Rilke to the Rescue

How strange to be sitting here in the midst of machines and medical break throughs that drip consented poison into an admittedly ingenious port right under my skin - unceremoniously releasing this fiery, armored chemo to chase rogue cancer cells throughout the labyrinth of my veins. How odd that life goes ticking quietly on amidst this raging little battle all the same.

I brought my books - my inanimate friends, I call them - looking so out of place in this chrome and plastic world to which I have brought them. They understand that I could not do otherwise. They try their best to comfort me.

And there lies the Rilke - like a little island of warmth before me. Rilke sitting in his old Parisian apartment - an elderly heliotrope seeking out the warmth of the autumnal sunshine with a scrape of his chair and a sip of tea sloshing happily in the bowl. He settles down to paper and pen. I wait for the magic to happen. He does not disappoint. I enter his world and travel far away from my present own.

Rainer is writing to his wife Clara. Letters - but not the hasty, lazy, sterile kind of emails we might pass off as human communication. These are generous missives filled with himself - vulnerable, inquisitive, loving, ruminating the under meanings of daily things. Clara always in mind.

He holds her an equal. He anticipates her reactions and defers to her intuitive understanding of poetry and art much keener than his own. The love spreads as the ink laces the page.

Clara sends some twigs of heather in her last letter. Rilke is quite taken and describes to her his feelings of joy as they slipped from the envelope. He places them in a box lined in dark velvet and tells Clara they are “serious and lowly like the smell of a begging monk and yet again as hearty and resinous like precious incense… they look like three cypresses woven into a Persian rug with violet silk”. He stares at them for days after and lovingly tells her so. I want so badly to know what she said in return to this lover’s reverie at her thoughtfulness.

Rainer describes his walks, his daily visits to the exhibition of Cezanne paintings at the gallery and how he eventually becomes so overwhelmed by their immediacy and simplicity. He exclaims that at last he has new eyes to see art for what it should be. He identifies with Cezanne in his old curmudgeonly ways and his longing to be left alone to work - to paint - to reveal the whole world in a clear and striking light. Rilke understands this through his poetry. He longs for as unique a word in his poems as Cezanne had for every shade of paint he has mixed to perfection; mixed to exact meaning.

Simply stated, Rilke shows me what writing is for. It is a love letter in which we dare to ink our vulnerabilities and exuberances without that wondering reticence at how they might be received. Like birds set flying without tether. All things matter. Walks, twigs, impressions, the damp depression of an autumnal Parisian afternoon. We seek an understanding heart on the other side of a letter sent. We want someone to write back in just this way - this daily way expressed so lyrically.

Heart unto heart. Mind unto mind. Feeling the palpable warmth of an admiring lover for things as small as twigs.

It is what I want my writing to be. It is the love and honesty of a heart in love with a world of beauty sought, found suddenly, and praised to the stars. There is no other writing I would ask for greater than this.

I close my eyes slowly now as the chemo drips away unto the fourth hour. Science can’t touch this expression of the depths. Medicine saves through odd and sometimes frightening ways. Art saves the soul and softens the raw emotions of Cancer.

Dear Rilke scratches on and dips his pen again and again. And Clara opens each envelope with an anticipation I truly feel and understand and long for. She lets me peer over her shoulder - perhaps rejoicing that another human heart sees how loved she is and reaches for the hope and beauty of it.

I begin to get cold and drowsy. I hold dear and warm Rilke in my arms and know his world is greater than any chrome and plastic I.V.’d world I may need to endure.

He is, in God’s sweet plan, my balm of Gilead.