He calls himself Rillke, after the poet Rainer Maria, he has just added another ‘l’ to the name, words are a game,
and this game is a killer, a cryptic clue, he plays with words as he plays with
people, all names, all people have principles, they may not be those that
others share but they all have them, and all words are principles, principles
of meaning; principles unite people, a principle is a person, persons who can speak
the same language, speak the same words, ‘Heil
dem Geist, der uns verbinden mag’. His real name is White, white, a colour
that is easily sullied, and so he changed it to Rillke, for Rilke cannot be stained,
despite the rumour that he cultivated an unsavoury, in terms of prevailing and
accepted principles, alliance with a young man; he wrote many letters to this
young man, some might call them poetry, but then he also wrote sonnets to
Orpheus, possible he was delusional in writing to a god and a young man. White
has come to this town to kill his father. There are fourteen lines in a poem, a
Rilke sonnet to Orpheus, Rillke has read Rilke many times, he has counted the
lines, fourteen performances, or thirteen for the fourteenth will be the final
line, the final act, and this will be the killing, an abstract action, the
ticking footsteps of a watch, he must write this poem for if he does not the
poem will write him. A question always has an answer, why must he kill his
father, why must he write a poem; will it have an iambic pentameter and a
rhyming couplet at the end? Answers are so easy – yes, no, maybe, because……… Rillke
does not know why he wants to kill his father or why he wants to write a poem,
he only knows that it must be fourteen lines long, he only knows that in its
original form it did, it does have iambic pentameter and a rhyming couplet
somewhere, but he cannot read German and so he only knows the poem in
translation, neben unserm eigentlichen
Tag, and he too is translating, translating action into words, killing the
word and replacing it will a body, a body of words, an original word, a poem.
Rillke also knows that at the end, the end of the fourteen lines, in the rhyme
of the rhyming couplet or not the rhyming couplet, he wants the writing to be
red, in fact when he writes the poem, the whole poem not just the end of the
line, the rhyming line, he will use red ink, the whole body will be striped in
red, ink will flow from a pen and he will blot its colour carefully. Rillke
wants the poem it to be read in America, America, actually North America, for
there is also a continent called South America, but most people think of the
word America as the United States of America, the place of dreams, the American
dream where a man can live one day in a log cabin and one day in the White
House, a man can spin a story and erase its tarnished parts, or add to its
ruins, its whiteness. America, North America, is a place he dreams of visiting
but knows he never will, but his poem will go there, will be translated into
many languages and read on CNN, Rillke, fifteen minutes of fame. White is grey for
white is a colour that is easily soiled and he has been indoors for a long
time, enclosed in the moving car; Rillke is Rillke, he is no longer white, he
is a clean cut young man with yellow grey hair that is carefully combed and
fresh, he is a killer. He drives along the road in a white micro car that he
borrowed from another, a small car, it does not move too fast and it does not
move too slow; a lot has changed in this town, the liquor store that was on the
right hand side of the road next to a bank is no longer there, now there is a
second hand furniture store and a café that sells oily chips and lottery
tickets, there are three liquor stores in this town now but he cannot see them
for they are no longer on the road side, they are in bigger stores, they could
be called malls these large complexes with parking spaces outside of them. The
grocery store is still in the town, but now there are also two chain stores, chain
stores that have red and blue signs directing a person towards them, arrows
that show anyone the way, there is no need to fret and worry for the sign will
always show the way, and the town people are here, here and there, the same grey
town people with executioner eyes. But he must begin his poem, first he drives
down the road, past the liquor store that is not there and arrives at a cross
roads, the same cross roads that has always been there, the sign that is ahead
reads, ‘MILITERY BASE BEWARE’ a tall pylon makes a creeping sound above him,
its antennae feels for other antennae, Rillke sees only emptiness. He turns the
car right and then almost immediately left and drives into a shopping complex,
a new complex, a mixture of shops surround him, shops that are advertised on
billboards and television, shops that were never in this small town, now they
have arrived, as he has arrived, a new shop smells sweet, sparkling and
sanitary, he smells the bite of the mosquito, he scratches his arm, a bump
where he is bitten, he is ignorant of this new place, it was never here before,
he was never here before, he drives past a hardware store. In the second line he
stops the car, parks it in the white marked space that is measured out for cars,
naked, and walks into the hardware store, he chooses an axe, is the choice of
the axe the third line, or can it be a part of the second, there is no rhyme,
let it be three, and arriving at the checkout counter, he realises that he has
no money on him, he does not even have a card for cards would leave a tail, a
name trail, a trail of numbers, numbers make statistics and statistics make
comparative words, names, consistency is always strived for, it is consistency
that makes a small mind smaller, safer, so in the fourth line he walks to a
bank, a bank that never was there before but now it is, there is a cash machine
outside of it, outside under the turquoise sign that says, FIRST FOR YOU, he
draws cash from this machine that was never there, enough cash for the axe and
something more, something more that he may need, like a cold drink for it is
hot in this town, it is always hot in this town, it has always been hot and it
always will be, it is stifling, people cripple each other, no-one can walk. In
the fifth line White, or Rillke, buys the axe, all people in the town buy axes,
other people encroach, they must be cut down, kill them, all acts are relevant,
all acts are real, handeln wir aus
wirklichem Bezug, there is no need to imagine that anyone will question the
purchase of an axe, but he has only written five lines and he still has ten more
to perform, it would be better to count the lines from a long time ago, better
to count all the ordinary actions, better to count all the interruptions, abgelenkt. First he left the town, and
he left the town because it was airless, there was no oxygen to breathe, only a
sky that was blue, all action was hidden, scorned; second he came back to the
town to kill his father, third he drives to the town in a car that he does not
own, a car that he borrowed from someone and fourth he drives for many miles,
many hours over sand and three lane highways until he reaches the town. Fifth
he walks to the bank, it is not very far from the hardware store so he does not
have to drive there, and obtains some money from the cash machine, enough for
the axe and a cold drink for it is hot in the town, stifling, sixth he goes
into the store, no fifth he realises at the checkout counter that he has no
money, cash for cards leave a trail, no fifth he walks past the shelves and
choses the axe, a sharp axe with a whetted side, sixth he realises that he does
not have money, seventh he gets the money and eighth he buys the axe. Now he
has nine lines and so he is able to continue, he does not have many lines to
think of now, nine is followed by ten. In the ninth line he drives back to the
cross roads, the cross roads that have always been there and turns left, he follows
the road, past a garage that was never there before, then he turns right, there
is a sign that says Antelope road but no sign of an antelope, an antelope is
foreign, an intruder, a name, only a name, here, on the corner of Antelope road
and the main road there is another shopping complex, it is on his left as he
drives down Antelope road, it has never been there, as he drives past he
notices that there is a fast food outlet and a shop that sells gold in the
shopping complex, fast food moves slowly and gold is always golden, and on
towards the house where his father lives, the house that was always there, has
always been there and will be there in the future, what will people imagine of
the past tomorrow, O Musik der krafte.
In the tenth line he parks the car, he
turns off the engine, he is a short distance away from the house, the house is
now surrounded by other houses, before it was alone, and so in the eleventh line
he crawls on his stomach to the house taking care to avoid the tar road, edging
around the people that walk on road, on the sidewalk, for a minute he stops and
stands up, he looks at the knees of his jeans, they are dirty and torn, white
is a colour that is easily ruined. When he reaches the house he stands up and
looks in the window, it has not been painted for many years, the paint is
scuffed and it peels, just for his amusement he takes a piece of paint and
pulls it, it skins off a long thin strand, it is yellow, yellow as is the
sallow wrinkled skin of his father who lies in an armchair, a pale pink
armchair, the chair is paler than he can remember but it is still pink, the
colour of a pallid sunset, the colour of a face as it should be, it appears as
if his father is asleep he cannot be dead, not yet. In the twelfth line, and
for a long time, or it seems to be a long time but it may only be a short time,
a winter, he observes his father through the semi opaque closed window, his
father lies in the pink armchair, his father is not dead he is snoring, he can
hear the sound from where he stands outside the closed opaque window, he can
hear the wind and the rats shriek. In the Thirteenth line White opens the wooden
front door of the house, there is a slight sound as it catches on the floor,
the wood has swollen, does this mean that there will be rain, there is never rain
in this town, or seldom rain, it is always hot, stifling, nothing to bring an
end to the ardour, Rillke enters the house. A dog, a brown dog that he knows
and that knows him, an old dog, it salivates, he has not been in this town for
a long time, he has not been in this house for a long time, but an old dog
remembers how White would tie a firecracker to its tail, a fond memory for an
old dog for this old dog has nothing else that he can remember, he is old and
little has happened in his life that is memorable except a firecracker tied
around his tail. Rillke looks down at the dog and, and, in the fourteenth line
he puts a hand on the dog’s head and caresses it, or pats it, or maybe just
touches it, he feels the hard fur, he feels how badly the old dog smells in the
closed up house, the old dog is not so old that it does not know this touch,
the fur is old, unwashed, hard. In the fifteenth line he takes the whetted axe and
with a strike he cuts off his father’s head, the seed has turned to summer. But
this is not fourteen lines, he cannot even write a poem for there was a dog,
and so Rillke sits down and cries, die
Erde schenkt.