Monday, September 29, 2014

Possible Explanation on The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Found this on youtube- such a privilege to hear a lecture without going to class- which was the part I hated most:




NOTES:

The person which changes history is rarely ever prepared for it- it just happens.
Experience- meditation and learning something from them not simply things happening to you.
Not only let time pass but give time to things around you and CARE about them.
Aha so he's jumping around in time! Now the existence of those weird passages make sense.
"The world is mysterious but the world offers us a kind of intimacy that does correspond ultimately to some of our deepest desires."-it's all real.
Can we share being with someone else? It's funny I asked myself the same question and personally I think it will always be limited- what we are able to share.
Objects can become personal and can take on emotions.

The passage about the girls going to the city is very interesting- he's actually talking about the role of women throughout the centuries- and how they've always had to do all the work "both sides of the dialogue" (in a relationship). Not within society specifically but within a relationship- within love.
Love shows us reality.
The Prodigal Son was lacking reality- the love was not real for him.
Love imposes demands on the ones whom you love.
It opens us up to a life in which not all of our questions can be answered but at least can be asked.

---
Interesting lecture- I liked his analysis on women- which I didn't pick up on while reading the book- like many other things. Still don't understand his analysis of his family and the vanishing house. A little bit more clear on what the book is about- basically how to love. And I guess the prodigal son connects with his learning how to love. He was angry that no one understood who he REALLY was- they just loved him blindly. This can easily happen in a relationship- when we love our partner based on an ideal and not the real person within them, and actually not even having an interest- for we love our ideal more. And then he realized that this selfless love is enough to understand him- for love doesn't need to be concrete- it encompasses all. From what I understand- which doesn't mean much- is that love doesn't need to be concrete, because it engulfs every detail of our soul, no matter WHICH detail it is. If that makes any sense. For example- I don't know EXACTLY what I love about you, which detail in your soul and where it is located- such as CONCRETELY what you are feeling- but I love it all anyway, even though I can't put my finger on it exactly. If that makes ANY sense.
I don't know I was struggling with this question as well- and I guess it DOESN'T matter if the person knows exactly the world within me, because their love can reach every part of my soul without them knowing the direction.
 That doesn't make sense does it? I don't know. All I know is that it encompasses the REAL without even our knowledge or know-how. In short: it does it's own thing and it is beyond us.



Thursday, September 25, 2014

The Notebooks Of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rilke

As an introduction- I just left all of my impressions while reading this book- so 
please excuse my freaking out when I thought Malte died (some creepy ghost walking
around- like a horror movie- sorry I am affected by today's media). Also I still 
don't understand many things- like what does the vanishing house mean. Why are dead
people walking around- why is he TALKING to dead people? Or maybe I just misunderstood
everything which is quite possible. In the end, though, it doesn't really matter
what I understood because I don't read books for "plots"- I read them for their 
concepts, and trust me- I got some very delicious ones from this book. Very 
satisfying I must say! If you want to be super confused and not understand lit
anymore- read this! Anyway I must read this again and again- throughout the years. 
Rilke though- there's a very special place in my heart for him. Not as high as
Dostoevsky- because Rilke is too delicate to concern himself with the insanity 
of consciousness- but all the same, very special.  
 
"God! it's all  there. God! It's all there waiting for us. We come along, we find 
a life, ready-made, off the peg, and all we have to do is put it on. 
You want to go, or you are forced to: 'No trouble at all, sir. Voila 
votre mort, monsieur'*." 
 
"And had anyone thought to ask what might be the cause of it all, what 
might have called down this glut of destruction upon this closely 
guarded room, there would have been only one answer to give: death."
 
It's very funny how the living react to the material possessions of a deceased one, 
how odd and ridiculous it becomes. For it is irrelevant to the death itself.
"To write a single line of verse one must see many cities, people, things, one 
must know animals, one must feel birds flying and know the movements flowers make
as they open up in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in
unfamiliar  regions, unexpected encounters, and partings which one saw coming long 
before;" 
 
"And having memories is still not enough. If there are a great many, one must be 
able to forget them, and one must have the patience to wait until they return. 
For the memories are not what's essential. It's only when they become blood within
us, become our nameless looks and signs that are no longer distinguishable 
from ourselves—not until then does it happen that, in a very rare moment, the 
first word of a verse rises in their midst and goes forth from among them." 
 
"At the same time they're living among other people, not the 'third' persons but
the two, about whom such an incredible number of things might be said and of whom
not a word is ever spoken, though they suffer and do things and don't know how to 
help each other."
 
How weak and helpless the "unimportant" characters are. 
 
"Ah then: is it possible to believe that one could have a God and not use 
him?" 
 
"Similarly it's all scattered about within me, -- the 
rooms, the staircases which opened onto the ground 
floor with such great elaborateness and other narrow 
circular stairways in whose darkness one travelled like
blood through veins; the tower rooms, the high 
balconies, the unexpected galleries one was urged along
from the little entrance door: --all that is still 
within me and will never cease being within me. It's 
as if the image of this house had plunged into me from
an infinite height and smashed to pieces on the 
foundation of my being. "
 
What memories can become within you- they materialize within your blood within 
your veins. They ARE you. This is an extremely poetic passage- someone should 
make a drawing based on this. Imagine how beautiful it can be- all of these
fragments. I am absolutely fascinated with the combination of the material and the
abstract.  
 
"I saw an old man who was blind and shouted. That's what I saw. Saw."
 
I'm absolutely in love with his style. He is so direct and simple and yet extremely
witty. 
 
"Also there was the sweet lingering smell of neglected breast-feeding 
babies, and the smell of anxious children setting off to school, and 
of the muggy beds of older lads. And a lot of the smells were those 
that had come up from below out of the chasm of the street; they'd 
evaporated; and others had dripped down in the rain which over cities 
is not pure."
 
SMELLS!!! The smells of our FEELINGS- what we emit from inside of us- without even
knowing! And there's one wall which traps in all the smells brought in by the wind.
 
I'm sorry at this rate I'll be copying/pasting the whole book: 
"Yes, he knew he was withdrawing himself from everything, not only from 
human beings. One moment more and everything would be gone from his 
mind and this table and this cup and the chair he was clinging to, 
everything in his daily life, everything close to him would have 
become unintelligible, foreign, difficult. So he sat there and waited 
for it to have happened. And he offered no more resistance."  
 
We cling to the material objects in order not to retreat within ourselves.  
 
"Though the world does look good to me. What 
would I do in another one? I would so like to remain among the 
meanings which have become dear to me, and if there were something 
that really has to change I would want, at the very least, to be 
allowed to live among dogs who have a world that is related to ours 
and has the same things."
 
What do you think it means to remain with your meanings? To remain in a world of 
memories? 
 
"And with whatever it 
is that comes along there also appears a whole tangle of confused 
memories that hang from it like wet seaweed from some sunken thing. 
Lives that you could never have heard of emerge from the depths and 
blend in with what had really happened, and they oust the past that 
you thought you knew; for in what rises is a new rested strength that 
had always been there and is weary from too frequent remembering." 
 
How frightening- it was there all along. And you thought you knew!
"Your heart drives you out of yourself, your heart pursues you and you are 
already almost outside yourself and can no longer get back in."
 
He has an almost crude appreciation of the music genius- comparing the music after 
Beethoven's death to semen spewing out while the musicians play with it but aren't 
satisfied. "But, Master, if, somewhere, a virginal young man were to lay his 
wakeful ear beside your music, he would die of bliss, or he would 
carry infinity inside him and his fertilised brain would burst from 
sheer birth." The birth happens in the mind due to the music fertilizing 
the idea. 
 
Fame- "And now they go around with you as if as if you were like them. 
And they take your words around with them in the cages of their 
darkness and reveal them in public places and tease them a little out 
of their safety." 
And:  
"They suspected that in all of this they had acted as he had willed them to 
act; they had strengthened him in his solitude and had helped him 
separate himself from them for ever. And now they'd changed their 
method and and were bringing to bear the ultimate form of opposition: 
fame. And at this clamour practically everyone looked up and let 
themselves be entertained." 
 
An extremely curious thing about Erik- I didn't realize it until they were talking 
together in the dark that he had died. That this little  boy in fact, was speaking
about dead people as if they were alive. It even begs the question- is Malte also 
dead? Because he keeps describing his fevers. 
 
Beautiful description about him and his lover- both on an island with a lion and a 
unicorn. I wonder whether that's connected to the drawings of islands when he 
was a child?
 
"Now, when so much is changing, they too want to change. 
They're very close to giving up on themselves and to thinking about 
themselves in the way that how men might speak of them in their 
absence. This seems progress to them. Already they're almost persuaded 
that you search for one pleasure and then another and then an even 
greater one: that life consists in this, if you don't want to lose it 
through some kind of silliness. They've already begun to look around, 
to search; they whose strength has always resided in being found." 
 
Sometimes we want to force change. We are always on the brink of something.
 
I don't understand the part about the house vanishing. Furthermore my suspicion is
growing that they're all dead. "'We're rising up around here like ghosts, 'and 
helped us back down the steps." and
"It became clear to me that all these recognisably grown up people who just a 
short time ago had been talking and laughing were going round back 
bent busying themselves with something invisible, and that they were 
admitting they couldn't see the something that was there. And what was 
terrifying was the fact that it was stronger than all of them." 
Why does the house vanish again?? What does it symbolize? Is it their death- their 
past existence? 
 
"No, no, there's nothing in the world that we can imagine, not the 
least thing. It's because everything is composed of so many single 
details that are unforeseeable. We ignore them in the hurry of using 
our imagination, so we don't know they're missing. But realities are 
slow and indescribably detailed."
 
Our imagination is hurried and to a point even desperate.
 
"For now I knew that out there things were going along with the same complete 
indifference, and that also out there was nothing except my 
loneliness. The loneliness that I had brought upon myself and to whose 
size my heart no longer bore any comparison. I thought of people I'd 
walked away from and I didn't understand how one could abandon people." 
 
TIME = MONEY funny character this Nikolaj Kusmitsch! Rilke managed to bring a 
classic russian literature feel in this astounding work. 
"And as he sat there in the dark room with 
his eyes wide open he began to understand that what he was feeling now 
was real time passing. He actually recognised all these seconds, all 
tepid, uniform, but fast, fast." 
 
Ok I think this is my new favorite book- it even surpasses Notes from the Under-
ground. How could one even ever think of this?
"You see, humans --if we're 
allowed, simply in passing, to compare them with tin lids-- humans 
sit on their occupations with the greatest reluctance and ill-humour."
Why yes let's compare lids and human beings. "Let's 
be perfectly honest and say: basically they're thinking of only one 
thing which is jumping down as soon as they can and roll about and 
make tinny sounds."
But I get it- it refers to our significance and our purpose in life. We each have 
our own use- we each are a lid which corresponds to our fulfillment in life. 
 
"From that time onwards his blood knew 
it was inside a lost man and it wanted to leave." 
 
Personifying blood as if it was another organism within us. It signifies the 
demon within us- the thing we cannot help. An animal, our passions. 
 
"No, Bettina is the one who has become more real in me; 
Abelone, who I knew, was like a preparation for her and for me now she 
had disappeared into Bettina as if into her own instictive self." 
 
A human being prepared him for being able to understand a concept, a character. 
 
"The woman who is in love 
always surpasses the man she loves because life is greater than fate. 
Her devotion wants to be immense: this is her bliss. But the nameless 
sorrow of her love has always been this: that what is asked of her is 
that her devotion be kept within limits." 
 
It is our misfortune and curse. Life is greater than fate- for life is always 
changing and is flexible. It can breathe, it is an organism, a creature. 
 
"They walk past the houses, 
people are continually coming along who blot them out, they go on 
fading until they are nothing." 
 
There's something terrible about having the power to make people fade away. 
 
"But somewhere there's still a piece of 
our disguise clinging to us that we've forgotten about. There's a 
trace of exaggeration on our eyebrows; we don't notice that the 
corners of our mouths are twisted. And this is how we go around, an 
absolute laughing-stock: neither a real being nor an actor."
 
"To be loved means to be consumed by fire. To love is: giving light 
with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to 
endure."
 
Using the parable about the Prodigal Son and how he did not want to be loved makes 
me wonder whether it is in fact about Malte himself. How interesting, that for some
unconditional love can actually hurt and drive one away. "For in his loneliness, he 
had loved and loved again, each time wasting his whole nature and 
entertaining inexpressible fears for the freedom of the other person. 
Slowly he had learnt to shine the rays of his emotion into his beloved 
instead of consuming the emotion in her." He learned to give love, instead of 
taking love away. And yet he craved for love to be given to back to him. I think
he found love in the sacred, in something spiritual- something beyond him. 
"I see more than just him. I see his whole existence, which 
was then taking up the long love to God, the silent goalless toil of 
it."
 
-----------------------------------------------------------
 
I have to be honest- I didn't really understand this book, but it has made a 
tremendous impression on me. I love parts of it- descriptions of places, of ideas
and concepts, of people... So sweet and delicate. He has extremely weird 
observations about life- and about his consciousness. I admire this book- and it 
has a special place in my heart. But yes the problem is that some parts confused me
especially about his family, and certain passages which he rambled on and on- like
about the king. I still don't know what the point of that is. I think my next task
is to read explanations based on this book and maybe clear some things out. But I 
always hate reading interpretations because they are not close to what I feel 
about the book- for me being close to a spiritual experience.  
I love what he wrote about death- I thought about it a lot- one time on the metro-
imagining what Rilke said- that it's there within us growing. It was strange to 
look at the people and see in each death, while their physical bodies are growing
and stretching so full of life. And the part about the lid will never leave my 
memory- I have to ponder on that some more... we all should. Oh Rilke what wonders
you have blessed me with- my mind is full of riches! 
 
Also in my search for finding some explanation to this book- I found this wonderful 
art book by Ben Shahn (For the sake of a Single Verse): 
http://www.oldprintshop.com/images/large/35424.jpg 
Very cool!!! :) I wish I lived in a country where this would be available... 
 
-- 
Pub Pdf- Translated by William Needham