Must I write? Rilke’s advice to sit outside a café and go within
In the first of his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke advises Franz Xaver Kappus to dedicate his life to poetry only if he feels he ‘must’ write.
There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, “I must,” then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge. Then draw near to nature. Pretend you are the very first man and then write what you see and experience, what you love and lose.
If Kappus effectively digs up such a necessity, he should try to share what he sees, lives, loves, looses. I think it’s the other way round: a poet feels the urge to write because of their buoyant necessity to contemplate. They have such a unique manner to see melancholy, live death, love lust or loose beauty, that it does feel like a duty to share their inner experience. Their ‘must’ is the pain, rather than the pen.
Aligning myself with Derrida’s différance theory, I believe that poetry, writing, or art in general, are nothing but the perfect, sensible ‘signifiers’ for the intelligible, ‘signified’ appreciation from our souls. I might even think that art and contemplation are only the first links of an unlimited chain of deeper ‘signifiers’ because there is no original, ‘transcendental signified’.
At the point at which the concept of différance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (...) become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of différance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to différance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis.
The absolute does not exist. There is no essential ‘must’. There is no ‘very substance to suck out of the bone’ of our existence (Gargantua, Rabelais). So, rather than hoping for the delusive ‘true answer’ Rilke promises, his advice to ‘go within’ should be taken for the journey it offers. This quest will be an endless task for we can always dig deeper into our hearts. It will also get more intimate as we uncover more layers of our singularity.
Reaching to the deepest place of ourselves allow us to connect with arts and people, which is so precious to me, because it makes it possible to share concurrent realities — but that is not to everyone’s liking. John Koenig recently named such a realisation the ‘sonder’, and his definition conveys a feeling of melancholy.
sonder
n. The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
In One, no one and one hundred thousand, Pirandello also narrates how human relationships painfully made him understand that each of us is experiencing their own perception of the other. The différance equally applies to us: there is no essential meness, or youness, or themness — he cries:
The idea that others saw in me one that was not the I whom I knew, one whom they alone could know, as they looked at me from without, with eyes that were not my own, eyes that conferred upon me an aspect destined to remain always foreign to me, although it was one that was in me, one that was my own to them (a “mine,” that is to say, that was not for me!) — a life into which, although it was my own, I had no power to penetrate — this idea gave me no rest.
Yet, I find so much peace in contemplating life through the eyes of another, and so much abnegation in sharing my own perception of it. Although I probably reached the most shallowed roots that stretch to my heart, I dove within, and this is what I dredged up: an enquiry for fleeting moments of sublime simplicity. For the ephemeral, euphoric epiphany that arises when I witness awe-inspiring beauty in the ordinary and unassuming aspects of life. For the soft plenitude filling my heart when I suddenly become aware that the sublime is in everything, everyone and everywhere in-between.
My favourite activity has always been to sit Outside a café and love.
Love the wine I’m drinking.
Love the sun that’s warming.
Love the company I’m enjoying,
Or the book I’m reading.
Love the uncomfortable chair I’m sitting on,
And the wobbly table I’m sitting at.
Love the building nobody’s looking at,
And the street it’s sitting on.
Love the dress of the woman walking by.
Love the two pigeons sharing bread, even dry.
Love the conversation the couple’s having behind.
Love that love is hard to find.
Love there’s a face in the cloud.
Love that couple is speaking too loud.
Love that I can’t read my book,
So, at the building I look.
Love I can see through the window.
I can see someone being lazy.
Love they’re watching bad TV.
Love that it’s a bit chilly now.
Love that it annoys me.
Love the window.
Love the sky.
Love the colours and love the rhymes.
There is only one way: Go within — and tell me: what’s your necessity? I’m curious.
