Broken English. Heather McHugh
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in it). To judge by these two photographic shots events inscribe themselves not only in retrospect but in anticipation, too. Every object has a field of force (you could say it is the eventual field) affecting other objects (and subjects) from afar. Rilke's poem “The Ball” plays with such “actio in distans”; for the object of concentrated attention is not only invested, but invests again the ones around it, with responsible gesture. Here object partakes of event, and rearranges its subjects in forecast and consequence.
The Ball
You round one, who take the warmth from two hands
and pass it on in flight, above, blithely
as if it were your own; what's too unburdened
to remain in objects, not thing enough
and yet sufficiently a thing so that
it doesn't slip from all the outer grids
and glide invisibly into our being;
it glided into you, you between fall and flight
still the undecided: who, when you rise,
as if you had drawn it up with you,
abduct and liberate the throw—, and bend
and pause and suddenly from above
show those playing a new place,
arranging them as for a dance's turn,
in order then, awaited and desired by all,
swift, simple, artless, completely nature,
to fall into the cup of upstretched hands.
The poem interests me (as do so many of Rilke's poems) as a physical (object) study that turns into a metaphysical (subject) study. The last line's “fall into the cup of upstretched hands” suggests nothing so much as the answer to a prayer: but the answer is a downfall, back into the realm of earthly bonds; the answer is “completely nature.” Rilke's desire for an answer is also the desire (invested in the poem as metaphor) that the analogy overcome the difference between the physical throw (of a thing) and the intentional one (of a verbal construct: a prayer, a poem). Insofar as the poem is his sport, he thus secures the return, the reception, the touchdown, if you will. But insofar as it is spiritual yearning, I'm convinced that the suspension of the object in space, the pausing of the poem in that long moment between inclinations (past and future, “had drawn” and “to fall”), amounts to an example of spiritual presence: neither rising nor falling, bound by neither past nor future, being, like a point, dimensionless.
The ball will, we are assured, as “desired by all,” fall back into the cup of forces and uses. The answer in this case is “completely nature,” and this is Rilke's characteristic spiritual insistence: that animation rises out of (and will, we are sure, fall back into) nature. To the human underling, the inclination that is “too unburdened to remain in objects” looks rather like the sign of transcendental promise—but falls back, as a sphere of natural law, into the sphere of natural law, to be the answer to the “upstretched hands.” For the long moment of the poem, in a suspension of deepening disbelief (subjective genitive!), the object seems to have escaped the forces of our plans and planet. But still the answer to the praying hands will be what was in them in the first place.
The trail of gestures in the poem is worth tracking. First, motion itself seems to be drawn from people into the object of their attentions (Rilke calls this motion “warmth”; I call it “animation”; one could call it “life”— in which case the poem investigates the question of what we do with life, where we locate it, where it goes). Then the gesture in which the motion originated is “abducted and liberated” from its physical origins (this phase has its counterpart in the Capa after-photo, where a sympathy of gesture is swirled into the bystander—or swirled from him—by the by-passers). This is the moment in which the seers are themselves shaped by the seen, the maker by the made. The object's uncatchability is dwelled on, not its catchability; what the artistic gesture frames remains essentially unlimited. The poem moves into the present's stillness, a moment in which the poem has arranged its subjects, and thus set up about it what will persist as tracery. In Rilke it is the moment when, at its height, the ball arranges its catchers; they seem thrown under it, at that turn, rather than it thrown over them—a turn or tour de force of etymological project, disposing subject and object nicely in its field. The object will answer the subject's yearning by returning (bound from boundless) into grasp, but the poem persists as a moment of ungraspability.
We find ourselves in the position of the artist looking at people who are looking toward and after what will never be (for us) in sight, and is only fleetingly in sight for them. In time, the greater event comprises the eponymous event's anticipation, its perception, and its memory, and these parts indeed replace each other, successively, so that even within one viewer what is perceived changes as memory performs its operations on it. And several viewers will all remember differently in any case: this one's experience had the feather of a hat bobbing in and out of it, that one felt heartburn at the edges of the perceptual field, this one once had ridden bicycles himself in competition and so noticed details of style and equipment that had changed since his day; and so forth down the line of onlookers. The instability of the nominal “event” is part of what we see in the de-tour Capa inscribes in the space where we expected the “Tour” to be.
Absent are both the object innermost in and the subject outermost from the photographic range. (That is, both the bicyclists, moved and removed, and ourselves, moved and removed, who, as we look at the photograph, form the outermost circle of onlookers, outliving even the photographer himself.) Yet both the bicyclists and ourselves are powerfully evoked in the radiations of subject around object, object around object, subject around subject. We are thrown beyond ourselves like Rilke's gestural object, thrown out of the intender's will and into the future tense's will.
The bicyclists are thrown not only past but into their onlookers, through gesture, and the boy's body catches the bicyclist's posture. And this is how a self is thrown into us, or we into a self. Subject into object, back into forth, up into down, our being is, like language, as much nominal as verbal, as much gesture as thing, as much thrower as thrown, and as much unfixed in time as illocable in space. Art, producing nominally fixed things, must somehow intimate that other nature, which is motion's, casting sub-and object back and forth into relation.
This is the true thrust, I think, of Rilke's famous “Archaic Torso of Apollo”:
We never knew his head and all the light
that ripened in his fabled eyes. But
his torso still glows like a candelabra,
in which his gazing, turned down low,
holds fast and shines. Otherwise the surge
of the breast could not blind you, nor a smile
run through the slight twist of the loins
toward the center where procreation thrived.
Otherwise this stone would stand deformed and curt
under the shoulders’ invisible plunge
and not glisten just like wild beasts’ fur;
and not burst forth from all its contours
like a star: for there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
What we cannot see is very much the point here, not what the eyeless figure cannot see. The conventional locus of portraiture, the conventional object (that is, the figure's head and eyes) are missing. But seeing enters the seen everywhere, and this is the thrust of art and the thrust of the idea of god. Two seers or three are immediately evoked—the god, the artist, and ourselves. In the religious as well as the artistic mystery, the part becomes whole only insofar as what exceeds it enters it. In a way, the poem offers the statue, in a brilliant synechdochic move, as emblemmatic of the part entered by the whole: the human body (partial as truncated stone) occupied by (impartial) spirit. It glows, it moves in turns, it is furred