Day 12: "The Duino Elegies" Rainer Maria Rilke (translation by Gary Miranda)

[druidspell]

Animals see the open with their whole eyes.
Only our eyes, turned inward, surround it
like traps, trying to hinder its freedom of movement.
That it's out there at all we learn only
from the faces of animals. For even the eyes
of small children we turn around to our own
arrangement of things, away from the open
that shines in an animal's eyes, free from death.
Only we see death. The animal is free
and carries his death always behind him,
just as before him he carries God,
so that when he moves he moves into always,
as a brook moves. Never, not for a single day,
do we have before us that pure space the flowers
continually open into. For us it's always a World,
and never a Nowhere without the No -- a pure,
unguarded space you can breathe and fully realize
and not be longing after. The way a child
will lose itself in the silence sometimes
and have to be shaken out of it. Or another
dies, and is it. For as death approaches
we no longer see it, but stare outward at last,
perhaps with the wide gaze of animals.
Lovers, although they block each other's view,
come close to it, and are amazed -- they catch a glimpse
of it, almost by accident, around each other's body.
But neither steps aside, and it's a World again.

Always watching creation, we manage to see only
reflections of the free and open, made cloudy by us.
Or maybe an animal, incapable of speech, lifts its head
and quietly sees right through us. This
is what our destiny is: to stand opposite,
and nothing else, to stand opposite always.

If this animal approaching us from the opposite
direction thought the way we do, he would force
us to his way. But to him his existence is absolute,
beyond grasp, and without a sense of its own condition --
pure, like his outward gaze. And where we see the Future,
he sees the all, and himself in the all,
and is complete forever.

And yet there is in this warm alert creature
the weight and care of a great sadness
For it clings to him too, and always, this thing
that overwhelms us: the ability to remember,
the sense that what we're striving after now
was once much nearer, more true, and knew us
in ways that were infinitely tender. Here
everything is distance, and there it was breath.
Compared to that first home, the second
is makeshift and drafty. Oh the bliss
of certain tiny creatures -- the ones that always
remain in the womb, though the womb delivers them!
The joy of the gnat, who, hopping, remains
within even when it mates. For the all is
its womb. And consider the half-assurance
of the bird, who, from the manner of its conception,
almost understands both. For like the soul
of a dead Etruscan it finds itself in a space,
yes, but one upon which its own image
rests as a lid. And how confusing to leave a womb
and have to fly! As though afraid of itself
it stumbles through the air, like a crack
going through a cup. Like the path of a bat
through the porcelain of evening.

And we: the watchers, always, everywhere,
looking toward the all and never from it!
It overpowers us. We arrange it. It falls apart.
We arrange it again. We ourselves fall apart.

Who has turned us around this way, so that,
no matter what we do, we look as though we're leaving?
Like someone standing for the last time
on the last hill from which he can view
his own valley -- the way he turns, stops, lingers --
this is the way we live, forever leaving.