I rest now in these words and the images conveyed. I am drinking tons of ginger tea, with lemon and honey. It makes for fascinating dreams.
Rilke: Charged with the Transfiguration of All Things
How all things are in migration! How they seek refuge in us. How each of them desires to be relieved of externality and to live again in the Beyond which we enclose and deepen within ourselves. We are convents of living things, dreamed things, impossible things; all that is in awe of this century saves itself within us and there, on its knees, pays its debt to eternity.
Little cemeteries that we are, adorned with the flowers of our futile gestures, containing so many corpses that demand that we testify to their souls. All prickly with crosses, all covered with inscriptions, all spaded up and shaken by countless daily burials, we are charged with the transmutation, the resurrection, the transfiguration of all things. For how can we save what is visible if not by using the language of absence, of the invisible?
And how to speak this language that remains mute unless we sing it with abandon and without any insistence on being understood.
Letter to Sophy Giauque – November 26, 1925
From Rilke’s Uncollected Poems:
The space within us reaches out, translates each thing.
For the essence of a tree to be real for you,
cast inner space around it, out of the space
that exists in you. Encircle it with restraint.
It has no borders. Only in the realm
of your renouncing can it, as tree, be known.