Inside A Rose

Dear Friends,

What is so magical as a rose?  Rilke found in roses a lifelong symbol, not the stuff of Valentine's Day or religious imagery, but a kind of mandala that invoked the whole world in its self-containment and self-abandonment.  His fascination with roses only appears to offer a trajectory that culminates in his self-written, rose-heavy epitaph.  Really, the trajectory is complete at every step.  Some rose-poems and reflections came early, some at the end of his life when he was writing in and translating from French.  They always have something special to suggest about space, about the self, and they often touch on the radical experience of being.

Today, we'll continue our meditation on Rilke's suggested inwardness, or world-inner-space -- that promise of non-duality by which the earth as a whole, as well as every part of it, could "arise invisibly within us" (as at the end of his 9th Duino Elegy).  Our focus is a poem called "Rose Insides,"  or maybe, "Inside a Rose," which I'm translating here.  (You can find the original at the bottom of this letter).

Inside a Rose

For this inside,
where is the outside?  On what woe
would you lay such linen?
What heavens reflect within
the inland lake
of these open roses? --
so carefree, look:
how they repose,
loose in the looseness,
as if any hand, trembling,
couldn't spill them out.
They can hardly hold on to themselves.
Many let themselves overfill
and overflow with inner space
into days that grow fuller,
ever fuller,
until the whole summer is a room,
a room in a dream.

The poem plays with space, or what we might call spiritual location, and we will too -- asking ourselves what it would be to overflow in this way.  Remember his other line, "Those who pour themselves forth like a spring are known by the Knowing."  If we could hold ourselves together so lightly, or even let ourselves go intentionally and completely, what would survive our dispersal?

wishing you joy in all you do,
Michael


Das Rosen-Innere
Wo ist zu diesem Innen
ein Aussen?  Auf welches Weh
legt man solches Linnen?
Welche Himmel spiegeln sich drinnen
in dem Binnensee
dieser offenen Rosen,
dieser sorglosen, sieh:
wie sie lose im Losen
liegen, als könnte nie
eine zitternde Hand sie verschütten.
Sie können sich selber kaum
halten; viele ließen
sich überfüllen und fließen
über von Innenraum
in die Tage, die immer
voller und voller sich schließen,
bis der ganze Sommer ein Zimmer
wird, ein Zimmer in einem Traum.