Sometimes A Man Stands Up During Supper

on Dec 16 in Essays & Reviews by Administrator

Sometimes a man stands up during supper

and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And other man, who remains inside his own house,
stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.

I’ve held this simple poem by Ranier Maria Rilke, a 19th century poet, close, for the past fifteen years. It became very powerful for me in my late thirties, when first hearing at various Men’s Movement events, I felt as though I had given up connecting with what was sacred to to me — not literally a church, but art and the archetype of eros — in favor of business and a life of debt and obligations.

Around my fortieth birthday, having stood as long as I could in a house, in a life, that was dominated by the requirement to worship in a different church, I performed my own enactment of this poem, standing up after supper one night, leaving my wife and business, and with great sadness, my four children, who, with my angry ex’s encouragement, said blessings on me as if I were dead.

In the language of metaphor, I have since found that church and returned to the hearth, connecting once again deeply with my children, remarrying, having a new child, new dishes to do every night, but before that, I had many a conversation with my friend Bob, a man who above all, loves his family and his hearth, but who’s also done a creditable job staying connected to his spiritual core and who he is. His refrain: One should not have to choose one position over the other. Mine: you cannot be in these two places at once.

Fifteen years later, I read this poem differently, hinging on the word “Sometimes” and a very slight alteration in the third stanza of Robert Bly’s translation from the original German:

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

Other times, he remains inside his own house,
stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.

At the risk of setting aside the effect of one’s actions on one’s children, which is perhaps the central meaning of the poem, I see myself oscillating between these two positions — pursuing a spiritual vision AND standing in the center of my family and my duty here to the mundane — quivering really, the way the filament in a lightbulb or the signal from the cellphone to the tower which pulses so frequently it appears to be a continuous condition.