You, Darkness
You, darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything;
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!—
powers and people—
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.
Rainer Maria Rilke
(via Kimberly Gray. Thanks.)
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5 comments:
Funny, I've been reading the Book of Hours and thinking a lot about darkness. I also just received the issue of Oh No the other day and was really taken with a good many lines from your poem.
Would love to read your thoughts on darkness. It's a preoccupation of mine.
Glad you're enjoying Oh No ! Thanks for reading.
One of the things I love about Rilke is that I feel like I actually understand the words. I'm not just guessing and pretending I know. I feel like I might actually know. And I like that.
As it is mine. It's refreshing to see Rilke's embrace of darkness as a valid spiritual state, especially since it's a state in which the majority of our lives is spent. He talks about how some of his work felt like it was being dictated (seems quite close to Spicer's talk of receiving transmissions), which means the words were coming from a place of darkness, inaccessible as the horizon. This connects in my mind with Plato's fear of poets as persons possessed that should be banished from his Republic. Without darkness (synonymous with otherness?) our world seems so small. Anyway, these are just some initial thoughts.
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