Joshua Alvarez Mastel | composer

 

With all its eyes the creature gazes into the Open. 

Only our eyes are as if they were reversed, and surround 

plant, animal, child like barriers, against their freedom.

We know what is outside us from the animal’s

gaze alone; since we already turn the young child round 

and make it look backwards at what is settled, 

not at the Open that is so deep in the animal’s visage. 

Free from death. We alone see that; the free creature

has its progress always behind it, 

and God before it,  and when it moves, 

it moves in eternity, as streams do.

     Never, not for a single day, do we have

before us that pure space into which flowers 

endlessly open. Always there is world,

and never the Nowhere without the Not: the pure,

unseparated element which one breathes and

endlessly knows, without desire. As a child

loses itself sometimes, one with the stillness, and

is jolted back. Or someone dies and is it.

Since near to death one no longer sees death,

and stares ahead, perhaps with the vast gaze of the animal.

Lovers are close to it, in wonder, if

the Other were not always there closing off the view...

As if through an oversight it opens out

behind the other...But there is no

way past it, and it turns to the world again.

Always turned towards creation, we see

only a mirror of freedom,

dimmed by us. Or that an animal

mutely, calmly is looking through and through us.

This is what fate means: to be opposite,

and to be that and nothing else, opposite, forever.

 

 

If there was consciousness like ours

in the sure creature, that moves towards us

on a different track – it would drag us

round in its wake. But its own being

is boundless, unfathomable, and without a view

of its condition, pure as its outward gaze.

And where we see future it sees all time,

and itself in all time, and is healed for ever.

 

And yet in the warm waking animal

there lies the pain and burden of a great sadness.

For it too feels the presence of what often

overwhelms us – a memory, as if the element 

we keep pressing toward was once

nearer, truer, and joined to us

with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance;

there it was breath. Compared to that first home

the second one seems ambiguous and uncertain.

     O bliss of little creatures that stay 

in the womb that carried them forever:

O joy of the gnat that can still leap within,

even when it is wed: since womb is all.

And see the half-assurance of the bird,

almost aware of both from its inception,

as if it were the soul of an Etruscan,

born of a dead man in a space

with his reclining figure as the lid.

And how dismayed anything is that has to fly,

and leave the womb. As if it were

terrified of itself, zig-zagging through the air, as a crack

runs through a cup. 

So the bat rends the porcelain of evening.

 

And we: onlookers, always, everywhere,

always looking into, never out of, everything.

It fills us. We arrange it. It collapses.

We arrange it again, and collapse ourselves.

 

Who has twisted us round like this, so that,

whatever we do, we always have the aspect

of one who leaves? Just as they

will turn, stop, linger, for one last time,

on the last hill, that shows them all their valley–,

so we live, and are always taking leave.

 

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Eighth Duino Elegy (1923)

(Trans. A.S. Kline)