Two Poems, Two Theories of Change

A half-formed thought on Rilke, Cavafy, and Augustine

Leon Sitarchuk, Study for "Moses and the Golden Calf," c. 1940.

Two poems have been bouncing around my head recently. I’m not sure why. The first poem, by Ranier Maria Rilke, is relatively well-known; the second, by C. V. Cavafy, is a little less so, I think.

Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

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The City
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

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What do these poems say about change? What do they say about the human capacity for change?

Rilke’s sonnet is lean and muscular, a masterpiece of emotional enjambment that demands attention and assent: “You must change your life.” Yes, yes. But how? We don’t know. Return to the opening line and consider: maybe we can’t know.

“Torso” is the kind of thing that appears in those sentimental side-table collections of inspiring poetry, and some of Rilke’s work would warrant that treatment. But after studying under Rodin, Rilke had turned toward a harder, more physical aesthetic, and despite the poem’s reputation, there’s a degree of ambiguity here that shouldn’t be brushed aside. Layers of simile accumulate — ripening fruit, a lamp, the fur of a wild beast — until suddenly everything is stripped bare: “there is no place / that does not see you.” All we’re left with is a final command, and commands are rarely sentimental. Was anyone especially sentimental when Moses came down from the mountain? “You must change your life.” Yes, yes. I know. But how? And what if I don’t want to?

Cavafy’s poem is a coda: the story of what happens when change is impossible. Stylistically it’s looser than Rilke’s, even repetitive. The second stanza is a mock recapitulation. Although the answer appears to be a foregone conclusion, the question is this: what if we know we need to change, even want to change, but can’t? What if the “black ruins” of our life make repentance — that is, not just renunciation, but transformation — a cruel joke? What if our past obliterates our future? Or to recall another overdone line, what if “the past is never dead. It isn’t even past”?

Two poems, two theories of change. One an ecstatic ode, the other a lamentation in the key of Ecclesiastes.¹ Are either correct? Neither? Both?

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There’s a third theory of change I’d like to mention, as well. This theory comes from Augustine, and Simeon Zahl has summarized it like this:

1. First…human beings are driven not by knowledge or will but by desire. We are creatures of the heart, creatures of love.

2. Second, the human heart is very hard to change. It strongly resists direct efforts to change it. The truth of this point is easy to demonstrate. Have you ever tried to change someone’s mind about politics through rational argument? Have you ever tried to talk someone out of loving the person they have fallen in love with? I rest my case.

3. Third, human beings are wired in such a way that judgment kills love. When we feel judged, we hide our love away, we put up our walls, we resist. If your theory of change depends in any way on the idea that telling someone what is wrong with them will lead to them changing what is wrong with them, you will be sorely ineffective. Augustine says it beautifully in his treatise On the Spirit and the Letter: “[The law] commands, after all, rather than helps; it teaches us that there is a disease without healing it. In fact, it increases what it does not heal so that we seek the medicine of grace with greater attention and care.”

Like I said, I’m not sure why these poems got stuck in my head — I hadn’t read either in a while — but I think they share a similar concern, and I think Zahl’s reframing of theory-of-change language may be a useful hermeneutic. According to the three points above, what would Augustine have thought about “Archaic Torso of Apollo” and “The City”? Are either correct? Neither? I tend to think he would’ve thought both rang true, though both are ultimately incomplete accounts. Humans are creatures of the heart; but the heart is hard to change; but the heart is the only way.

1. I really wanted to write “ecstatic ekphrasis.” If that’s better, that’s what I wrote.