We never have, not even for one single day,
the pure space before us in which the flowers
infinitely emerge
"Infinitely" here means "endlessly," "without stopping at a limit." and also means "as a whole." "Emerge," of course, does not refer here to what the Greeks think by φύειν but means the "mergence" through which, for example by dissolving sugar in water, the emergent is merged and assumed up into the whole of the air and all cosmic relations This e-merging is possible because there is nothing standing over and against the "living being" (plant or animal) as object, turning the living being back on itself and forcing it into re-flection. The all-determining and all-encompassing basic meaning of the word "open" for Rilke is the limitless, the infinite, wherein living beings breathe and unrestrainedly dissolve into the irresistible causal nexuses of nature, in order to float in this infinity In accordance with that limitless realm, Rilke names the animal "the free animal." To what extent Rilke can say: "With all eyes the creature sees the open," and to what extent "the open" is "so deep in the face of the animal," that is what the poet must justify poetically.
We need to clarify first of all the meaning of "seeing" here. Rilke says of "our eyes" that they would be "reversed." They do not go away into the objectless domain, but instead, in the very representing of the object, they are doubled back by that object onto themselves in the opposite direction. If our eyes therefore look at a creature, it is caught as an object by our representing; the "free exit" of the look of the creature into the open is suspended and distorted by our objectification. Our eyes are "traps" for the look of the animaL traps which catch its look and hold it fast. These traps close, occlude, and debar the open, the meaning of which is expressed most readily in the term "open water." This is reached when all borders of land have disappeared. The open is the absence of borders and limits, the objectless, not thought as lack but as original whole of reality, in which the creature is immediately admitted and let free.
Man, on the contrary, is forced into a relation to objects, with himself as the subject, a relation that posits the whole of what Rilke calls the open and at the same time occludes it whenever this relation arises. According to Rilke the animal sees more than man does, for the animal's gaze is not trammeled by any objects but can go on infinitely, in some unknown way, into the objectless. The animal "has before itself" the limitless. It never encounters a limit on its path, hence not even death. The animal is "free from death" as it goes on into the limitless; its advance is never doubled back. as is the case with human representing,