OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
Perhaps, however, this manifestness of being within the fulfillment of metaphysics is simultaneously the extreme oblivion of being. What if this oblivion were the concealed essence of the desolation of the desolateness of the time? Then there would certainly be no time for an aesthetic flight to Hölderlin's poetry. Then it would not be the moment to fabricate a myth out of the figure of the poet. There would be no chance then to mistreat his poem as a rich storehouse for a philosophy. However, there would be and there is the single necessity: by thinking soberly in what is said in his poetry, to experience what is unsaid. This is the course of the history of being. If we enter upon this course, it brings thinking and poetry together in a dialogue engaged with the history of being. Researchers in literary history will inevitably see the dialogue as an unscholarly violation of what they take to be the facts. Philosophers will see it as a baffled descent into mysticism [ein Abweg der Ratlosigkeit in die Schwärmerei]. However, destiny pursues its course untroubled by all that.
Does a poet of today encounter us of today on this course? Does that very poet encounter us, a poet who today is often and hastily dragged into the vicinity of thinking and plastered over with a good deal of half-thought-out philosophy? Yet let us ask this question more clearly with the stringency appropriate to it.
Is Rainer Maria Rilke a poet in a desolate time? How does his poetry bear on the desolateness of the time? How far docs it reach into the abyss? Where is it that he comes to, assuming he goes to where he can?
Rilke's valid poems stretch across two slim volumes, patiently collected: the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. The long path to these poems is itself a path of poetic questioning. En route Rilke experiences the desolateness of the age more clearly. The age is desolate not only because God is dead but also because mortals scarcely know or are capable even of their own mortality. Mortals are still not in the possession of their essence. Death withdraws into the enigmatic. The mystery of suffering is covered over. No one is learning to love. But mortals are. They are so long as there is language. Song still lingers over their desolate land. The singer's words stay on the track of the sacred. A song from the Sonnets to Orpheus says it (I, 19):
What though the world changes swiftly
like shapes of the clouds,
all that is finished falls home
to the primeval.
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