Modersohn-Becker died in childbirth, which led Rilke to write one of his most powerful, devastating and angriest poems, "Requiem for a Friend". In it, he denounces, among others, her husband and even the manner in which love itself manifests as a desire to possess. https://twitter.com/rebeca6169/status/1335011421667602433

Unfortunately, too many know Rilke only from his early poems and his "Letters to a Young Poet". Not enough know *this* Rilke:

"But now I must accuse:
not the man who withdrew you from yourself
(I cannot find him; he looks like everyone),
but in this one man, I accuse: all men."

"Requiem" is a profoundly disturbing and anguished poem, and should be read alongside "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" in that both deal with the death of a woman who, in so many words, is better off dead than being pulled back into the world of the so-called living, which Rilke

regards as essentially fraudulent, where nothing is real, everything is interpreted, appearance. As Robert Hass writes, "[that suffocation] flares in the brilliant anger of the 'Duino Elegies' - in the Fourth, for example, where the images that the world presents to him seem so

much like a bad play that he swears he'd prefer a real puppet theater..."

"Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart's
curtain? It rose: the scenery of farewell.
Easy to recognize. The well-known garden,
which swayed a little. Then the dancer came.

Not *him*. Enough! However lightly he moves
he's costumed, made up - an ordinary man
who hurries home and walks in through the kitchen.
I won't endure these half-filled human masks;
better, the puppet. It at least is full.
I'll put up with the stuffed skin, the wire, the face

that is nothing but appearance..."

When Rilke writes, "...the scenery of farewell. Easy to recognize", he is indicting the manner in which the human drama is rehearsed and repeated, acted from a script, lazy, inauthentic, where we are understudies in our own lives,

repeating ad infinitum lives already prefabricated and staged for us, who slip into roles already written out and predetermined. His fury and frustration boil over when he veritably screams at the dancer: "Not *him*. Enough! However lightly he moves he's costumed, made up -

an ordinary man who hurries home and walks in through the kitchen." The dancer is, after all, nothing more than a mere man with a domestic little life, which recalls the moment in "Requiem" where Rilke writes, "For somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life

and the great work." And when he writes, "I won't endure these half-filled human masks; better, the puppet. It at least is full", he is saying he would rather have a fully-realized fiction, than the half-fictional lives we lead, pretending they are real.

In the Tenth Elegy, Rilke goes even further, and thunders with a description of what would later come to be understood as the vulgarity of kitsch:

"And the shooting-gallery’s targets of prettified happiness,
which jump and kick back with a tinny sound

when hit by some better marksman. From cheers to chance
he goes staggering on, as booths with all sorts of attractions
are wooing, drumming, and bawling. For adults only
there is something special to see: how money multiplies, naked,

right there on stage, money’s genitals, nothing concealed,
the whole action - educational, and guaranteed
to increase your potency...

It is difficult not to think about modern life's commandment that we must be deliriously and preferably unconsciously happy at all costs,

costs paid for, of course, with actual cash, "money's genitals," spurred on by self-help pronouncements that proliferate on this very site, where increasingly "nothing [is] concealed" and our so-called personal lives are pornographically exposed for all to see, and "happiness"

itself is a whore, all you have to do is pay its price. It is almost as if Rilke, nearly 100 years before its advent, predicted the existence of social media and the vulgarity and kitsch of late-stage capitalism.

Hass remarks "...how passionately Rilke had argued that the life

we live every day is not life." One can only imagine what Rilke would have made of the lives we lead on social media, of "the half-filled masks" we put on and present as fraudulent avatars of ourselves in ever more fictionalized fashion.

In the First Elegy, Rilke, now anguished, writes:

"And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note
of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and already the knowing animals are aware

that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world."

It is in this context, the recurring motif in Rilke's mature poetry that insists "the life we live every day is not life," that "we are not really at home in our interpreted world," that his "Requiem" comes into focus.

I quote the first stanza in its entirety:

"I have my dead, and I have let them go,
and was amazed to see them so contented,
so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful,
so unlike their reputation. Only you
return; brush past me, loiter, try to knock

against something, so that the sound reveals
your presence. Oh don’t take from me what I
am slowly learning. I’m sure you have gone astray
if you are moved to homesickness for anything
in this dimension. We transform these Things;

they aren’t real, they are only the reflections
upon the polished surface of our being."

Perhaps there is a late-Romantic morbidity in the subtext which proposes that Paula is better off dead and staying dead. But I don't think that's right, or at least it's not the whole story.

That our world is "interpreted," that "we transform these Things; they aren't real, they are only the reflections upon the polished surface of our being" is something that Nietzsche, in particular, had laid out long before, and with whom Rilke had a personal connection via his

relationship with Lou Andreas-Salomé, who was Rilke's lover and whom Nietzsche's tried unsuccessfully to woo (Rilke was, in his very poetic and gentlemanly way, what we would today call "a ladies' man," greatly admired and adored by many women).

Further, Freud was at that time elucidating the degree to which "Things," as Rilke calls them, are essentially a cognitive construct and projection. As Anais Nin elegantly and succinctly put it, "We do not see things as they are - we see them as we are."

In other words, Rilke's contention that our world is essentially "not real," is not a mere poetic conceit, but an idea that was very much in the cultural consciousness of his time, and which is a foundational idea of what we now regard as modernism.

As for being "at home in being dead," it is another way of saying that the dead, unlike us, and like Rilke's "angels" of the "Duino Elegies," are real, complete and fully realized.

Decades later, Sylvia Plath would conclude her poem "Tale of a Tub" by making a similar point:

"In this particular tub, two knees jut up
like icebergs, while minute brown hairs rise
on arms and legs in a fringe of kelp; green soap https://twitter.com/GabeBlessing/status/1332906595676790785?s=20

navigates the tidal slosh of seas
breaking on legendary beaches; in faith
we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail
among sacred islands of the mad till death
shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real."

Unlike Rilke, in "Tale", Plath insists that we must invent

the tall tales of our lives in order to "disguise the constant horror [of the real] in a coat of many-colored fictions". As Nietzsche wrote, "We have art in order not to die of the truth." But it would be difficult to believe that Rilke, being a poet, would not agree with both

Plath and Nietzsche. He does write, after all, "better, the puppet. It at least is full." And in "Requiem," which among other things is a wonderful example of creative art criticism of enormous sensitivity, Rilke describes how Paula's work was able to capture something

of the essence of "Things" which are otherwise inaccessible to us simply because we don't see them, blinded as we are by the "ancient enmity between our daily lives and the great work," and by our inability to express our seeing when we are "costumed, made up" and "half-filled."

In contrast, Rilke describes Paula's painting in terms of fullness:

"For that is what you understood: ripe fruits.
You set them before the canvas, in white bowls,
and weighed out each one’s heaviness with your colors.
Women too, you saw, were fruits; and children, molded

from inside, into the shapes of their existence.
And at last you saw yourself as a fruit, you stepped
out of your clothes and brought your naked body
before the mirror, you let yourself inside
down to your gaze; which stayed in front, immense,

and didn’t say: I am that; no: this is.
So free of curiosity your gaze
had become, so unpossessive, of such true
poverty, it had no desire even
for your yourself; it wanted nothing: holy."

That is extraordinary, and the axis around which the voluptuousness of this text revolves

is the line, "and didn't say: I am that; no: this is." It recalls Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," a profoundly modernist idea of art and its self-sufficiency and independence, which would eventually lead inexorably from figurative, referential art to non-referential,

abstract art, a path down which Paula, and Rilke's beloved Cézanne, where already walking. No, this isn't that, a ripe fruit. This is this. It exists as its own Thing. It is real. This was of immense significance for Rilke, for some years before, due at least in part to his

relationship with Rodin as his secretary, he set out to change his writing completely, which he accomplished via the writing and publication of his "Neue Gedichte." Almost overnight, Rilke transformed himself from a Romantic into a Modernist poet.

As he said, he wanted to capture "not feelings, but things I had felt." Probably the best example of this new style of writing is his famous "The Panther," which is stunning in its immediacy, power, and careful and detailed observation.

Rilke stated that he wanted to do with his poetry what Rodin did with stone, to sculpt words into shape. Thus "The Panther" has the quality of a moving sculpture, and an objective, observational language that is far removed from Rilke's earlier, more outwardly emotive verse.

In fact, he called these new poems "Dinggedichte", or "thing-poems." In Paula, he found a kindred spirit, who accomplished through her painting what Rilke tried to capture in his poetry: the act of seeing, as far removed as possible from that "interpreted world" he so disdained.

And so it was that Paula's death not only pained Rilke for having lost a dear friend and fellow artist; it incensed him as he felt that she died as a direct result of the possessiveness of a man who "withdrew [her] from [herself]."

The following stanza is brutal, resentful and positively seethes with rage:

"For this suffering has lasted far too long;
none of us can bear it; it is too heavy -
this tangled suffering of spurious love
which, building on convention like a habit,

calls itself just, and fattens on injustice.
Show me a man with a right to his possession.
Who can posses what cannot hold its own self,
but only, now and then, will blissfully
catch itself, then quickly throw itself
away, like a child playing with a ball.

As little as a captain can hold the carved
Nike facing outward from his ship’s prow
when the lightness of her godhead suddenly
lifts her up, into the bright sea-wind:
so little can one of us call back the woman
who, now no longer seeing us, walks on

along the narrow strip of her existence
as though by miracle, in perfect safety -
unless, that is, he wishes to do wrong."

When Rilke writes, "this tangled suffering of spurious love which, building on convention like a habit, calls itself just, and fattens on injustice",

he is not mincing words - the earlier restraint is gone, replaced with a righteous rage - not because she was loved by another man who indirectly caused her death, but because his love was "spurious", "[built] on convention like a habit",

and "[called] itself just, and [fattened] on injustice." As quoted earlier, Rilke couldn't be more clear or direct: "but in this one man, I accuse: all men." And he goes further, "Show me a man with a right to his possession." Finally, Rilke lowers the boom:

"so little can one of us call back the woman... unless, that is, he wishes to do wrong." I cannot conceive of a more damning indictment, and I can hardly imagine what Paula's widower must have felt when he read those lines. I hope he suffered horribly.

And it is from here that Rilke segues into nothing less than his philosophy of love found throughout all of his late poetry:

"For this is wrong, if anything is wrong:
not to enlarge the freedom of a love
with all the inner freedom one can summon.

We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting each other go. For holding on
comes easily; we do not need to learn it."

Shocking in its directness, expressed with absolute authority and conviction, there exists no verse that is as fundamental for humans to understand as this.

This is the Rilke I love - not the Rilke of his early poetry, which frankly now sounds dated and trite, nor the Rilke of "Letters to a Young Poet," with its "sometimes sanctimonious tone," as Hass put it, but the unsparing, direct, sometimes brutal, even furious Rilke.

The moments of great beauty and transcendence are still there, but they are always earned, without eschewing the great difficulties and even horrors of existence, and as such they are never banal or facile as in much of his early poetry.

As Hass wrote, "the 'Duino Elegies' are an argument against our lived, ordinary lives." But this is also true of much of Rilke's mature work. As he writes at the end of "Archaic Torso of Apollo": "You must change your life." Perhaps more than any other poet,

Rilke actually *argues* with the reader, confronts him, challenges him with something to the effect of: "You can't keep living a scripted, costumed, made up life which, building on convention like a habit, calls itself just, and fattens on injustice."

And this leads me to Luce Irigaray, of all people, the "French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst and cultural theorist." Her now-famous essay (at least in certain circles), "When Our Lips Speak Together", reads, in the context of what we've been

exploring, like an exegesis on the central theme of Rilke's late work. It's remarkable the way the first three paragraphs mirror Rilke's "argument", if one wants to call it that. Keeping in mind his line, "It rose: the scenery of farewell. Easy to recognize",

we read Irigaray's own extraordinary text:

"If we keep on speaking the same language together, we’re going to reproduce the same history. Begin the same old stories all over again. Don’t you think so? Listen: all round us, men and women sound just the same. The same discussions,

the same arguments, the same scenes. The same attractions and separations. The same difficulties, the same impossibility of making connections. The same... Same... Always the same.

If we keep on speaking sameness, if we speak to each other as men have been doing for centuries,

as we have been taught to speak, we’ll miss each other, fail ourselves. Again… Words will pass through our bodies, above our heads. They’ll vanish, and we’ll be lost. Far off, up high. Absent from ourselves: we’ll be spoken machines, speaking machines...

How can I touch you if you’re not there? Your blood has become their meaning. They can speak to each other, and about us. But what about us? Come out of their language. Try to go back through the names they’ve given you. I’ll wait for you, I’m waiting for myself. Come back.

It’s not so hard. You stay here, and you won’t be absorbed into familiar scenes, worn-out phrases, routine gestures. Into bodies already encoded within a system. Try to pay attention to yourself. To me. Without letting convention, or habit, distract you."

This is astonishing. Although it is regarded as a seminal feminist text, it can be read by any human being as a call to live a life of your own, beyond convention and habit, beyond the language that speaks us into an already written script and predetermined roles,

but rather one which we speak on our own behalf and as far as possible, invent ourselves, for ourselves, and for each other. No more "the same difficulties, the same impossibility of making connections." It's a call for a radical freedom from "speaking the same language together"

while "[reproducing] the same history," so that we "won’t be absorbed into familiar scenes, worn-out phrases, routine gestures."

It is not difficult to imagine Rilke writing exactly this. For the Rilke I love, is the philosopher-poet of radical love and radical freedom.