ABSTRACT
The hands reappear in the tenth sonnet of the same second series. Now they exist not to minister to flowers but to serve as a conquering foil to machines. The efficiency of the machine’s cutting of stone for buildings, the machine’s powerful ability “to build, to arrange, and destroy,” Rilke muses, might diminish “the glorious hand’s beautiful lingerings” (701). But in the sonnet’s closing two stanzas, the power of hands is implicitly associated with “A play of pure/forces, that no one touches without kneeling in awe,” and which play translates into words and music: Worte gehen noch zart am Unsäglichen aus . . . Und die Musik, immer neu, aus den bebensten Steinen, baut im unbrauchbaren Raum ihr vergöttlichtes Haus. Words still gently yield to the unsayable … And music, forever new, from the most tremulous stones builds in unusable space her house for the gods. (701) The very yielding of words touches upon, and thus alludes and gives shape to a realm untouchable, unthinkable for machines. But what is of importance here is how words yield to the unsayable: not in deference, defeat, or resignation but “zart,” gently. The metaphysics implicit in this gentle yielding is the words’ Orphic power to call forth that which seems precisely beyond their power. Or to say this differently, if words are to overcome the brute force of machines, it is because they do not relinquish their power to machines but to “the unsayable” that is beyond words, indicated by the ellipsis in the first line. What words mean or intend is not in competition with the efficacy of machines but in concert with the words’ own spiritual resonance. It is this resonance by which words are transformed—not into a theology—but into music. While money and machines build a material world, words and music build an immaterial one.
