To write a single line of verse one must see many cities, people, things, one must know animals, one must feel birds flying and know the movements flowers make as they open up in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unfamiliar regions, unexpected encounters, and partings which one saw coming long before; one must be able to think back to those days in one's childhood that are still unexplained, to one's parents whom one could not help offending when they brought a delightful gift and one didn't appreciate it (it was a delight for someone else), to those childhood illnesses which arose so peculiarly and with so many profound and difficult changes, to those days in peaceful and secluded rooms, and to those mornings by the sea, to the sea anywhere, to seas, to nights of travel that swept along high above, flying with the stars; and it's still not enough, even when one's allowed to think of everything one can. One must have memories of many nights of love--no two nights the same--of the cries of women in labour and of pale, white, sleeping women who have given birth and are now closing again. But one must also have been with the dying, one must have sat in a room with the dead with the window open and random noises coming in. And having memories is still not enough. If there are a great many, one must be able to forget them, and one must have the patience to wait until they return. For the memories are not what's essential. It's only when they become blood within us, become our nameless looks and signs that are no longer distinguishable from ourselves--not until then does it happen that, in a very rare moment, the first word of a verse rises in their midst and goes forth from among them.
―Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
In an earlier passage and expressionist style, Malte as alter ego writer-author writes that he is learning to see…an interior he did not know was there. At the turn of the century, the traumatic individuation of the literary prodigal son, a kind of fantasized second self-birth, excretes “the interior” as a kind of remainder. A nagging hollow that surveilles from the vantage of an ultimate privacy that longs at one and the same time to be registered on (or in?) the membrane binding it to an implied, slippery beyond. This great reversal in consciousness, seeing alienation inverted, the ‘exterior’ reified, due to consciousness’ new condition of immanent boundedness (or bounded immanence) from the deep recessions of the freshly self-surveilling mind, was a corollary of feeling slip its proprietary and curatorial privileges on [the] human experience; of being forced to face the horror and humiliation of specificity.
This sundered mind rails against the knowledge of its own properties and feels itself condemned by them; to be merely a European lowercased man and not Man, of certain letters and travels, and non exhaustive experiences. In eulogizing the contraction in scope and scale of its curations it also betrays a discomfort in its own self, of ‘two minds’, made aware. From its earliest modernist manifestations in commercial capitals to its more peripheral settings (Prussia, Austria-Hungary, semi-industrialized imperial Europe), it poses the question of how to reinscribe itself back into the whole, from this new receded vantage revamped into position of domination, that Nietzsche had already answered in one way: Become corp/s/e; self-inscribe into the vellum of text, philosophy, sacred genre, borrowing from the biblical style a structurally inconclusive semiosis that can generate interminable interpretation, far exceeding any specific material instance of being read, any encounter, any body, even as it, with brain, corrupts into syphilitic boils. The interior—elusive, yawning, agape—to be filled with this new lens, at the most abstract discretion—telescopic, microscopic, or obscure—made to overcome mortal provincialism and, not coincidentally, expiring empire. The soul, scooped out, lens, inserted. But not yet for Malte. The bored crust of his empty residence throbs importunately for its organ, almost too slickly harmonizing with allegory of its story’s prodigal theme. He is still and elsewhere, as it were, doing his best to deflect the magnetism exercised by the “faceless, flayed, exposed empty head” of a presumably homeless woman, forcing his eyes to linger on her torn face—a shriveled mask from a series of spent others—held in her lap by two trembling, uncertain hands.