the man watching

illustration by Felicitas Kuhn from the tale "Brother & Sister"

Rilke, as translated by Robert Bly

---

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

---

the golden leash in this story bothers me a lot

---

The following is only an obliquely related tidbit, as I really don't consider the above poem to be specifically about men, but about us all.

I read Bly's book Iron John: A Book About Men about four years ago when I was pregnant with my second son. What I remember most about it was the author's conviction that a boy must steal the key that lets loose the Wild Man inside him, he cannot merely ask for permission from his parents. Bly recalled a situation in which a young man tried to persuade him that the boy need only request to have the Wild Man freed from his cage (which had been my own initial inclination as well), but Bly came down hard against that option. I have to say I don't yet feel I fully understand this metaphor, even though it has stayed with me for years and I've poked at it quite a lot, hoping to unravel it completely. Perhaps Bly is wrong, or perhaps I am just too inculcated with the culture of polite consent and working-togetherness to embrace the concept of a necessary theft... even if I've already lived it out as a thief in my own way. (Evidently the latter then, hmm?)

A quote that jumped out at me from the book, interestingly along the lines of my previous post:

A university, like a father, looks upright and decent on the outside, but underneath, somewhere, you have the feeling that it and he are doing something demonic. That feeling becomes intolerable because the son's inner intuitions become incongruous with outer appearances. The unconscious intuitions come in, not because the father is wicked, but because the father is remote.

Young people go to the trouble of invading the president's office to bridge this incongruity. The country being what it is, occasionally they do find letters from the CIA, but this doesn't satisfy the deeper longing...

---

"Brother and Sister" is not a Grimm tale I knew in childhood. Instead I grew up with "The Six Swans"... specifically the sad version of the tale in which the princess isn't able to finish all the shirts in time and her last brother is left with an arm permanently deformed because of her failure. The illustration of the final prince and his poor bird arm was assigned to my birth date in an anthology of fairy tales broken into 366 readings. I remember asking my parents to read that story to me over and over, each time disappointed with the ending, wondering how it was that they all "lived happily together," as the story claimed, in the face of irreversible loss. I was equally captivated by the tale of the girl who chopped off her own finger to open the lock on the glass mountain in order to free her brothers, the seven ravens.

Cruel stories for children, maybe. That's life, though. We give away things (and have things taken from us forcibly) that we cannot ever regain... and we are supposed to gimp our way toward happiness regardless.

(Maybe we'll even make it.)