True knowledge of the world does not begin behind the eyes but in front of them, in the “Open” (“Offene”), a material space that is the locus for the creative will. Written in blank verse, the Eighth Elegy carries Rilke's most extended meditation on what consciousness is as a psychic capacity that exerts itself through space and time. At crucial moments in the Elegy, Rilke will invoke the vitalistic presence of animals who, lacking human self-consciousness, can (“with all eyes”) fully absorb the “Open” into themselves; “they never bring the Open before themselves as an object” (Heidegger, 110). Our eyes, however, have been turned inwards, not to explore the riches of our inner selves but as an analytical medium for self-scrutiny. Small children are not, as yet, victims to this distortion, having within them a natural sense for the wonder of the new. They soon, however, lose this capacity, and become victims to the adult need for order and routine, to a repression that is not libidinal, as it had been in Elegy 3, but perceptual and cognitive. Small creatures, resplendent in their comfortable place in the womb, are now called into view, before images of flight and death appear to problematize even these smallest holdings on the world.