Sonnet 190

A doe of purest white upon green grass
wearing two horns of gold appeared to me
between two streams beneath a laurel’s shade
at sunrise in that season not yet ripe.

The sight of her was so sweetly austere
that I left all my work to follow her,
just like a miser who in search of treasure
with pleasure makes his effort bitterless.

‘No one touch me,’ around her lovely neck
was written out in diamonds and in topaz,
‘It pleased my Caesar to create me free.’

The sun by now had climbed the sky midway
my eyes were tired but not full from looking
when I fell into water, and she vanished.

Petrarch

 http://nessunmitochi.blogspot.com/

During the printing of the Elegies, Rilke explained this in a note on the proof sheets:

As if it were the label on a druggist’s urn; abbreviation of Subrisio Saltat(orum). The labels on these receptacles almost always appear in abbreviated form.

For the angel of the Elegies, all the towers and palaces of the past are existent because they have long been invisible, and the still-standing towers and bridges of our reality are already invisible, although still (for us) physically lasting….All the worlds in the universe are plunging into the invisible as into their next-deeper reality; a few stars intensify immediately and pass away into the infinite consciousness of the angels-, others are entrusted to beings who slowly and laboriously transform them, in whose terrors and delights they attain their next invisible realization. We, let it be emphasized once more, we, in the sense of the Elegies, are these transformers of the earth; our entire existence, the flights and plunges of our love, everything, qualifies us for this task (beside which there is, essentially, no other.)
Rilke to Witold Hulewicz, November 1925

He says everybody at Bellvue is somebody who lost love somewhere along the line. The ones that love means the most to get sick, a lot of them die. It doesn’t take very long, either. (Saroyan, p. 152)

? i am sleeping on it. i have been writing my way through my dreams in real time – not afterward but during.

The bird is a creature that has a very special feeling of trust in the external world, as if she knew that she is one with its deepest mystery. That is why she sings in it as if she were singing within her own depths; that is why we so easily receive a birdcall into our own depths; we seem to be translating it without residue into our emotion; indeed, it can for a moment turn the whole world into inner space, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between her heart and the world’s.

(Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salome, February 1914)

My name isn’t really Clara, but Thea. That’s not in my passport. My religious upbringing, as I’ve told you, has been strictly orthodox and I’m sure I correspond to what my mother and father think a good daughter ought to be.

I have suffered a great many bodily ills, the worst an irritation which has persecuted me like a waking nightmare for two years. Another torment is my over-developed sensitivity. I react violently to sudden noises, intense light (I’m blind in one eye) or unpleasant smells. The normal pressure of a dress, for instance, can drive me mad with pain. When I was fifteen, I married a young Austrian actor. I wanted to start in the theater, but the marriage was unhappy, I had a child who died, and I went back to the school in Switzerland. Now the dry twilight rattles above the child’s head. I can’t go on. I cry now.

My glass eye also weeps.

I pretend I am a saint or a martyr. I can sit for hours at the big table in the closed room (where we played the forbidden records.) I can sit for hours gazing at the palms of my hands. Once a redness appeared out of my left palm, but no blood. I pretend I am sacrificing myself for my brothers. I am saving them from mortal danger. I pretend ecstasy and speak to the Holy Virgin. I pretend faith and disbelief, defiance and doubt. I pretend I am a rejected sinner with an insupportable burden of guilt. Suddenly I reject the guilt and forgive myself. It’s all a game. I am pretending.

Within the game, I am the same, sometimes extremely tragic, sometimes boundlessly exhilarated. All with the same small effort. I confided in a doctor (I’ve been to so many doctors.) He told me that my dreaming and idle life were damaging my psyche. He prescribed specific things that would force me to leave the prison of my egocentricity. Order. Self-discipline. Tasks. Corsets. My father, who is so gentle, so wise and coolly calculating, says that I should not worry, that everything exists in all things, and living is a torment that one overcomes with resignation, but preferably without cynicism. I am not keen on that kind of effort, so I’m thinking of going even further into my games, taking them more seriously, if you understand what I mean.

(from The Magic Lantern)

so the bat quivers across the porcelain of evening.

…so we live here, forever taking leave

from rilke’s eighth elegy

Her face is as white as a piece of paper and she doesn’t even talk; and she spends the whole day as if she were in a dream or something, half asleep and half awake. Why, yesterday I put my hand on her forehead like this, and she was burning up. And you’d just finished sprinkling holy water on her to shoo the spirits away. That old man is the one to blame for all this-he doesn’t believe in anything, not even so much as the mother that bore him. We’ve got to pray, we’ve got to ask God to help. That child is not well. Tomorrow first thing in the morning I’m going to go out and find me some ironweed leaves and some rue to work against the spell, and make her a bath to sit in. She’s thirteen, and that’s a dangerous, dangerous age. I’ll tell you, she might be going to turn out to be a medium. But anyway-this is a hard test, a test of what’s in store for her to bear. These days she spends the livelong day, her whole life, you might say, looking out the hall window. Like there was something to see out that window-and you can’t even see the street…But I tell you, the devil himself is in this house. Tell me the truth-do you pray every night? Well, then, from now on you better not sleep so much. Look at that face and tell me it doesn’t look like the face of the dead…May God forgive me for what I’ve said, and for what I didn’t say, too, and ought to have. You’ve got to fight it. My advice to you would be for you all to move out of this house. I believe there’s some evil or something buried here…Some evil, or an evil eye, or some kind of hex or other. Her bed might be right on top of where it’s buried, that might be what it is. Move her bed, or at least make her sleep with her head down at the foot. Look at that face, what does it look like to you?…Give her lots of spiritual waters to drink. A little bottle of Turn-the-tables.

The Palace of the White Skunks, Reinaldo Arenas

who gave benign answers and reassuring blessings. every time i confronted god with the realities i witnessed, he turned into something ugly and revolting. a spider-god, a monster…

from ingmar bergman’s winter light, second movie in his ‘trilogy of faith’ or lack thereof, after through a glass darkly, so important…