“In solitude a dialogue always arises, because even in solitude there are always two.”
-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch
In the back of a volume of letters between Louise von Salome and Rainer Maria Rilke, Hannah Arendt wrote in pencil: “253, 256, Einsamkeit.” On the corresponding pages, she marked out two passages from a letter from Rilke to Salome from January 10th, 1912. The first:
Can I, despite everything, move on through all this? If people happen to be present they offer me the relief of being able to be more or less the person they take me for, without being too particular about my actual existence. How often do I step out of my room as, so to speak, some chaos, and outside, perceived by someone else’s mind, assume a composure that is actually his and in the next moment, to my astonishment, find myself expressing well-formed things, while just before everything in my entire consciousness was utterly amorphous.
When he wrote this letter, Rilke had been alone for several days after the departure of a guest. He thanks Salome for her letter, and describes the comfort and enrichment he got from it. (He uses a strange and vivid simile about a single ant that has lost the anthill.) He only knows himself through others, and when left alone, he feels völlig amorph, completely formless. Arendt may be able to create two out of her own one, but Rilke makes Salome into a dummy “second,” to whom he addresses his private thoughts for the purpose of ordering himself in a way that only happens in the presence of others.
What I find interesting is the use of the word Einsamkeit by both Arendt and Rilke, who explains in the second marked passage:
I merely want you to know what I meant by “people”: not any forfeiting of my [Einsamkeit, here translated as “solitude”]; only that if it were a little less suspended in mid-air, if it were to find itself in good hands, it would lose all its suggestions of morbidity (that is bound to happen eventually), and I would finally achieve some sort of continuity within it instead of carrying it around like a pilfered bone from one bush to the next amid loud hallos.
Einsamkeit could mean the deeply personal and negative feeling of the English “loneliness,” the more neutral, artistic state of “solitude,” the intentional “reclusion” or (often externally) imposed “isolation.” Each of these options would give a different taste to Rilke’s letter. It is interesting and slightly odd that Arendt chose to bracket these two passages in her book, since they illustrate an instance of Einsamkeit which seems to contradict her ideas on that subject.
She makes a great deal of entries in her “Thinking Diary” about Einsamkeit (in these cases she clearly means “solitude” as a tool for thought), especially in the early nineteen-fifties. Arendt argues that we live our whole lives in plurality, either in public, in private, or in solitude. She defines Einsamkeit as “Alone with myself: thinking,” and writes, “In solitude a dialogue always arises, because even in solitude there are always two.” But even in the case of Verlassenheit, her preferred word for “loneliness,” she sees a positive: “Thinking or thought is the only positive side of Verlassenheit.”
In the case of Rilke’s solitude specifically, Arendt writes in her essay on his Duino Elegies that solitude is necessary for Rilke, given the transient nature of the world. We simultaneously are abandoned by things and abandon them ourselves, and this double act, active and passive, is known as solitude.
She argues that love is an exceptional emotion because it does not attach itself to only one person or thing, thus abandoning and being abandoned. In fact, according to Arendt, “love lies in this abandonment alone.”
However, given the way Rilke discusses his Einsamkeit in the letter, it seems that he cannot always put his solitude to good intellectual use as Arendt would like; rather, it owns him. It morphs into a loneliness he cannot control.
Rilke usually treasures his solitude; he wrote a dark yet reverent poem titled “Einsamkeit” in 1902, and the final stanza of his poem “Herbsttag” (also from 1902) is similarly comfortable in its loneliness:
Whoever has no house now, will never have one,
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restless, while the dry leaves are blowing.
Rilke, in his earlier poems, is able to relish his Einsamkeit, but in his letter to Salome of January 10th, 1912, he is not just alone; he is lonely.
- Louise Brinkerhoff
One of my favorite images in Arendt's writings comes not from Arendt herself, but her citation of the poem "Magic" by Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke's poem reads (in an approximate translation):
From indescribable transformation originate
Amazing shapes. Feel! Trust!
We suffer often: To ashes turn our flames;
Yet art can set on fire the dust.
Magic is here. In the realm of enchantment
The ordinary word appears elevated
But sounds as real as if the dove called
To seek its invisible mate.
Arendt cites Rilke's poem in the final section of the chapter of the Human Condition on Work. It is part of her discussion of art and her claim that "the immediate source of the art work is the human capacity for thought."
Art, Arendt writes, has its foundation in thinking. Works of art, she writes, are "thought things." They are thingifications of thoughts, or to use a word that is so often abused, they are reifications of thoughts—The making of thoughts into things. It is this process of transformation and transfiguration that Rilke captures in "Magic": To "set fire to the dust" and bring beauty and truth to the real world. That is what art does.
My mind turned to Rilke's poem as I watched the great South African artist William Kentridge deliver the first of his 2012 Norton Lectures at Harvard University.
Kentridge spoke in praise of shadows, and situated his talk within a reading of Plato's allegory of the Cave in Book VII of the Republic. The story of the cave begins with prisoners shackled and unmovable who see shadows along a wall projected by a fire. First one sets himself free and climbs out into the light of the sun and, slowly, painfully, comes to recognize in the light of the sun that the shadows were indeed shadows, untrue. The parable illustrates the error of sensible things and is one part of Plato's illustration of his theory of ideas. The ideas, supersensible truths of reason and logic, do not deceive and change like the shadowy things of the world. Only what lasts eternally is true; all that is sensible and fleeting is false.
Kentridge tells the story of Plato's cave to explain why he sees art, and especially his art, in opposition to the Platonic idea of truth. If Plato celebrates the primacy of the eternally true over the shadows, Kentridge argues that art elevates the image above the truth. For this reason, at least in part, Kentridge's art works with shadows. Shadow figures and shadow puppets.
Kentridge lauds shadows. In the very limitations of the shadows, in the gaps, in the gaps that inspire in us leaps to complete an image, that is where we think and learn. The leanness of the illusion pushes us to complete the recognition. It is in shadows that we find our agency in apprehending the world.
Shadow art is, for Kentridge, political. Plato's politics depends on a truth known and understood by the few and then imposed on the many. In this sense philosophy is, in Arendt's words, opposed to politics, and the philosopher either must seek merely to be left alone by the people (which is difficult because philosophers are dangerous), or they will always seek to dominate and tyrannize the polity with their reason. Arendt's lifelong battle is to free politics from the certainty of rational and philosophical truth, to open us to a politics of opinion and openness.
Knowledge is power and there is, in Kentridge's words, a relation between knowledge and violence. Kentridge embraces shadows and silhouettes to oppose the philosophical and Platonic tyranny of reason. He writes elsewhere:
I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.
Optimism must be kept in check since any certainty about the destination can underwrite the need for violence to bring others to that end. For Kentridge, "There is no destination. all destinations, all bright lights, arouse our mistrust."
Kentridge offers us an image of the artist. He speaks from the studio and from his notebook to emphasize the source of artistic truth in the thought image rather than the logical word. An artist thinks. He sees. He makes art. He makes things that reflect not truth and certainty but gaps, misgivings, and questions. Kentridge gives reality to the questionability of the world in his shadow art. In this way his art reminds us of the magic of Rilke's fire that transfigures dust into flame.
Few modern artists work magic like William Kentridge. His Norton Lectures are a great introduction to his art and the thinking behind his art. If you are not graduating this weekend, take the time to hear and look at what Kentridge says and makes.
You can view Kentridge's First Norton Lecture here. Consider it your visual weekend read.