Rilke and the “space”

On the plight of the punctured space, Rilke scrawls: “Dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.”

Undoubtedly, the concern of the conscientious writer for the haunting space that slinks in blanks of prose and poetry alike can invariably be traced to the nooks and crannies of correspondence. It is in the paragraph preceding this one, the quoted contents of which were happily encountered in Mr. Maria’s Letters to a Young Poet, that the Speaker encounters an authoritative voice amidst the cacophonous clashing cymbals of modern Punctal Theory. And while our sentimental poet’s moving portrayal of heartfelt empathy illuminates the barely absent punctle’s slighted state, it hardly renders its true shape: Rilke’s insight dwells in deliberate word choice, and further, in a certain white male’s inability to resist the temptation to inflect gender upon the space, prefacing what is an otherwise perfectly poignant lament for the loneliness of a certain specter with a deceptively innocent and undoubtedly biting “Dear Sir”. Indeed, the space around the space is geometrically expanding in lonesome leaps; its quest for identity ruthlessly undermined; masculinity thrust upon it as the echoes of the female voice are lost in inscription. Here we have our most neglected punctle, in it’s self-referent glory, mistook for a masculine silhouette: and is it not, this mis-gendered shade, the punctle that pervades?