Rilke, Pynchon, Kleist

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

Sorry, Vaska,

lagging behing again, am able to contribute approx. every three 
days nowadays. I'm delighted that you liked my contribution.

Hmm, I was not thinking of _Vineland_ when writing my puppet post. 
I always connected East Asian religions to DL. It is as if no matter 
how hard she -- powerful, competent young female -- tries to reach 
pure zen ideals, and how close she gets, she nevertheless remains
a wonderfully messy, unbalanced (American?) character. (Now that 
I think of it, the same holds true of that native East Asian, Takeshi, 
too.) Pynchon seems to like characters in whom non-Western/premodern
magic and urban neuroticism mix with excessive results.

But of course DL can be seen as a self-conscious puppet (whose
paranoia, to refer to some recent hystoria mailings, seems justified
indeed). But no passive, meek puppet, to be sure.

Your message makes me think of something I had never thought of before:
possible similarities betw. German Romanticism and East Asian religions.
Or better still, between German mystics and zen. (I know that Hinduism
influenced German Romantics, and later, e.g., Emerson.) So I really am 
no expert here, but Kleist's essay seems to draw on that rich German 
tradition, among other things. (Meister Eckhardt, Hildegard von Bingen,
Angelus Silesius, Jacob Boehme etc. Also young Rilke wants to see the
artist as a monk-mystic in _The Book of Hours_; but as to puppets, I
don't actually know if Kleist had an impact on Rilke. But I wouldn't be
surprised.)

It's only that any mystical union, seamless merging of subject and object,
is no longer possible for Kleist; he belonged to the more "fragmentary"
line in German Romanticism. 

That kind of ineffable, selfless merging of subject and object seems
quite zenlike to me, and is surely not reachable for DL, either. (Nor
is it for Zhang Fang, for that matter.) 


Heikki