Notes about the BEES of Rilke & Balthus

"The word beauty is coming back into style, after having been under something of a cloud all during the twentieth century. . . . ' We are the bees of the invisible,' Rilke wrote to a friend in November, 1925: ' . . . our task is to impress this preliminary; transient earth upon ourselves with so much suffering and so passionately that its nature rises up again ‘invisibly' within us. . . . We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible, to store it up in the great golden beehive of the Invisible.'" Louise Cowan, Ph.D. http://dallasinstitute.org/listenandview_read_thefrailstrengthofbeauty.html


A BIT OF POETRY
"Everything beckons to us to perceive it,
murmurs at every turn, 'Remember me!'
A day we passed, too busy to receive it,
will yet unlock us all in its treasury.

"Who shall compute our harvest? Who shall bar
us from the former years the long-departed?
What have we learned from living since we started,
except to find in others what we are?

"Except to re-enkindle commonplace?
O house, O sloping field, O setting Sun!
Your features form into a face, you run,
you cling to us, returning our embrace!

"One space spreads through all creatures equally --
inner-world-space. Birds quietly flying go
flying through us. O, I that want to grow!
The tree I see outside it's growing in me!

"I have a house within when I need care.
I have a guard within when I need rest.
The love that I have had! -- Upon my breast
the beauty of the world clings, to weep there." Rainer Maria Rilke
http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/0Gurdjieff/beesoftheinvisibleworld_web.pdf


"Balthus' adolescents are Rilke's 'bees of the invisible,' taking in from books, from daydreaming, from as yet ambiguous longing, from staring out windows at trees, sustenances that will be available in time as Proustian ripenesses, necessities of the heart.... Where in Greek writing you always find a running account of all the senses in intimate contact with the world, in Latin you find instead a pedantry accustomed to substituting some rhetorical convention for honest and immediate perception. Balthus has Greek wholeness." Guy Davenport, "Balthus" in 'Every Force Evolves A Form', North Point Press, San Francisco, 1987.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balthus