Rilke, Lot49, GR connections

[Brian H. Rogers]

"Loren Passerine, on his podium, hovered like a puppet-master...An
assistant closed the heavy door on the lobby windows and the sun.. She
heard a lock snap shut; the sound echoed a moment. Passerine spread his
arms in a gesture that seemed to belong to the priesthood of some remote
culture; perhaps to a descending angel. The auctioneer cleared his throat.
Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49."

Duino Elegies - The First
"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' 
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me 
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed 
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying."

"		am I not right
to feel as if I must stay seated, must
wait before the puppet stage, or, rather,
gaze at it so intensely that at last,
to balance my gaze, an angel has come and
make the stuffed skins startle into life.
Angel and puppet: a real play, finally."	-Rilke

"...in a world in which fate and even God himself have become famous above
all because they answer us with silence...the doll was the first to
inflict on us that tremendous silence (larger than life) which later kept
breathing on us out of space, whenever we came to the limits of our
existence. It was facing the doll, as it stared at us, that we experienced
for the first time (or am I mistaken?) that emptiness of feeling, that
heartpause, in which we could have vanished..." - Rilke

from introduction to selected poetry of rainer maria rilke:
"The angels embody the sense of absense which had been at the center of
Rilke's willed and difficult life. They are absolute fulfillment. Or
rather. absolute fulfillment if it existed, without any diminishment of
intensity, completely outside of us. You feel a sunset open up an
emptiness inside of you which keeps growing and growing  and you want to
hold onto that feeling forever; only, you want it to be a feeling of
power, of completeness and repose: that is longing for the angel. You feel
a passion for someone so intense that the memory of their smell makes you
dizzy and you would gladly throw yourself down the well of that other
person, if the long hurtle of the darkness would then be perfect inside
you: that is the same longing. The angel is desire, if it were not desire,
if it were pure being. Lived close to long enough, it turns every
experience into desolation, because beauty is not what we want at those
moments, death is what we want, an end to limits, an end to time. And--it
is hard to think of Rilke as ironic--death doesn't even want us; it
doesn't want us or not want us. All of this has come clear suddenly in
Rilke's immensely supple syntax. He has defined and relinquished the
source of longing and regret so pure, it has sickened the roots of his
life. It seems to me an act of great courage. And it enacts spiritual
loneliness so deep, so lacking in consolation, that there is nothing in
modern writing that can touch it."

"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is
nothing to compare to it now."

just some thoughts as i was reading rilke last night:
- Passerine, and Blicero - ironic versions of Rilke, embodying perhaps a
very different
	reaction to the absense as suggested by him?
- Passerine: "crying" out to the (descending) angel's,
	of whom will not answer. (Rilke: "...in a world in which fate and even
	God himself have become famous above all because they answer us
	with silence..."
- When faced with that silence, Passerine transfigures into a much deadlier
	Blicero (& others), who answer themselves. Their cry reflected back
	back as a scream: the V2 Rocket. 
- Is Pierce Inverarity an Angel then?  Is Inverarity Rilke? 
	("Who knows what Evil lurks in the Hearts of Men? Only 
	the Shadow knows!")
- V2 Rocket as Imoplex G Angel, Descending with the reflection
	of Blicero's desire to "Fling the emptiness out of your arms/into 
	the spaces we breathe;perhaps the birds/will feel the expanded 
	air with more passionate flying" (rilke -First Elegy), Though needless
	to say not what Rilke necessarily intended in those last few lines.

thoughts? contradictions?