Rilke was a very, very sexy Austrian poet, deeply influenced by Nietzsche and Lou Andreas-Salomé. His work is a fusion of flesh and spirit, dripping with existential yearning, as though every stanza were a whispered secret between lovers. He was a wanderer, a vagabond, a saunterer; Thoreau would have been proud of him. And though his tender soul might have been too delicate for Henry Miller’s taste, I think he would have made a great wingman for him. Can you imagine a threesome with these two? Süskind must have read Rilke to capture the voluptuous sorrow in the final scene of Perfume: a crowd so accustomed to fear and loneliness, to emotional hunger, that when beauty confronts them so suddenly, they consume it to the bone. They tear the flower from its roots instead of simply contemplating it, instead of loving it.
I discovered him through a chick flick, not a mainstream one, but a 2001 LGBTQ+ film, if that helps make me seem less girly and more “intellectual.” I was sixteen, and I had already lived a little too much. By then, I owed my life to dog-eared books and the feral calculus of sex. Letters to a Young Poet cracked me open. His words framed my chaos, every word felt like a gift, an explanation for why everything had seemed so blunt, confusing, and yet alluring up to that point. “Everything” meant, at the time, everything, from my relationships with my parents, my mother’s family, my friends, my friends’ parents, and, of course, boys—at first, it was just boys, to the Zapatist movement, the violent geopolitics of my country, and even the universe.
Borgeby Gård, Flãdie, Sweden, August 12th
[…]
But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens.For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don’t think we can deal with.
But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.
For if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security.
[…]— Rilke, R. M. (1904). Letters to a young poet: Letter Eight.
When I read this, I smirked, my lips curled like a scar. The self confidence required for such a challenge is a luxury, one that is not known from where I come from, one I’m happy to expropriate. Rilke’s “incomprehensible experiences” aren’t abstract to me, they’re the texture of my skin, the weight of my bones. I have lived them, survived them. And maybe, just maybe, that’s what he means. Perhaps my room isn’t small, it’s vast, and I can map every inch of it, even the dark corners. But against Rilke’s preaching solitude as salvation: through the people to come in it, the “others”, the strangers, community. Maybe I could let myself imagine stepping out of that narrow strip “they” want me to walk back and forth. Not because I am fearless, but because it’s the only way to catch a glimpse of freedom. And maybe that’s enough.
I made these thoughts my mantras, my prayers. It took a little over two years for another thinker to sit on my altar. Reich, yes, before Marx, my beloved Guillermito. A storm after Rilke’s drizzle. Where Rilke romanticized solitude, Reich dissected it: emotional plague, armored bodies, the way capitalism strangles eros into submission; and Marx built weapons against the violence outside: alienation, exploitation, the commodification of touch. Those “dark corners” where fear curdles into longing? That’s where Reich’s orgone pulses and Marx’s chains clash.
Survival isn’t poetry. But Rilke, Reich, and Marx, together? They redefined the “inconceivable.” To love deeply under capitalism is to revolt —to peel back the armor, smash the factory of alienation, and let the room breathe.
My first love will always be Rainer Maria Rilke. Always.
So, how do you inhabit your room? Do you pace the narrow strip they’ve allotted you, safe in your chains? Or do you—like Rilke’s “ready” wanderer, Reich’s unarmored body, Marx’s class-conscious proletariat—stretch into the shadows, daring to want more?
Eros o Barbarie 