august philippic

According to legend (and the testimony of his hostess), in 1912 Rainer Maria Rilke was walking along the cliffs at Duino Castle when he was struck with the inspiration for a series of poems — the Duino Elegies, a collection I tend to keep near to hand the way the English Patient clasped his Herodotus. Thinking about Rilke’s epiphany today (an uncharacteristically overcast, cold August day in New York), I realized that for all the solitude and windswept loneliness of the work, it is an urban poem. If you can imagine the Delphic Oracle walking through the streets of Paris, hearing the music of violins, the arguments, the footsteps, that is close to Rilke’s writing. He is a poet of overheard voices. Life, he says, is spent speaking:

What if we are here just for saying: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, jug, tree, window, –
or at most column, tower… but for saying, understand,
oh for such saying as the things themselves
never hoped so intensely to be.

It confirms my impression of New York — that nobody can stop talking. Consider also: Italo Calvino’s Melania:

…every time you enter the square, you find yourself caught in the dialogue: the braggart soldier and the parasite coming from a door meet the young wastrel and the prostitute; or else the miserly father from his threshold utters his final warnings to the amorous daughter and is interrupted by the foolish servant who is taking a note to the procuress. You return to Melania after years and you find the same dialogue still going on; in the meanwhile the parasite has died, and so have the procuress and the miserly father; but the braggart soldier, the amorous daughter, the foolish servant have taken their places, being replaced in their turn by the hypocrite, the confidante, the astrologer.

In this “invisible city,” what is lasting is the conversation, which survives longer than the participants or the buildings.

A third example: martial arts novels. Paize Keulemans has shown that popular martial arts novels in late nineteenth-century China were products of urban culture. They were filled with sound — writers devised techniques to portray such details as a knife cutting through a melon, a foot striking an opponents head, and of course the swish of sword in the air. These cliches are still recognizable in the conventions of Kung Fu movies.

Urban life is cacophonous. The brakes of New York subway cars, for example, are destroying my hearing. But within the din lurk conversations that shape urban life. I’m going to spend a few posts highlighting these city voices.

——
Excerpt from Rilke’s Tenth Duino Elegy from Edward Snow, trans., Duino Elegies (New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000), p. 59. Melania appears in Italo Calvino’s classic Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 80. Paize Keulmann’s 2005 Ph.D. dissertation is from the University of Chicago. If I ever find the title, I’ll let you know.

Tags: cities, China //