Patience

I gave R.M. a copy of Rilke’s Malte Lauridds Brigge for her birthday. She now works in the City, in London; I remembered when I too worked – although not in such an elevated position – and how I would read Rilke in my lunch hour.

Unpleasant memory. Another memory: my edition of Malte was given by a friend on my course in my first year as an undergraduate. A daughter of a well known artist, Beckett was her godfather; she knew him as ‘Sam’; he died that same year; it was Manchester, 1989. She put Malte in my hands; I had barely read anything (Fitzgerald and Joyce on the train home from work the year before; Lawrence …)

A few years later, I read Rilke again, and this time it was with an understanding of that great sense in his work of the immense patience one should have before death (it is similar in the last, wonderful poems of Lawrence …) I read Rilke in the sadness that such patience was impossible and that the world whose appearance he mourned was my world and that the invocation of a true relation to things, to the world, to death had disappeared. The wonderful Charlotte Street quotes a favourite passage of mine:

To our grandparents, a "house," a "well," a familiar steeple, even their own clothes, their cloak still meant infinitely more, were infinitely more intimate—almost everything a vessel in which they found something human already there, and added to its human store. Now there are intruding, from America, empty indifferent things, sham things, dummies of life . . . . A house, as the Americans understand it, an American apple or a winestock from over there, have nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which the hope and thoughtfulness of our forefathers had entered . . .

‘O Lord, grant to each his own death, the dying which truly evolves from this life in which he found love, meaning and distress’, writes Rilke, shocked by the suicide of a young man. Take your life, seize it for yourself and you join the anonymous dead of the big cities.

Recall Malte’s anguish at the murals which had been stolen from their original context. Murals, artworks moving to the exhibition space just as human beings have departed the places of their birth and made their way to the city. Just as Malte, this itinerant Danish poet, is a wanderer and an exile.

Malte is lost as the tapestries are lost, whence his anguish. But for what does he reserve his true horror? That death has become banal; it has become null, that is, mass-produced (why do I think of the wanderer Malte alongside the Russian poet of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia?) Now death is a product like any other; one size fits all; the exchange value of a life is measured in its end, which is the same for everyone who inhabits the big city.

Malte reflects:

It is evident that with accelerated production, each individual death is not so well executed, but that doesn’t matter much anyway. It’s the quantity that counts. Who still attaches any importance to a well-wrought death? No one. Even rich people, who can pay for luxury, have ceased to care about it; the desire to have one’s own death is becoming more and more rare. Shortly it will be as rare as a life of one’s own.

By contrast:

When I think back to my home (where there is nobody left now), it always seems to me that formerly it must have been otherwise. Formerly one knew — or maybe one guessed — that one had one’s death within one, as the fruit its core. Children had a little one, adults a big one. Women carried it in their womb, men in their breast. They truly had their death, and that awareness gave dignity, a quiet pride.

Yet there is hope, or at least a kind of hope: the artist, celebrating this authentic death, remembering things that have disappeared into the past, restores the dignity of death. Is death to be engendered by each of us? Or will our death come into the world as a stillborn child? ‘And grant us now (after all women’s pains) the serious motherhood of men’. To write, to die, for Rilke, is to mature like a fruit, to grow like a child; it is to be patient. Death must be formed; it forms itself in patience.

But what if death fails to give itself to us in this way? Rilke: ‘Be satisfied to believe that it is a friend, your profoundest friend, perhaps the only friend never to be alienated by our actions and waverings, never’. But what happens when this friendship becomes impossible?

There’s an autobiography in this, unreal, unwriteable pages as beautiful as Malte. A task I set myself many years ago: rewrite Malte replacing the Danish poet with a temp at a computer company (I was working at Hewlett-Packard). But I’d forgotten Pessoa had created something like this temp in his heteronym Bernardo Soares, clerk at a firm in Lisbon (I gave R.M. The Book of Disquiet, too …) I never wrote a line.

Was this a way to seek a death as authentic as the one for which Malte yearns? To discover an intimacy with things as I wrote the blazing pages of a great work? What foolishness! But I was never innocent enough to think this act of composition was possible. Even in 1989, I had already worked, I knew what had dissipated in the skies above the new industrial estates. It was, rather, to write an anti-Malte, to rid myself of anything left of the faith the Danish poet possessed …