Sep '02 [Home] By Degree 365:  Year One of 9/11 Masters:Centuries are hooped together… Judgment Day From the Writings of a Monk R. M. Rilke (1875-1926)

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They will arise as from a bath out of their yielding graves; for each believes in the last reunion, and awful is their faith, without grace. Speak softly, God! One might think Your kingdom's trumpet sounded; next to its tone no depth is deep: with all the ages rising from the stones and all the vanished reappearing in rumpled linen, fragile bones misshapen by the weight of sod. It shall be a marvelous returning to a marvelous home and hearth; even those who never knew You will cry out and demand entitlement to Your majesty: like bread and wine. All-seeing One, You know the wild imagery that I envisage, trembling in my gloom. All things pass through You who are the gate,— and in Your face were all things once contained 'ere they were lost in ours. You know the huge tribunal scene: It is a morning, but formed of light Your age-old love did not create, a sound not of Your voice's making, a tremble not from godly self-denial, a tipping, but not of balances that You put right. There is a rustle and a marshalling of will in all the ruptured buildings, a self-reward and -dissipation, auto-copulation and gawking at oneself, a fondling of every former pleasure and limp requickening of each desire. And over churches, agape like sores, black birds fly, no design of Yours, in haphazard patterns back and forth. They grapple like that, the long reposed, and attack one another gnashing teeth, scared that they no longer bleed, cold fingers held to empty sockets, as they probe for the dead tears. And weary. Just minutes upon their morning, their evening obtrudes. They sober and disperse, ready to ascend into the tempest, when the dark droplets of Your wrath appear in the clear blue vintage of Your love, in order to appease You. And so it begins, after the general clamor: the colossal, hideous holding of tongues. They all sit as if in blackened doorways, in light that sprinkles them with garish spots, like ulcerating sores. Deepening, the evening grows frail and late. Nights fall down in mammoth chunks upon their hands and backs that bend to the black encumbrances assumed. They wait a long time. Their shoulders pitch under the pressure like a dark sea, they sit, as though immersed in thought, and yet are void. Why the finger to the temple? Their minds are thinking somewhere deep within the Earth, collapsed and buckled up: all the old Earth thinks a bluestreak and its big trees rustle so. All-seeing One, have You considered this pale and timid picture that has no counterpart among the visions of Your will? Do You not fear this dumbstruck city clung to You like a shriveled leaf, meaning to arise at the signal of Your wrath? Oh, seize the spokes of every day that they not reach this end too soon,— maybe You can still prevent the massive hush we two observed. Maybe you can still choose one of us to rob this horrible reanimation of its purpose, yearning and soul, one who is disgruntled to the core and yet content to float through every thing, as the insouciant consumer of the forces, one who can be bowed on all his strings, and descend as unsuspected diver unmolested into every death. .  .  .  How else do You expect to bear this day, longer than the length of every day combined, with its horrendous hushed-up singing, and when the angels press about You, like so many questions, with the dreadful flap of wings? See how they hover, atremble, and accuse You with a hundred thousand eyes, their voices' dulcet song reduced to improvising chaos in transition, no longer daring to produce pure sound. And if the old men with the ample beards who attend You in Your greatest triumphs, merely sway their whitened crowns, and if the women, who fed Your son, and those he led astray, the comrades, and all the virgins who made him vows: the lucid birches in Your darkened gardens,— who would help You, if they all fell mute? And none but Your son would come forward from among all those who sit about Your throne. Would Your voice then dig into his heart? Would Your lonesome agony then say: Son! Would you then seek out the face of him who assembled the tribunal, Your tribunal and Your throne: Son! Would You, Father, then command Your issue, in the quiet company of Magdalene, to descend to those who wish to die again? This would be Your final edict, the final dispensation and the final scorn. But then everything were over: heaven, Judgment Day and You. The wrap about the world's enigma, enshrouded for so long, falls away with this one clasp. .  .  .  Yet I am afraid .  .  .  All-seeing One, see how afraid I am, appreciate my suffering! I fear that You have long since gone away. When first You glimpsed in Your all-embracing the image of this pallid court, which You, All-seeing One, powerless approached. Did You flee then? Where did You go? None more trusted could come to You than I, would not seek to sell You out like all the pious ones. I only want, being quite as hidden and spent as You, even more spent perhaps, and as frightened by the huge tribunal that You fear, to hold my face just next Your face, and cleave to You; with no small zeal, we shall halt the giant wheel which churns the mighty waters that crash and wheeze — because: woe be if they arise again. Such is their faith:  immense and without grace. (ca. 1906) (Translation © 1995, 1996, 2002 Maureen Holm)