remember at the end that we feel we lived well - but how wonderfully full life could be if those moments were impossible to count!

And think how the world would be transformed if more and more of us began to live in the moment in the true, rich way it can be. What if our leaders took this way of life more seriously. Beyond the platitudes toward a deep commitment to letting go of the past. One must learn from the past, but the past must not dictate the present and, thusly, the future. That's like saying we have to keep letting our soldiers die and get wounded in Iraq because of the others who went before them in this war. Somehow that logic is supposed to keep the previous deaths and injuries meaningful. The only way for them to have died with honor is to pour more living souls into the war zone?

Ah, but I digress. I am getting beyond the scope of this blog.

Just think on this: Our lives contain, from the very beginning of the potential of their existence, the inescapability of death. Just think how meaningful that makes every moment inbetween.