Re-reading Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks. Brilliant, radiant intellect. One of the most profound books I know. The essay on Pythagoreanism. The equations or affinities she develops between mathematical and religious concepts. Comparable notions of suffering, kenosis and mediation. The concept of number and the (trinitarian) nature of God. French clarity, & some other kind of depth and passion... this book is one of the cornerstones of civilization.

(BTW see Charles Simic's little poem in this week's New Yorker. This is a poem about kenosis.)

On a different topic : strong sense, walking around this morning, of poetry as evocative dream. When the imagination is stirred by the evocation of a feeling-scene... remote, rare, elusive, subjective, personal. Rilke comes to mind. The legend of the poet wrapped up in song-feeling-memory. Distance, absence. Adolescence. Hard for me to describe this clearly. Attendant sense of a kind of betrayal or desolation of this reality, in the constant internet chit-chat (my own, especially) about "poetry".

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(Maybe this isn't a completely different topic. There's a passage in Weil where she briefly analyzes the concept of the Trinity, and the idea of God as Subject, the one whose name is "I am"... & how it could be that God is wholly Love and Goodness, and also the active Subject, enveloping & encompassing all subjectivity... she identifies this with early Greek philosophers - e.g. Philolaus's terse saying about the One, whose first creation is Unity, the name of which is Hestia, or the hearth-fire... Weil outlines how this agrees with the idea of the Trinity...)

Still reading Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. I think I first read it as sophomore in college, 1971 or so. It made a strong impression.

Around that time there was, I seem to recall, quite a Rilke vogue. I got annoyed with some of his portentous poetique mannerisms, how they chimed with 70s New-Ageyness, literary "spirituality". (People my age might remember what I'm talking about.)

But this was all just Rilke in American pop translation.

He was drawn to Russia & Russian poets (friend & correspondent with Tsvetaeva, who hero-worshipped him).

& I'm just being superficial, journalistic myself here.

Rilke offers a suave, cultivated, aristocratic image : but there's a clear hardness and independence to his writing too. A sort of old-fashioned 19th-cent. stoic "peasant" awareness of the facts of life and death.

In Malte he dwells on poverty and suffering. Sometimes it seems unflinching, sometimes it veers toward the edge of literary voyeurism (slumming), but mostly it offers a stream of eloquent sympathy, compassion. (Many passages in Malte should be required reading in medical or nursing school.) Bearing witness to the gradual moldering of strange old European culture, the imminent end of a certain historical era.

As part of my escape from poetry, am re-reading Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

Rilke moved to Paris in August 1902, into an apartment at 11, rue Tollier (Ironworker Street?).

The book begins with this inscription : September 11th, rue Tollier.

Here are the first few sentences, trans. by Stephen Mitchell :

"So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in. I have been out. I saw : hospitals. I saw a man who staggered and fell. A crowd formed around him and I was spared the rest."

Weird.

Examples of perfect, "seraphic" poets : Holderlin, Pushkin, Marvell, Keats, Donne, Rilke, Celan, Mandelstam, Whitman, Dickinson...

what makes them perfect? At their best, they make verse sing on all levels. Intellectual music. Going to the edge of the human (the upper limit).

Mystery of when & how nations & cultures evolve perfect poets. Dialect of the tribe; shared meanings & forms of play.