The Primordial Power of Myth and Poetry: Rilke, Orpheus, and the Search for Communal Being

One reason why the mythical narrative is of prime importance in early societies is the absence of the written word. Without recourse to the written word there exists no stable and consistent record which people can refer to in communicating with one another. The narrative provides a ‘map’, handed down from one generation to the next, in which the ‘same’ world can be experienced by all who follow it. It’s a perpetual "learning by doing" which keeps the community and the world alive. We can see with this one example the meaning of Vico’s insight: the myth created by the primary imagination unites individuals into a community of shared concern through rituals repeated by each generation; to abandon the rituals is to abandon the gods and to put at risk the joint meaning of the individual within the community: the sensus communis gives way to the broken society.

Heidegger, whose own philosophy terminated in the celebration of the language of poetry, identified Rilke as "the poet of a destitute time”. In this connection, it is worth noting that Rilke’s journey towards the gods ended, not with a transcendent God, nor with praise of what he called "The Angels - the paragons of virtue who transcend the earthy, and, in such a state, like Holderlin’s Diotima, could not cope with the customary misfortunes of human life - but with the Rilke’s figure of Orpheus, for whom "Song is Being" (Rilke, 1987):

Erect no monument. Allow the rose
to breath each year the fragrance of his fame.
For it is Orpheus. His metamorphosis
is here and there. We have no other name

which can concern us. For once and for all time
it’s Orpheus when there’s song. He comes and goes.
Isn’t it enough that he from time to time
stays longer than the perfume of the rose?
Then, the advice of the poet: be like Orpheus:

Silent friend of many distances, feel
How your breath enlarges even space.
In beams of gloomy belfries be a bell,
let yourself peal. What has you in embrace

Grows stronger from such nourishment.
End and begin in total transformation.
Tell me what your greatest suffering was.
If drinking is bitter, turn yourself into wine.

And in this night beyond all measure
be magical where all your senses grow together,
be yourself the point of their unique encounter.

And when what’s earthly has forgotten you,
say to the silent earth: I’m flowing.
Tell the flowing water: I am.

This is the poetry of the first language. It celebrates a symbiotic unity of nature and humanity, of person and person in a communion with nature and our delight and redemption in the faithfulness we enjoy with each other and with nature. On the one hand, it is a philosophy of identification: we become fully human in these transactions. On the other, it is a praise or hymn to nature, in which, however sporadic our encounters, we have a sense of a value that is both within and beyond them: something we make and receive at the same time - Wallace Stevens’ idea of "a truth beyond us, yet ourselves” that previously went under the name of Grace.

Of the greatest significance, I wish to claim, is that Rilke’s verses bypass talk of the opposing forces of beginning and concluding. It’s as though the end is so closely embraced by the constancy of beginning, and the beginning so fully embraced by the ending, that the distinction no longer holds. The poet’s praise has no terminus. In the fourfold sequence of development envisaged by Blake, praise assumes its ultimate form, not in some finished achievement of humanity, but as a finality which is always a beginning, that of a praise bestowed.

This is the movement from the objective, "the old man grey” to the metaphorical, the old man as "the thistle”, then onwards to the third realm of "soft, Beulah’s night”, (John Bunyan’s earthly paradise existing at the border with heaven), then finally to the ultimate sense of a wholeness, "Infinity”, in which the contradictions of part and whole, subject and object, beginning and end, lose their force, and thought passes the baton back to life itself. Each stage in the development of this series incorporates the one before but leaves it intact - the thistle remains itself, as does Beulah’s domain - but the fourth level brings its own kind of finality, the ethical in its Platonic ideal. Thomas (1993) describes how the end transforms us. The journeying selves, he says, “are orbited around an unstable centre, punishing their resources to remain in flight”. But at the journey’s end, which is also a new beginning, we realise that:

There are no journeys,
I tell them. Love turns
on its own axis, as do beauty and truth
and the wise are they
who in every generation
remain still to assess the nearness
to it by the magnitude of their shadows.

The journey ends, says the poet, but, of course, the poetry never ends, since its task is to remind us of those experiences that particularly take us out of ourselves to that which may be our measure, yet ourselves. There is one school of poetry, however, that has the manner of being written after the illumination of the centre, namely, the poetry of Zen. Three examples:

Under cherry trees
There are
No strangers
Issa
Autumn wind
Across the fields,
Faces.
Onitsuru

Dogen (1993) writes: just as a fish takes for granted the water in which it swims, and a bird, the air in which it flies, we have no need to examine the world in which humans exist. He says:

But if there were a bird that first wanted to examine the size of the sky, or a fish that wanted to examine the extent of the water, and then try to fly or swim, it would never find its way. When we find where we are at this moment, then our every day life is itself the manifestation of the truth. For the place, the way, is neither large nor small, neither self nor other. It has never existed before, and it is not coming into existence. It is simply as it is. (1993, p. 98)

There is, I believe, an immediate parallel between these examples and the phenomenology developed by Merleau-Ponty. Both argue that it would be absurd for us to make objective that pre-reflective intentionality which gives the world to us, and in which poetry does its work. That intentionality is not simply directional to the world; it is an orientation to the fulfilling experience., an availability to a consummating end: "finding where we are at this moment”. We find that there are no strangers under the cherry trees, or that the autumn wind strikes our faces, and we remain still in the nearness of them.

References:
Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous. Vintage Books.
Brooks, C. (1956). The well wrought urn. Houghton Mifflin.
Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, language, thought. Harper and Row.
Johnson, G. A., Carbone, M., & Saint Aubert, E. (2020). Merleau-Ponty’s poetic of the world: Philosophy and literature. Fordham University Press.