In an untitled poem (Durch den sich Vögel werfen .) written in June 1924, after the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus had been completed, Rilke wrote about space (Raum) in a way which makes a connection between our most intimate sense of ourselves, our experience of other living things and the space we all inhabit. The poem awakens in us the utterly familiar and therefore often dormant sense we have of our own lives amidst the lives of other beings, and at the same time prompts the thought that a fuller account of inter-relatedness would connect the inwardness of experience with detectable properties of external space. In my version the poem reads:
Birds launch themselves but not through space that's shared
in which each form is tellingly exposed.
(out there in the open, you would deny yourself
and dwindle further without a turning back.)
Space struggles from us and across to things:
for a tree to succeed in being fully present
throw inner space around it, from that space
which dwells in you. Hold it with restraint.
It knows no bounds. Only in the shaping limit
of your surrender does it develop into the actual tree.
In the first stanza the birds launch themselves, and the sensation that they have is inside them. I find it natural to say that the sensation is in their breasts. It is not shared and is an immediate knowledge of their inner space, of their being alive. To remove oneself from all relatedness would cause the sense of self to fail. The second stanza begins by suggesting that this change is constitutive, at least in part, of external space. Far from being a passive process, it is described as intensely physical. On the face of it, for Rilke to discuss relatedness using a tree as example seems strange. Doubtless he was recalling the feeling of communion with a tree against which he leant in the garden at Duino Schloss in 1912, and which he described at length in a prose piece 'Experience' (Erlebnis), the following year. Perhaps the very stillness and seeming impassivity of the tree helped him to achieve his sense of closeness with it. (We know that Rilke's at times pressing wish for solitude arose out of his sensitivity to the needs of others, even of animals, and that he felt these needs as demands which removed him from a proper sense of himself). The stanza goes on to say that we experience being alive as an unbounded feeling arising from within. Through relatedness to another we feel our own boundedness, and through deep and accurate empathy we allow the other to achieve its full finite potential.
Elsewhere Rilke suggests that the space between beings is shot through with the tension of their relatedness. In poem 1, 12 of the Sonnets to Orpheus he writes:
Without an understanding of our true place
we act out of a real relatedness.
Antennae feel for antennae
and the empty distance carries
pure tension.
If the external world is permeated by the efforts of living things to connect with each other, by psychical energy, as Rilke here describes, then surely physicists should be able to provide evidence for the existence of this psychological space between beings and of how it plays a part in shaping events. And of course it is the case that the effort to describe the physical world has resulted in mind entering modern physics, albeit in an unforeseen way,namely at the limit of understanding.
So it is that relativity regards space and time as smudged together, and holds that reality can only be described from a frame of reference which is specified. But it seems that something essential is lost if the observer is shrunk from a point of view to a set of co-ordinates, because in making the frame of reference transparent, all possibility of experiential content disappears. And in quantum theory the difficulty of intuitively grasping wave-particle duality, together with the impossibility of providing a definite description of both the momentum and location of subatomic particles has raised questions about how and where uncertainty enters the physical picture. Is it a property of the subatomic realm itself, is it a by-product of the process of measurement, or is it introduced by the conscious mind of the observing scientist?
Philosophy too has wrestled with the relationship between mind and matter, and the opposing tendencies of idealism and materialism can both be traced back to classical times. If Kant has a special prestige among later philosophers, it is in part because he took such enormous pains to occupy a middle ground in which both mind and matter are given their due. Nevertheless, since in his system mind is ineluctable, space and time are held to be the forms of its limitation, characterizing outer and inner sense respectively. Kant insisted on the independent existence of an external world, but since it lay beyond space and time there could be no knowledge of it whatsoever. Not surprisingly physicists have tended to resist Kantian epistemology because of its idealising bias. Contemporary philosophical and scientific thinking is dominated by varieties of materialism, in which mind is regarded as a complex ordering of matter. There are many different expositions from this basic standpoint, although it is doubtful whether any can meet the logical problem, akin to the 'ought-is' dichotomy, that personal experience is incommensurate with external observation.
But if Kantian metaphysics is unattractive to modern thinkers, it is a commonplace of diverse mystical writings that behind everyday experience there lies a deeper reality. Certain forms of religious life, both solitary and communal, presuppose the possibility of penetrating the world of appearance to win through to a spiritual grasp of how things stand and are sustained by traditions which proclaim such ways of living meaningful. Prominent in mystical teaching is a sense of there being something misleading in our appreciation of the passage of time.
Two of the greatest 20th century writers, Proust and Eliot, have written about time out of their own deeply considered personal experiences. What they seem to hold in common is a sense of something permanent lying behind the relentlessness of daily change which may be glimpsed when memory allows an intuition of sameness in difference.
Much less common than references to the unreality of time, are writings which suggest that the out-thereness of space might be deceptive, but Rilke's late poetry returns to this subject again and again. Despite his belief of the inter-relatedness of living things, he also has a profound sense of the abysses of unique experience which separate us and make intimacy so difficult. So in poem 2, 20 of the Sonnets to Orpheus he writes:
What vast distances between the stars; but nevertheless
how much more we learn from what is close to hand.
Somebody, a child for example, and nearby somebody else,
and yet how inconceivably far off.
...think only of how far it is from a woman to a man
when she both likes and shuns him.
These two features of our experience, our connectedness and our aloneness, lead him to write of outer space, literally world space (Weltraum) and of breaches, intervals, or interstices (Zwischenraüme). In certain altered states of consciousness the feeling of alienation may be overcome, resulting in a sense of oneness with the outer world. Thus he described an episode in a garden in Capri: 'a bird call in the open and in his consciousness were one, when it did not, as it were, break on the barrier of his body but gathered both together in undivided space, in which there was only one region of the purest deepest consciousness, mysteriously protected. On that occasion he had closed his eyes so that he might not be confused by the contours of the body in such a generously granted experience, and infinity passed into him from all sides in so familiar a manner that he believed he felt within him the gentle presence of the stars which had now appeared.'
Poem 2, 26 of the Sonnets to Orpheus recalls this moment:
How the shriek of a bird will shake us ..
any cry once it has broken in.
And again children at play in the open
cry far beyond their actual cries.
Cry coincidence. Into the many breaches
of this, the world space, (where birdsong
plunges entire, as people into dreams - )
they drive their piercing shouts.
In these lines each conscious being is described as a breach in the world space, a phrase which hints at the mystery of selfhood. But there is also the suggestion that the breach may be annulled by the shrillness of birdsong or children which awaken some echo or correspondence in us. The prose passage adds that through some obscure attunement of inner and outer an oceanic state of feeling may arise, while the poem goes on to liken us in our oneness with the open to kites in the wind.
Where, oh where can we be? Even more free,
like kites torn loose form the earth
we swoop in the air with rippling laughter .,..
Rilke used the same word, Zwischenraüme, in poem 2, 3 of Sonnets to Orpheus, where a mirror is described as if it is a conscious being because it puts a girl into a different relationship with herself:
Mirrors: no one yet has knowingly described
what you must be in your depths.
You like the empty holes in sieves,
make good the gaps in time.
..A few have blazed right into you - ,
while others you've sent shyly past.
But the loveliest of all will linger - until
the freed Narcissus has found his way
into her doubting cheeks over there in you.
The poem analyses a sequence of events. The girl looks attentively at her reflection, and sees the reflection as beautiful. This causes a change in the way she feels about herself and this alters her appearance which then passes to the mirror where it is seen by her as heightened self-consciousness and self possession. The empty holes in sieves exist only by virtue of what lies outside them, and the same is true of the reflection in a mirror. Nevertheless the poem shows that there is a genuine dynamic between the girl and her image, which mimics and externalises the movements of introspective reflection.
Whereas the poem about the cries of the children refers to their being driven into the breaches of the world space, this poem refers to the mirror not as a breach in space but a breach in time. I do not think it puts too great a burden of interpretation on the two poems to see a parallel with Kant's outer and inner sense. For although the image in the mirror falls on outer sense, the reflection disturbs the girl's experience of herself. There is a breach in personal time or inner sense at the instant of altered self-awareness.
So Rilke suggests in these poems that each private world of consciousness is discontinuous with the outer world, but continuous with itself. As a breach in world space, a person is alienated and constantly engaged in the effort of establishing relatedness. Sometimes a moment of attunement, correspondence or coincidence may afford a brief feeling of oneness with the outside world. As an uninterrupted line of world time, an individual may be shocked or jolted into feeling things differently. A change in the awareness of self will be seeded between a hitherto undifferentiated before and after and development take an unpredictable turn.
Why does individual experience have the properties of being separate from the external world and continuous with itself through time? Consider: if self-conscious beings were externally determined, and thus seamlessly wedded to the material world, it would be impossible to assign any role to consciousness whatsoever. And if beings were recreated anew in every moment there would be no historical self in which to anchor experience.
From the intense inwardness of a great poet, there is an implicit challenge to science. The shared world, the world in which everything can be measured, has left the world of experience untouched, one might almost say, unguessed at. In Rilke's work there is the suggestion that the public space cannot be described apart from the innumerable private spaces.
David Graham Cook was a Senior lecturer in Mental Health at Bristol University and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist. Currently he is working part-time as a Locum Psychiatrist and writing