Digital Detox with Rilke

Indexed: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]There's a growing distance between us and the world of things. Studies have recently shown how digital culture and digital addiction are changing our relationship to the world uh to to animals, to objects, to other people that inhabit this world. And some studies also show how media causes this uh dematerialization of things in the way we think of things uh especially through their transference into digital copies. Other researchers have shown how digitization of everything is making everyday objects more data driven. We even have objects now that are are linked to personal devices. So we have this value of things that's shifting from their use in our everyday lives to these objects that collect data for other entities. Things like watches, smartwatches, cars, refrigerators, even uh doorbells. They've all become Trojan horses of surveillance. and and we know this, we're aware of this and it's shaping how we view things and the way we interact with the material world. Uh these new factors are really shaping how we see because of the neuroplasticity of the brain which means that it's able to adapt very quickly to new changes in our environment. Our attention is adapting to those new changes too and we are becoming out of touch with things with those beautiful everyday material objects that make up our daily lives.

[00:01:31]Now our ability to appreciate moments of quietude and contemplation must be strengthened. Right now our cultural values really emphasize work and effort and digital production. But so much of our spiritual growth that should take place in our lives, so much of the real education of understanding ourselves in the world we inhabit, the only world we really have is the only real activity we've come to do. Uh many of us who have grown up in the post-digital age will in our old age I think cast a lingering eye upon our history only to see that we never really knew who we were and that had we spent hours in quietude discovering ourselves in the world instead of trying to curate a persona or an online identity or to impress people in the digital world. We might have actually learned something about ourselves. We might have actually learned something about the world. And no doubt some of us will be on our deathbeds one day. And we're going to look around at all the things that will soon be out of our sight. Things like the morning sunlight on a curtain or a vase of of withering flowers on the table. Uh the green glow of summer light under a thick canopy of early leaves. Uh those one or two stars that still shine despite all the city lights. the winter moon floating through those bare branches of trees and they'll see them as if for the first time and love them. But don't allow that to happen then. Don't wait till your old age to relish the beauty so near at hand now. Don't waste your life satisfying your lowered natures with with with entertainments and diversions of the post-digital world. Apply yourself to something worthy of your attention to poetry to to books to to plants to made objects discovered objects animals. The poetry of Rhino Maria Rilka I believe has the potential to help us rediscover our relationship to the world, the world of things and of strengthening that relationship.

[00:03:47]uh his thing poems what he called dingedict in the German language which he spoke and wrote in are all about the life of things. His poetry channels our attention to those objects all around us. His poems invest objects with the halo of human attention and they wake us up to the beautiful world around us, beautiful things in the world. So for June this year, I've designed a literature course on Rilka's thing poems. Uh and this course is more than an academic study of poetry. Although we'll be doing that, we will be treating his poems with the rigor that they deserve. But it will be more than an academic or intellectual rigor. Each week I'm going to host uh conversations at different times for people in different time zones. Uh each week I'll guide us through some of these pre-irculated discussion questions about the poems and I'll lead a conversation around these poems. We'll all be able to share our experiences and what we we found in them, but we will also learn how to write thing poems. We will use Rilka's thing poems as models for our own attention. And so for each week along with the the analytical questions, I've also got prompts for how to devote your attention to the world exercises where you put away your phone, you turn off all devices, you go out into the world, you find an object, you devote your attention to it, you journal about it, and then distill your notes into a poem. And if you're if if you're willing to share, we'll have a time for those who are willing to share to share the thing poems that we've written each week inspired by Rilka. So let me introduce you to one of the poems. We'll have this cast on the screen here. This is uh before summer rain which in the German was Vorom Sulan and we're using Steven Mitchell's translations here in the course. Just want to read you this poem. Suddenly from all the green around you something you don't know what has disappeared.

[00:05:50]You feel it creeping closer to the window in total silence.

[00:05:56]From the nearby wood, you hear the urgent whistling of a clover reminding you of someone St. Jerome.

[00:06:05]So much solitude and passion come from that one voice whose fierce request the downpour will grant.

[00:06:13]The walls within their ancient portraits glide away from us cautiously as though they weren't supposed to hear what we are saying and reflected on the faded tapestries now.

[00:06:28]The chill uncertain sunlight of those long childhood hours when you were so afraid.

[00:06:39]It's an incredible, incredible poem of enormous depth and subtlety because as many of his poems, his thing poems will do, he takes a situation, a landscape or a circumstance or an object, person or animal, and through detailed description brings it nearer within the scope of human sympathy. But he does it without imposing upon those objects the human attention or the human projections. I mean the verb tense in this first paragraph is this present tense urgency.

[00:07:13]Suddenly from all the green around you something you don't know what. Um and you find that this he'll do this beautifully and we'll we'll try to do this ourselves in our exercises. the description of the natural world that is also an emotional portrait without subjugating the natural world to the human mind. You don't want to have what John Ruskin called the pathetic fallacy where you're projecting onto nature your own feelings or the feelings of the poet. You're drawing the feelings out.

[00:07:43]And it's interesting without the title you wouldn't you'd read this poem differently. Like if you didn't know this was titled Before Summer Rain, what would you think about the poem? The pver here in the German is regal fifer the rean fifer excuse me rean py which is the um the rain piper or the clover so you've got that in the German but in the English version here you don't that doesn't the rain doesn't really appear what's fascinating is and this is what all great poets do and this is what Robert Frost said himself that a poem is about one thing but it's also saying something else secretly it's not you don't have to decode it but there's often this conccominant meaning, a spiritual or psychological meaning that's going along with the description.

[00:08:27]That's what we see happening here. It's this human experience of solitude and passion heard in the Reagan fifas call, the whistling of the clover coming from that one voice which becomes a sort of prayer, a type of prayer called supplication. It's that request for the downpour. Stanza 3 brings us into this.

[00:08:48]It's such a strange moment where the walls of the ancient portraits suddenly glide away from us. Portraits, I mean, what do they what do they seem like?

[00:08:58]They're they're agents of vicarious representations of of human beings, watchers, listeners. But that human world disappears. something is receding and and there are these these these unseen listeners of the portraits that are suddenly kind of disappearing are moving away as though something very intimate has happened or is about to happen and they should not be witnessed to it as though they overheard something uh that wasn't supposed to be overheard.

[00:09:26]It's almost like when you're walking on an over uh on a on a clouded day and suddenly the clouds break and it's like boom the day is completely in instantly changed. It's almost like the changing of dreams and sleep. It's strange how that happens, but all of a sudden, maybe you turn over, but but you're in this different world. And that's exactly what's happening here with the coming of the summer rain. The poem is this subtle confrontation with the reader because as you see here, as he comes to the end, there's this uncertain sunlight and it's uncertain because it's unper it's not permanent. It's impermanent and uh because the rain's moving in, but it's also linking it to your childhood hours when you were so afraid. Those vacant hours perhaps solitude brings you back to that emotional childhood state of solitude and perhaps even abandonment.

[00:10:20]And what he's done in in in drawing our attention to this moment in the landscape is he's he's it's difficult to describe actually in analytical close reading terms. You just simply can't.

[00:10:34]But something about the withdrawing sunlight, the prayer of the clover, and the receding walls of human observation all conspire to produce an effect upon us some kind of isolation. It's a it's a wonderful art and it's a it's an art that he perfected in his his two volumes of the new poems. And so we're going to be reading those in our course. We'll only be reading a handful each week.

[00:10:59]Let's see if I can get us to the syllabus here. Here it is. Uh so here's the course. We'll meet twice on Mondays for 75 minutes. We're going to meet at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time and 6:00 p.m.

[00:11:12]Eastern time. Hopefully this gives folks uh in Europe who join us uh time to to pick one that that that works best for them. Uh so if you're a global audience uh member, you want to join, we we have we have uh both of those times and the meetings will all be recorded. So if you have to miss one, you can just watch the recordings. So uh this is all on versed community where I'm teaching. I give a little introduction here, but I've kept the reading really light because I'm expecting you to read these poems more than once. You ought to read them five or six times before coming coming to class. If you can only manage one or two good readings, that's perfectly fine.

[00:11:54]But that's one of the reasons why we have this course so highly focused on just a handful of poems each week. We're reading the Steven Mitchell translation which you can pick up in any bookstore.

[00:12:05]Barnes & Noble's uh Books a Million for the American uh bookstores probably available too in many used bookstores.

[00:12:14]But here we have the first week we're going to be studying this selection from the new poems but also we'll be reading excerpts from the notebooks of Brig and we're going to be pairing these readings with that because he talks about the life of things there and I think it's going to be very important. Here are our discussion questions. Um, I'll just be asking things like at the start, what makes a thing poem based on what you've read and know on nothing else for this week. How would you define it? And then we're going to open up a conversation about Before Summer Rain and several other of the poems. And then we're going to come back at the end of the discussion to say, okay, has your understanding of thing poems enlarged or changed? How would you define a thing poem? Now, after we've all discussed, we'll also have a time to be reading those poems. So, here's an exercise I have lined up for us. On the first week, choose an object that's remained in place for a long time. Could be around the house, could be in your garden, could be in the park. Don't spend a lot of time trying to find the perfect object. Choose one. Devote your attention to it for a good 15 minutes.

[00:13:25]Then, journal a description of what you see. And then from your journal notes, make a poem. Distill that into poetry, but make sure that you don't resort to symbolism. Real does not do that. We're going to try to make it suggestive. You want the emotional weight to be suggested by the description, not explicitly said. You can use simile, you can use metaphor, but try to allow that deeper meaning to emerge. trust the reader of your poem to be able to find that meaning without explicitly stating it. And uh that's one of the exercises we're going to do for that first week. If you want to see the other exercises, uh just check the link below. I've offered this syllabus. You can take this syllabus. If you don't want to take the course with us, you can do it on your own time or you can start your own little study group and use this as a way to guide the meetings. Uh I think that's fine. Of course, if you want to join me and support my work, it would be great if you did. You can join on and it's $25 membership gives you access to this course and every other course I'm teaching live and all the other past courses that I've ever taught. They're all available there on.

[00:14:36]So if you can't afford the $25 a month, we we give out scholarships and you can apply for one of those on the website.

[00:14:45]Uh so uh just follow that link below and um don't let the money keep you from this experience because I do think this is going to really help uh you and your world you to come to a better relationship to the world and a more spiritual understanding of the world and the significance of of objects. Uh even even atheist poets uh have a sense of spirituality of objects. I think Wallace Stevens is a good example of this as many others. So this isn't this isn't a religious idea, but it's this idea of the spiritual reality of things. This whole metacategory of of meaning making and coming into a holistic understanding of our relationship with the earth and the objects around us. There's so much more to life than um than what's online, even though the internet of things and the the digital world is really eclipsing uh real life in significant ways right now. So, I've designed this as a little spiritual retreat in poetry.

[00:15:49]I hope you'll join us. I hope you'll uh come to the conversations and and add your thoughts and help enrich our conversations. Uh so, find out more there below. Thanks for watching.