Lass, which could mean many different things in English: sweetheart, young girl, a feminine darling. In German, it only means to “let” something happen...
The line that has carried me through my nights, companioned or no, my lyrical creation myth, begins as an imperative in both languages. It supposes obedience, wants to instruct. Like a master, this word heralds into the room with agency, with an agenda. Rilke wrote, “God talks to us before he makes each one of us”—what tameness brought him there?
Gott spricht mit jedem von uns ehe er in macht—
Rilke wrote The Book of Hours in Russia, where he was startled by God's presence. Like Nietzsche before him, Rilke thought God to be pantheistic, all-encompassing.
Marina Tsvetaeva said of Rilke that he was pure; poetry incarnate; that he was the only clean, and cleansing, soul among war-destroyed Europe, because his poetry refused to acknowledge that terror.
My mother let me happen to her. She let prison happen to her, simply because she believed in Women's Rights and Afghanistan as a sovereign state. She went to prison with her little sister, and she emerged. She was, I can say now, a political prisoner. She let it happen to her; then she decided to leave her family behind, move on for love, for family, for me.
This sacrifice let her become monstrous. She let monstrosity happen to her, then offered it back to me. When I ask, “God, who am I?” am I not just asking, Mother, who are you?
Let me rephrase this—are there any mothers that aren't cruel, perverse, unbelievable?
Rilke's mother, to this day, is called “perverse” and “unbelievable” by many male critics. She is ostracized, her own monster. She was a woman, she had her tics. She had opinions.
Rilke, who writes as neither man nor woman, is influenced mostly by God. Rilke loves God endlessly 𝑢𝑛𝑑 is not ashamed of it. Brecht called his relationship to God “gay.” I like to believe Rilke wouldn't have cared, would have said: “Let me be gay with God, then.”
As Ulrich Braer puts it, Rilke's God wasn't a fascist or heterosexist; he simply was, encompassing both the finite feelings of physical intimacy and his Drau fensein, his being-outside.
The transitive verb 𝑙𝑒𝑡 supposes danger; it is aware of the other, like paranoia. It is influenced by the other, only exists in relation. Let is only summoned when we want to be done away with: let me do this.
Meaning: give me permission. Let this happen to you. Let it go.
Meaning: I give you the permission to abandon it. Let me go outside!
Let me be
everything that happens to you.