Simone Weil was an outsider, this she clearly stated in her personal letters and essays which are gathered in fragments or in small volumes, such as in Waiting for God. Those meagre fragments that have been published are not really readily accessible save on the curriculums of theological colleges (in modular forms) and presented in a contextualised and safe manner. I do not think that her writings on mysticism have been done justice in contemporary thought.
Weil’s themes are of her intellectual alienation from Catholicism (and her desire of it), poverty, philosophy, war, struggle, and totalitarianism ,
“A collective body is the guardian of dogma and dogma is the object of contemplation for love, faith and intelligence, three strictly individual faculties. Hence almost since the beginning the individual has been ill at ease in Christianity and this uneasiness has notably been one of intelligence, this cannot be denied” (I: 314)
and yet, in further essays on education, philosophy and the need for frontline nurses, Weil rejects civil law as aberrant and only necessary to prevent religious totalitarianism. Her dividedness is a mark of her deep and enduring thought on education and its uses, which can be reduced to the cultivation of attention. Here, Weil’s thoughts could be placed alongside other catholic women thinkers but her refusal of baptism puts paid to that. Her ideas culminate in the magnificent and difficult poetic work, Necessity.
I question why the work of Weil is not put on a par with her contemporary Paschal, or any comparative writer of religious mysticism. I can only imagine that her desire to be an outsider has been readily and promptly answered by those guardians of her letters (thoughts) in their failure to categorise her sufficiently in the annals of the catholic thinking which she so desired and yet so readily and completely rejected,
“Nearly all our troubles come to us from not having known how to stay in our room,” said another sage, Paschal, I think, thereby calling to mind in the cell of recollection all those crazed people who seek happiness in movement and in a prostitution I might call fraternal, if I wanted to use the fine language of my century. ” ( I:314)
I suppose it is difficult if one approaches the writings of a female mystic and powerful writer to safely categorise and apply a workable label to her when her outsider status was so firmly delineated by writing that does not really achieve for the reader a comfort-zone that can be safely and inalienably tagged as pedestrian. She presents a difficulty for those guardians of dogma who would rather not approach the questions of the post war-time era in a manner that may jolt sensitivities in those areas of agnosticism, anarchism, and mysticism discussed by Weil in her letters. There are many such neglects in contemporary thought on issues of philosophy and religion, though mostly they (or their invisibilites) apply alone to women writers of depth and clarity, such as the great Simone Weil. I am excerpting Le Personne Et La Sacré by Simone Weil, in which she develops her ideas regarding the individual cultivation of attention as the most necessary of those approaches to study and whilst I may not agree with her ideas on dogma and justice, I find her constant and integral struggle with the problems of developing the intellect to be almost pressing when so much of post-modernism is directed toward the degradation of the intelligence in favour of willful and negligent consumption,
Le Personne et la Sacré : by Simone Weil
“Beauty is the supreme mystery in this world. It is a brilliance that attracts attention but gives it no motive to stay. Beauty is always promising and never gives anything; it creates a hunger but has in it no food for the part of the soul that tries here below to be satisfied; it has food only for the part of the soul that contemplates. It creates desire, and it makes it clearly felt that there is nothing in it [beauty] to be desired, because one insists above all that nothing about it change. If one does not seek out measures by which to escape from the delicious torment inflicted by it, desire is little by little transformed into love and a seed of the faculty of disinterested and pure attention is created.”
“It was not a romantic sentiment , nor self-determined; rather , it was embarrassing. My love of spearheading, from introvert to extrovert, from cowardice to consequence, from the enjambment to the unspecified dunce. It was a sabotage, a reckless moment : a purulent, tawny decree. All temptation puzzled me and drew me in. I dropped out of a large life, I flew over exams, I punched out breakfast teachers with lunch money, toiling over the idea of belonging rather than over upward mobility. I understood how power flung outward into the troves of the cursed ( I felt troubled or cursed all of the time). I wasn’t bearing oranges, limes, or even lemons. All of it blurred together so that a mere suggestion made by an outside force was something to be freely ignored. I could nod off, I could misinterpret, it could be reconfigured as a negotiation. The fog felt like an aphorism. Never lifting, always dull, always an added pull. The tribunal cloud judged below, judged my direction. There was lying, conning, faking, elucidating in order to get away with undoing. I was interested in preserving yet I can’t tell you if it felt sacred or befallen. Your anxiety might have represented a crushing faith or a character assassination, my own or someone else’s. Or a lack of grip on reality : the wet rip of the grocery bags all of it falling – your body on all fours. Accumulating soot upon retrieval. There were downsides to feeling different so I huddled in the corner (not a ball, not rocking). I felt friendless and yet social. I felt no aptitude towards refining a skill. However, words cut my brain into two brains with their precipice their demarcations, their incisions (too strong a word). They held me captive against their edge, their influence : I felt like insinuating something delicate or dear.
Now- I am playing on- trying to pay attention to the collusion that I must be playing over and over in my mind, and it was my mind, it needed me to leave everything outside, on the steps or in the sky, to feign exhaustion in order to meet an aberration, the one in the corner that felt large and carefree with its own vernacular sprawled with whitewash on bricks or floors or that ghastly far above that kept me standing very still but perhaps I wasn’t inactive, I was just interpreting what had already been an assumed boundary, immersed in its insularity and in what stuck to its roundedness.”
Prageeta Sharma was born in Framingham, Mass. in 1972. Her parents came from Jaipur. This poem is taken from The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, ed Jeet Thayil. Bloodaxe Books 2008. Reviewed at this link.
To have carved on the days of our vanity A sun A star A cornstalk Also a few marks From an ancient forgotten time A child may read That not far from the stone A well Might open for wayfarers Here is a work for poets— Carve the runes Then be content with silence.
Lux Perpetua.
A star for a cradle Sun for plough and net A fire for old stories A candle for the dead.
Lux perpetua By such glimmers we seek you.
I have two reading recommendations this sunny cold morning in Dublin, Interrogation of Silence, The writings of George Mackay Brown,Rowena and Brian Murray. Publ. John Murray (2004). and The Absence of Myth by Georges Bataille Publ. Version (1994/2006).
I am sad to hear the John Hurst, proprietor of Rare and Interesting Books in Westport died this past weekend, he always got the exact book that I sought and I had put him alongside Charlie Byrne’s In Galway for his excellent collection of books. Indeed I had been re-reading a certain book this weekend that I had bought from him in the last years, RIP. For those readers interested in George Mackay Brown, I include here the GMB website, along with a link to a short Poethead post on John’s lovely bookshop in Mayo.
I just saw this interview link which has been released today by The Paris Review to celebrate Ann Sexton’s Birthday and I have added it to myFacebook page. I thought to add it through an excerpted paragraph andhyperlink onto the Poethead blog also.
There is an existent link to Ann Sexton’s Transformations also availableon the Poethead blog which will be carried at the end of this shortpiece, along with the Paris Review Interview on ‘The Art of Poetry No 15’ byBarbara Kevles.
” Until I was twenty-eight I had a kind of buried self who didn’t know she could do anything but make white sauce and diaper babies. I didn’t know I had any creative depths. I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children. I thought the nightmares, the visions, the demons would go away if there was enough love to put them down. I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out. The surface cracked when I was about twenty-eight. I had a psychotic break and tried to kill myself. “
(excerpted Interview with Ann Sexton , The Paris Review )
A Scene from ‘The Company of Wolves’ from Angela Carter’s Tales (Directed by Neil Jordan)
Briar Rose
Consider a girl who keeps slipping off, arms limp as old carrots into the hypnotist’s trance, into a spirit world speaking with the gift of tongues. She is stuck in the time machine, suddenly two years old sucking her thumb, as inward as a snail, learning to talk again. She’s on a voyage. She is swimming further and further back up like a salmon, struggling into her mother’s pocketbook.
Whilst awaiting this morning for a sheaf of three poems from my Saturday WomanWriter, I thought to add in an excerpt from the Notebooks of Simone Weil, whose Necessity is the most sought after poem on the Poethead blog. I will include at the end of the excerpt a link to Necessity in stand alone format (without comment). Here follows an excerpt from Le Personne Et Le Sacré :
“Beauty is the supreme mystery in this world. It is a brilliancethat attracts attention but gives it no motive to stay. Beauty is always promising and never gives anything; it creates a hunger but has in it no food for the part of the soul that tries here below to be satisfied; it has food only for the part of the soul that contemplates. It creates desire, and it makes it clearly felt that there is nothing in it [beauty] to be desired, because one insists above all that nothing about it change. If one does not seek out measures by which to escape from the delicious torment inflicted by it, desire is little by little transformed into love anda seed of the faculty of disinterested and pure attention is created.“
I have used this paragraph before as a static text in this blog, because it epitomizes Weil’s writing. It was the centenary of her birth in 2009 and some of those notebooks made their way into general publication. Weil is placed with Paschalin terms of her philosophical and writing output, but it incredibly difficult to locate texts in ordinary bookshops in Ireland. I have quoted from Thinking Poetically, ed Joan Dargan.
I suppose that it is an approach to art that encapsulates the purity of the relationship between the individual and the transcendent work that I find attractive, living in a country (as one does) where people must fight to bring to Government the necessity and importance of the arts: in their funding, archiving, presentation and their preservation. There is always hope that the necessity of the arts in developing the intellect will be recognised and supported in Ireland.
There among the roots and trunks with the mushrooms pulsing inside the moss he planned how to eat them both, the grandmother an old carrot and the child a sly budkin in a red red hood. He bade her to look at at the bloodroot, the small bunchberry and the dogtooth and pick some for her grandmother. And this she did. Meanwhile he scampered off to Grandmother’s house and ate her up as quick as a slap.
The image which accompanies this short introduction to Ann Sexton’s book Transformations is from that other mistress of the dark tale/fairy tale’s pen, Angela Carter. The image is from the Neil Jordan produced movie, The Company of Wolves , which Carter scripted based in her collection of Fairy Tales and Wolf stories of transformation and Metamorphoses. The tales did not include those which sit outside of the theme of the movie and are among her classic writing, so I’d generally urge readers who like women’s novels, fiction, prose and critique to seek out Ms Carter’s opus which is available in book shops and on Amazon. High on my list of personal recommendations isThe Bloody Chamber (Bluebeard), The Lady of the House of Love (Vampire) and her essays Expletives Deleted.
I bought Transformations on Friday morning to read on the way home from a brief holiday in my usual haunt, The Rare and Interesting Bookshop, in Mayo, as I have given up on Newspapers doing anything but horrifying me (and not in the delightful Carteresque manner).
Here are Briar Rose, Cinderella, wicked step-mothers, Rumpelstiltskin, The Little Peasant and the coterie of Grimm falling out of the slim but packed volume of tales of transformations and metamorphoses. The twist is in the language and schemes, as opposed to the twists and turns in Carter’s feminist and microscopic eye in her versions.
Briar Rose
Consider a girl who keeps slipping off, arms limp as old carrots into the hypnotist’s trance, into a spirit world speaking with the gift of tongues. She is stuck in the time machine, suddenly two years old sucking her thumb, as inward as a snail, learning to talk again. She’s on a voyage. She is swimming further and further back up like a salmon, struggling into her mother’s pocketbook.
Briar Rose, by Ann Sexton.
Do read the book, it isn’t by any means a new book , but all books are new when discovered , bought or found. And no-one can really tell how one will react to the images, content or stories therein. Always new books are something critics and interpreters forget are an adventure to the mind.
I have included at the end here the name of a collected Carter, the title of the Sexton and a link to another Ann Sexton poem which is on Poethead.
I have referred here before to the book that creeps me out the most,The Fifth Child,indeed I took down my copy again last night to read up for today’s post; but I ended updeweeding the garden where my tree was being invaded by a parasitic alien Clematis, and myrose’s roots being pushed up out of the ground by rogue bamboo shoots. I Am sore andembattled after taking up the roots. I digress, read Doris Lessing for intricate mature writing.
I am not so fond of the sci-fi stuff but do adore also The Golden Notebook, which I have not read in a small while.
Very few readers get to enjoy that peculiar attention to detail of the real writer, indeed in Plath, Lessingand Lavin it is most evident. Plath referred to it as The thinginess of things , it is a fine lacemakers attention todetail, which we mostly miss in an era of mass-media noise . I have read many books but this unique quality ismost evident in women writers, I think I’ll throw in Julian of Norwich there whose unique use of description haslasted centuries. I suppose I do get amazed whilst reading media and other modernist pap tha the woman’s voiceand attentiveness is so wholly absent, except maybe in some historical writing – most notably in Lady Fraser’s writing.
So, on a busy morning I wanted to recommend the writing of Doris Lessing, the Poetry of Sylvia Plath, the shortstories of Mary Lavin and the historical writing of Antonia Fraser. There is an excerpt linked at the base of thisshort note, along with an image by Ann Madden, whose Megaliths series seemed appropriate to the content.
When Julian of Norwich describes her mystical experiences and her visions in her Revelation of Love, she describes them in three parts, thus:
‘That is to sey, be bodily sight and by word formyd in my understonding and be gostly sight. But the gostly sight I cannot ne may not show it as hopinly ne as fully as I woulde’
There are sixteen ‘Shewings’ – ‘Showings’, a term that midwives and those experienced in the process of birthing would recognise as the first indications of imminent birth.
Julian Of Norwich was an anchoress, she went through a process and experience of visionary state which she then communicated in a non-theological manner. The visions emanated from her experiences in spiritual writing and in an illness that threatened her life. The writing is astounding in descriptive terms, this is how a vision began:
‘and the bodily sight stinted and the gostly sight dwellid in mine understonding. and I desired as I durst to see more’.
The introductory to the folio editions and mss of Julian of Norwich is in print by The Exeter University Press and introduced by Marion Glasscoe. Glasscoe compares the writing of Julian of Norwich to the experiences ofIsaac Luria ( a 16th Century Kabbalist) in trying to vocalise his experience. Indeed, Simone Weil and others like Paul Celan have hit upon the same type of writing, although discussion on this topic of mysticism is severely limited and often in the essays accompanying their major works. Its an area of interest that I have threaded throughout this blog in pieces about Weil, Karlen, Julian, Celan, and Marguerite of Porete (who was unfortunately murdered during the Inquisition for refusing to disclaim her works).
Someone entered ‘Penelopiad Rubbish‘ into the search engine and ended up on the site! I suggest reading the ‘Suicide Angel’ byMargaret Atwood before embarking on her lively engagement with mythos, the stringing up of the abused maids might be a little heavy on the palate as an introductory to Atwood and her waddling Penelope, whose shrewish hatred of Helen and thirst for blood might be off-putting to the faint-hearted.
Comes somebody from faraway with a language which perhaps locks the sounds with the neighing of the mare or the chirping of the little blackbird or even as a screeching saw that cuts up all that is near—
Comes somebody from faraway with the movements of a dog or perhaps a rat and it is winter so clothe him warmly- it may be that he has fire under his soles (maybe he rode on a meteor) so do not reproach him if your perforated carpet screams—
A stranger always carries his home in his arms like an orphaned child for which he perhaps only seeks a grave.
Chris Murray 