Breathing Space

In the Duino Elegies, Rilke expresses the role of time in the life of the artistic work. One day when we discussed it in class I had a really magnificent experience. The British author Colin Wilson refers to it as “breathing space”. We spoke about that moment when the bow is pulled completely back, at the fullness of tension, and there is a split second of nothingness when the draw is released, but the arrow has not yet begun to fly.  When a person is going to jump into a pool, there’s the moment when they’ve begun their thrust, when they’ve decided to jump, sprung forward, there is the moment of tension between the decision and the action. There is the moment when the very tip of their first toe touches the water, but is not yet wet—not yet submerged.  T.S. Eliot referred to this as “the still point at the center of the universe,” like an axis around which all of existence revolves. When we discussed this in class I had this sensation that Colin Wilson expressed—this notion of “breathing space”. This is a feeling one gets when one transcends ordinary reality, and as it persists one achieves a state Wilson referred to as “Faculty X”.

Faculty X is the place to be. According to Wilson, and Rilke, all great art arrives from this place: a place that exists beyond time. Rilke said, in the Seventh Elegy, “Truly being here is glorious.” The italics were from Rilke himself. To my mind, truly being here is dramatically different than just being here. 

And this is where Rilke says the angels live for eternity: beyond time, truly here. This is a state of heightened consciousness, of hyper-reality, and of true understanding.  Eliot wrote, in the Four Quartets, “Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter.” So love exists beyond time, along with other mythic, heroic, and ethereal qualities.

Could it be that everything  we perceive as reality is only a projection from this deeper realm, but it’s snapped into the finite via our imperfect senses? My good friend Tyler McDonald seems to think so. He talks about how, when we perceive something, our perception is only an illusion—or, a way to make the infinite, finite.

So I wonder whether this is the responsibility that has fallen on the poet: to bring the infinite a little closer. The poet creates linguistic structures which convey hyper-real sensory experiences, thereby bringing us a bit closer to that realm of angels, and to Faculty X. But how do we arrive there, and how can we stay? Or can we? Is this a domain only habitable by hyper-real entities? Can man ascend to such a high state of consciousness that this is where he always exists? (Women too, of course.) Eliot asked, “Where is the summer? That unimaginable Zero summer?” Does it exist, and can we arrive there?

Rilke seems to think we cannot. In the Ninth Elegy he asks, “Why then have to be human—and escaping from fate, keep longing for fate?” So, why do I enter heightened consciousness for a little while, only to be snapped back unwittingly? He answers his own question a few stanzas down: “Because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some way keeps calling to us.” This requires us to question a statement from the First Elegy, when Rilke said, “We are not really at home in our interpreted world.” He seems to think we can enter the angelic realm for a moment at a time, but then we snap back into our reality, because, in a way, we are needed here. This is where the philosophy of Tyler McDonald comes in. When we arouse Faculty X we see with the eyes of angels: we see the infinite, if only for a few beautiful, fleeting moments. But our sensory perception of the hyper-real, the extra-dimensional leaves us struggling with our language, our “shabby equipment”, Eliot called it. We can only explain our experience through metaphors, and metaphors are extraordinarily imprecise, inaccurate, and clunky.

“Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction,” wrote Rilke. That’s one of my favorite passages I’ve ever read anywhere, by anybody.  It rings so true. One of my hobbies is boundary dissolution—so to see the experience articulated so beautifully—well, it feels good.

 So what is this extra-dimensionality? After all, “Trees do exist. The houses we live in still stand.” T.S. Eliot phrases it perfectly, (as per usual), “Not the intense moment isolated, with no before and after, but a lifetime burning in every moment.” And a few lines later, “We must be still, and still moving into another intensity.” This is the same conclusion that every great mystic has ever reached, I think. There’s a Buddhist saying that you don’t have to climb to the top of the mountain to reach enlightenment. You can do it from home. And Eliot and Rilke and Wilson and T. Mac all arrive at the same conclusion. The time is now. The place is here, right where we stand. “To have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing,” wrote Rilke. “And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it, trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands, in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.” Rilke knows, though, that it’s not out there waiting for us to find it; it’s in here waiting for us to look at it. “And we, who have always thought of happiness as rising, would feel the emotion that almost overwhelms us whenever a happy thing falls.”