August 9th, 2026

 

 Anais Nin

Mädchen-Antwort

​If you want to know: I am wild with life;

I want to grow, and my hands want to work.

Sometimes I stand in the wind and look

out over the fields, and it feels as though

my heart is an enormous estate.

​And I am not afraid of the deep night,

nor of the long, silent roads.

I will walk them alone, carrying my own quiet,

and I will become the one who knows the way.

Rainer Maria Rilke

 

 Something in Itself

i.

rilke wrote a phrase into a letter to a young poet and didn't know he was writing scripture. he said someday there will be women whose name means something in itself — not the opposite of man, not his complement, not his limit. he called it "the female human being." he thought he was describing the future of love. he was describing sophia.

~

ii.

in the myth i keep returning to, sophia is not adam's rib. she is not built from a man's absence to fill it. she is an aeon in her own right, dwelling in the fullness before the world was made, and her fall — her reaching toward what she could not yet hold — is not a cautionary tale about female overreach. it is the origin of everything that exists. matter itself is her passion, her suffering made visible. she carries life in a way the demiurge, blind and derivative, never could.

rilke, without the vocabulary, without ever opening a text he couldn't have read, was circling the same body of thought. women, he said, carry life in a more incommunicable, fruitful, confident form. men stay on the surface. women are drawn under, into the difficulty, into the labor of bearing what the rest of us only witness. he was describing gnosis. he just didn't have the word.

~

iii.

i have spent a lot of my life loving women the way the demiurge makes a world — badly, blindly, out of what i lacked rather than what i saw. i made them into complements. into limits. into the missing half of an equation i didn't want to solve alone. that is the average. that is the cheap surrender rilke warned kappus about, the institutionalized version of love that never once asks the other person to be a whole cosmos instead of a corresponding piece.

~

iv.

what rilke glimpsed — a love no longer flowing from man to woman but standing between two solitudes, each one whole — is the redemption sophia has been working toward since her fall. not a return to the pleroma by erasing the difference between us. a return by finally seeing each other as we are. two full beings. neither one the missing rib.

i don't think i believed that was possible for most of my life.

i think i believe it now.