Human Religion
Along with play reviews, Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote articles about Christianity. She didn’t necessarily rebuke religion altogether, but she felt that the need to be compelled into good behavior dangerous because there isn’t an authentic motivation. The imperfection found in human beings means constant failure and hypocrisy. Noticing the constant development of religions, in how the dogma and interpretations are never perfected, but only elaborated on, pointed to “a fictional ‘correction and completion’ of the real world…The best religions, she pursued, have simply enabled men to face life and love life, so that to transcend religion is to fulfill it by embracing ‘the naked truth,’ a god more jealous than even its Semitic forebear in that ‘it blesses only those who come to it at the price of being damned by it.'” Religion for Lou fell under positivism and was a human creation. “This realm above and beyond the world, this imaginary duplicate—made for hushing up the unpleasant things that had happened to Mankind—was called religion.”
We tend to want what we can’t have and our formative years lead to exploration of our opposites. “Every child begins in the realm of infinite possibilities, due to his insufficient analytic powers and the overwhelming strength of his desires. As our sense of at-oneness with the universe gives way to rational judgment, a shimmer from the past settles upon those objects to which we were most attached, or surrounds the events which first moved us deeply, like a transfiguration, lifting them into a higher dimension—as in a universal embrace. Suppose today or tomorrow the trend of the times tends to insulate a child from this realm, hoping to spare him inevitable disillusionment. Suppose he is called upon to develop his critical faculties at too young an age, abnormally repressing the natural desire to exercise his imagination, which is active long before his rational faculties. Would we not have good reason to fear a reaction against rationality, a revenge of the imagination in which objective standards are abandoned? A normal child usually outgrows an all-too-‘religious’ upbringing on his own, turning his critical attention to the world about him—just as his preference for fairy tales gives way to a burning interest in reality. If this does not happen, it generally is a case of arrested development, a discrepancy between the drive toward life and a reluctance to come to terms with life’s restrictions.”
Woman in the Dunes – Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kX4h_sEBiI
This psychosis to try to escape reality is what the worst aspects of religion does to a follower. “But what enables a person to accept a fantasy as real? Only the refusal to limit oneself to the external world, to the imposition of something which is Outside Ourselves, the refusal to give full recognition to something which does not include ourselves within it.” Bursting the narcissistic bubble is reality, and like narcissus who’s addicted to his reflection in the mirror, the mirror is just a symbol for the ideal that he wants to superimpose on reality. If he looks honestly in the mirror, it painfully restricts the imagination. “Whenever I looked into one, I was disturbed to see so clearly that I was no more than what I beheld: so limited, so restricted.” The health ultimately comes from embracing and accepting reality by working with it, because there are more results than trying to survive in psychosis. There is also a wonder available in nature, and often why people have less depression when they get some access to it. “But fear, need, and horror first unloosed human fantasy; in the struggle with the beast of the wilderness, the uncanny and preternatural exerted its effect and opened up new conceptions, new vital possibilities; piety toward the tribal father slowly fused with awe before the incomprehensible power of nature so as to bear a god.” Again, presaging Freud, human needs for religion would lead to superstitions in trial and error to try to make the difficult aspects of nature conform to human desire. Some of the remaining rituals provide comfort and even escape, whereas the best elements of religion make people more capable of facing reality and engaging with it fruitfully.
Stepping Stones
Lou traveled to Europe after visiting family in Russia. The last time she met with Gillot “her demon having told her at his wife’s death that he was free at last: they took grandiloquent leave of each other for life.” With Frieda she travelled to Vienna. There she was called up by the playwright Arthur Schnitzler who sought her criticism of his works. “Having found Vienna enchanting at first sight, Lou now found it doubly so. Schnitzler was then, on turning thirty-three, a physician who dabbled in letters; only later that year did his drama Liebelei invert the formula overnight. Nor were his cronies yet celebrities: Richard Beer-Hofmann, going on twenty-nine, author of two short stories; Felix Salten, twenty-five, theater critic; Hugo von Hofmannsthal alias Loris, twenty-one, poet-dramatist.” These group of intellectual companions in a loose way resembled the trinity, and they helped her to fall in love with Vienna. Through Arthur Schnitzler she met and fell in love with his internist Friedrich Pineles, called Zemek. At the time, he was also taking in Freud’s seminar on neuroses.
There are gaps in her diaries during this time, but in other diaries and letters, as well as Lou’s stories, they hint at an abortion she went through arranged by her brother Jenia. She was now old enough to take the place of those father figures she idealized. “After the summer of 1896 Lou was to maintain her liaison with Zemek but concurrently to work out an amorous routine involving an ‘almost rhythmic turnover’ of lovers young enough to have been her sons.” In the same fashion as Gillot “so I also certainly abused Z. and the others (who, likewise unconsciously, followed the given signals); nonetheless it came to turnover, almost rhythmic turnover, because my strong subjectivity ever and again won freedom for solitude, for ‘fructified peace.'” Her short-term relationships ended by way of approximation of “the pregnancy cycle. In the two cases in which it exceeded this term (those of Zemek and René Maria Rilke) there was a lengthy separation after the ninth month.”
Binion icily psychoanalyzes Lou as a woman who took conception to the same level as her influences from, who in many cases would be great writers in the future, her idols. “Besides taking the sperm home to nurture it within because she unconsciously equated it with a penis, female nature rests in what it has once internalized, growing with it organically: thence her repeated conceptions. Her sperm complex embraced the equivalence of sperm with the germ of an idea, whence she appropriated germinal ideas from her god-men—including this one of literary pregnancy adapted from Nietzsche’s teachings and example.” By being old enough to be an idol, she was flirting with intellectual incest. “Her sons-and-lovers, anxiety-ridden beginners in life, were father figures by way of contrast. That final, most compulsive moment of her rites of incest with a god in disguise corresponded to the hysterical recoil climaxing her former flirtations with her father-gods.”
The desire of the masochistic follower of God eventually becomes bored because the search is ultimately to ascend to the level of a God following her human religion and self-worship. The folly of course is that the human mortals can never move beyond those limitations. The searching for oneness at some point needs to end to gain that wholeness. There’s also a wholeness a person is looking for in their search for independence in that they are taking inspiration from others that are stepping stones to the height of their powers. Nobody works with completely original material. Like she criticized others for philosophies based on personal dossiers, she was no different.
Trying to be independent like a God, when interdependence is seen amply throughout Lou’s story, is the same mistake done to oneself when projecting God-like prestige and independence on idols who similarly have influences that may not be readily apparent at first meeting. True independence and freedom is for removing tyranny to allow potentials to maximize harmoniously with others who also want to do the same. Each generation takes from the prior and tries to compete for the same professional positions and at best they provide small incremental contributions on top of those famous foundations.
The intensity that Lou sought, the excitement of being inspired by others and dropping them like a rock to move onto the next inspiration needed the excuse of contribution to society to enhance her vocation. “By the very succession of lovers she assured herself that she meant it personally with none of them. She did see each in his veriest particularity and bring out the unsuspected best in him—magically, but also through unremitting exactions both imperious and tender, like a mother-goddess grooming a beloved mortal for immortality: like a god-woman. But then as suddenly as she had come and summoned him, she would dismiss him and go, leaving him shattered. ‘Only my small misdeeds grieve me,’ she would boast to herself, or else she would apprise herself of our need to economize our goodness ‘lest bitterness ensue.’ Once she ascribed her ‘obstreperously good conscience over brutal rupturing of relations etc.’ to her voluptuous ideal of ‘being compelled to do service be it in the hardest, most painful way (as, say, God compels man)’—adding, however: ‘This thought would ease my black egoist’s soul!’ Between encounters she would write about her lovers as her instruments of self-gratification, thanking them rhetorically.”
Binion’s analysis of her thanking was what was really the live births she was interested in, like books being children for authors. “Lou’s thanking—’danken’—strongly suggests ‘abdanken,’ to dismiss (‘thank off’). Its deeper source was the anal complex (gift=turd/penis/child) even as regards Lou: ‘This inner thanking is like the single valid proof of God’s existence, presence…Only the thanking in a creator’s bestowing gesture…wholly designates God.'” In a way, she was treating her love relationships almost like a future psychoanalyst. As her internal god developed, she would try to instill that in her partners by pointing to their own internal god until they seemed well and they would go their separate ways. “Her phantom internal love partner signified her father just as did alternatively that faceless stranger outside—that ‘[transparent substance] with human contour’ bearing ‘the dearest name.’ She affirmed that she never loved a man except in his creatureliness—as an instance of the vital ‘all’ and medium for life eternal—and that, his love service done, she would restore him to ‘the totality whence he came,’ where he would stand amongst his brethren ‘placid and solid and at one with Being itself.’ Therewith ‘a new sort of sympathy and love arose: to be sure, less for the everyday person, let alone due to private relations with him, yet by no means solely contemplative, but enthused with his individuality: as if we were to set his soul before his god, in whose sight he is creative, ‘god-made,’ and asking none of our (quite unimportant) love for himself—just as, for our authentication, we need none of his.” With the world closed off to religion, almost like a mind-virus, she was an example of the narcissism and self-worship new generations would be tempted by after Darwin. In a reversal of traditional monogamy Lou “flattered herself that among humans ‘the natural love-life…is grounded in the principle of infidelity,’ the domesticated love-life in a vestigial vegetative instinct. Nietzsche before her had pronounced love of one person uncouth, ‘for it is practiced at the expense of all others’—only he had added: ‘Including love of God.'”
Lou couldn’t accept mundane morality because her ideals were only in her head and could never be found in reality. “Alone, we enjoy the love extract pure in dreamy visions. Only it is lethal: if taken in reality, it would fast wear us down, kill us off: all life is a diluting and polluting of essences.” Like in her book The House, reality always bursts the bubble of the ideal and only compromises are what’s left. “This discrepancy between her practical deficiency and ideal sufficiency in love fell in with her alternation between daughterly-hysterical extroversion among men (incidental mannishness notwithstanding) and fatherly-narcissistic introversion at home (incidental girlishness notwithstanding).”
Marriage for Lou was meant to be that brotherly-sisterly self-development project that could disband whenever progress was stymied. The self-development aspect was always the personal project getting in the way of the collective one and it always requires a partner that has the same goal and agrees to it without any subterfuge. Psychoanalyst Poul Bjerre described his experience with Lou: “She told me that she had been pregnant once but that she could not, or did not want to, become a mother. There may have been deeper reasons, however, for her refusal to accept motherhood. To become a mother means to give something away from one’s own person to the child. A woman who becomes a mother sacrifices herself in a certain sense to her child. But that was precisely what Lou could not do. She could never, not even during the most passionate embrace, and then she was by no means cold, give herself completely. She always talked about it but she could not do it. Intellectually she could merge into her partner but not humanly. Perhaps this was the real tragedy in Lou’s life. She longed for deliverance from her strong personality but did not find it. In the deepest meaning of the word, Lou was the unredeemed woman.”
Like in Freud’s sublimation, Lou wondered “whether chastity (in the full, pure sense, with no playing around or fantasy indulgence) is not a treasure house for the strength which, even sexually active and constructive, pervades the body and nervous system. This would be a path that many intellectually gifted women would discover as an option to only being a mother and housewife, which influenced Anna Freud greatly.
Rainer
Lou didn’t just write reviews and visit the Freie Bühne, but she travelled with them as they toured plays. She was also beginning herself to be reviewed negatively by some as being artificial, abstract, and too intellectual. As any content creator knows, fans can offset critical appraisals, and one fan of her writings was another fledgling creator looking for guidance. “Soon after her arrival at the end of April, 1897 to meet an old friend, Frieda von Bülow, [a man] began to send her, anonymously, handwritten copies of his poems, along with effusive letters, which she shrugged off as an annoyance.” Lou eventually visited novelist Jakob Wassermann where her anonymous fan was introduced. “René Maria Rilke first met Lou Andreas-Salomé on May 12, 1897. Rilke was twenty-one years old, a student of art history, prolific though nearly unknown as a poet but busily expanding the purview of his contacts. Lou was thirty-six and an established author.”
Lou was again faced with being the self-overcoming woman that could show a young man how to meet their potential. René was the perfect enthusiast and he fall hard. His first letter to Lou was like he was opening a door to a new world. He wanted her to be his muse. “You see, gracious lady, through this unsparing severity, through the uncompromising strength of your words, I felt that my own work was receiving a blessing, a sanction. I was like someone for whom great dreams, with all their good and evil, were coming true; for your essay was to my poems as reality is to dream, as fulfillment is to a desire…Perhaps someday I’ll be granted the privilege of reading to you one or another of my own Visions of Christ, from the ones I have kept copies of here. I can think of no deeper joy.” Mirroring Lou’s criticism of ascetic Christianity, René trusted “those strangers who blaze the paths of what is new…”
Lou’s original impression of René was that of a “sickly aristocrat” with “narrow shoulders, thin neck,” and a “receding chin and almost no back to his head.” He was from Prague but she put him in her calendar as “The Viennese.” Over time she did get to his works but, as the literary critic that she was, she found them to be overly sentimental. She imparted to him in his early days a requirement that he should focus on ideas more. If readers can learn something of wisdom along with the emotions, the results would be more forthcoming. Taking on a more masculine pseudonym like Rainer may also be more appealing to readers. The general public was full of repressions and if they read something that was freeing, it quickly became valuable as a kind of therapy. Lou described later on the modern feeling of compulsion and doing things only as a means to an end and what that does to people.
“One sometimes encounters similar dreamt anxieties, that mixture of suffering and violence, in pubescent boys before they have fully acknowledged their sexual identity and recognized their bodily needs as their own. But even if this confusing feeling of bisexuality persists for a long time afterwards, it is overcome by physical maturity; it is corrected through the opposite sex. The erotic partnership brings the blessing of clear unequivocal identity. This is not always the case with a person with burgeoning creative abilities. Natural physical maturity spawns a dangerous rivalry; in differing degrees its powers are claimed by the workplace and not by a real partnership. Inclined toward compromise, there results a greater paralysis in the corporeal processes; the unwilling attention directed to these things gives rise to proclamations of disgust that are repressed longings for pleasure. They cloak the body in melancholy and elicit a hypochondriacal oversensitivity.” Lou’s description of hypochondria could easily be the reason for modern addictions that are typically used to numb emotional pain. These feelings both lead towards political activism as a way to change repressive economic structures, and reduce the pressure of compulsion.
René felt that Lou was worth the pursuit precisely because of the potentials he was already exploring in bringing out authentic spontaneity. “Whatever reservations Lou had when she met Rilke, she could not long resist his passionate pursuit. He sought her out with a single-minded zeal that surpassed anything she had encountered before. Wherever she went he tried to be there too. When he missed her in the theatre he looked for her all over Munich…After every meeting he rushed home and poured out his heart in poetry. He knew instinctively that the spontaneity of his lyrical adoration was his strongest weapon. It disarmed her intellectual resistance by appealing to her own emotional spontaneity.” Despite her incestuous feelings of being a mother to sons or a sister to brothers, Rilke was more sexually adept than she expected. The blending of sexual compatibility with common artistic goals made the relationship more natural. “The long and severe training to which she had subjected her mind had made her wary of uncontrolled emotions, but she could not long resist the intensity of Rilke’s lyrical assault. When she succumbed to him a few weeks after they had met, he rushed into her arms like a child who has finally found his long-lost mother. But once she received him, she discovered to her surprise that the child was really a passionate young man, well versed in arts of love. Suddenly their roles were reversed; it was now Rilke who played the dominant role.”
Lou later recalled “I was your wife for years because you were the first reality, body and man undistinguishably one, the incontestable fact of life itself. I could have said literally the same you said when you confessed your love: ‘You alone are real.’ In this we became husband and wife even before we had become friends, not from choice but from this unfathomable marriage. It was not that two halves were seeking one another: shudderingly, our surprised unity recognized a preordained unity. We were brother and sister, but as in the remote past, before marriage between brother and sister had become sacrilegious.”
Her critical faculties could be undermined by Rilke’s passion, but she was suspicious of his nervous side. He could be on the one hand very confident and at other times self-criticism and self-pity would arise. She tried to love him into health but with that failure she was worried that it was really mental illness and she broke up with him. During this time they did inspire a lot of poetry, including themes of religious belief in a world that rewards it with silence. “He vowed that it would be many years before she understood how much he loved her. What a mountain spring means to a man dying of thirst, her love meant to him. He said he wanted to see the world through her for ‘then I do not see the world but only you, you, you.’ Everybody could see his happiness shining in his eyes. He wanted to ‘lose his separate identity and dissolve completely’ into her. ‘I want to be you. I don’t want to have any dreams that do not know you, nor any wishes that you cannot grant. I do not want to do anything that does not praise you…I want to be you. And my heart burns before your grace like the eternal lamp before the picture of Mary.'”
Despite Lou’s agreement with Andreas, she got Rilke to agree to destroying the poetic evidence of their love so that it couldn’t be read by the public, especially Andreas. He still preserved many poems in his notebook that were eventually published. “It was a passionate affair, with Lou always, at first, being overawed by Rilke’s male aggressiveness before her greater maturity asserted itself. Then she would take her young lover into the garden behind the house and teach him to walk barefoot over the dewy grass. She would tell him the names of her favorite flowers, make him listen to the wind in the trees and the rushing water of the brook. Her husband had taught her to observe the animals at daybreak and now she passed this knowledge on to her young lover. For the first time in his life Rilke entered into a real relationship with nature, a simple, direct and non-literary relationship. Lou communicated to him her sense of wonder at the oneness of the world, her joy of living, and her vitality. The healthy vigor of her sensuous enjoyment made him feel ashamed of the mawkish sentimentality of his adolescent dreams. A new world opened before his eyes, less tortured than the one he had known. He felt as if reborn. His whole life, he now realized, had been influenced by the false piety and the artificial values of his mother. She was responsible for the unhealthy exaltations which alienated him from reality. He had met Lou just in time. She would help him find himself. Inspired by his love for her, and with her guidance, he tried to express his feelings more simply and directly.”
Zen Haiku: https://rumble.com/v1gpga3-zen-haiku.html
He wrote to her daily when she was away for her other appointments with his mawkish language that denoted jealousy, and this was not entirely unfounded because of her relationship with Zemek which René was unaware of. Despite Andrea’s well known temper, he was already used to many male admirers of Lou and Rilke appeared harmless to him. “He seems to have grown quite fond of the young poet and raised no objections when Rilke proposed to return to Berlin with them. Thus ended the first chapter of Lou’s affair with Rilke. Henceforth she would become more and more his friend, his teacher and his mother-confessor. Their honeymoon was over.” Lou saw that Rilke’s depression stemmed from a lack of discipline to replace finished projects with new goals. Inspiration required work and skill to manifest more regularly. It inspired him to go to the University of Berlin. That allowed him to rediscover the art of Italy and he was soon there steeping himself in the atmosphere of Florence and Viareggio creating a diary with beautiful prose. He wrote back to Lou of maidens fearful, but also expecting, of their bridegrooms and the life ahead. He talked of how mothers could also love illegitimate children hinting at a possible offspring they could share.
His love of nature that Lou taught him gave him confidence, but when he returned to her he was alternately angry at her treatment of him as a boy, and his lack of economic prospects as a poet. She wanted him to be a translator and he agreed because it allowed them to be together. He learned Russian, wrote poems and was also involved in literary criticism. When they moved to Russia, the piety and reverence struck both of them with overwhelm. She was struck, but it did not return her faith for long. Rilke was animated to write prayers in his Book of Hours. They met Boris Pasternak’s father Leonid, and he facilitated a meeting with Leo Tolstoy. Their conversations dwelled on the need for updating Russian knowledge of science, economics, and politics, but Tolstoy didn’t trust the intelligentsia. “The problem facing Russia was to effect a synthesis between Occidental knowledge and the needs of the heart. But is such a synthesis possible? Can reason be married to faith? The educated Russian embodied the whole tragedy of this conflict. He advocated progress because he wanted his people to emerge from their feudal past. At the same time he had the uneasy feeling that what he advocated was wrong, not because the Czar was opposed to it, but because his God did not and could not want it. For progress in secular knowledge inevitably leads to a decline in faith. The Bible was right: mans fall from grace began when he ate from the tree of knowledge.”
Rilke’s love was still inspired by the environment. His love was something that couldn’t be damaged like bodily sensation:
Put out my eyes, and I can see you still,
Slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;
And without any feet can go to you;
And tongueless, I can conjure you at will.
Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you
And grasp you with my heart as with a hand;
Arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;
And if you set this brain of mine afire,
Then on my blood-stream I yet will carry you.
Frieda von Bülow invited the couple to an estate she was taking care of for Princess von Meiningen. She felt a little used because they ignored Frieda and studied Russian culture like they were studying for an exam. There was a lot of exhaustion. They eventually had to leave in an emergency where Lou’s dog Lottchen fell ill and died a few days after their arrival. She was usually more devoted to dogs than her human counterparts, and she felt remorse. Rilke still used his time in Berlin to work on “Prayers he called them, and that is what they are, although the deity to whom they are addressed bears no resemblance to God as the orthodox Christian reveres Him. That God, Rilke felt, was dead, had become an empty symbol in the Sunday Service ritual of the West. To the Russian monk whose prayers he reports, there was something blasphemous in the way in which Western artists represented Him. Their efforts to limit the limitless One, to imprison Him in time and space, were deeply alien to the Russian concept of a growing God.”
God is:
…the deep epitome of things
that keeps its being secret with locked lip
and shows itself to others otherwise:
to the ship, a haven—to the land, a ship.
There was a “relentless probing and searching for some ultimate reality.” He came into his own as a poet and Lou rediscovered her youth. “For the first time she realized what she had missed by surrendering her youthful ardor to Gillot’s tutelage and for the first time she felt really young.” Rilke became enamored by all things Russian and eventually appropriated successfully enough that he could write Russian poetry. He hoped this would create enough commonality between him and Lou for her to stay with him in Russia. It tempted her, but she felt engulfed in his idealistic view of Russia. His excessive emotions turned into strange phobias. “Her alarm grew when she noticed strange states of anxiety which Rilke began to suffer and during which he was almost paralyzed with fear. She tells that once during a walk he was suddenly fixed to the spot and could not take another step. With horror-stricken eyes he looked at an acacia tree in front of him as if it were a ghost. Her efforts to make him see that it was no different from any of the trees around it were in vain. Rilke was unable to walk past it. They had to turn around and go back the way they had come. Such incidents alarmed Lou. Rilke clung to her with the desperation of a drowning man, but no matter how much she loved him she was not willing to give up her life to take care of him. Her desire to regain her independence grew as Rilke became more and more dependent on her, until she reached the conclusion that it was necessary to end their affair. With a quiet finality she noted in her diary at the end of January: ‘Rainer must go.'”
This didn’t all happen at once and they eventually returned to Moscow and travelled around with Leonid Pasternak and his son Boris. Boris recalled of the couple “On a warm summer morning of the year 1900 an express train leaves the Kursk station. Just before its departure somebody in a black Tyrolese cape steps to the window. A woman of tall stature is with him. She is probably his mother or his older sister. They talk animatedly with my father about something that occupies them all three. Occasionally, the woman addresses a few words in Russian to my mother. The stranger only talks German. Although I had a complete command of that language I had never heard it spoken like this. That is why, amidst all the people on the crowded platform between two sounds of the parting bell, the stranger seemed to me like a silhouette, like something imagined in the thicket of the unimagined.”
They tried to communicate with Tolstoy but their visit was unexpected and they were left in the company of his son and as hours went by Tolstoy would return without eye contact and ask about the visitors and then leave. He eventually invited them for a walk. “Far from being the gentle, wise and understanding Russian peasant they described, Tolstoy was a tortured genius, self-centered and intolerant. His ideas on art and religion were diametrically opposed to theirs and had ‘no kind of attraction’ for Rilke, as he later admitted. At the time, however, Rilke was so much under Lou’s influence that he overlooked the unpleasant aspects of their visit. But he may have wondered in retrospect whether Tolstoy’s brusque rejection of him as a poet was not symbolic of the whole journey. Its outcome, certainly, was quite different from what he had hoped. No such thoughts troubled Lou. Their visit to Tolstoy remained in her memory as the gateway to Russia.”
Travelling to Kiev, they witnessed religious fervour of the people. “They joined the solemn procession of candle-bearing peasants that wound its way through the dark corridors of the Pechevsky Monastery with its caves and catacombs, where the bodies of monks are buried and where hermits, interred in rude cells, used to spend their lives in eternal darkness for the glory of God.” Rilke enjoyed the experience, but Lou preferred the Cathedral of St. Sophia. She liked the how icons didn’t reveal the sacred persons they depict like in Western churches. “Upon a golden background their dark-brown figures are almost unrecognizable, leaving it to the imagination of the beholder to think what he likes. ‘What he sees are merely questions, symbols, vessels for that which he pours into them. Between picture and icon there remains a difference in kind, not in degree only.'” Even though they found things to like about Kiev, “they did not really care for it. Rilke complained that the town was too Western, too cosmopolitan. And Lou voiced the typically Russian contempt for the Ukrainians. They were importunate and lacked the spontaneity of the Russians. Traveling by boat down the Dnieper, they made their way to Poltava, where they boarded the train for the long journey eastward to Saratov on the Volga.”
The Volga and the western part of the central plateau was much more tranquil and communicated Oneness to her. “Lou was charmed by it. She praised its wide and gentle aspect, its vast simplicity, its solitude. And Rilke felt that he had to re-think all dimensions. Everything was limitless: water, land and sky…From the deck of the Alexander Nevsky they watched a peaceful procession of towns, villages and hamlets glide by quietly and dreamlike. Lou confided to her diary: ‘Here I would like to stay forever. Here, as so often, the Volga is not a river, it is as broad and comprehensive as the sea. But unlike the sea it is intimate and friendly.’ This combination of intimacy and grandeur seemed to her its peculiar charm. It caused her an almost physical pain to see it glide by. An inner voice told her that this Volga landscape was the landscape of her soul. Here is where she belonged. In a poem reminiscent of the love poem Rilke had addressed to her she expressed her love for it:”
Though you be far, I still will look at you.
Though you be far, you are forever mine.
You are the present that will never fade;
You are my landscape harboring my heart.
If I had never rested on your banks,
I yet would know your open amplitude,
And every wave and every dream would take
me back to your enormous solitude.
As Lou was connecting with her ideal, Rilke was sensing their intimacy waning when Lou asked for a second mattress. She wrote of the experience. “Splinters in my fingernails and in my nerves.” It was reminding him of Worpswede north of Bremen, where he lived with artists, that called to him as well. Her faith towards herself was triggered by reading her older diary entries. “I am faithful to memories forever. I shall never be faithful to men.” With turmoil in the background, they still enjoyed the company of the peasants and their honest expressions and emotions. “One old woman especially, the grandmother of the family, made a deep impression on her because she spoke ‘in the grand style of a chronicle and with an eye to eternity.'” It became clear to Rilke that his love for Russia was actually an extension of his love for Lou and both were fading. Their ideals about Russia were only projections. When Lou returned to St. Petersburg, her family moved to Rongas in Finland. She left Rilke behind. He wrote her a hateful letter that she tore up. She was now her own person, distinguished and didn’t need to run away from the heritage of her youth. “Everywhere, within the circle of her family and outside in the well-known landscape of forests and lakes, she heard the echo of voices from her childhood.” Her return reconnected her to her “Father-God” and the memories of her father. Even though he was long dead “she felt that for the first time she really understood what he was like. He embodied all she had come to love in Russia, simplicity, human warmth, and greatness of soul. ‘Now,’ she confided to her Russian diary, ‘I would really have become his child.'”
She also trained with Gillot in this location and her memories of him didn’t trouble her anymore. When Lou travelled Europe she was able to compare habits and customs from other locations and that experience helped her to appreciate where she grew up. The authenticity she touched upon was related to cultural preferences that she felt were easy to sympathize with and understand, even if she was still unable to make a permanent marriage possible. It had more to do with her repelling others who compelled and pressured her, so that way her volition was free to make authentic choices. Home didn’t really have to be in St. Petersburg, but it was where compulsion was banished. She was also able to enjoy satisfaction from her Super-ego by using her Ego to create enough achievements that narrowed the gap between reality and her Ego-ideal. The feeling is about achieving enough so that one can look back on life with satisfaction. Achievements can continue of course, but when a certain threshold is met, which is usually going beyond expectations, or reaching an easily demarcated apogee in one’s career, there’s a meditative rest in that one has made a positive stamp on history, which is another form of immortality.
The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html
Her positive letter in response to his hateful one was like a crumb he could use as a salve for his wounded pride. When she returned he was already depressed and somewhat down by the fact that he couldn’t be secure in his future with Lou. “Hence, after their return to Germany at the end of August, Rilke did not stay in Berlin. He accepted an invitation from his artist friend Heinrich Vogler, who lived in Worpswede. Vogler introduced him to a group of dedicated young artists who had settled in this rather bleak moor-and-fen landscape so that they might work undisturbed by the distractions of city life. Rilke felt immediately at home among them and busied his heart with new friendships. He was especially attracted to two young girls: the fair-haired painter Paula Becker and her close friend, the dark, brown-eyed sculptress Clara Westhoff. Both of them took pity on the sad young poet and made him feel that life was worth living after all…In the presence of the two girls he recovered his faith in his poetic future. He decided on the spur of the moment to spend the autumn and winter with them and rented a little house in Worpswede.”
One of the women Paula, that was a rebound to Rilke, and similar to Lou, instead moved on and became engaged with Otto Modersohn. He was looking for a permanent muse, but he returned to Lou to continue his studies under their new more professional relationship. His depression continued and Lou felt it resembled Nietzsche’s when they ended the Trinity. He returned to Clara Westhoff who was interested in his poetry, but he was not immediately interested in her. She continued communication with him and gave him gifts while he warned her to not expect quick responses because of how immersed he was in work. “And then, all of a sudden, in the middle of February, he declared his love to her and proposed marriage. This sudden decision puzzled and surprised Rilke’s friends. Lou was also surprised and even a little angry when she heard of Rilke’s plans. She felt like a mother who resents her son’s getting married. On the other hand, she realized that this was the decisive moment. It gave her the opportunity for the final break which she had long been contemplating. In a long letter with the heading ‘Last Appeal’ she summed up the course of their love and cautioned Rilke against his proposed marriage. Claiming the right to speak to him like a mother, she wrote that she was afraid he might suffer the fate of the Russian writer Garshin (who had committed suicide in a fit of depression) if he entered into any marital ties. The only way for him to find peace was through his work.”
She realized that she found herself, and she was right in the sense that Rilke would only find peace in work, but it didn’t stop him from marrying Clara. He ended up having a daughter named Ruth with her. “Lou continued to be the person to whom Rilke turned for enlightenment, far beyond the years of their love affair, into years of separation that witnessed Rilke’s marriage to the sculptor Clara Westhoff and Lou’s romantic involvement with several men. Lou became for Rilke an interpreter of his experience, but more than the wisdom she shed on any particular event it was her being, the fact of her caring, that was essential and indispensable to Rilke. The extent of Rilke’s real reliance on Lou for understanding is perhaps most dramatically underscored in the record of the last days of his life. Refusing to hear the doctor’s prognosis, Rilke instructed Frau Wunderly-Volkart, the attendant at his deathbed, to entrust ‘the whole truth’ to Lou. Later, although he refused the invitation to write to Lou, Rilke nevertheless expressed several times the wan hope that maybe Lou would be able to understand the source of his illness. Stricken with acute leukemia, Rilke did not meet with Lou again, and the poet was deprived of an answer from his muse. Just as he had depended on Lou for insight into life’s traumas, Rilke turned to her for understanding in death. And Lou, his survivor, assumed the task of formulating an answer for herself and for posterity in an elegant memorial to Rilke’s life.”
It remains to be seen what his problems were because Lou’s descriptions contained stereotypes of genius being close to madness. The work he did plumbed the depths of the mind, but it also ironically created self-abnegation because of how all consuming his work was. His yearnings were a burden for partners because he was searching for a muse that could be a mood booster that he could rely on indefinitely. His rewards were precariously dependent on the kind words of others. “In pursuing internally the core of man, the poet crosses the same path, upon which the psychically ill patient gropes aimlessly before him. The healthy person cannot fathom through rational means what ominously sways back and forth between the two on such occasions…Abandoning himself in everything, and thereby making himself superfluous, the benefactor becomes at once the petitioner, the recipients become donors, and he hides in their secure existence…where his form is allowed to fade and no longer requires visibility or the boundaries of self. Restored to a stronger presence: standing there, in deep peace, he too a nameless one among the nameless.”
He definitely was suffering from depression and many years after being with Lou he found another muse Baladine Klossowska that he met in Paris, but it’s a debate as to whether her influence was a good one or not. Because psychology was in its early stages, his irritability and depression points to obvious stress and insecurity, but there’s no absolute proof of a psychosomatic cause. “The leukemia which killed him had been almost reluctantly diagnosed, and had struck like a storm, after a period of gathering clouds. Ulcerous sores appeared in his mouth, pain troubled his stomach and intestines, he slept a lot when his body let him, his spirit was weighed down by depression, while physically he became as thin and fluttery as a leaf.” In term of psychological diagnoses, his mania and depression would easily slot him with a form of bipolar disorder. There aren’t a lot of studies that connect bipolar disorder to leukemia, but there are increased overall cancer risks involving bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple – Rudolph Binion: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780691618609/
My Sister, My Spouse – H.F. Peters: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393007480/
Looking Back – Lou Andreas-Salomé: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781569248485/
Salomé, her life and work – Livingstone, Angela: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780918825049/
Lou von Salomé – Julia Vickers: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780786436064/
Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters – Rainer Maria Rilke, Lou Andreas-Salomé: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393331905/
You Alone Are Real to Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke – Lou Andreas-Salomé: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781929918324/
Reading Rilke Reflections on the Problems of Translation By William H. Gass: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/g/gass-rilke.html
BarChana M, Levav I, Lipshitz I, Pugachova I, Kohn R, Weizman A, Grinshpoon A. Enhanced cancer risk among patients with bipolar disorder. J Affect Disord. 2008 May;108(1-2):43-8.
Grassi L, Stivanello E, Belvederi Murri M, Perlangeli V, Pandolfi P, Carnevali F, Caruso R, Saponaro A, Ferri M, Sanza M, Fioritti A, Meggiolaro E, Ruffilli F, Nanni MG, Ferrara M, Carozza P, Zerbinati L, Toffanin T, Menchetti M, Berardi D. Mortality from cancer in people with severe mental disorders in Emilia Romagna Region, Italy. Psychooncology. 2021 Dec;30(12):2039-2051.
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/