In the rain Rilke walks from the streetcar up the slick marble steps into the Museum of Antiquities. He strolls with the stride of a twentieth-century Apollo himself past the Etruscan and Minoan exhibits and into the curtained room where the Greek fragments are displayed.
The broken fragment of some statuary, perhaps Apollo, rises in the morning and gives inspiration to spoken words, the words carrying the import of prophecy, and if sung, taking on the qualities of music. For the sick, the hearing of the right words poetic, musical as poetry is music, pre-requisite as prophecy must be, and healing like medicine, like good medicine, what is needed to heal the broken spirit, to make the breath full and ample again so that to still the tracing of the thumping heart, the life blood surging through the veins, the best words might be sung in ways worthy of their import.
Only the torso of the god Apollo remains, the fragment, nonetheless, of prophecy, music, medicine, and poetry. All these arts heal the soul, for it is only in the healing of the soul that Rilke realizes that change can take place.
Apollo's presence is omnipresence; the effect on Rilke is inevitable--"denn da ist kein Stiele, / die dich nicht sieht." The prophecy drives the poetry musically toward healing. The light is the medicine. Just as Apollo tells Rilke, so he tells the reader: "Du Must dein Leben andern."
Implicit as the watching eye of the looker and those who look back, staying alive is avoiding death and starving off stasis through continual change.
And I? I want to grasp the ears full of music, take notice like medicine's bitter pill, promote the poetry, and set all this appropriate prose to prophecy. How like any beautiful young man I had once become, I older now reaffirm the continual ripening, never to decay, of the vision of Rilke. Met by the heat and light suffusing within, how I hold the pen predicts the cadence of ceramic on ragged paper lines. Later, at the keyboard the tattoo of sensitive fingers on plastic keys makes its own music.
Seized in a gaze of now absent eyes, the eyes of a god, the god I have become in my individuality of the twentieth century, I write. Power in the gaze transmits itself through the light, and the light never completely diminishing exists forever and forever, so that now to stop the movement of my hand, the hand held pen cast into suspension, a creation of its own presence as action changes the empty journal into the full journal.
I reach toward the future with this handful of the past--all this
done in this fleeting presence that I am now writing in. I no longer
think about the war, the death and destruction those awful nights brought,
but I do smile when I imagine my procreative hips moving in the fantastic
light of biological intensity.
All this is stone cold, like marble, eleven degrees Fahrenheit
cooler than room temperature, and in the room once a poet saw a headless,
and therefore eyeless, statue gaze at him so that he shouldered the responsibility
for growth in his own life.
Similarly, with no ears to listen, the statue god heard the wordless silent plea of the questioning poet, and the answer was simply that nothing remains static long enough to be approached through the fatal intimacy of interrogatives.
The skin is more than the border of self, for around the epidermal upholstery a light exudes, and this is the frontier. Only here is the light adequate for change. I burst like stars from the skin-limited limitations of self into these surrounding frontiers of auras, the light around the body, the feasting place in the long mall of the soul. No matter where I am, I am seen, a part of the vision, never apart from the vision, and only the not present eye, like Rilke's Apollo, can see here, for this is the realm of fixed-eye images; this is Emerson's transparent eyeball; this is the dynamic state of life and death; and, this is the haunt of the soul where one's soul haunts a man until he changes again and again and again.