Someone once joked that I was the sort of poet who read Rilke while eating cheeseburgers. I suppose I still am that sort; I have not given it much thought until now. If I was ‘one of us’, I was, to be sure, a barbarian by virtue of living west of Ontario, in my mid-thirties and still more or less unvetted. Back then, I drove cab and dispatched them.

Here was the scene: a Saturday night, and hundreds of teens stoned out of their gourds would be pouring into the streets looking for transport metaphorically and otherwise, cabbies in a feeding frenzy... Rilke’s angel could easily have been amongst it all, casting a baleful eye on it all, as in some scene or other of Wim Wenders. Orpheus and Eurydice in charity shop combat boots...

Things quieted down, the streets rain-slicked, and Cindy Cupcake would ring for a cab. Cindy Cupcake was a fiction, creation of a previous generation of dispatchers, but we would send this phantasm a pretend cab anyway. She was a kind of soul floating about the city in the wee morning hours.

Soul. I hear the word ‘soul’, and I run for the hills. But there is no getting around it: ‘soul’ wants a bit of discussing, not too much. Rilke, if nothing else, erected an on-ramp to such a discussion. Yes, I was reading Rilke. I read a great deal of the man, in fact, including those letters he wrote to a young poet, and a depressive novel. I found myself stuck between clashing rocks: Rilke and Yeats. (They seem so far away now, that pair of poets, as if they are fading languages soon enough to be purely mumbo jumbo.) In any case, there was the poet who was roundabout and yet, he always seemed to cover essential ground: Rilke then. Yeats was a poet whose verses were a bow stretched for release, bullseye imminent, the arrow rarely missing its target.... The poet of the speculative ear and the poet whose pitch-sense was unerring... how to reconcile the two? For that was what my ear was telling me to do in between hangovers, in between mic clicks and the crises that arose inevitably on any graveyard shift at Taxi Dispatch.

I ate my cheeseburgers in a European backwater in Vancouver, B.C. ‘The Old Europa’ was the name of the place. Various tribes that had fought tooth and nail with one another back in the Old Country now had to countenance the presence of the other on the alien soil of a ‘host’ nation. There might have been boombox music passing by on the street, but Rilke was not out of place. A lot of hissing in that restaurant between the Hungarian contingent and ‘gypsies’, for instance... The ‘terrible angel’, the terrible silence, the eloquent goulash.... No, not necessarily out of place, that angel…

I read Rilke against a backdrop of Virgil and the Romans, Homer and the Greeks, and my growing disillusion with what certain critics were pleased to call the New American poetry. Perhaps I was giving Rilke a free pass as I took his mention of the ‘terrible angel’ at face value. Even so, one slight alteration in the pronunciation of ‘terrible, and the angel in question is laugh track material. “Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich”. Well, ‘schrecklich’ to my American-Canadianized ear comes off comical, not dread-inspiring, so perhaps, that is why the translations into English of the ‘schreck-whatever’ do not especially satisfy. For all that (and I do not remember at this moment as to which translation I was reading), the words ‘terrible angel’ did get to me, burrowed into me, touched some part of myself I would not have thought existed.

A friend remarked on a photograph of Rilke, that the face the camera captured was the ‘ugliest mug’ he had ever seen. We laughed, as if recalling some ‘loser’ we had known in high school who had been in serious need of dating advice. Someone informed me that Rilke had been a ‘terrible’ mooch, living off the avails of other peoples’ purses, perhaps trying their patience. High maintenance. His, and I am paraphrasing here, ‘go to the farthest reach of your longing’ could eat you out of house and home. There is not a lot I remember from Rilke’s body of poetry save for a few ‘Rilkean notions’: the ‘terrible angel’ of course, a village well, and the soul and what it is for.

Soul. It is one of those words that can seem both small and compact, and seem infinitely large and imprecise. It has to do with a great many things, no doubt, but it surely has to do with memory. Not the kind that would tell you where your lost keys might be, but the kind that remembers the ‘terrible wrath of Achilles or Artemis’... Or that remembers some cataclysm... Or that would remember what is good in us without killing that ‘good’ with mindless pieties...

In the modern, post-modern, post-post-post seething mess of a world we have gotten ourselves into, so much has been disappearing and with such speed, one has chronic whiplash. I do not recall exactly how Rilke framed the metaphor, but ‘soul’ and the village well were somehow one and the same, the soul being where the things that disappear went and could still draw breath, especially those things that did not deserve to disappear. (The soul was a kind of warehouse, though I suppose the idea of the well is so much more poetic.) Like I said, I do not recall exactly what it was Rilke wrote on the matter, but I will never forget that I read it, and that all sorts of gizmos in my brain lit up as I read, and I probably (if silently) spoke the equivalence of “that’s right, that’s right”, and then applied a serviette to my mouth, the pickle garnish I was eating quite disappeared.

There was much that was New-Agey and cultic going about at the time, most of which I scorned, but not Rilke’s little metaphor, and whatever it was that I thought poetry had to do so as to sing for its supper, it now had that to do; it had to keep certain intangibles on life support, intangibles inseparable from physical objects, that infamous red wheelbarrow, for instance, of William Carlos Williams, Rilke’s angel, his well, a rusted tractor in a field, a bicycle built for two, some bit of pottery that my love wanted to throw out the other day, and I said, “You can’t.” “Why the hell not?” “It’s a soul-object.” Her look declared me daft. Shall we bring on chatter about the Holy Fool?

I suppose you can say you will not have seen this coming, but I may as well out with it: I have seen a soul depart a human body. Whatever else I might have seen at that instant is arguable, but I saw a soul leave a room and felt its wake, its slipstream, as it were. It lasted but a second, but a second is all one needs for a glimpse of eternity. Rilke was the last thing on my mind at that particular juncture in time, but everything he might have said about it would have been spot on. The other notable thing he said, not in so many words, but paraphrased here: “Befriend your demons, invite them to your breakfast table. Because you aren’t ever going to be rid of them entirely, and to think you will is a poor sort of arrogance. Why not get on speaking terms? Who knows, they might, someday, have utilitarian value.” Then again, there are times when to capitulate to one’s demons is the worst thing any individual or country-wide collective can do, and the price to pay will be paid for generations.

It is not clear to me that redemption renders a soul more soulful. Hercules? St Paul? Rudy Giuliani? Agents of genocide? Certainties that would declare God dead or that He has never existed; or that He is alive and well in Rio or Helsinki or Chattanooga, are hazardous to any divinity’s health dead or living. Direct apprehensions of the pagan gods were not to be desired; any theophany as such was lethal to the beholder. Likewise, the greeting card cliché that the eyes are the windows of the soul is a way to suggest that any view of the soul more direct than Bush squinting into the eyes of Putin is also a killer.

We need doubt; we need shadows; we need buffers between our physical reality and the sense (and we are always sensing it) that there is something other in this life besides the strict cause and effect of natural law and the predictabilities of human nature, once an ‘x’ has been postulated for our perversities. That life, at bottom, given what we know of the origins of the universe and life on this earth, is both a miracle and the stuff of dread. What was unleashed when a bunch of cells decided to ‘hang’ and become something other than a chemical process? Is not the ‘terrible angel’ a kind of tour guide, pointing at what is ‘good’ while showing us our death and depravity? Traffic cop? Kindergarten minder? Someone you know has had an unauthorized psychotic episode by way of drugs, has seen what is behind the wizard’s curtains, and the sight of it has sucked all the oxygen out of his or her brain? Basket case on your hands, and now you are playing Dr Kildare or Nurse Nancy in league with Martin Buber....

But sometimes it seems to me that Rilke was the first modernist to get ahold of something very ancient, the mumbo jumbo once associated with it fallen away because no longer understood (it happened in the earliest days of Rome as with the priest-king Numa) and Rilke had found a fresh language, a new use for the elegiac, for what was latent in both certainty and doubt, in the sunlight, in the shadow, and in the depths of the human eye. But I am veering on purple prose here. Enough of the nonsense.

Back in the Hungarian’s Old Europa (which was my university, call it post-graduate studies), and a group of twenty-somethings, would-be poets, are talking Hölderlin. They are looking for something to buttress their language theories and get them aboard the 3:10 to Yuma. At the adjacent table with its checkered cloth, a Romany of immense girth is knocking back his cabbage rolls, his back to the setting sun in the window. He has no idea what the young masters are on about, but he can see through the pretense and his sides are quaking. Laughter. Tectonic slippage. That is the world for you and the soul’s lot. The world is full of it, of cataclysm and nonsense. So many people like to say ‘old school’ so as to express their skeptical view of the soupe du jour. Well, here is old school for you: that the soul wanders about like a tramp, attire grungy, and the best part of his day is when he can stand still a moment and stroke his silly moustache; before the cop shows up, baton brandished.

Or if we are talking a female soul, then Clara Bow and big eyes and Jazz Age hair, even if Taylor Swift, on a piratical raid, is horning in on the mirage. Is there a contemporary analogue in the flesh for the human soul? Spock? A dead punk rocker? Why not Johnny Depp as the poet Johnny Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, thoroughly debauched and, so we might say, a little alarmed that he might lose his soul out of spite, so much earnest drunkenness packed into a 21st century flick? Marvin the Martian? Where’s the kaboom? The soul may well not exist as some neat and orderly clearing house but as debris borne along by a sea wave... But then I am not up on current trends of brief shelf lives. And it is not easily dismissible, the obvious riposte to assertions that argue for the truth of the soul: all that interstellar emptiness. All those stars gorging on stars...

At my address, we are feeding the sparrows. The birdfeeder is suspended from a fire escape (the last section of stairs just before it swings down to the ground) just beyond the living room window. It is better than watching TV, watching the vicious little creatures gather at the feeder, and it is all in fun; watching a female cardinal do her best to pass herself off as a sparrow, what with her crest; watching the squirrels attempt to solve the puzzle that is the squirrel-proof seed outlets. Perhaps, we are spoiling those sparrows, winter coming soon, and we should have a care that we do not render the birds dependent on us. I would like to think that animals have souls, and if ‘soul’ is somehow an inextricable part of our consciousness, I would like to think that the way birds ‘trust gravity’, as per a Rilkean notion, is not only instinct, but something profound on their part, not to be taken for granted as in ‘instinctual’.

Beyond this, what is there to say? I can see how, for Rilke, birds were a language that did not diminish the ‘bird-ness’ of them, or whatever it is that grew out of saw-toothed dinosaurs. If there is such a thing as the soul, it must have been there at the instant of the Big Bang, awaiting its moment in time. Perhaps it has been subject to evolutionary pressures all along. If it is a fiction only, perhaps such make-believe speaks to a deep need on our part, a way of balancing all sorts of pressures, which is what I believe Rilke was about, to keep the whole damn thing from crashing down on us on account of greed and hubris and bloodlust and zealotries. Three in the morning and Cindy Cupcake. I would wager that some kind of consciousness preceded the Colossal Bang.

To repeat: sentimentality is death on the soul. So is tinkling lounge piano. Painless dentistry and the elimination of various poxes are boons that science has provided us (and scientists have been known to have souls), but what of its increasingly reductive language (for all the technobabble) that shrinks the world to the size of a dried pea, and no amount of deep space physics or a person’s multiple self- identifying pronouns as are post-it notes to self are going to broaden a pea’s horizon? Perhaps Rilke saw all this coming, perhaps not. Perhaps the eyes of your dog are full of soul. Perhaps our souls keep a low profile, lie dormant until forced into a collision with the banalities of the world, the evil banalities too, and if a soul’s predilection is to fly as fast as possible in the opposite direction, it might judge that now it has to stick around and fight. Consciousness and sacrifice? Are they one and the same?

Do we hear a guffaw? I do not know that the soul has strings to pull when it comes to heart and mind and even body. I do not know that soul always acts in the interest of the good. I do not know that this sort of thing is measurable, but I seem to remember that there was more soul in the ordinary course of life fifty years ago than now, collateral damage not so much militarism in the present hour as fraternal larks. Can soul and outrage share the same whisper? Sometimes those sparrows about which I talked earlier, having had their fill of seed, perching on the fire escape, stropping their beaks, preening their feathers, regarding each other, cock their heads at the world. They look up; they look down. They are most likely scouting for danger. They are not comparing their cribs on Aristotle. Still, they seem so self-satisfied, content, at one with what drives their urges and wants, and now, with a lot of flitting, off they go, leaving me to my own pathetic devices.

-Norm Sibum