Thoughts from the Eye of the Storm

The fall semester for my MFA program kicked into gear, and we’re also juggling a household move (to Palo Alto, for any of you in that neck of the woods). All very fun and exciting, even if life tastes a bit overcomplicated at the moment.

I woke up at 3 a.m. last week angry at Rilke. I was assigned the task of reading him especially closely for this week’s “Classics in Nonfiction.” I had been unfamiliar with Rilke, and to read his advice during the Chechan terrorist crisis was jarring. “Go into yourself”? Fine advice from one German to another, just three decades before German silence became a key ingredient in the Holocaust. If we don’t talk about it, if we do it in the night and the fog, then it’s not happening, and we’re still very, very good people.

I was so annoyed that I forced myself to type up my notes on Rilke so my classroom presentation would give his craft my due (yes, lost a lot of sleep that night–doesn’t happen very often any more, so when it happens I assume it’s because my brain is just not finished with the day behind it). Finally, I re-read his advice, scribbled mean notes in the margins (I believe “wuss” was among my comments, though I’m afraid to revisit what I wrote), and flounced into bed, still miffed with poor, frail, gifted Rainier.

In the light of day, Rilke’s advice seems to be less guidance for an ethical path in life than practical advice for developing a craft and finding time for allegiance to it. Judged by that standard, some of his guidance is still rather odd advice for MFA students. If “No one can advise or help [me],” then why not save myself the agony and expense of this field of study, not to mention all that gas and oil and those missed TV programs, and just write every morning until I’ve got my art down pat?

But all this about Rilke is really to point out that the MFA program is a kind of second adolescence for me, one in which the writer is emerging, pimply and awkward and susceptible to random outbursts of emotion, but with a definite shape in her future. It is remarkable, a stunning gift, to feel so strongly about a writer and his work that I would sit bolt upright in bed, fuming over his words, angry that someone else got Martin Luther King (an author problematical in his own right, as a colleague later pointed out).

It still seems rather 1970s-woowoo to read, “What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.” My inner artist says, “Please! An artist has a duty to the world.” Then again, what is important is not what we believe, but–as Rilke is trying to tell me, across the decades, through these old letters to a young poet–how we shape the words informing that belief. And what awkward but miraculous delight there is in the process of that discovery.