Skip to main content

Rilke's 8th Letter: Sadness and Solitude and Faith

In my previous post, I discussed the first of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. The first letter is mostly about poetry, but the rest of the letters are about life and love more generally. His favorite topic seems to be solitude. Rilke sees solitude as a beautiful and necessary part of existence. He sees solitude as deserving of our reverence. 

In his seventh letter, Rilke lauds solitude as the antidote for unhealthy enmeshment in relationships. He writes, "But those who have already joined forces and no longer distinguish and differentiate between each other, those who no longer possess anything that is truly their own: how should they find a way out of themselves, out of the abyss where their solitude is buried?" 

Isn't that relate-able? Haven't we all, at some point, lost ourselves in a relationship? Rilke goes on to describe what love could be like if we saw each other as equals, "the love of two solitudes that protect, delimit, honor, and recognize each other." YAS! 

As a polyamorist, I obviously loved his seventh letter. I think I would have appreciated it even when I was monogamous, because even in the early years of my marriage, before we opened up, we took steps to maintain our individuality. So the seventh letter was great and had me internally shouting "Amen!" and "Preach!" 

Then the eighth letter wrecked me. 

Let's talk about sadness for a minute. Let's talk about profound and chronic sadness that leaves you numb and apathetic. Consider your own existential dread, your own severe losses, your own long-term illnesses. What are the patterns you have noticed in your own experiences? What are the realities you struggle to make peace with? 

I struggle to embrace the truth that life is chaos, and significant changes can occur at any moment. I struggle to embrace the truth that I am actually alone in my experiences. I'm not trying to say that no one has ever felt what I feel. I'm just saying that no one can be with me, holding my hand and feeling things with me, all the time. I am alone in my body, and I must carry my sadness myself most of the time. 

What does Rilke say of the numbness and apathy? "Almost all of our sadness, I think, consists of moments of tension that we experience as paralysis because we've lost the capacity to experience our own alienated feelings as something alive." Sadness is a living tension. We can see it as such. We can experience it as such. It does not have to lead to cold, empty, indifference. We can stay alive in the sadness. 

Like Cloud Cult and e. e. cummings, Rilke says we have to feel it. "We have to accept our existence as fully as possible." We even have to accept our isolation. Rilke acknowledges that solitude is not easy to embrace. He writes, "Of course it may happen that we'll get dizzy since we'll lose the fixed points that normally guide our vision: there's nothing near anymore and everything far recedes to infinity... [we'll feel] unparalleled insecurity, and a feeling of abandonment..." 

Have you been there, Love? Have you experienced the severance of a strong connection? Have you lived through a loss that left you with no choice but to face your solitude? Have you been that dizzy, that insecure? Rilke says we must experience even that. 

Because this is our humanity. As the astronaut David Scott said, "Man must explore." We will live a more rich, full, human existence if we explore our sadness and our solitude rather than shrinking from it in fear. Rilke says, "far more human is the insecurity, so fraught with dangers." 

But then he pokes at the concept of danger. He says the world is not actually against us. He writes, "If it contains abysses, these abysses belong to us, if there are dangers we must try to love them ... How could we forget those old myths found at the origin of the history of all peoples, the myths about dragons that transform at the last possible moment into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our life are princesses who are only waiting for us to be radiant with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything terrible is at bottom helpless, waiting for our help." 

Ah, here is faith. Rilke's words are poetic and compelling. I want to believe that all things work together for good. Maybe in Rilke's life this was true. Maybe in my own life this can be true. But there are certain types of suffering that should not be tolerated, certain dragons that are definitely not helpless. I am thinking of systemic injustice, but I'm sure my informed and imaginative readers are referencing a plethora of evils. 

Even still, Rilke's words have validity on an individual level. I am content when I can embrace the chaos of existence, when I can breath deep in the vastness of my solitude, when I can have gratitude for my sadness, when I can believe that all of this will help me become a more full and complete human. 



If you appreciate my work, leave me a tip!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"Why Can't You Be Discreet?"

  How non-affirming theologies re-traumatized me - a sexual assault survivor - when I came out as queer and polyamorous to my family: I was raised in a protestant church. I was sexually abused multiple times by multiple Christian men when I was 13 to 15 years old. I did not understand that I was being abused, and I absolutely blamed myself for what was happening to me.  When I talked to my mom about just a portion of it, while it was ongoing, I asked her what we were going to do about it. She said, "We're going to pretend it never happened." For half my life, I lived by that. I did my best to pretend it never happened. I did this, partly, for the comfort of my family members. I did not want my parents to know about everything that had happened to me, because I did not want them to blame themselves for not protecting me. I did not want to tell any of my family members, because I did not want them to be hurt or upset or have strained relationships with people in the church....

Literary Provocation

Literary critic Juan Vidal wrote a  piece  for NPR Books entitled Where Have All The Poets Gone? In it he   says, " The Beat Generation is dead, and literary provocation in America, I submit, is at a low." He hungers for a time when poets were at the forefront of marches and rallies, speaking out against injustice.  I don't know what the world used to be like. I don't know if poetry used to have a broader audience than it does now.  Allen Ginsberg died when I was six years old. I've never marched for any cause. But maybe that's because when people in my generation support a cause or are enraged by an injustice, we don't take to the streets. We go to social media. We raise awareness by sharing youtube videos. We try to change minds by blogging.  All the great poets aren't dead and gone. They're online. After Michael Brown's death,  Sarah Kay  shared the poem  not an elegy for Mike Brown  by  Danez Smith  on facebook. Poets a...

Spotlight on Guante

I'm late to the party, but I just discovered Guante . His poem  "Ten Responses to the Phrase Man Up"  has been viewed over half a million times and will be published in the Button Poetry anthology  "Viral" . I heard that poem first, and it got me hooked, but his poem "Action" truly moved me. "Rape Culture is silence." I don't think I've ever heard a more perfect definition of Rape Culture the one he gives in this poem. It is silence. It's us not having the conversations we should be having with our friends and our siblings and our kids. We should be telling our girlfriends to stop slut-shaming and our guy friends to stop using violent terms for sex. We should be telling our kids about  enthusiastic consent . ("Consent is not the absence of a no. It's the presence of a yes.") Rape Culture is perpetuated by our silence, by our fear of the potential social isolation that comes from standing up for what's right...