by Christopher Hall
Certain essays hit you like a thunderbolt. As someone who has suffered from episodes of debilitating anxiety, I found Freud’s concept of the death-drive as outlined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to be a moment of pure revelation when I first read it years ago. I don’t know if there’s anything in Darwino-capitalo-materialist social consensus that specifically encourages anxiety – I have my suspicions – but the focus on Eros as the sole driver of human activity meets a needed counterpart in Freud’s Thanatos. The human body and mind want calm, and the ultimate calm is death. “Das Ziel alles Lebens ist der Tod” –“Ziel” in English could mean something as pedestrian as “destination,” but Freud’s sense seems to have more of the sense of “goal.” All of this getting and earning and fornicating, the centers of evolutionary and capitalist life, are utterly exhausting – and not the good kind of exhaustion which comes after a day of labour, but the kind that comes the moments we are too tired to sleep. If human life is linear, we are nevertheless trapped in endless cycles big and small, and the most impactful one must be the constant interchange between agitation and torpor as we try to find some equilibrium.
And surely this is echoed in nature itself. When September comes, I struck most with the contrast between my life and the life outside the window. Nature, of course, is preparing for slumber, but my year, with the beginning of the fall semester, is just ramping up. In the moments when the agitations and activities of spring and summer are calming down, I find myself more active, more agitated, driven to a restlessness that often has no clear source or object. The great and eternal – though not, thanks to climate change, eternally unchanging – systems of flux which bring about in nature perpetual resurrection take place within a universe which itself, if we believe in the Heat Death theory, has a definite beginning and end. Inevitably, there is a kind of stasis in spring and summer – the year has settled, so to speak. Fall and winter – where the new year starts and, also, new semesters begin for me – are moments of change and agitation taking place within a setting where the death-drive is asserting its dominance.
German poet Rainier Maria Rilke published his collection The Book of Images in 1902. He was 26; he published a revised edition 4 years later, in which the poems I’m going to discuss appear. Rilke had not quite fully developed the Dinggedicht, “thing-poem” style that would be showcased fully later in his two New Poems collections, where we find what are likely his most famous lyrics, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” and “The Panther.” In these poems, time is annulled by the strict, obstinate attention of the poet on the object in question, seeing every detail and their deep resonances within the human subject with a clarity that’s nearly unbearable. This triumph over time is not, I think, what Rilke is generally trying to achieve in his earlier work; time here is the object, but attention can only be focused on the moments of agitation and calm that outline its movement. (The translations I use in this essay are from Edward Snow, which I prefer because of their overall lack of fussiness.)
The key to Rilke’s “Herbsttag” – “Autumn Day” – is the shift from the imperative mood to the future tense:
Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your long shadows on the sundials,
and on the meadows let the winds go free.
Command the last fruits to be full;
give them just two more southern days,
urge them on to completion and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.
Who has no house now, will never build one.
Who is alone now, will long remain so,
will stay awake, read, write long letters
and will wander restlessly up and down
the tree-lines streets, when the leaves are drifting.
The vatic poet commands the Lord – of all people – to, well, command. The nested action sequence enacts the “urge” depicted in the lines, and marks a deep contrast to the sudden stoppage of change and time in the third stanza: “never build one,” “will long remain so.” When there is flurry, there must also come the point when we understand things to be determined and set. The wandering “restlessly” and the final image of slow action, “when the leaves are drifting,” are moments of quiet, soft resistance within the great settlement of the year.
Motion and stasis are at the core of “Herbst,” “Autumn:”
The leaves are falling, falling as if from far off,
As if in the heavens distant gardens withered;
They fall with gestures that say “no.”
And in the nights the heavy earth falls
From all the stars into aloneness.
We are all falling. The hand is falling.
And look at the others: it is in them all.
And yet there is One who holds this falling
With infinite softness in his hands.
What Rilke achieves with the alternation of moods and tenses in “Autumn Day” are enacted here by something simpler: repetition. Motion and cycle are encased in one thing, paralleling the withering gardens of heaven, eternal but eternally changing. This is a prayer against time, to see behind all of this falling the first cause, the Unmoved Mover, who can animate, and whose hand, unlike that of the poet, holds and does not fall.
September will end and October begin this coming week. Fall is beautiful, of course, like a swan song, rendered all the more beautiful because – and I’m trying my hardest not to directly echo Game of Thrones here – we know what is coming. Rilke’s “Ende Des Herbstes,” “End of Autumn,” must be read as a kind of riposte to the atmosphere of the previous two poems:
I have seen for some time
How everything is changing
Something rises and acts
And kills and causes grief
From time to the next
All the gardens are not the same;
From the yellowing to the
Golden slow decay;
How long that path has been.
Now I stand amid emptiness
And gaze down all avenues.
Almost to the distant oceans
I can see the solemn ponderous
Relentlessly denying sky.
There are simple cadences and diction here, and both the garden of “Herbst” and the streets of “Herbsttag” emerge in darker imagery. There is no heavenly sustenance of change – just decay. No potentially pleasant wandering through the leaf-lined avenues, only a gaze at emptiness. The “denying” – “verwehrenden” – late autumn sky is in direct contrast to the far-off heaven where the One holds all movement; this sky denies you, prevent any such soothing envisioning. The verbs here provide no structure, there is little precision, “something” kills and causes grief. If the other two poems find in Autumn the declining pleasantries of the year’s pleasure principle, the death-drive here prevails, and renders clear the deep risk of Freudian calm; there is a calm after which there can be no Spring.
Linearity triumphs; cycles end. But I don’t give this a whole lot of thought, even at this time of year. Fall is, after all, beautiful, and weirdly so (weird beauty is the best beauty); the leaves give off their strange color and light even as they shed themselves of the chlorophyll that sustains them. After all, no one needs to get too far beyond the pleasure principle, not when wandering restlessly down the avenues, “Wenn die Blatter treiben.”
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