Flesh and the Angels

A meditation on creativity in life, art and psychotherapy, its expression as a phenomenology of bursting, and the challenge of keeping going, with John Coltrane, Rainer Maria Rilke and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as companions.

Derek Bean is a practising Existential-Phenomenological Psychotherapist and registered member of the UK Council for Psychotherapy.

Art is always the outcome of one’s having been in danger, of having gone right to the end of an experience to where no human being can go further    Rainer Maria Rilke

I am listening to John Coltrane ablaze with sound.  Probing, relentless; beyond now his infamous ‘sheets of sound’. In My Favourite Things, a signature tune to which he returned many times, recorded at Temple University on November 11, 1966. His soprano horn breath searching and soaring.  Soaring and then suddenly abandoning into shouts and strange chanting. A bursting of himself.

Coltrane’s innovative sound, whilst remaining rooted in gospel and blues, had always pushed against the boundaries of the genre, and by the mid-1960’s, he was also exploring Indian classical and Sufi forms of modality and musical structure. A quiet and very spiritual man, his music was described by the jazz critic and writer Nat Hentoff as ‘a way of self-purgation so that he could learn more about himself to the end of making himself and his music part of the unity of all being’.

John Coltrane at the Guggenheim Museum, 1960
William Claxton Photographer (Creative Commons, CC BY-NC)

Always emotionally charged, Coltrane’s playing by this time could be hypnotic, incantatory and densely textural in a search for seemingly infinite musical possibilities. And when, at Temple University in 1966, his saxophone could not make the emotional leap he demanded, he broke into chanting, singing wordlessly, pounding his chest to change the sound he vocalised, before returning to his soprano. It was one of Coltrane’s last concert gigs and the last full year of his life.

Listening to John Coltrane I think of Rilke and his terrifying angels. The angel of the Duino Elegies (1923) and, in particular, the angel of the first elegy:

For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to
endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying

Coltrane seems to soar on flaming wings and take us into a beauty almost unbearable, for us and for him.

Bees of the invisible

Rainer Maria Rilke brought us many angels. Not angels of a Christian order (Rilke disowns any such association), but angels who, in mysterious ways, are present and active with us in the world, ‘this fleeting world, which in some way keeps calling to us’. Some are gentle and watchful, and I can’t help thinking here of Damiel and Cassiel in Wim Wenders evocative film Wings of Desire (1987); others are fierce and challenging, come to ‘seize you as though they’d created you and broken you out of your mold’. And how powerful a breaking open this is, in poetry and in art, when, beyond image and beyond metaphor, it touches us as lived experience. This is the angel of the Duino Elegies.

In a letter written shortly after publication of the Elegies (to his Polish translator), Rilke describes how the elegies were a white canvass upon which he sought to represent his ‘affirmation of life as well as death’ where ‘there is neither a This-side, nor a That-side’ and the whole is the realm of the angels. For Rilke, the very transitoriness of life, and of things, needs to be rescued, taken in:

To impress this fragile and transient earth so sufferingly, so passionately upon our hearts that its essence shall rise up again, invisible, in us. We are the bees of the Invisible. Nous butinons éperdument le miel du visible, pour l’accumuler dans la grande ruche d’or de l’Invisible (We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible).

Rilke’s poetry expresses beautifully an enigmatic shifting between visible and invisible, self and world, subjectivity and being, with, in the Duino Elegies, his angel as watcher and interrogator. What Michael Heller has called catching the moment of being/non-being, offering an openness to the permeability of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds. Where, for Rilke, the angel is ‘terrible’ for us because we cling so strongly to the visible. Yet this is always an ambiguous space, with every possibility of jeopardy and loss. Hannah Arendt, writing on the elegies in 1930, sees the paradox and ambiguity, but equally a witnessing of desperation in the human situation. For Arendt, Rilke’s poetic mission to rescue things also shows us knowledge of futility and despair in the human condition, ‘despair at not being able to be heard, and finally the need to speak even without an answer’.

In his letters to his wife Clara, Rilke spoke frequently about the painter Paul Cezanne, identifying with his artistic struggle, his seriousness, and his crisis:

Without real pleasure, it seems, in a continual rage, ever at odds with his every endeavour, none of which appeared to achieve what he regarded as the ultimate desideratum. This he called la réalisation…The incarnation of the world as a thing carrying conviction, the portrayal of a reality become imperishable through his experience of the object.

Cezanne, who ‘concentrated so much incorruptible actuality into the constitution of its colours that it began a new life on the further side of colour’. In his introduction to the Selected Letters, John Bayley observes how Cezanne’s aim of réalisation became Rilke’s own and how Rilke devoted himself to the same honest realisation of himself in things. What Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his essay Cezanne’s Doubt (1948), describes as a powerless wanting ‘to make visible how the world touches us’. This was always perilous for Cezanne and felt as wretchedly unsuccessful.  Nevertheless, Cezanne’s art inspired in Rilke the greater possibilities of a life put in danger, spent going further, in seeking his own transformation of the ‘Here it is’ that the truthfulness of Cezanne’s colours taught him: ‘The good conscience of these reds, these blues’.

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