You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense

Introduction: Engaging the Work of Art

Introduction: Engaging the Work of Art We never knew his startling head, wherein the eyes, those apples, ripened. But still his torso glows like a candelabra in which its gazing, just twisted back, holds fast and shines. If not, the breast’s bow could never blind you, nor in the slight swerve of the loins could a grin run towards that middle which carried life in the making. If not, this stone would stand deformed and squat under the shoulders’ clear, sudden fall and fail to glisten so like wild beasts’ fur; and fail to burst forth at every brim like a star: for there is no point that does not see you. You must change your life. —Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’’ Without much exaggeration, I can say that most of the reflections gathered here take their leave from this poem that, in 1908, initiated the ‘‘other part’’ of Rilke’s New Poems.1 In fact, near the center of this study and at its rim the poem’s final two lines vibrate like a tuning fork, keying the leading questions and lines of inquiry: ‘‘for there is no point / that does not see you. You must change your life.’’ The phenomenon that Rilke presents is stark, even precise in the way that intensity has its own focus. And examples abound. At twenty-one, I picked up Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1959) one Friday night, knowing I 1. The translation is my own, as most of the translations from the German will be. Where they are not, it is because I was unable to improve upon them. 2 You Must Change Your Life was to have it read by Monday. Opened, Howl was just another assignment , a useful way of killing time until the bars began to fill. And because the apartment was empty, except for me, I read aloud. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night (lines 1–7) Over the top, no doubt, but I was transfixed, drawn in, even turned around. And I kept on, aloud, equally excessive, equally indulgent, and very twenty-one. I read on and into the ‘‘Footnote to Howl’’ that insists upon an impossible redemption within the ‘‘incomprehensible prison’’ of America, the Moloch to whom so many have been sacrificed. And when it was done, when I had set Howl down, showered, and finally set out for the night, I moved about the campus of Kenyon College certain that we were destroying ourselves, selves that were once and potentially again holy. The world is holy? The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand And asshole holy! Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! (lines 3–6) Fierce thoughts. But whatever resistance I might have had to such severe conclusions had been, in reading, rooted out, and I left that night reworked from gaze to gait. Some years later, I watched—at least initially—Philip Glass perform pieces for solo piano. I began by watching because Glass’s minimalist compositions do not immediately grab one by the hair and turn one around. But as the evening lengthened, I began to keep his exquisitely slowed time with my fingers, then my hand, later adding my foot to the patterns opening between us. In short, I played along, even humming now and then, quietly. And gradually, without marked transition, these 3 Introduction three or four notes sounded along different intervals and set into various combinations enveloped me, then the room, and then all that there was to see, hear, or even think. Awash, I began really to hear the notes, hear moments in time slowed into relief, hear physical resonances lengthened until the fluidity of time-consciousness became palpable, until the depth and texture of a single tone became a thicket unto itself. Again, I was transfixed, sounded out, drawn into the work until it found its way into all of my other engagements. And it became clear as the evening drew to a close that I had taken so much for granted, not only with regard to music but also with regard to whatever I assumed was only the simple component...