Rilke as bookmark

For years, I had these self-help books I dragged around with me through every move. Most of them were gifts (of a sort) from one particular person who shall remain nameless, and they inspired in me an absolute rage; the others, while less rage-inspiring, were quite notable in their absolute inability to help me help myself. They were more like self-unhelp books, or self-trouble.

After the last move, in 2012, unpacking these ridiculous books again, I got angry at myself (self-angering books): WHY was I torturing myself by lugging these horrible, offensive, accusatory, unhelpful, rage-inducing books with me through house after house? Just because they were printed and bound did not mean they were automatically worthy of respect.

If they weren’t going to be helpful–and they patently weren’t–if they were determined not to be useful as a product, then they could become an input.

I carefully cut about fifty pages out of the worst book, gessoed them, painted them, stamped them, cut them, folded them, stitched on them, and turned them into other things.

You don’t want to original text to be distracting but you do want it to show that it was originally a page from a book; I don’t want to be reminded of what I hated so much about the books whenever I see them, but I do want to see what I made of my life and myself out of what the self-help books were supposed to help me with. So it takes forever. But it’s satisfying, too.

This bookmark was one of the first. The lines are from a poem by Rilke, who I love (who doesn’t love German transcendental poets?), and the patterns are from a variety of sources meant to make it look a bit like an old-fashioned sampler. Here’s the full, original poem:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

My favourite Rilke poem is the 10th Elegy, but it is very very long (about 10 pages in my translation) and has no short pithy quotes suitable for hand-made bookmarks. He wrote so much gorgeous stuff, though. I can only imagine how it must thunder along in the original, with its rhyme and meter intact.

One of the things I love about Rilke is that when he wrote about God, he quite openly and clearly discussed having created him, built him, projected him out into the universe; that God was something we made, and then lived by. And yet the sense of worship and holiness is still there. It didn’t rob God of his meaning or value to have been created by people. It’s a fascinating perspective.