Broken English. Heather McHugh

God, This God, whom they would all find,

      if they'd follow the huge pointing hands

      that reveal Him as He is: enraged.

      A stunningly brutal (one might say sacrilegious) view—based on God's wrath as inscribed in Old Testament accounts—but cruelly foreshortened, to expose its distorting pressure on the human figure. This God has volcanic force, hardness and heat, as if from the center of the earth (where Dante places hell). For man to bear THAT, to bear the inconceivable (which God is, if we take Christianity literally), he must be racked. Its power and its revelations come not from outside, but from his “inmost self,” just as destructive lava erupts from the inmost earth. Who can say which is the ground of which? Does the lava make the earth, or the earth the lava? Does the God inside make the man, or the man make the God inside? If this is spirituality, it will not turn away from the brutal lights of the material world. It recalls Nietzsche's saying, of the universe, “How could we reproach or praise (it)? Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things. It does not strive to imitate man. None of our aesthetic or moral judgments apply to it.”⁵

      The voice of ordinary authority can handle the comprehensible, the graspable, the seizable; but with Rilke the soul does not seize God, the soul is seized into God. What is inmost and what is outermost are equally incomprehensible, and our lives are framed between.

      The Rose Window

      In there: the lazy pacing of their paws

      creates a stillness that's almost dizzying;

      and the way then suddenly one of the cats

      takes the gaze that keeps straying from it

      overpoweringly into its own great eye,—

      and that gaze, as if seized by a whirlpool's

      circle, stays afloat for a little while

      and then sinks and knows itself no longer,

      when this eye, which only seems to rest

      opens and slams shut with a roar

      and tears it all the way inside the blood—:

      in the same way long ago the cathedrals’

      great rose windows would seize a heart

      from the darkness and tear it into God.

      Here the gaze that wants to stray is ours, the onlookers’, and the eye that captures it is at once the eye of an animal and the eye of God. Rilke once again (as in “Archaic Torso of Apollo”) frames the missing human element between stone and star, between fire and fur. The statue's sensual surface in “Archaic Torso,” remember, was compared to everything but the human skin it represents. (Rilke surrounds his absent object the way Capa does—he captures its traces and effects on bystanders, on onlookers, on attendant human being.) In his object (that object so likely to slip into subject, as the statue does, and as the rose window will) we lose ourselves, in an annihilation intimately related to a death; that is why he invokes the wild animal, the dangerous whirlpool. And all of these figures are full of paradox—spirit and flesh, still and dizzying, seeing and seen—the spectator at the same moment seen, and the one reaching out at the same moment seized. All our daily inclination to be idle tourists, to be comfortable believers, our inclination to tame art or spirit or the unspeakable by comprehending it, turns on us. For the uncontainable is everywhere, as Rilke loves to tell us; it is even in ourselves.

      That's why the poem “The Rose Interior” moves from expansion's question (“Where for this Inside is there / an Outside?”) to the poem's final contract (not contraction) of paradox (“until all of summer becomes / a room, a room within a dream”). We mean to keep the dream in its place, in the safety of a stored construct, the comfortable narrative we like to tell ourselves about our lives—it is, we console ourselves, all in our mind, in our sleep, in our night, in our room, in our house. But the dream has us, and not the other way around. The scales are reversed, the thing in us is larger than ourselves. To be seized is to be rapt. Its noun is rapture. We think we have experience in hand, in mind; but then everything we made secure is nothing, and nothing seizes us. This otherness is in us as the hollows are in the hands of the beggars.

      It is for this discovery (the discovery that the true focus of the moment of art is not on an object but on a subject, that the missing center is not in the title but in the reader) that one loves the photographs of Robert Capa so much. One of his most terrible and eloquent photos is of a group of soldiers crossing a minefield. The field is ordinary, the shot is one of a thousand he would have taken and discarded in his life as a photographer on front lines everywhere. But this one is informed by what came after it. It was the last he ever took. It was shot a few hundred feet from the ground which would explode, killing him. That knowledge, coming from the future back into the photograph, informs it terribly for the viewer who knows Capa never saw it printed. As we live, as artists and sensitive readers of art, we cast our object ahead of us, as if it were seizable by will; but we must be seized, ourselves, must be inscribed as we inscribe. There is some at-onceness which is presence—partaking of past and future and something unlocatable, in time—at work in the work that moves us most. In it we recognize the inseparable claims of inward and outward, sayable and unsayable, seeable and unseen.

      My greatest pleasure in studying the “Tour de France” diptych occurred on the edge of the unseen. It occurred in a glimpse that changed all the other moments for me and gave me the jolt of a revealed ideal, glimpse of the stilled thing, absence materialized. Within the rush of my seeing, with its busy intentions and connections, the noise of the before and after, breeze in newspapers, faces looking forward and then looking after, the speed with which presence has gone rushing by—within all that, there is, still, a sign of the presence that stays. In anticipation, you can't see it, though the anticipators have it in mind. Only after the actual bypassing of the bicyclists, only after the brush with the whoosh of the experienced, only, in other words, after THEY see them, can we see it: it was hidden by the postures of looking forward, and revealed by the turn to look after. These witnesses have their backs to the only form of the occasioning object we as readers could see: the stilled apparatus all this reference was about (“art is about something,” says Allen Grossman, “the way a cat's about the house”): image of pure potential, sign seized out of time. It was there all along, the mechanism of the missing subject/object, figure for the art itself, there all along in the photo's window. It is a kind of present for us; over against the occasion as passage, it does not pass. After we have registered the brimming breezes of the passage (subject always moving out of object), we see again, by virtue of still photography's medium, the sign of the mind's abiding occasion: a time that stays as idea, out of the stream of motions in time. Convinced we'd got the point (the object missed, but adumbrated in surroundings), were we, after all, the ones who failed to see?

      One last look at a Rilkean passage, before we close.

      Encounter in the Chestnut Avenue

      He felt the entrance's green darkness

      wrapped coolly around him like a silken cloak

      that he was still accepting and arranging:

      when at the opposite transparent end, far off,

      through green sunlight, as through green windowpanes,

      whitely a solitary shape

      flared up, long remaining distant

      and then finally, the downdriving light

      boiling over it at every step,

      bearing on itself a bright pulsation,

      which in the blond ran shyly to the back.

      But suddenly the shade was deep,

      and nearby eyes lay gazing

      from a clear new unselfconscious face,