Letters to A Young Poet (blog)

    


 Notes from Rilke's, Letters to a Young Poet.
This is one of the first passages that stood out to me; "When a truly great and unique spirit speaks , the lesser ones must be silent". I'd be interested to see if anyone was struck by this as a bit anti-egalitarian and a bit of an homage to the "master".Overall, I thought there were many nuggets of wisdom in this book but it did hover into sentimentality and an overly romanticized perspective.
     More thoughts on Letters to a Young Poet. I'm trying to understand all the possible implications in this passage, " We are utterly alone in the things that are the most important". First of all, this presents perhaps part of the struggle I am encountering in my own studio practice. I have just completed my midway exhibition and am having several critiques by members of my committee and my graduate studio practice instructor. Several of the views expressed were similar while having their own shades and hues. I also felt the comments ignited things that were vibrating in the back of my mind. However, now I have to decide how to act on these comments. I have to sit in my studio and, in a sense, render myself "utterly alone". Does this mean I must operate in a vacuum? I don't believe so. I believe it takes a kind of emotional maturity or something related to understand how to act on VALID comments made regarding my work. During my first year of graduate school I just made work to find "answers" , so to speak. Perhaps I need just a bit of quiet time to allow some digestion. Ultimately, though I'm thinking my most salient work may be manifest somewhere outside the realm of intentions (or maybe its a blend). This brings me to a passage on page 28 of the book, " innocently unaware of his best virtues". I guess this means a lot of my job is in creating a fertile field of play to allow some things to occur on their own? Of course, I am not sure. How do I defend a question mark?
     I have mixed emotions about some of the passages and their implications. Several of them reminded me to varying extents of a book I was given a while ago called "Everyday Zen". It was given to me by someone who thought I needed to adopt more of a zen approach to life. On page 84 of the Rilke book he writes that "there are no traps or snares set for us; nothing that could frighten or torture us. There is no reason to untrust our world". This seems to fly directly in the face of my current (far more tragically rendered) thesis regarding the human's inescapable conundrum. I TRY to find the Hallmark Card ending to the human story and have yet to find it. I can't help but often feel that humans are a minor species.