And Freedom, Oh Freedom…
It’s unseasonably cold this morning. The sky is gray, underbellies of clouds glow pink at the point where the sun is soon to rise. I am at a Holiday Inn in Louisville, Kentucky. I have more to say about the topic of freedom, as instinct says that I left the matter unfinished. The topic is important, that I feel like a fish who desires to speak about water. One cannot say enough, and you just finish when you must, knowing that others have said and will say a great deal more.
I purchased a collection of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets of Orpheus edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. The Eighth Elegy treats the matter of freedom. These words by Rilke “knock me out.” I offer about half of the Eighth Elegy translated from German by Mitchell for your contemplation. I will resist offering any explanation of my own to Rilke’s words. Your interpretation will be relevant to your own life and thus outweighs anything that I could say. I have highlighted in orange the language that particularly impacted me. Rilke wrote these ten poems while staying at Duino castle in 1923.
THE EIGHTH ELEGY
Dedicated to Rudolf Kassner
With all its eyes the natural world looks out
into the Open. Only our eyes are turned
backward, and surround planet, animal, child
like traps, as they emerge into their freedom.
We know what is really out there only from
the animal’s gaze; for we take the very young
child and force it around, so that it sees
objects – and not the Open, which is so
deep in the animal’s faces. Free from death.
We, only, can see death; the free animal
has its decline in back of it, forever,
and God in front, and when it moves, it moves
already in eternity, like a fountain.
Never not for a single day, do we have
before us the pure space into which flowers
endlessly open. Always there is World
and never Nowhere without the No: that pure
unseparated element which one breathes
without desire and endlessly knows. A child
may wander there for hours, through the timeless
stillness, may get lost in it and be
shaken back. Or someone dies and is it.
For, nearing death, one doesn’t see death; but stares
beyond, perhaps with an animal’s vast gaze.
Lovers, if the beloved were not there
blocking the view, are close to it, and marvel…
As if by some mistake, it opens for them
behind each other… But neither can move past
the other, and it changes back to World.
Forever turned toward objects, we see in them
the mere reflection of the realm of freedom,
which we have dimmed. Or which some animal
mutely, serenely, looks us through and through.
That is what fate means: to be opposite,
to be opposite and nothing else forever.
If the animal moving toward us so securely
in a different direction had our kind of
consciousness — , it would wrench us around and drag us
along its path. But it feels its life as boundless,
unfathomable, and without regard
to its own condition: pure, like its outward gaze
And where we see the future, it sees all time
and itself within all time, forever healed.
3 thoughts on “And Freedom, Oh Freedom…”
That one really has a lot in it! Enjoyed it!
Jeff
Though it may not seem like it, I am often reluctant to add onto one of your blogs, especially if it is something that corroborates the essence of the day’s message, since it is usually so eloquently stated already. Yet here I am again, doing exactly that.
In my photography classes I spend the first hour of the first class in explaining how humans are hardwired to see specific objects while remaining blind to the environment around that object. I suggest that our ancestors were fixated on single things as a matter of survival. While hunting, the prey was of critical importance or in the arena of safety, they were watchful for an enemy. The background of the object in view was of no consequence nor was the shadow of that object or the reflection or the nuance of light falling across the object’s surface. These elements of the environment were superfluous to the gathering of food or the safety of the tribe. Yet these pieces of the world are there, in plain sight and in photography, the camera “sees” them just as it “sees” the image of the object where we have focused our attention.
When we can begin to view our environment the way our camera sees, the world opens up. Much as Rilke describes the human limitation with regard to noting the world, learning from our camera can allow us to understand and engage with the world on a completely different level. This expansion of our line of sight can only offer us new perspectives that will increase our knowledge and offer us ways of connecting to nature where we have, over centuries, limited that connection to both those objects we seek and turned our gaze inwards where we fixate on ourselves. Rilke’s insight is spot on.
I have enjoyed photography for many years, in part for the reason that you give. The lens ability to capture “reality” that is missed entirely, or that vanishes in the succession of sense experience too quickly for proper appreciation — makes a photograph a cherished artifact.