For what it’s worth I’ve not read much Rilke and I’ve always had a somewhat Platonic reading of the Archaic Torso of Apollo, in that the defective nature of the torso points towards the transcendence of its Form. In this reading, it’s the encounter and the ensuing revelation of the Forms -> Good or One in general and how one must contemplate those, so we get to “you must change your life” more as a therapeutic approach.
But after reading Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, in particular the Philip Verheyen story, I feel like I was probably off and as a result I’m reconsidering my entire perspective on Rilke. To summarize the whole episode: Paul Verheyen is a world-renowned anatomist, who in early adulthood developed an infection and lost his leg. Subsequently he started to experience life-long phantom pain and grew obsessed with that pain and its metaphysical source.
I immediately started connecting the Archaic torso to the missing leg of Verheyen but the relationship disrupted my previous reading of the AToA. Verheyen isn’t experiencing the lack as pointing towards transcendence in a platonic sense, it’s suggesting immanence. The leg is there in spite of its absence. The absence reveals an intensification, and excess that is there instead of anywhere else. “There is no place that doesn’t see you” suggests that it’s that immanence that reshapes perception via constant revelatory pressure that is exerted simultaneously on all points on a field. So “you must change your life” isn’t so much as a therapeutic device so much as a command being made by sheer perception, towards endurance.
Am I missing something? Does anyone have different readings of the poem? Or anything relevant to discuss in general?