Letters To A Young Poet - II

Oliveira do Hospital  
Central Portugal  
 
My dearest J,  
 
I have just poured myself an agreeable glass of wine to consider your second letter. This is the Dão region of Portugal. The wine is good and cheap. It is 6 p.m, 30deg Celsius, warm for late September, and I am sitting on my balcony with a view westwards towards the Caramulo mountains.  
 
You are worrying you will not be allowed to enter an artistic career, even less so as a poet. You assume your father will forbid it. I can tell you that ten years from now when such choices are to be made it will be less of a worry than currently. But young minds are like sponges, soaking up family atmospheres and unsaid expectations; sometimes falsely interpreted.  
 
As you know, your great Aunt Hilda was a woman of the theatre but was considered by the family to be ‘temperamental’; “half temper and half mental” as you recount your father saying. This has given you the idea that an artistic or poetic career will lead you to being an embarrassment to the family, to becoming mentally unstable causing your mother extra worries, and on top of that failing to earn a respectable income. And then of course there is your mother herself, my dearest sister; an avid thespian who largely gave up her theatrical pursuits when she married your father. All this you take as further ‘evidence’ that an artistic life is somehow ‘lesser’.  
 
Heavens above! My dearest J, such burdensome concerns, though real to you as experience, are largely of your own imagination. I diminish not the value of imagination (it has saved my life on occasion) but in certain circumstances it can “run away with you” leading to unnecessary worries.  
 
As a child, you are subject to your parents’ choice of upbringing - for good or ill. What is most important is to keep the spark of life alive within your heart and soul, whatever the circumstances. Keep that alive and ten years from now you will have the strength, clarity and resolve to make your own way in the world, holding your own against family wishes and expectations if need be.  
 
You mention the “sticks & stones” incidents again. Think of it like this. Words are symbols. Consider a flag; it is just a rectangle with some coloured design on it. And yet under the influence of that flag whole nations go to war. This demonstrates the flag’s symbolic power. The same is true of words - they can both hurt, and heal, at a very deep level. This is why your ‘defence’ “doesn’t work”.  
 
I am intrigued that you are also known in school as ‘the meccano king’ and have built an 8’6” working model of the Eiffel Tower with lifts going up and down, driven by a clockwork motor. How splendid. I can assure you that a practical and inventive mind coupled with a poetic mind attuned to other realms is indeed a wonderful and precious combination and would certainly lend itself to kinetic art as well.  
 
With love and affection  
Uncle Jocelyn  
 
 
#Rainer Maria Rilke