Rilke/Rodin

Borges says beauty lurks forever near. There is something about work that stands independent of its maker, alone, rising above the rest of world, as if touched by some higher truth or beauty that in the dailiness of life sometimes get obscured, but since it is there deep in all of us, meeting it in the work is like a reunion with the infinity, truth and beauty within, a concordance.

I read Auden talk about Shakespeare and when he says it is little to do with the writer's life or a poet's life or an artist's life, but so much to do with the depth or heights that their work reaches. And I hear Borges say that all art or all words or at least great works are 'holy ghost' expressing itself in the world, and perhaps why works should be nameless.

And then our personal local selves, chances of our local particulars, our personal self, our egos, our identifiers or name becomes a hindrance in a way. The light to shine unhassled, uninterrupted, undisturbed by little transient identifiers of an ego or a self, of what is forever enduring to shine unhindered, it needs to be somehow expressed in the work. 

Like one purifies the self before worship. Like one recalls to mind the highest and the holiest. Like one summons all that is infinite, eternal, the most enduring to this transient firmament, a self is little to hold it, perhaps here and there fragments, cathedrals, temples, Rodin's work, a poem, a book, a painting.

We have heard this in many different ways in perhaps many cliches and proverbs and scriptures. Perhaps why it is always a rediscovery. God is that way personal. It is perhaps found in work (verb). And then perhaps the spirit too has been transferred sometimes to the work (noun).

Perhaps this, life, is a personal journey of that discovery. Each discovers in their very own personal way, the fundamentals that  seem to be resonant throughout.

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Rilke on Rodin, some excerpts.

Rodin was solitary before fame came to him and afterward he became, perhaps, still more solitary. For fame is ultimately but the summary of all misunderstandings that crystallize about a new name.

Rodin's message and its significance are little understood by the many men who gathered about him. It would be a long and weary task to enlighten them; nor is this necessary, for they assembled about the name, not about the work,—a work that has grown far beyond this name's sound and limitations, and that has become nameless as a plain is nameless or a sea that has a name but on the map, in books, and to men, but which is, in reality, but distance, movement and depth.

..

He is a man rich in years; and his life is one that cannot be related. It began and still continues; stretches out deeply into a great age, and to us, it seems as though it had passed many hundreds of years ago. It perhaps had a childhood; a childhood in poverty—dark, groping and uncertain. And maybe it possesses this childhood still, for, says St. Augustine somewhere, whither should it have gone? It holds, perchance, all its past hours, the hours of expectation and abandonment, the hours of doubt and the long hours of need. It is a life that has lost nothing and has forgotten nothing; a life that has absorbed all things as it passed, for only out of such a life as this, we believe, could have risen such fulness and abundance of work; only such a life as this, in which everything is simultaneous and awake, in which nothing passes unnoticed, could remain young and strong and rise again and again to high creations. Perchance the time will come when someone will picture this life, its details, its episodes and its conflicts. Someone will tell a story of a child that often forgot to eat because it seemed more important to him to carve inferior wood with a cheap knife, and someone will relate some event of the days of early manhood that contained promise of future greatness—one of those incidents that are intimate and prophetic.

..

Here was a task as great as the world. And he who stood before it and beheld it was unknown and struggling under the necessity of earning his bread. He was quite alone and if he had been a real dreamer, he would have dreamed a beautiful and deep dream—a dream that no one would have understood—one of those long, long dreams in which a life could pass like a day. But this young man who worked in the factory at Sèvres was a dreamer whose dream rose in his hands and he began immediately its realization. He sensed where he had to begin. A quietude which was in him showed him the wise road. Here already Rodin's deep harmony with Nature revealed itself; that harmony which the poet George Rodenbach calls an elemental power. And, indeed, it is an underlying patience in Rodin which renders him so great, a silent, superior forbearance resembling the wonderful patience and kindness of Nature that begins creation with a trifle in order to proceed silently and steadily toward abundant consummation. Rodin did not presume to create the tree in its full growth. He began with the seed beneath the earth, as it were. And this seed grew downward, sunk deep its roots and anchored them before it began to shoot upward in the form of a young sprout. This required time, time that lengthened into years. "One must not hurry," said Rodin to the few friends who gathered about him, in answer to their urgence.

His real development took place outside of all this; it was compressed into the free hours of the evening and unfolded itself in the solitary stillness of the nights; and he had to bear this division of his energy for years. He possessed the quiet perseverance of men who are necessary, the strength of those for whom a great work is waiting.

..

Rodin knew that, first of all, sculpture depended upon an infallible knowledge of the human body. Slowly, searchingly, he had approached the surface of this body from which now a hand stretched out toward him, and the form, the gesture of this hand contained the semblance of the force within the body. The farther he progressed on this remote road, the more chance remained behind, and one law led him on to another. And ultimately it was this surface toward which his search was directed. It consisted of infinitely many movements. The play of light upon these surfaces made manifest that each of these movements was different and each significant. At this point they seemed to flow into one another; at that, to greet each other hesitatingly; at a third, to pass by each other without recognition, like strangers. There were undulations without end. There was no point at which there was not life and movement.

Rodin had now discovered the fundamental element of his art; as it were, the germ of his world. It was the surface,—this differently great surface, variedly accentuated, accurately measured, out of which everything must rise,—which was from this moment the subject matter of his art, the thing for which he laboured, for which he suffered and for which he was awake.

His art was not built upon a great idea, but upon a minute, conscientious realization, upon the attainable, upon a craft.

There was no haughtiness in him. He pledged himself to a humble and difficult beauty that he could oversee, summon and direct. The other beauty, the great beauty, had to come when everything was prepared, as animals come to a drinking-place in the forest in the late night when nothing foreign is there.

With this awakening Rodin's most individual work began. Not until now had all the traditional conceptions of plastic art become worthless to him. Pose, grouping, composition now meant nothing to him. He saw only innumerable living surfaces, only life. The means of expression which he had formed for himself were directed to and brought forward this aliveness.

The next task was to become master of himself and of his abundance. Rodin seized upon the life that was everywhere about him. 

..

For years Rodin walked the roads of life searchingly and humbly as one who felt himself a beginner. No one knew of his struggles; he had no confidants and few friends. Behind the work that provided him with necessities his growing work hid itself awaiting its time. He read a great deal. At this time he might have been seen in the streets of Brussels always with a book in his hand, but perhaps this book was but a pretext for the absorption in himself, in the gigantic task that lay before him. As with all creative people the feeling of having a great work before him was an incitement, something that augmented and concentrated his forces. And if doubts or uncertainties assailed him, or he was possessed of the great impatience of those who rise, or the fear of an early death, or the threat of daily want, all these influences found in him a quiet, erect resistance, a defiance, a strength and confidence—all the not-yet-unfurled flags of a great victory.

..

As Parsifal grew so his art grew in purity alone with itself and with a great eternal Nature. Only his work spoke to him. It spoke to him in the morning when he awakened, and at even it sounded in his hands like an instrument that has been laid away. Hence his work was so invincible. For it came to the world ripe, it did not appear as something unfinished that begged for justification. It came as a reality that had wrought itself into existence, a reality which is, which one must acknowledge.

..

However great the movement of a sculpture may be, though it spring out of infinite distances, even from the depths of the sky, it must return to itself, the great circle must complete itself, the circle of solitude that encloses a work of art. This was the law which, unwritten, lived in the sculptures of times gone by. Rodin recognized it; he knew that that which gave distinction to a plastic work of art was its complete self-absorption. It must not demand nor expect aught from outside, it should refer to nothing that lay beyond it, see nothing that was not within itself; its environment must lie within its own boundaries. The sculptor Leonardo has given to Gioconda that unapproachableness, that movement that turns inward, that look which one cannot catch or meet. Probably his Francesco Sforza contained the same element, it carried a gesture which was like a proud envoy of state who returned after a completed commission.

..

This comprehension is the foundation of the grouping of figures by Rodin; from it springs that coherence of the figures, that concentration of the forms, that quality of clinging together. He does not proceed to work from figures that embrace one another. He has no models which he arranges and places together; he starts with the points of the strongest contact as being the culminating points of the work. There where something new arises, he begins and devotes all the capacity of his chisel to the mysterious phenomenon that accompanies the growth of a new thing. He works, as it were, by the light of the flame that flashes out from these points of contact, and sees only those parts of the body that are thus illuminated.

..

One may always explain, accompany and surround Rodin's works with thoughts. For all to whom simple contemplation is too difficult and unaccustomed a road to beauty there are other roads, detours leading to meanings that are noble, great, complete. The infinite correctness of these creations, the perfect balance of all their movements, the wonderful inward justice of their proportions, their penetration into life—all that makes them beautiful—gives them the strength of being unsurpassable materializations of the ideas which the master called into being when he named them. Rodin lived near his work and, like the custodian of a Museum, continuously evolved from it new meanings. One learns much from his interpretations but in the contemplation of these works, alone and undisturbed, one gathers a still fuller and richer understanding of them.

..

Thus a long time passes during the creation of each work. The conception evolves partly through drawings, seized with a few strokes of the pen or a few lines of the brush, partly from memory. For Rodin has trained his memory to be a means of assistance as dependable as it is comprehensive. During the hours in which the model poses he perceives much more than he can execute. Often after the model has left him the real work begins to take form from out the fulness of his memory. The impressions do not change within it but accustom themselves to their dwelling-place and rise from it into his hands as though they were the natural gestures of these hands.

This manner of work leads to an intense comprehension of hundreds and hundreds of moments of life. And such is the impression produced by these busts. The many wide contrasts and the unexpected changes which comprise man and man's continuous development here join together with an inner strength. All the heights and depths of being, all the climates of temperament of these men are concentrated and unfold themselves on the hemispheres of their heads.

..

Rodin did not conceive work as a monumental figure or a great gesture; for work is something near, it takes place in the shops, in the rooms, in the heads, in the dark.

He knows, for he, too, worked; he worked incessantly; his life passed like a single working day.

..

With his own development Rodin has given an impetus to all the arts in this confused age. Some time it will be realized what has made this great artist so supreme. He was a worker whose only desire was to penetrate with all his forces into the humble and difficult significance of his tools. Therein lay a certain renunciation of Life, but in just this renunciation lay his triumph, for Life entered into his work.

Entire essay can be read here.