Rilke and Rocket(s) & Blasphemy 1 of 20

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Doug M. provided two reviews and a chapter or two of "Rilke
Reflections on the Problems of Translation by William H.
Gass. I've read it, it's not the best book on Rilke or
translation. Here is a review that opens up many of the
interesting topics that would need to be discussed if we
were to delve into TRP/Rilke. TRP, in my opinion, and my
opinion is consistent with the two scholars that have
written books on TRP and Rilke (Hohmann and Edinns) is that
TRP's use of Rilke, while very complicated, reveals his
misgivings about both Rilke and how he was read in Germany
up to the war. 

http://www.thenewrepublic.com/050800/phillips050800.html

Another essay on Rilke, this would have fit in nice with our
discussion of dogs in GR. 


http://www.mtsu.edu/~dlavery/mimicry.htm

TRP's use of Rilke is not limited to Duino Elegies and The
Sonnets to Orpheus. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
may be as important as these and other poems such as Requim
and Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes are important as well. 

http://www.danae.demon.co.uk/rilke/orpheus.html

Again, I'm not a scholar, not a Rilke or TRP scholar or
expert on anything but bigotry, so, although I don't have
time to do this in anyway but poorly, I hope it will not be
a complete waste of band-depth. 


http://www.bgg.atfreeweb.com/rilke.htm

http://www.gcty.com/Paris/LeftBank/4027/


Otto,  

For the Rocket Kabbalists, the Rocket is the Logos. 

 Lo·gos:  n. 1. Philosophy. a. In pre-Socratic philosophy,
the principle governing the cosmos, the source of this
principle, or human reasoning about the cosmos. b. Among the
Sophists, the topics of rational argument or the arguments
themselves. c. In Stoicism, the active, material, rational
principle of the cosmos; nous. Identified with God, it is
the source of all activity and generation and is the power
of reason residing in the human soul. 2. Judaism. a. In
biblical Judaism, the word of God, which itself has creative
power and is God's medium of communication with the human
race. b. In Hellenistic Judaism, a hypostasis associated
with divine wisdom. 3. Theology. In Saint John's Gospel,
especially in the prologue (1:1-14), the creative word of
God, which is itself God and incarnate in Jesus. In this
sense, also called Word. 



The Rocket with a capital R, is the Logos. It is the
ultimate rationale and the argument itself. It is like a
mirror too (TRP's extensive use of mirrors is important,
imho), in a metaphysical sort of way (think Weissmann's
"mirror metaphysics" from V. through GR)  it is a reflection
of the connectedness (in the positive sense of paranoid)  of
the cosmos. So if kabbalists  can interpret it correctly
they will understand the purpose, the rational, source of
power that moves the stars, the very mystery of the All, the
power and the mystery of creation, the Word incarnate. They 
will know the objective of or the purpose towards which
history is on the move. So kinda like the
Torah, the Rocket both sets forth the objective and is the
objective of the quest.  

The  Rocket (with a capital R)  in GR is obviously is not
simply and only a rocket. That is a a rocket as in JFK's
famous "we chose to go to the moon" or we will get there in
our rocket before you Reds get there or V-2 or even ICBM.
The Rocket is  kinda like that white whale in Melville's
great tale, only different. Can't remember the essay, maybe
The Rocket and the White Whale" or something like that,
anybody
remember? Well, I did post it, see the archives. 

The rocket is an alternative to the natural process, it is
pornographic, a surrogate system that replaces cyclical
nature with irreversible artifice. It is Enzian, the most
important figure I think, very reliable too, who discovers
(remember Enzian is a Moses figure and he matures as he
comes to understand his role in the novel, the fiction, the
destiny of his people, in history, and as he recognizes how
he was in his words both "a fool", and "a cripple", when  
in "love" with the White scholar who seemed so in love with
language)  that "the Rocket was an entire system won, away
from the feminine darkness, held against the
entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature"
[GR.324]. 

Now why all this talk of sex and Norman O. Brown and Marcuse
and S&M? This will be discussed later, but it is important
that Enzian discovers this all when  "Weissmann brought him
to Europe: 

"a discovery that love, among these men, once past the
simple feel and orgasming of it, 
had to do with masculine technologies, with contracts, with
winning and losing. Demanded in his own case that he enter
the service of the Rocket...."  

TRP's "Feminine Nature" carries the great American tradition
of the
"feminine" Earth. She is "scatterbrained" because she is
progenitive and is permeated by randomness, qualities
celebrated by GR because they are not only unacceptable but
transgressive to those whose religion (Weissmann/Blicero
being the gnostic high priest and god of this cult) is the
consciously
sterile Discipline of Control and Service to the Rocket. The
text makes explicit, that the  desire of the Cartel
scientist/priests is to defeat nature's entropies. They
practice and preach absolutism, their gnosis is of a
determinism that seeks a "divine" stasis beyond entropy. 

So while  particular rockets are ultimately defeated by
gravity, or by the humor, irony, the faustian arrogance that
TRP ridicules, THE ROCKET symbolizes
a constant metaphysical rebellion against such natural
defeat. 


So if we look at the Zone-Hereros, we find one of the groups
that have identified the Rocket as both "Destiny" and
"Torah." They have a sacred mission (Rilke's use of this
word,  "mission", it's interesting, how does this word
translate from the German in trans. of Rilke's DE? ), they
are the Kabbalists or the scholar-magicians of the Zone"
[GR. 520]. 

What they do is what we sometime are guilty of
with this novel, they explicate to exhaustion its
"symmetries" and its "latencies." Why? Well, the  goal of
this task is to attain the Holy Center. This is a big idea
in GR. 


For Enzian, this holy center "will never need a design
change. Time, as it is known to the other nations will
wither away inside of this new one. The Erdschweinhohle will
not be bound, like the Rocket, to time. The people will find
the Center again, the Center without time, the journey
without hysteresis, where every departure
is a return to the same place, the only place...." [GR.319]. 

As Weisenburger and others have noted (see pages 164-65 of
his very useful Companion to GR)  both the North and the
Moon have characteristics of this Center for the
tribe and the Zone-Hereros believe that firing the
Rocket targeted to these  will lead them back into this
perfect, timeless center or realm. 

So, this is very sad stuff, (the story of the hare and the
moon will of course return at GR.730.4-6) in fact like all
the cultures/religions of GR it is very, very sad stuff.  
How poignant indeed is the white scholar's reading of Rilke
to the Herero boy, here we find the same, a tortured
conflation of tribal myth and the white Rocket technology,
fatal contact with the white man. In GR this history
functions as nothing less than a gnostic perversion of the
original Herero religion. That religion
with its own ideas about the North and the Moon was
Earth-centered. TRP gives us a beautiful and poignant
description of the woman literally planted in the aardvark
hole (compare the aardvark with the pigs and other animals
in the text). Here we see that in the Herero tradition the
Earth has the fecund regenerative powers to  redeem the
preterite.


The Erdschweinhohle is a sacred womb, the woman is quite
literally "in touch with Earth's gift for genesis."
Beautiful, right? This woman in the womb of the earth brings
together all of the fecund powers which go  flooding
"through every gate" of her body [GR.316]. This was of
course before the rocket, when ceremonies and rituals of
renewal were beautifully structured  and whole and defined
by their opposites, the  antithesis inherent in the Herero
concept of the
netherworld--the moon. This is what TRP talks about in that
now famous letter. More proof of TRP's predilection for
agons within mandalas.  

"The moon is  a fallen world in which preterition is the
result of a false message from the moon, and a paradisal
netherworld where the tree of life ( a fig tree! btw,) grows
and makes its power partially and sporadically available to
preterite humanity. [See Eddins GP.139].  

This lunar netherworld can be entered, however, only after
death, with
the result that everyday life retains the fertilizing
tension of the Earth system.

TBC w 2