Rilke and Music: Beyond Human Experience?...

Music. The breathing of statues. Perhaps:

The quiet of images. You, language where

languages end. You, time

standing straight from the direction

of transpiring hearts.

Feelings, for whom? O, you of the feelings

changing into what?— into an audible landscape.

You stranger: music. You chamber of our heart

which has outgrown us. Our inner most self,

transcending, squeezed out,—

holy farewell:

now that the interior surrounds us

the most practiced of distances, as the other

side of the air:

pure,

enormous

no longer habitable.

Rilke calls Music a “language where languages end”... 

For him it’s clearly a medium of Transcendental  communication. But for him Music is the same as a sphere in which the rules of common physical experience are suspended: "...statutes breathe".

Hence the power to give animate force to the inanimate. Hence the repeal of the normal perception of time: “time arises out of the direction of hearts transformed”, so no wonder music for Rilke is a vehicle for the suspension or extension of time. In other words, those who truly understand how to listen, will pass through the portal to another world …which will shape their experience and understanding of our Universe.