Unutterably

Yes, I'm alone--but then again I always was. (Trent Reznor)

There is a place on the road where the solitary nature of the human journey becomes clearly seen. (Gwynneve in Confessions of a Pagan Nun)

The necessary thing is after all but this: solitude, great inner solitude. (Rilke)

I was chatting with a friend the other day, and we were talking about traveling. He asked me what place I'd like to visit. Immediately what came to mind was Rorogne, Switzerland, where Rainer Maria Rilke is buried. If I could purchase a plane ticket right now and fly to Switzerland, here's what I'd do: I'd rent a car and drive to the tiny town of Rorogne in Canton Valais. Then I'd pack a backpack and hike up to the old Rorogne church. Then I'd find Rilke's grave and unroll my sleeping bag--directly on top of the grave, to be exact. I'd camp out there six feet above his bones, under the alpine sky, with my head pillowed near his epitaph. That's it. That's where I'd go this very minute if I could.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not like the early, rather morbid, Christians who venerated the remains of fellow believers. (Julian Augustus nicknamed their churches "charnel houses.") Reliquaries, in fact, sort of give me the creeps. No, what I want to do is get as physically close to Rilke as possible. I just feel the need to rest my body against his final resting place. To rub against both the traces of his presence and the cold, earthy reality of his absence.

For a while now I've been trying to come to terms with a lot of personal sadness. I find my eyes welling up at unexpected moments, though I wouldn't really characterize the experience as crying. More accurately, it's as if my body can no longer contain my interior; therefore, it brims over my edges. Perhaps, like Gwynneve, the protagonist of Kate Horsley's Confessions of a Pagan Nun, "I [am learning] the loneliness of incarnation." The more I try to live toward life rather than resist it (to, as Robinson Jeffers puts it, "feel greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly"), the more I am drawn downward--toward soil, roots, underground caverns, underworlds, and what Jungian analyst Sandra Lee Dennis calls "the embrace of the daimon." Down here, "at bottom--in the deepest and most important things" we are "unutterably alone" (Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Norton trans., p. 23). It's an existential loneliness; no matter how connected we long to be with another body or soul, there is no such thing as perfect union. This truth is the wormwood nectar that drips from Eros' lips: "Yearn but do not consummate." The tragedy of this--when one really allows him- or herself to look it in the eye--is devastating.

Still......

In Letters Rilke goes on to say, "We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them" (p. 69). [For an expanded version of this section to the book, click on http://mythosandlogos.com/Rilke.html.]

I want to curl myself atop Rilke's grave because it's not merely his presence I want. I want to feel the circumference of solitude as well. Seemingly dissimiliar, I know: the presence of absence, the warm breath of death, the substance of intangible hoped-fors. But these are the very things that make sense to me. They are the songs of Orpheus, the logic of the mythopoetic. And they reverberate not only audibly; they river familiarly from some inner spring. Because of them, I can somehow cope with--possibly even own--my aloneness.

The self-authored inscription on Rilke's headstone reads:

Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire
to be no one's sleep under so many lids.

Someday I'll run my fingers--lips--over the hard, etched granite.