you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood
by the ropemaker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.
Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,
serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing–, and blissfully
escapes far beyond the violin.–And these Things,
which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,
they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.
They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,
within–oh endlessly–within us! Whoever we may be at last.*
Rilke's elegy calls on the reader to pay attention to the here and now, not just the glories of the great hereafter, and is a trembling (as in Kierkergaardian fear and trembling) meditation of the evanescence of being, a source of wonder and awe deserving of tribute and reverence, and not merely a shoddy and contingent waiting room to be endured until God calls.
To look, not just with eye and brain, but with sense-memory as well, elevates the most mundane thing, and makes experience - all those overlooked, unconsidered, unremarkable and unremarked experiences, which otherwise count for little or nothing - into a long moment that no other may dictate or define.
I think that one of the things that people tend to look for too much in art is meaning. And they tend to project meaning much faster than I would like them to. If I was a dictator, an art dictator, I would tie them up and say: ‘Here, look at this. And look at it again, and look at it again’. (Vija Celmins in conversation with Robert Gober, 2004
* Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegy No. 9
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