15 Jeffs and the Jackson 5

Before masticating this octopus*,

Two confession about last week’s newsletter:

1. I mistyped Etel Adnan’s last name. It is Adnan, even if autocorrect doesn’t think so.

2. In last week’s intro, I wrote that this draft had been “arguably lugubrious.” It wasn’t lugubrious—maybe more didactic—but I was swept up by the lumpy glubness that “arguable lugubriousness” connotes. Sometimes sounds should win.

For these, I am sorry. As a penance, I’m covering for a sixth grade music class this afternoon. Last time I subbed for this class, half the kids introduced themselves as “Jeff.” Picture me leading 15 Jeffs in an analysis of Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye,” and you have my afternoon.

Was this forwarded to you?

Words & Letters

A few weeks ago, I came home to mail. Not tax documents or credit card promotions, mail. A whole letter with my whole name on it, written by a whole hand. And it was weighty.

I opened it:

A friend had mailed me this: her annotated version of Rainer Maria Rilke’s First Elegy. It was glorious. Commensurate feelings include: Wearing a loved-one’s well-loved sweater, listening to a James Taylor cover, finding a new spot in an old neighborhood, and tasting homemade marmalade.

Whatever it took to become a person to whom friends mail annotated versions of Rilke’s First Elegy, I am grateful for. I will do it all again and again to land exactly, precisely, here.

This is what I hope this newsletter to be: letters of annotated poems. Ideas made into gifts—given handles, if you will. I hope you hold them.

So, Why Don’t We Annotate Some Rilke?

Note: Strap in, people. I’m going to try to say some stuff.

For those who weren’t in an English department recently, Rainer Maria Rilke and last week’s Virginia Woolf are both modernists, along with Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and many other highly stressed, sepia-toned individuals. Modernism here is the literary movement in the late 1800s/early 1900s that opened writing up to the dirtiness of the world: industrialization, war, disillusionment.

It was modernism that took the beautiful glass vase of Romanticism, smashed it on the ground, and took a photo. Instead of “a host of golden daffodils / Fluttering and dancing in the breeze” (Wordsworth), we had Eliot: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?”). Also, those nice four-lined stanzas or iambic sonnets? Those are out. Free verse is in. 🤘

But, as you’ll soon note, this crap can feel hard to understand. Whoever is telling you that they’re skimming The Waste Land—or that Gertrude Stein is moderately comprehensible—is lying. (Is a rose a rose?) Modernism is tough, and it’s tough because it’s reorienting the entire landscape of writing.

One big shift is the advent of Imagism. William Carlos Williams (of Red Wheelbarrow fame) had a mantra: “No ideas, but in things,” meaning that we’re moving from the communication of packaged morals or ideas into carving raw images into the page so that the reader can sort them out herself.

Is this a cop-out? Maybe. Is it closer to reality? Yeah! Why? Because in reality, we don’t live in tidy narratives. We live in moments, and we construct the narratives as we go. We make up our upstairs neighbor’s personality based on their footfalls. We tell stories from snippets of overheard conversations. Life is the beads, and we’re out here stringing the necklaces.

And sometimes, we experience the completely incomprehensible—that which completely evades storylines. To the modernists, the incomprehensible was World War I. They saw that war doesn’t end with a moral in a rhyming couplet, but is (in the words of Eliot) “a heap of broken images.” When Imagists write in fragments, it’s because they’re trying to mimic a feeling of a life made of fragments.

So that’s Imagism. With Imagism comes consciousness. A painting analogy: Think of Rembrandt versus Monet. Rembrandt wants you to see the subject of the painting, whereas Monet wants you to see the object of the painting: the fact, for example, that there is paint. Rembrandt would love for you to forget about paint. (Do I know this as a fact? No. But let’s keep rolling.)

In this analogy, the paint=thought (in contrast to other movements, where the paint=language or the paint=physical page). According to many modernists, when I see an image, I am not actually interacting with the image itself. I am interacting with the interpretation of the image in my thought, in a huge landscape of other thoughts that create contexts, biases, and interpretations.

So there’s our background on modernism: heaps of broken images and the admission that the poem is not a fact, but a manifestation of consciousness.

Which brings us to Rilke:

The tiniest bit on Rainer Maria Rilke’s life: He is German! This work is in translation. I highly recommend finding other translations and comparing them, or simply learning German. He’s very influenced by painters Rodin and Cézanne, and to quote a quote: “Where others have found a unifying principle for themselves in religion or morality or the search for truth, Rilke found his in the search for impressions and the hope these could be turned into poetry... For him Art was what mattered most in life.”

This poem is the first of a series of ten elegies that Rilke began in 1912 and finished after a long period of war-related writer’s block in 1922. So, since “Duino Elegies” took ten years to write, I feel super proud that this newsletter is only four days late.

A recommendation: Simply fill your pockets with what is good. If you’d prefer, you can read my annotated version here to see what I was thinking about as I prepared to write about this poem.

Let’s Read

Note: I’m actually going to hyperlink this thing—go ahead and pop it into another browser and use it to read along with the analysis!

Analysis: A Trial & Error Approach to Eternal Satisfaction

We’re going to do a little bit of role-play. Imagine, if you can, that you are lonely. Perhaps you want to find a sense of connection, but not only to the world, but to Truth. You want to know that something exists beyond your chai latte and 5 o’clock deadline, but you’re not sure exactly what that is. Now, rather than, say, going to SoulCycle or redownloading Hinge, you exile yourself into an Italian castle and begin to pursue wild images of metaphysics and the afterlife. As you ruminate, you flip through options: what will bring me satisfaction?

So, you start a literary science experiment in the form of a poem.

Goal: Satisfaction Through A Lasting Connection With Immortal Truth

Strategy One: Crying Out To Angels

Level of Success: 2/10

Analysis: Dang. The Angels are no use. Partially because they can’t seem to hear us. Partially because, in Rilke’s conception, these beings operate in an entirely world than ours; while the human still seems to function in the visible, Rilke writes: “…the Angel of the Elegies is that creature in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible, which we perform, appears already complete” (Letter, 1925). In other words, as much as we try to ask angels for help, they’re just too realized. They don’t care about your chai latte. Also they’re too scary!

Strategy Two: Engaging with The Earth

Level of Success: 3/10

Analysis: So, it turns out we can’t actually engage with the earth. We’re not like those cool, “sly animals” who get to have all these immediate and exciting experiences, free from analytical thought or rumination. We’re stuck in “the interpreted world.” The best we can do is to engage with, say, “some tree on a slope, to which our eyes returned day after day” or “yesterday’s street,” but those all exist in past tense—we’re still only engaging with the memory of those things, not the things themselves.

Strategy Three: Taking A Lover

Level of Success: 2/10

Analysis: Lovers should be helpful, right? Wrong!! Lovers “only use each other to mask their fates.” Oof. Not only do lovers distract you from your goal (“Weren’t you always distracted / by expectation, as though each such moment /presaged a beloved’s coming?”), you’re also distracted from your lover: “where would you keep her, / with all those big strange thoughts in you / going and coming and sometimes staying all night?” Being in love with someone may feel like intimacy, but nope—you’re just using someone else to avoid yourself.

Strategy Four: Losing A Lover

Level of Success: 5/10

Analysis: Much better! In losing your lover, at least you’re acknowledging the situation: that you only loved the idea of them. Now, your Lover is immortalized in your little broken heart—a broken heart that is “so much deeper in love than those whom love allayed.” You might be in pain, but at least it’s a deep and immortal pain. Nice! Furthermore, as an independent person, you’re leveling up in Rilke’s book: nothing is there to distract you, but you’re still in motion: “trembling, [standing] free.” Abiding is nowhere, ladies!

Strategy Five: Listening

Level of Success: 5/10

Analysis: Hey, it worked for the saints! But don’t get crazy: you’re not actually listening for God’s voice. You’re listening for energy—for potential. You’re not listening to silence; you’re listening for the way a silence can hold the power of “unbroken news” or the way an inscription can “echo deep within you.” Don’t get caught up on ideas, but sensations.

Strategy Six: Death :( But Like In An Immortal Way :)

Level of Success: 8/10

Analysis: Look, it is strange to dwell on earth no more. Rilke admits that there are some great perks to life on earth: “one’s own name,” “wishing one’s wishes,” “giving roses.” All are great! But we’re here for something deeper, so we’ll just have to take the hit. The benefit of shifting from the visible world to the invisible one? We stop with all this distinction—people, ideas, time all can begin to blend into an eternal current; even life and death become one in the same! So it’s not all that bad.

Strategy Seven: Vibration

Level of Success: 9/10

Analysis: So things don’t really help. Neither do God or Angels. And people are a big thumbs-down. But what about all the energy springing from these factors—the felt effect of listening for God or losing people? You know, like “stunned Space?” or “vibrations [in that] void?” What if we could exist in an electric nothingness? What if all of these specifics are replaced by spirit? Rilke seems relatively content with this, calling vibrations “rapture and solace and help.”

So, vibration has it! For now. There are nine more elegies.

Whew.

We got through it! Take a break:

“Young owls sleep face down, mainly due to the weight of their heads.”

Some Light Fare from Fran Lebowitz:

Writing Prompt: Make your own list of ideas and notions. My contribution?

Idea: Pie

Notion: Pi Day

Idea: Croissant

Notion: Everything Croissant from Poppy’s

*Cathy Park Hong’s “Engine Empire” includes the line: “A man tried to devour a whole writhing octopus as it suctioned around his face and head, his teeth struggling to masticate this all too living body. But he gave up in exhaustion.” This is what writing about Rilke felt like. This is me giving up in exhaustion. Let the octopus take me.

Please let me know what you loved from the poem, and tell me how wrong this analysis is! Remember: leave your lovers and pay attention to vibrations.

To all our terrifying angels,

Robiny

Croissant of the Week:

To be honest, I took my eye off the croissant ball this week. I had to settle with an Everything Croissant from Poppy’s Café in Prospect Heights. It was Fine.

Freshness: 3/10

Internal Texture: Cream Cheese!?

External Texture: Seeds, 6/10

Flavor: 7/10

Overall: Cream Cheese and a Half