Rainer Maria Rilke; The Tortured Nomade

If there ever was a poet that I had almost a fetish admiration for , it would have to be Rainer Maria Rilke.  His poems and writing touch a part of my psyche that no other writer/poet can.

 

 

 

He is considered the most famous of German-speaking poets, and is known for his, at times bewildering use of metaphors, that he employed throughout his writings.  He understood well the mystical side of love that he weaves with lyrical perfection,  capturing the feminine persona he so well-integrated.

I share his forever seeking to understand the impossible labyrinth of love, and would have certainly have had empathy for the suffering that plagued his life, but would have been inevitably crushed underneath his solitude that he refused to allow anyone to penetrate.

Rilke’s poetry expresses the sensitivities of a  woman, albeit a tormented woman.   His thoughts follow the tortuous meanderings that his inner and anguished soul bleats out  in trying to understand the impossible and more to the point, the incomprehensibility of loving.

For Rilke knows all to0 well the insensitive woman, who narcissistically would abandon the very essence of the little soul she gave birth to.  He knows every  treacherous crevice of her devious heart.

He knew the impossibility of pleasing her and of ever being what she so desperately wanted him to be.  The hopelessness in understanding her love or even more significantly, her lack of giving him what he needed.

Yes, Rainer Maria Rilke was well-trained to the core in trying to figure her out.  He eventually grew a thick skin of exasperation that caused him to pull back from loving her as  he knew in the end her rejection and abandonment. would mangle him.

How this tormented relationship with himself begins, we must go back to his birth in Prague.  He was born in 1875 to an aristocratic mother, named Phia, and to a father who had ambitions for him, that he himself was unable to fulfill, career wise.  Both were from German-speaking families  that comprised a large community in Prague, that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire  at that time.

Before Rilke was born his mother had suffered the loss of an infant girl.  Her grieving played out in a very maladaptive and selfish way by her insistence that her newborn son was to reincarnate the little girl she had loss.

His mother dressed Rilke is frilly long lace dresses till he entered school.  She called him Rene, which had double gender connotations, and sometimes even Sophie, the name of her deceased daughter.

They spent hours together playing with dolls, dressing them and combing his dolls hair.  Despite his father’s concern about these practices, his mother prevailed in her efforts to turn her young son into the daughter she had hoped to raise.

It wasn’t until he started school that he had his first trousers.     Around the age of eight, his parents started living in separate dwellings and although he lived with his mother, she often left him for days in the care of a maid servant, later he would describe as evil.

His father Josef, having failed in succeeding in his own military career, sent Rilke off to a military school at age 10.   He would remain a rather shadowy figure in Rilke’s life,  due to his  inability to maintain a close emotional and physical presence with his son. This ignited within Rilke a hunger that lead him to seeking out  strong males in his adult life.

It was at his first military school, where he suffered emotional and physical assaults from his fellow classmates.  Despite Rilke’s unhappiness, his father then sent him to another stricter military academy where he barely finished his secondary education.

During the latter, he was often sick, which succeeded in at least capturing the attention of his mother, who would then feel concerned enough to come check on him.  His performance there, being less than stellar, left Rilke riddled with fear of letting his father down.

Rilke would write later of his hatred for his mother, though she did understand his passion for poetry and encouraged his writings.  His father though, had hoped he would follow through with a military career, rather than pursue writing poetry.

His relationship history is convoluted, beginning with a teenage love that he broke off during his university years.  Poetry was the only mistress or beloved that he ever nurtured and allowed to flourish in his life till the end.

Lou Andreas Salomé, seen in the photo, who was a Russian psychoanalyst, and 15 years older than he, was the longest and most deeply loved of all the women in his life.    She introduced him to Russian culture and through her, he met Tolstoy during a trip to Saint Petersburg, her native city.

When she met Rilke, she was already married , though she reportedly never consummated her marriage, preferring to take multiple lovers instead.    It was she who encouraged him to change René to Rainer, as it had a more masculine connotation.

Lou Andreas Salome mirrored back to him her own deep-seated fears of intimacy, which provided the complicit dance of their evolving relationship unto his death. After their intense affair, it was Lou though who distanced herself from  Rilke when he ended up marrying  Clara Westhoff in 1901.

His marriage to Clara proved to be perhaps too great a challenge to maintain his treasured solitude that was his only safe haven.  After their daughter Ruth was born, they separated to different dwellings.

Ruth was farmed out to her maternal grandparents to be raised, and Clara went on to pursue her career as a sculptress.    Rilke never provided Ruth with the paternal attachment and love his daughter needed.

Rilke first came to Paris in 1902  and with great fortune was hired by Auguste Rodin to be his personal secretary.  He developed a rather over idealization of the sculptor, as if he had finally found the strong father figure that he himself didn’t have.

But Rodin could not even be close to his own son, much less cater to Rilke intense admiration and abruptly dismissed him a year later.  The Hotel Biron, which now houses the Rodin museum seen in the photo, was suggested to Rodin by Rilke, who lived there several years.

From his Paris base, he traveled for long stays in Rome and Scandinavia then to  Munich.    World War I erupted during a return stay there, and he was drafted into the military, which with the help of friends he was able to be discharged.

Rilke was an opportunist who sought out those with wealth and power to help support his nomadic lifestyle. His financial status was always precarious from his own efforts and was largely supported by Princess Marie Thurn und Taxis.

His letters to her were always affectionate in nature, but she was never one of his lovers, perhaps wisely sparing herself from her tormented protegé,  It was she who offered her  Duino castle near Trieste, Italy, where Rilke begin his Duino Elugies.

As mentioned before Rilke’s “solitude” became his sacred sanctuary that solaced him, but at the same time prevented him from obtaining the very needed unconditional love he was denied by his mother.  From this painful well, came his poetic genius, prodded by his ongoing anguish that he never escaped.

He intensely “loved” the women in his life, but only to a certain level . For as the intensity mounted in him, so did his fear of being  rejected  and abandoned engulf him like he was by his mother, therefore he would start to  distance himself  from them.

Rilke was only successful in “loving” women from a far, as physical distance from them ensured they would never have a chance to enter his interior sanctuary.  He could regularly pine emotional overtures to Lou Andreas Salomé, the only woman he really loved to any great depth, because she kept a respectable emotional and physical distance from him, therefore providing the necessary safety he needed in loving anyone.

He also maintained sporadic correspondence with his estranged wife Clara, who he never divorced.  His interpretation of marriage was that each spouse would be “guardians of the others solitude”, which is a very maladaptive way to bridge marital “intimacy”

If Rilke can be seen as a victim of his narcissistic mother, then his very unfortunate daughter Ruth, suffered from his cruel and  narcissistic abandonment of his only child.  Rilke had an aversion to dolls, that he was made to play with to placate his mother.

I can only suspect that Ruth’s gender stirred up his disgust of having to “care and love” the deceased little girl that he always competed with  for his mother’s love. Besides, Rilke was too needy and busy looking to be loved, rather than selflessly being available to give love.

Even more tragically, Ruth committed suicide at age 72, reportedly feeling a lifetime of being unloved. She carried the  scars  from the pathology of her famous father and unavailable mother, coupled with a probable inheritance of his history of severe depression.

Rilke never was able to set out any roots for any region, though he felt Bohemia and Russia were his spiritual homes. Throughout his life he opted for extended stays in Spain, Germany, Locarno, Trieste, and even north Africa.

The last stop of his nomadic life was in  Switzerland where he spent the majority of the last years of his life.  He returned to Paris to live several months in 1925, hoping to combat his frequent bouts of illness.

In his letters Rilke often complained of much mental anguish from depression.  Because he also had  periods of intense creativity, it is possible he suffered from bipolar 2 illness. Lou would often encourage him to seek help through psychoanalysis, but he resisted.

He had been diagnosed with leukaemia , when he pricked his finger on a rose thorn and died from the ensuing infection in 1926.    Finally in death could he repose in the only home he felt secure and safe; that of his inner solitude.

His epitaph, that he wrote surrounded the symbolic interpretation he gave to roses.  Many theories of what he meant abound, but I suspect the real interpretation went with him to the grave. He wrote :”Rose, oh pure contradiction, delight of being no one’s sleep under so many lids.”

The rose has a mystical association with love, beauty,  and the Virgin Mary, and the five wounds of Christ.  Rilke was very spiritual and some of his works, including one on Mary, embrace Christian themes, though expressing his own interpretations.

My own guess is that Rilke saw the many petals of the rose as the incomprehensible hidden layers of the beauty of perfect feminine love,  that he had never been able to obtain in living.  The inherent contradiction is the rose, being studded with thorns, can wound her pursuing admirers.  He at one time identified with the wounds of Christ in his consuming pursuits of this perfect love.

My favorite writings of Rilke is for me his exquisite treatise on the mystical nature of love:

“I tell you that I have a long way to go before I am__where one begins.

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Resolve to be always beginning __to be a beginner!”