What might the essence of Rilke’s Egoic soul reveal to us, if we tried to put it into words, using all our knowledge of the poems transmitted through an Ich, Rilke’s Ich (aka Ego), over many years, as well as the letters, and notebooks, and biographies we have of him to guide us? This might also include our ability, now a century after Freud, to apply everything we have learnt in the last 100 years about the mechanism, or the Operating System of the Ego, the Self?
The word that I find best describes both the Panther’s predicament as well the predicament of Rilke’s Ich, is LONGING. It is this painful, and somewhat absurd emotional fixation that this episode mainly focuses on by examining the following three poems:
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
-Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell)
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me—the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods—
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house—, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,—
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening.
-Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell)
One night a man was crying,
Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
"So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.
"Why did you stop praising?"
"Because I've never heard anything back."
"This longing
you express is the return message."
The grief you cry out from
that wants help
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
no one knows the names of.
― Jalal Al-Din Rumi (tr. Coleman Barks)
Transcript: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/rilkes-panther-the-cage-of-self/
