Nature

…how deeply we are placed on the ground of all transformation, we most changeable ones who walk about with the urge to comprehend everything and (because we’re unable to grasp it) reduce immensity to the action of our heart, for fear that it might destroy us.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 13, 1907 (Part 1)

Early this morning I read about your autumn, and all the colors you brought into your letter were changed back in my feelings and filled my mind to the brim with strength and radiance.

Yesterday, while I was admiring the dissolving brightness of autumn here, you were walking through that other autumn back home, which is painted on red wood, as this one’s painted on silk.

And the one reaches us as much as the other; that’s how deeply we are placed on the ground of all transformation, we most changeable ones who walk about with the urge to comprehend everything and (because we’re unable to grasp it) reduce immensity to the action of our heart, for fear that it might destroy us.

Paul Cezanne. Large pine and read earth. 1895.

If I were to come and visit you two, I would surely also see the pageant of moor and heath, the hovering bright green of the meadows, the birches, with new and different eyes.

Though this transformation is something I’ve completely experienced and shared before, in part of the Book of Hours, nature was then still a general inducement for me, an evocation, an instrument in whose strings my hands found themselves again.

I was not yet sitting before her; I allowed myself to be swept away by the soul that emanated from her; she came over me with her vastness, her grand exaggerated presence, the way prophesy came over Saul; exactly like that.

I walked about and saw, saw not nature but the visions she gave me. How little I would have been able to learn from Cézanne, from van Gogh, then. I can tell how much I’ve changed by the way Cézanne challenges me now.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

COLORS AND WORDS. REALITY

Rilke mentions his book of poems, The Book of Hours: Love poems to God, as a premonition of the transformation he is experiencing in 1907.

Here is a poem from this collection which, I think, gives us a glimpse of what he means (translation by Babette Deutsch, from 2009 edition):

Although, as from a prison walled with hate,
each from his own self labors to be free,
the world yet holds a wonder, and how great!
ALL LIFE IS LIVED: now this comes home to me.
But who, then, lives it? Things that patiently
stand there, like some unfingered melody
that sleeps within a harp as day is going?
Is it the winds, across the waters blowing,
is it the branches, beckoning each to each,
is it the flowers, weaving fragrances,
the aging alleys that reach out endlessly?
Is it the warm beasts, moving to and fro,
is it the birds, strange as they sail from view?
This life — who really lives it? God, do you?

SEEING: we most changeable ones

The rhythms of nature are so varied: some things exist on a time scale for grander than our own, others arise and disappear before our eyes, like waves, or in the course of a single day or season, like flowers.

So what does he mean when he says: “we most changeable ones”?

As we go through life, it is so easy to get caught in the illusion of our own sameness. Our environment changes, but the self seems to be constant.

But when one truly sees, sitting before Nature (like a dog), having let go of this urge to comprehend everything, then all that remains of the self is the fluid, constantly changing vantage point.

Everything is simplified, reduced to a few regular light planes, like the face in a portrait by Manet. And nothing is insignificant and superfluous.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 12, 1907 (Part 1)

These are the days where everything is all around you, luminous, light, barely intimated in the bright air and yet distinct; even what is nearest has the tones of distance about it, is taken away and only shown, instead of being put there, as usual;

Paul Cezanne. Houses at the l’Estaque. 1880.

and all the things that are related to distance—the river, the bridges, the long streets, and the extravagant squares—have been absorbed and hugged close by that distance, are painted upon it, as if on silk.

Paul Cezanne. Bend in Forest Road. 1906.

Edouard Manet. Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets. 1872.

You can feel what a light-green carriage can be on the Pont-Neuf or some red that can’t contain itself, or simply a poster on the fire wall of a pearl-gray group of houses. Everything is simplified, reduced to a few regular light planes, like the face in a portrait by Manet.

And nothing is insignificant and superfluous.

The bouquinistes along the quai are opening their boxes, and the fresh or withered yellow of the books, the violet brown of the volumes, the green of a portfolio: everything is right, is valid, takes part, adds its sound to the ensemble of bright correspondences.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

LANDSCAPE OF WORDS. THE WORK

Another of Rilke’s landscapes, now with a direct comparison to a painting. And not to a landscape even, this would have been too straightforward. To a portrait!

This landscape, including this comparison, was later included, almost word-by-word, in Rilke’s novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge — “work” done not as “work”, just as a fruit of unfolding life.

SEEING PRACTICE: Nature like Paintings

The common sense is to compare paintings to nature: are they true to life? Are they realistic?

But the way we see nature is informed by paintings we see, and let sink deeply into our sense of vision. Do you, too, sometimes feel that the best way to describe what you see in nature is to remind the listener of a painting?