Marginal notes to Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus

the reader in the margins

Found written in pencil, in the margins of a book of poetry, is a short confirmation of what I found in reading Denis de Rougemont’s Passion and Society. There I learnt about the intertwining layers of Manichaean heresy and orthodoxy in the development of Catharism, Troubadour’s courtly love, and the northern French interpretation of wrong-way love stories from the Celtic fringes presented as Arthurian romances. It then lived on in the romantic strains of European culture and ideas of Bildung.

Witness the first paragraph of the translators introduction below.

I am currently reading Peter Sloterdijk’s You must change your life, so this also supports that planet.

The key thing from de Rougemont, is that a Manichaean soteriological theology survives this way and that layered through many eras and genres, this saving of a true spirit is illustrated by a union, often with the other of the self as a woman, perhaps with a kiss, at death of the body ( that fleshy prison made by the demon Ašaqloun wherein your true spirit is held). Remember courtly lovers never kiss. Tristan and Iseult die in each other arms, finally. Union in death is a freeing of the spirit.

I myself know positively that it is not the transformation at first but the “generation” so that percievings should be generated between the spirits of male-female as unit in another to “perfect” them, otherwise a state of UN-balance occurs, --

These small songs were written as a monument to the death of a young woman and friend of Rilke’s daughter, taken too soon. Written with speed, and of their own urging, the poet re-sings the mythic hero Orpehus who returns from the underworld almost successfully with his wife Eurydice.