First Snow, and Rilke on Ambition

The snow is falling fast here this morning - it's lovely. About a foot I'd say. Should taper off this afternoon. The wood pile is almost all stacked in the shed (yesterday's labor), and the new furnace is humming along. We discovered a mystery electrical cord emerging from the crawl space in the basement and realized that it's heating tape for the kitchen and bathroom pipes - the ones that froze last winter. C. the Postmistress told me about heating tape - you attach it to your pipes, plug it in, and it (safely) heats the pipes when temps fall below freezing. I was planning on researching and trying to install, so what a relief - one of those gifts from above - that it's already done. My second winter, and I'm just a little more prepared, which is a good thing.

So winter is officially here, and in the quiet of the world going dormant, laying itself down to sleep, I have been reading Rilke's early poems and some biography. The poet's realm was that of the soul, the deep inner life. In Robert Bly's intro to his translations of selected poems, he writes:

When I first read Rilke in my twenties, I felt a deep shock upon realizing the amount of introversion he had achieved, and the adult attention he paid to inner states. From the pragmatist or objectivist point of view, Rilke goes too far in this attention; he goes over the line. The American, in Latin America or North America, is willing to accept some introversion, but when it goes this far, he may dismiss the whole thing as solipsism, or as an evasion of political responsibility... Rilke knows what Tolstoy knows in The Death of Ivan Ilych: that our day-to-day life, with its patterns and familiar objects, can become a husk that blocks anything fresh from coming in. Before the industrial revolution brought its various creature comforts, it is conceivable that the shocks of winter cold, sudden poverties, plague, brutal invasions, abrupt unexplainable deaths, regularly broke the husk. In our time the husk is strong, and Rilke turns to look at it.

Here in the country, in solitude, I find that the husk falls away. The soul, the spirit, unfolds:

I want to unfold.
I don't want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

The spareness and the stillness of a country road, farmlands minding their own seasons and work in good time, big sky, snow falling... the slow, deep work of fruitfulness that is born of nature, as opposed to human-driven competition or ambition. And yet Rilke, like Donald Hall, has a very clear idea of his ambition:

You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything:
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing,
and are raised to the rank of prince
by the slippery ease of their light judgments.

But what you love to see are faces
that do work and feel thirst....

You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.

Calmly. As Denise Levertov reminded us, "Much happens when we're not there." And much happens when we do nothing. We unfold... and we hear things. We may even hear the snow falling.