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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2024
True knowledge of the world does not begin behind the eyes but in front of them, in the “Open” (“Offene”), a material space that is the locus for the creative will. Written in blank verse, the Eighth Elegy carries Rilke's most extended meditation on what consciousness is as a psychic capacity that exerts itself through space and time. At crucial moments in the Elegy, Rilke will invoke the vitalistic presence of animals who, lacking human self-consciousness, can (“with all eyes”) fully absorb the “Open” into themselves; “they never bring the Open before themselves as an object” (Heidegger, 110). Our eyes, however, have been turned inwards, not to explore the riches of our inner selves but as an analytical medium for self-scrutiny. Small children are not, as yet, victims to this distortion, having within them a natural sense for the wonder of the new. They soon, however, lose this capacity, and become victims to the adult need for order and routine, to a repression that is not libidinal, as it had been in Elegy 3, but perceptual and cognitive. Small creatures, resplendent in their comfortable place in the womb, are now called into view, before images of flight and death appear to problematize even these smallest holdings on the world.
Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur
das Offene. Nur unsre Augen sind
wie umgekehrt und ganz um sie gestellt
als Fallen, rings um ihren freien Ausgang.
Was draußen ist, wir wissens aus des Tiers
Antlitz allein; denn schon das frühe Kind
wenden wir um und zwingens, daß es rückwärts
Gestaltung sehe, nicht das Offne, das
im Tiergesicht so tief ist. Frei von Tod.
Ihn sehen wir allein; das freie Tier
hat seinen Untergang stets hinter sich
und vor sich Gott, und wenn es geht, so gehts
in Ewigkeit, so wie die Brunnen gehen.
Wir haben nie, nicht einen einzigen Tag,
den reinen Raum vor uns, in den die Blumen
unendlich aufgehn. Immer ist es Welt
und niemals Nirgends ohne Nicht: das Reine,
Unüberwachte, das man atmet und
unendlich weiß und nicht begehrt. Als Kind
verliert sich eins im Stilln an dies und wird
gerüttelt. Oder jener stirbt und ists.
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