The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich

Author:Adrienne Rich
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

PAULA BECKER TO CLARA WESTHOFF

Paula Becker 1876–1907

Clara Westhoff 1878–1954

became friends at Worpswede, an artists’ colony near

Bremen, Germany, summer 1899. In January 1900, spent

a half-year together in Paris, where Paula painted and Clara

studied sculpture with Rodin. In August they returned to

Worpswede, and spent the next winter together in Berlin.

In 1901, Clara married the poet Rainer Maria Rilke; soon

after, Paula married the painter Otto Modersohn. She died

in a hemorrhage after childbirth, murmuring, What a pity!

The autumn feels slowed down,

summer still holds on here, even the light

seems to last longer than it should

or maybe I’m using it to the thin edge.

The moon rolls in the air. I didn’t want this child.

You’re the only one I’ve told.

I want a child maybe, someday, but not now.

Otto has a calm, complacent way

of following me with his eyes, as if to say

Soon you’ll have your hands full!

And yes, I will; this child will be mine

not his, the failures, if I fail

will be all mine. We’re not good, Clara,

at learning to prevent these things,

and once we have a child, it is ours.

But lately, I feel beyond Otto or anyone.

I know now the kind of work I have to do.

It takes such energy! I have the feeling I’m

moving somewhere, patiently, impatiently,

in my loneliness. I’m looking everywhere in nature

for new forms, old forms in new places,

the planes of an antique mouth, let’s say, among the leaves.

I know and do not know

what I am searching for.

Remember those months in the studio together,

you up to your strong forearms in wet clay,

I trying to make something of the strange impressions

assailing me—the Japanese

flowers and birds on silk, the drunks

sheltering in the Louvre, that river-light,

those faces. . . . Did we know exactly

why we were there? Paris unnerved you,

you found it too much, yet you went on

with your work . . . and later we met there again,

both married then, and I thought you and Rilke

both seemed unnerved. I felt a kind of joylessness

between you. Of course he and I

have had our difficulties. Maybe I was jealous

of him, to begin with, taking you from me,

maybe I married Otto to fill up

my loneliness for you.

Rainer, of course, knows more than Otto knows,

he believes in women. But he feeds on us,

like all of them. His whole life, his art

is protected by women. Which of us could say that?

Which of us, Clara, hasn’t had to take that leap

out beyond our being women

to save our work? or is it to save ourselves?

Marriage is lonelier than solitude.

Do you know: I was dreaming I had died

giving birth to the child.

I couldn’t paint or speak or even move.

My child—I think—survived me. But what was funny

in the dream was, Rainer had written my requiem—

a long, beautiful poem, and calling me his friend.

I was your friend

but in the dream you didn’t say a word.

In the dream his poem was like a letter

to someone who has no right

to be there but must be treated gently, like a guest

who comes on the wrong day. Clara, why don’t I dream of you?

That photo of the two of us—I have it still,

you and I looking hard into each other

and my painting behind us.

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