Showing posts with label Simone Weil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Simone Weil. Show all posts
Monday, March 13, 2017
Readings: How We Need to View our "Problem" with Refugees & Immigrants
In an essay* written in London in the last months of her too-brief life, Simone Weil presents very concisely in the following brief paragraph why "obligation" must be understood to belong to a higher order than "rights," despite the obsession with the latter that has dominated such Western thought as has come down to us from the Roman Empire:
"Whoever has his attention and love turned in fact towards that reality outside the world** recognizes at the same time that he is bound, in both public and private life, by the unique and perpetual obligation, according to his responsibilities and to the extent of his power, to alleviate all those privations of the soul and the body capable of destroying or mutilating the earthly life of a human being whoever he may be." [italics added]
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*Ercits de Londres et dernieres lettres
**i.e., "absolute Goodness" or "God"
Sunday, March 12, 2017
Readings: Classical Greek Thought in The White Rose and Simone Weil
The last two non-fiction works I have recently read (Sophie Scholl & The White Rose by A.
Dumbach and J. Newborn, and Simone Weil--Waiting on Truth by J. P. Little) show how both the young German pamphleteers of
The White Rose and French philosopher, Simone Weil, turned to classical Greek models in their
writings in response to, and against, the Nazi oppression of their respective
societies.
In the third of six pamphlets written and distributed by The
White Rose before Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and several other members of
their inner circle were arrested, tried, and executed by the Nazis in 1943, Aristotle’s Politics, is thus quoted:
“Further…[a tyrant] should also endeavor to know what each
of his subjects says or does, and should employ spies everywhere…and further,
to create disunity and division in the population to set friend against friend,
the common people against the notables, and the wealthy among themselves. Also
he should impoverish his subjects; the maintenance of guards and soldiers is
thus paid for by the people, who are forced to work hard and have neither the
time nor the opportunity to conspire against him…Another practice of tyrants is
to increase taxes, after the manner of Dionysius at Syracuse, who contrived
that his subjects paid all their wealth into the treasury within five years.
The tyrant is also inclined to engage in constant warfare in order to occupy
and distract his subjects.”
In his study of the life and thought of Simone Weil, J.P.
Little shows how Weil used the writings of Plato to describe the workings of a
totalitarian regime:
“[…] Simone Weil turns…to the Greek world, to Plato’s image
of society as ‘the Great Beast’…whom his masters (society’s leaders) try to
tame by studying his moods and habits.
“[…] The Beast represents for her the elevation of society
into an absolute, which is then judged without reference to anything exterior, so that in a very real sense nothing but the collective exists. This is the characteristic of what
Simone Weil calls totalitarianism, and here of course her usage is in line with
what we have become accustomed to designate by that term. The Beast represents
the totality of collective values and the destruction of the individual. Its
main concern is existence, and since the existence of anything else is
intolerable to it, its own existence involves infinite expansion, a total hold
over the lives of its subjects.”
As it was in ancient Greece ,
so it was in World War II-era Europe ; and as it is again (or
still) now.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Review: A Simone Weil Documentary Film
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Mini-Review: An Encounter with Simone Weil, a film by Julia Haslett
I have just finished watching this film, which I loaded into the DVD player with great anticipation. Since Simone Weil has been an important part of my intellectual and spiritual life for over two decades, anything with her name on it is of immediate interest to me. This is a very worthwhile film. I recommend it to anybody, and especially to anybody who is unfamiliar with Simone Weil. It is a good introduction to who she was, why her work is well worth reading in depth, and why her biography is an inspiration to both socio-political activists and to persons interested in the topic of God.
The film is centered around a line of Weil’s which is printed at the top of the front insert of the box the disc is packaged in: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” This line is important to the film’s creator, Julia Haslett, in part because she is the daughter of a suicide--her father; and later, as we learn at the end of the film, the sister of another suicide--her older brother. These meta-narratives skillfully allude to the ambiguous suicide, by self-starvation, of Simone Weil herself.
Another meta-narrative is that of political activism and the possibilities of commitment to a cause. Haslett links the issues of today--particular the wars in the Middle East--with the issues of Simone Weil’s day--the two World Wars, the rise of fascism and the struggles of the workers for justice.
Finally, we have the meta-narrative of the making of the film. Of the attempt by Haslett to train an actress--a Weil look-alike--to (as much as possible) BE Simone Weil, so that Haslett can experience Weil in the flesh. This narrative doesn’t work very well, but not many minutes are spent on it.
What works very well are the interviews conducted with persons in France (and one niece who appears to be American) who actually knew Simone Weil, in locations where she lived and worked.
I would have appreciated less focus on the political and more on the spiritual. I would have preferred less meta-narrative and more of Simone Weil’s own words worked into the script of the film. But that’s me. I’ve read most, or all, of Weil’s works in published English; I own four or five biographies of her, as well as several critical studies of her writings by other intellectuals. For this reason, I’ve developed strong areas of interest that the general viewer would most likely not possess. I strongly recommend the film to anyone. I agree with the opinion of Albert Camus that Simone Weil was the only truly great soul of our time.
X
Mini-Review: An Encounter with Simone Weil, a film by Julia Haslett
I have just finished watching this film, which I loaded into the DVD player with great anticipation. Since Simone Weil has been an important part of my intellectual and spiritual life for over two decades, anything with her name on it is of immediate interest to me. This is a very worthwhile film. I recommend it to anybody, and especially to anybody who is unfamiliar with Simone Weil. It is a good introduction to who she was, why her work is well worth reading in depth, and why her biography is an inspiration to both socio-political activists and to persons interested in the topic of God.
The film is centered around a line of Weil’s which is printed at the top of the front insert of the box the disc is packaged in: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” This line is important to the film’s creator, Julia Haslett, in part because she is the daughter of a suicide--her father; and later, as we learn at the end of the film, the sister of another suicide--her older brother. These meta-narratives skillfully allude to the ambiguous suicide, by self-starvation, of Simone Weil herself.
Another meta-narrative is that of political activism and the possibilities of commitment to a cause. Haslett links the issues of today--particular the wars in the Middle East--with the issues of Simone Weil’s day--the two World Wars, the rise of fascism and the struggles of the workers for justice.
Finally, we have the meta-narrative of the making of the film. Of the attempt by Haslett to train an actress--a Weil look-alike--to (as much as possible) BE Simone Weil, so that Haslett can experience Weil in the flesh. This narrative doesn’t work very well, but not many minutes are spent on it.
What works very well are the interviews conducted with persons in France (and one niece who appears to be American) who actually knew Simone Weil, in locations where she lived and worked.
I would have appreciated less focus on the political and more on the spiritual. I would have preferred less meta-narrative and more of Simone Weil’s own words worked into the script of the film. But that’s me. I’ve read most, or all, of Weil’s works in published English; I own four or five biographies of her, as well as several critical studies of her writings by other intellectuals. For this reason, I’ve developed strong areas of interest that the general viewer would most likely not possess. I strongly recommend the film to anyone. I agree with the opinion of Albert Camus that Simone Weil was the only truly great soul of our time.
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Monday, January 3, 2011
Reflections: Solitude and Wisdom
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As I sit poised to launch into the first work-week of the new year, I am thankful for the acquisition, at the tag end of 2010, of a new literary / spiritual / philosophical mentor – Robert Lax.
I admire Søren Kierkegaard. I am fascinated and at least partially convinced by Carl Jung and some of his disciples (e.g. Hermann Hesse). I enjoy reading the critical theory of Harold Bloom and share some of his interests (e.g. Gnosticism). And there are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of other creative writers and thinkers whose oeuvres I admire and have studied in their entirety. But, until my recent discovery of Robert Lax, Simone Weil inhabited a category in my regard of which she was the sole member.
Weil and Lax were very different. One was male; one female. One was primarily a poet; the other primarily a philosopher. They were alike in each having been a solitary. But very different types of solitary they were. Lax was gregarious in his solitude – living alone, but enjoying the company of friends and strangers alike. Weil was largely a true loner. Her primary association with other people was in the role of teacher.
So much do I admire each of these human paragons, that I most value in myself those things in which I detect their faint echoes. So much do I learn from studying their very different lives and modes of solitude, that I’ve come to an understanding that I probably went wrong in my life by not seeking solitude for myself.
Here, from a work of Lax’s entitled A Greek Journal, are two entries with which I strongly identify and which I admired greatly when I read them yesterday morning:
sometimes, i have conversations with an imaginary guru, naturally one who lives inside me. he used to be a psychiatrist: at least in the old days a lot of my conversations were started with, & a lot of my problems heard out or resolved by, an imaginary Viennese who listened carefully, often accusingly, & showed me with a few apt technical phrases how far i had erred in my thinking, or behavior. the Viennese fellow has disappeared; comes back if ever for very short visits; but has been replaced by chuang tzu (sometimes merton, or sometimes chuang tzu in merton translation) who tells me other wisdoms: usually the wisdoms of abstinence & avoidance; of retreat, prayer & preparation, of non-attachment, of “sitting quietly doing nothing,” of seeking smallness, not greatness, or of seeking nothing at all.
[…]
what he promotes is wisdom, what he promises is grace. zen wisdom, perhaps; zen grace, but certainly wisdom & grace.
Amen.
I admire Søren Kierkegaard. I am fascinated and at least partially convinced by Carl Jung and some of his disciples (e.g. Hermann Hesse). I enjoy reading the critical theory of Harold Bloom and share some of his interests (e.g. Gnosticism). And there are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of other creative writers and thinkers whose oeuvres I admire and have studied in their entirety. But, until my recent discovery of Robert Lax, Simone Weil inhabited a category in my regard of which she was the sole member.
Weil and Lax were very different. One was male; one female. One was primarily a poet; the other primarily a philosopher. They were alike in each having been a solitary. But very different types of solitary they were. Lax was gregarious in his solitude – living alone, but enjoying the company of friends and strangers alike. Weil was largely a true loner. Her primary association with other people was in the role of teacher.
So much do I admire each of these human paragons, that I most value in myself those things in which I detect their faint echoes. So much do I learn from studying their very different lives and modes of solitude, that I’ve come to an understanding that I probably went wrong in my life by not seeking solitude for myself.
Here, from a work of Lax’s entitled A Greek Journal, are two entries with which I strongly identify and which I admired greatly when I read them yesterday morning:
sometimes, i have conversations with an imaginary guru, naturally one who lives inside me. he used to be a psychiatrist: at least in the old days a lot of my conversations were started with, & a lot of my problems heard out or resolved by, an imaginary Viennese who listened carefully, often accusingly, & showed me with a few apt technical phrases how far i had erred in my thinking, or behavior. the Viennese fellow has disappeared; comes back if ever for very short visits; but has been replaced by chuang tzu (sometimes merton, or sometimes chuang tzu in merton translation) who tells me other wisdoms: usually the wisdoms of abstinence & avoidance; of retreat, prayer & preparation, of non-attachment, of “sitting quietly doing nothing,” of seeking smallness, not greatness, or of seeking nothing at all.
[…]
what he promotes is wisdom, what he promises is grace. zen wisdom, perhaps; zen grace, but certainly wisdom & grace.
Amen.
X
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Quote du Jour: Social Reprobation
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"Pharisees: 'Verily I say unto you, they have received their reward.' Inversely, Christ could have said of the publicans and prostitutes: 'Verily I say unto you, they have received their punishment'--that is to say social reprobation. In so far as they have received this, the Father who is in secret does not punish them. Whereas the sins which are not accompanied by social reprobation receive their full measure of punishment from the Father who is in secret. Thus social reprobation is a favour on the part of destiny. It turns into a supplementary evil, however, for those who, under the pressure of this reprobation, manufacture for themselves eccentric social surroundings within which they have full licence."
XXXX ~ Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, "The Great Beast"
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"Pharisees: 'Verily I say unto you, they have received their reward.' Inversely, Christ could have said of the publicans and prostitutes: 'Verily I say unto you, they have received their punishment'--that is to say social reprobation. In so far as they have received this, the Father who is in secret does not punish them. Whereas the sins which are not accompanied by social reprobation receive their full measure of punishment from the Father who is in secret. Thus social reprobation is a favour on the part of destiny. It turns into a supplementary evil, however, for those who, under the pressure of this reprobation, manufacture for themselves eccentric social surroundings within which they have full licence."
XXXX ~ Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, "The Great Beast"
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Thursday, March 4, 2010
Reflections: Music of the Blogosphere
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I have recently been visiting the blog of a woman who has evidently encountered in her life (about which I actually know almost nothing) personal trials that might be filed under some of the same headings as a sampling of my own. My visits to her site have been productive, already having resulted in a couple of new poems. These you can find linked in the sidebar, under Rodak’s Writings.
What follows here is an excerpt from a book that I am currently reading, followed by a Simone Weil quote which I have cited before, but never tire of contemplating. Each of these seems--in my mind anyway--to relate to the thoughts and feelings which visiting the blog mentioned above has given rise to:
The idea of God reconciling the world to God’s self represents a departure from the prevailing understanding of reconciliation in Hellenistic-Judaism. There the standard interpretation was that the fall and the subsequent human sin has so angered God that God must be appeased. The human sinners must therefore take steps to reconcile themselves to God and to propitiate God’s anger. Against this background, the Christian creedal formula reversed the roles and understood God to be initiating this cosmic reconciliation. Furthermore, the Christian formula suggests that God effected reconciliation by “not reckoning [humanity’s] trespasses against them,” thereby canceling the debts of moral depravity humanity has piled up in God’s ledger.
~ Power in Weakness: the Second Letter of Paul to the Corninthians by Sze-kar Wan, Associate Professor of New Testament, Andover Newton Theological School
Wan elaborates on this point by quoting verse 18: “All things come from God who has reconciled us to himself through Christ." Recalling his earlier discussion that Christ had died for all (5:14-15), Paul reformulates the role of Christ as effecting the cancellation of the sinners’ debts by means of his dying on their behalf.
Simone Weil, by contrast, sees this reconciliation not as an outright gift, or as an end-in-itself, but rather as an opportunity. We are given the Cross; but then we must--of our own volition--take it up:
God wears himself out through the infinite thickness of time and space in order to reach the soul and to captivate it. If it allows a pure and utter consent (though brief as a lightening flash) to be torn from it, then God conquers that soul. And when it has come entirely his he abandons it. He leaves it completely alone and it has in its turn, but gropingly, to cross the infinite thickness of time and space in search of him whom it loves. It is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes the same journey that God made towards it. And that is the cross.
Or, we could just oil the pocket of our baseball glove and bitch about paying taxes. It is March, after all.
X
I have recently been visiting the blog of a woman who has evidently encountered in her life (about which I actually know almost nothing) personal trials that might be filed under some of the same headings as a sampling of my own. My visits to her site have been productive, already having resulted in a couple of new poems. These you can find linked in the sidebar, under Rodak’s Writings.
What follows here is an excerpt from a book that I am currently reading, followed by a Simone Weil quote which I have cited before, but never tire of contemplating. Each of these seems--in my mind anyway--to relate to the thoughts and feelings which visiting the blog mentioned above has given rise to:
The idea of God reconciling the world to God’s self represents a departure from the prevailing understanding of reconciliation in Hellenistic-Judaism. There the standard interpretation was that the fall and the subsequent human sin has so angered God that God must be appeased. The human sinners must therefore take steps to reconcile themselves to God and to propitiate God’s anger. Against this background, the Christian creedal formula reversed the roles and understood God to be initiating this cosmic reconciliation. Furthermore, the Christian formula suggests that God effected reconciliation by “not reckoning [humanity’s] trespasses against them,” thereby canceling the debts of moral depravity humanity has piled up in God’s ledger.
~ Power in Weakness: the Second Letter of Paul to the Corninthians by Sze-kar Wan, Associate Professor of New Testament, Andover Newton Theological School
Wan elaborates on this point by quoting verse 18: “All things come from God who has reconciled us to himself through Christ." Recalling his earlier discussion that Christ had died for all (5:14-15), Paul reformulates the role of Christ as effecting the cancellation of the sinners’ debts by means of his dying on their behalf.
Simone Weil, by contrast, sees this reconciliation not as an outright gift, or as an end-in-itself, but rather as an opportunity. We are given the Cross; but then we must--of our own volition--take it up:
God wears himself out through the infinite thickness of time and space in order to reach the soul and to captivate it. If it allows a pure and utter consent (though brief as a lightening flash) to be torn from it, then God conquers that soul. And when it has come entirely his he abandons it. He leaves it completely alone and it has in its turn, but gropingly, to cross the infinite thickness of time and space in search of him whom it loves. It is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes the same journey that God made towards it. And that is the cross.
Or, we could just oil the pocket of our baseball glove and bitch about paying taxes. It is March, after all.
X
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Quote(s) du Jour: Some Assembly Required
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Creation is a fiction of God’s
Creation is a fiction of God’s
xxx~ Simone Weil
Sometimes I come home on the double-quick, my mind so saturated with ideas and impressions that I feel I must hasten to make a few notes—for the morrow. If I have been writing, these thoughts and sensations have to do with pure irrelevancies. Useful ones, however, since they are often completed thoughts which had made themselves known in embryonic form months, even years, ago. This experience, which happens over and over, only convinces me the more that “we” create nothing, that “it” is doing it for us and through us, and that if we could really tune in, as it were, we would do as Whitman said—make our own Bibles.
xxx~ Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
Sometimes I come home on the double-quick, my mind so saturated with ideas and impressions that I feel I must hasten to make a few notes—for the morrow. If I have been writing, these thoughts and sensations have to do with pure irrelevancies. Useful ones, however, since they are often completed thoughts which had made themselves known in embryonic form months, even years, ago. This experience, which happens over and over, only convinces me the more that “we” create nothing, that “it” is doing it for us and through us, and that if we could really tune in, as it were, we would do as Whitman said—make our own Bibles.
xxx~ Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
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Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Reflections: Time Outed
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It is time that tortures us. Man’s whole effort is to escape from it, that is to say, to escape from past and future by embedding himself in the present, or else by inventing a past and a future to suit himself. ~ Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks
Perhaps you are still young, at an age where time seems to be a restless waiting for things to happen, every minute, every hour, every day, week, month, year, one more obstacle on a long and winding road that surely leads to some vague, but special, event that is always coming, always about to manifest itself as your own, unique, reward. Just for being. Just for that.
Or maybe you are no longer so very young and have learned to ignore horizons and to stare only toward those things which present themselves within your reach. Perhaps your vision, your perception of time, has become the radius of a comfortable circle, within the familiar confines of which alternating bouts of work and entertainment join forces to distract your attention, so that time hardly seems a factor in your busy, your important, your so very centered, life.
But, then again, perhaps maturity, or—as is the case w/r/t the precocious observations of David Foster Wallace which follow—an abnormally acute gift for pattern recognition, has rendered you vulnerable to recognition of time’s literal, rather horrible, realities:
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable – if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.*
Keep this phrase in your mind: “…like a thief in the night.”
Dig it.
__________________________________________
* David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
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It is time that tortures us. Man’s whole effort is to escape from it, that is to say, to escape from past and future by embedding himself in the present, or else by inventing a past and a future to suit himself. ~ Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks
Perhaps you are still young, at an age where time seems to be a restless waiting for things to happen, every minute, every hour, every day, week, month, year, one more obstacle on a long and winding road that surely leads to some vague, but special, event that is always coming, always about to manifest itself as your own, unique, reward. Just for being. Just for that.
Or maybe you are no longer so very young and have learned to ignore horizons and to stare only toward those things which present themselves within your reach. Perhaps your vision, your perception of time, has become the radius of a comfortable circle, within the familiar confines of which alternating bouts of work and entertainment join forces to distract your attention, so that time hardly seems a factor in your busy, your important, your so very centered, life.
But, then again, perhaps maturity, or—as is the case w/r/t the precocious observations of David Foster Wallace which follow—an abnormally acute gift for pattern recognition, has rendered you vulnerable to recognition of time’s literal, rather horrible, realities:
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable – if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.*
Keep this phrase in your mind: “…like a thief in the night.”
Dig it.
__________________________________________
* David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
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Sunday, October 11, 2009
Readings: Golden Silence
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I've already forgotten where I saw Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector's name dropped that prompted me to read her. But I can say where the great joy of reading her, as expressed in several posts below, has sent me next. The poetic quality of Lispector's philosophically-loaded fiction has reminded me of the thought of Simone Weil, on the one hand, and of the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, on the other. Weil, of course, I was already reading on a regular basis. Rimbaud, however, I hadn't contemplated for years. I therefore went to my shelves and took down a translation of A Season in Hell, which I had purchased years ago and never read. My perception of correspondences between Rimbaud and Lispector persisted in that reading. I next went to the stacks of the university library and borrowed Henry Miller's study of Rimbaud, The Time of the Assasins. I think that I had read this in the past. Henry Miller was an early enthusiasm of mine, but one that became satiated sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s. I can now say that what I have learned in the interim has enabled me to get a lot more out of reading "Assassins" today than I was equipped to absorb in that early first reading.
In the course of these studies I was struck by the correspondences intrinsic to the following excerpts, each being a comment on the function of poetic language. The first is Lispector, from "The Foreign Legion":
Since one feels obliged to write, let it be without obscuring the space between the lines with words... The word fishes for something that is not a word. And when that non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Once the space between the lines has been fished, the word can be thrown away with relief.
And here is Miller, from The Time of the Assassins, writing about the sensibility of the poet, as exemplified by Rimbaud:
The signs and symbols which the poet employs are one of the surest proofs that language is a means of dealing with the unutterable and inscrutable. As soon as the symbols become communicable on every level they lose their validity and effectiveness.
In his study, The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil, Miklos Veto expounds upon Simone Weil's conception of beauty:
Weil is careful to specificy that "[t]he world's beauty is not an attribute of matter in itself. It is a relation of the world to our sensibility." The beautiful is...the sensible experience of the order of the world.
That is, just as the effective beauty of the poem is not in the formal necessity of the word, but rather in that which the word inspires in our hearts, so the beauty of the world is not in objects in the world, but rather in the fact that, as Veto says, because [the world] appears beautiful to us, we can feel all the sweetness of obedience through the iron links of necessity. The beauty of the world, like that of poetry, adds immeasurable value to our ontological state. It makes life in the material world bearable, even joyous.
Miller goes on to say the following of the "uncompromising pitch" of Rimbaud's symbolic language:
Unlike our latter-day poets, be it noted, he did not make use of the symbols used by the mathematicians and scientists. His language is the language of the spirit, not of weights, measures and abstract relations.
In the introduction of his book, Simone Weil: Interpretations of a Life, author George Abbott White quotes Weil's brother, noted mathematician, Andre Weil, of saying of this sister:
[T]here is no doubt that in many ways she transcended [her] philosophical training. She never uses technical philosophic language, for example, and she wrote in very simple and beautiful French. Some have said they find her hard reading, however, since her thought is sometimes difficult...
It is this capacity in Clarice Lispector, in Arthur Rimbaud, and in Simone Weil, to transcend concrete words and the formal sterility of mere technique, in order to expose to the sensibilities of the human heart the transcendent intelligibility of the essentially Real, that has made a rewarding constellation of their works in my recent contemplative reading.
X
I've already forgotten where I saw Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector's name dropped that prompted me to read her. But I can say where the great joy of reading her, as expressed in several posts below, has sent me next. The poetic quality of Lispector's philosophically-loaded fiction has reminded me of the thought of Simone Weil, on the one hand, and of the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, on the other. Weil, of course, I was already reading on a regular basis. Rimbaud, however, I hadn't contemplated for years. I therefore went to my shelves and took down a translation of A Season in Hell, which I had purchased years ago and never read. My perception of correspondences between Rimbaud and Lispector persisted in that reading. I next went to the stacks of the university library and borrowed Henry Miller's study of Rimbaud, The Time of the Assasins. I think that I had read this in the past. Henry Miller was an early enthusiasm of mine, but one that became satiated sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s. I can now say that what I have learned in the interim has enabled me to get a lot more out of reading "Assassins" today than I was equipped to absorb in that early first reading.
In the course of these studies I was struck by the correspondences intrinsic to the following excerpts, each being a comment on the function of poetic language. The first is Lispector, from "The Foreign Legion":
Since one feels obliged to write, let it be without obscuring the space between the lines with words... The word fishes for something that is not a word. And when that non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Once the space between the lines has been fished, the word can be thrown away with relief.
And here is Miller, from The Time of the Assassins, writing about the sensibility of the poet, as exemplified by Rimbaud:
The signs and symbols which the poet employs are one of the surest proofs that language is a means of dealing with the unutterable and inscrutable. As soon as the symbols become communicable on every level they lose their validity and effectiveness.
In his study, The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil, Miklos Veto expounds upon Simone Weil's conception of beauty:
Weil is careful to specificy that "[t]he world's beauty is not an attribute of matter in itself. It is a relation of the world to our sensibility." The beautiful is...the sensible experience of the order of the world.
That is, just as the effective beauty of the poem is not in the formal necessity of the word, but rather in that which the word inspires in our hearts, so the beauty of the world is not in objects in the world, but rather in the fact that, as Veto says, because [the world] appears beautiful to us, we can feel all the sweetness of obedience through the iron links of necessity. The beauty of the world, like that of poetry, adds immeasurable value to our ontological state. It makes life in the material world bearable, even joyous.
Miller goes on to say the following of the "uncompromising pitch" of Rimbaud's symbolic language:
Unlike our latter-day poets, be it noted, he did not make use of the symbols used by the mathematicians and scientists. His language is the language of the spirit, not of weights, measures and abstract relations.
In the introduction of his book, Simone Weil: Interpretations of a Life, author George Abbott White quotes Weil's brother, noted mathematician, Andre Weil, of saying of this sister:
[T]here is no doubt that in many ways she transcended [her] philosophical training. She never uses technical philosophic language, for example, and she wrote in very simple and beautiful French. Some have said they find her hard reading, however, since her thought is sometimes difficult...
It is this capacity in Clarice Lispector, in Arthur Rimbaud, and in Simone Weil, to transcend concrete words and the formal sterility of mere technique, in order to expose to the sensibilities of the human heart the transcendent intelligibility of the essentially Real, that has made a rewarding constellation of their works in my recent contemplative reading.
X
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Readings: The Inside-Out
X
Below are three brief excerpts from three books that I’ve been reading in the past few days. Each of these excerpts struck me as interesting, even instructive. They may, or may not, be thematically related. Think about them and see what you decide:
But my mind is asleep, I can tell.
If it could stay wide-awake from this moment on, we would soon arrive at the truth, which may even now surround us with its weeping angels.*
xxxxx~ Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, “The Impossible” (tr. Paul Schmidt)
The form of the horse exemplifies what is best in the human being. I have a horse within me who rarely reveals himself. But when I see another horse, then mine expresses himself. His form speaks.
xxxxx~ Clarice Lispector, Soulstorm, “Dry Point of Horses”
One must destroy that intermediate, uneasy part of the soul…in order to expose the vegetative part directly to the fiery inspiration that comes from beyond the heavens. Strip oneself of everything above vegetative life. Bare vegetative life and turn it violently toward the heavenly light. Destroy everything in the soul not attached to the light. Expose naked to the heavenly light the part of the soul that is practically inert matter. The perfection offered to us in the direct union of the divine spirit with inert matter. Inert matter seen as thinking is a perfect image of perfection.
xxxxx~ Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks
Weeping angels, equine form, mud thinking: in each case, attention is being paid by the subject to transcendent interior states—or to the desire to achieve same—states that normally we ignore, distracted as we are by ego trips and daydreams. Purified, such attention is true prayer, in and of itself.
_____________________________________________
*--Mais je m’aperçois que mon esprit dort.
S’il était bien éveillé toujours à partir de ce moment, nous serions bientôt à la vérité, qui peut-être nous entoure avec ses anges pleurant!
~ Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer, “L’Impossible”
X
Below are three brief excerpts from three books that I’ve been reading in the past few days. Each of these excerpts struck me as interesting, even instructive. They may, or may not, be thematically related. Think about them and see what you decide:
But my mind is asleep, I can tell.
If it could stay wide-awake from this moment on, we would soon arrive at the truth, which may even now surround us with its weeping angels.*
xxxxx~ Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, “The Impossible” (tr. Paul Schmidt)
The form of the horse exemplifies what is best in the human being. I have a horse within me who rarely reveals himself. But when I see another horse, then mine expresses himself. His form speaks.
xxxxx~ Clarice Lispector, Soulstorm, “Dry Point of Horses”
One must destroy that intermediate, uneasy part of the soul…in order to expose the vegetative part directly to the fiery inspiration that comes from beyond the heavens. Strip oneself of everything above vegetative life. Bare vegetative life and turn it violently toward the heavenly light. Destroy everything in the soul not attached to the light. Expose naked to the heavenly light the part of the soul that is practically inert matter. The perfection offered to us in the direct union of the divine spirit with inert matter. Inert matter seen as thinking is a perfect image of perfection.
xxxxx~ Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks
Weeping angels, equine form, mud thinking: in each case, attention is being paid by the subject to transcendent interior states—or to the desire to achieve same—states that normally we ignore, distracted as we are by ego trips and daydreams. Purified, such attention is true prayer, in and of itself.
_____________________________________________
*--Mais je m’aperçois que mon esprit dort.
S’il était bien éveillé toujours à partir de ce moment, nous serions bientôt à la vérité, qui peut-être nous entoure avec ses anges pleurant!
~ Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer, “L’Impossible”
X
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Reflections: A Few Idol Thoughts
X
Consider this brief excerpt from Simone Weil’s First and Last Notebooks:
For Protestants, who no longer have the Church, religion has become to a great extent national. Hence the revived importance of the Old Testament.
What Weil had in mind when she penned these thoughts, may mostly likely have been such institutions as German Lutheranism, the Church of England, and their importance in the Nazi-era struggle for dominance of Europe and the world. But it occurs to me that the essence of her point can be translated, with regard to both time and place, so as to comment on our current plight in 21st century America.
While the constitution of the United States of America specifically forbids the establishment of a formalized national religion, that constitution has not served to prevent a de facto national religion—demonstrably Protestant at its core—from emerging out of the swamps of history; namely—American Exceptionalism.
Because of American Exceptionalism, for instance, the genocide of the original inhabitants of this continent was not really a genocide, or an "ethnic cleansing," but a feature of “Manifest Destiny”—God’s will that His people should be given this Promised Land, to have and to hold in perpetuity. The “Indians” were in the way. Though we have uttered weak proclamations of repentance for perpetrating this slaughter (as we have with regard to the race slavery that accompanied its accomplishment), we have done little—and that reluctantly—to make amends for either. God does not require it of His new Chosen People. That is so Old Testament.
Because of American Exceptionalism, throughout the 20th century, and yet today, the American invasions of sovereign nations, from Latin America to Asia, back to Latin America, thence to Asia again, and currently, on to the Holy Land itself, are not understood to be conducted in the service of greed enforced by power, but rather to be launched in the service of Truth, Justice, and the American Way: Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s—Superman! Americans, you see, are a Super-race descended from the heavens, and endowed with all the extraterrestrial rights and privileges pertaining thereto: Old Testament, am I right?
The bullying of a Superpower, isn’t really bullying, you see—it’s God’s Will in the form of geopolitical pragmatism: as American as apple pie. Not “national,” then, but “nationalist.”
That major fundamentalist Protestant figures such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have delivered tremendous political clout; that their heirs have come to dominate the most conservative of our two major political parties; and that “Religious Conservatism” is dominated by Old Testament imagery and the morality of “an eye for eye” needs no elucidation here. If you don’t already know that for a fact, then you haven’t been paying attention.
But just about the best thing ever concerning our national religion is that anyone can play! In the service of “life,” Roman Catholics can bemerde themselves carrying water for the war-mongering, propagandizing, neocon, AIPAC lobbyists, who in turn can anoint (with Old Testament oil) the heads of such Protestant worthies as Ronald “Bitburg” Reagan, and George W. “Burning” Bush—with Sarah “Voodoo Doll” Palin waiting in the wings: Exceptionalists all. From God’s lips to their ears, and on to Abu Ghraib. Mine eyes have seen the Glory—and it is us’ns!
Just a few idol thoughts.X
Consider this brief excerpt from Simone Weil’s First and Last Notebooks:
For Protestants, who no longer have the Church, religion has become to a great extent national. Hence the revived importance of the Old Testament.
What Weil had in mind when she penned these thoughts, may mostly likely have been such institutions as German Lutheranism, the Church of England, and their importance in the Nazi-era struggle for dominance of Europe and the world. But it occurs to me that the essence of her point can be translated, with regard to both time and place, so as to comment on our current plight in 21st century America.
While the constitution of the United States of America specifically forbids the establishment of a formalized national religion, that constitution has not served to prevent a de facto national religion—demonstrably Protestant at its core—from emerging out of the swamps of history; namely—American Exceptionalism.
Because of American Exceptionalism, for instance, the genocide of the original inhabitants of this continent was not really a genocide, or an "ethnic cleansing," but a feature of “Manifest Destiny”—God’s will that His people should be given this Promised Land, to have and to hold in perpetuity. The “Indians” were in the way. Though we have uttered weak proclamations of repentance for perpetrating this slaughter (as we have with regard to the race slavery that accompanied its accomplishment), we have done little—and that reluctantly—to make amends for either. God does not require it of His new Chosen People. That is so Old Testament.
Because of American Exceptionalism, throughout the 20th century, and yet today, the American invasions of sovereign nations, from Latin America to Asia, back to Latin America, thence to Asia again, and currently, on to the Holy Land itself, are not understood to be conducted in the service of greed enforced by power, but rather to be launched in the service of Truth, Justice, and the American Way: Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s—Superman! Americans, you see, are a Super-race descended from the heavens, and endowed with all the extraterrestrial rights and privileges pertaining thereto: Old Testament, am I right?
The bullying of a Superpower, isn’t really bullying, you see—it’s God’s Will in the form of geopolitical pragmatism: as American as apple pie. Not “national,” then, but “nationalist.”
That major fundamentalist Protestant figures such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have delivered tremendous political clout; that their heirs have come to dominate the most conservative of our two major political parties; and that “Religious Conservatism” is dominated by Old Testament imagery and the morality of “an eye for eye” needs no elucidation here. If you don’t already know that for a fact, then you haven’t been paying attention.
But just about the best thing ever concerning our national religion is that anyone can play! In the service of “life,” Roman Catholics can bemerde themselves carrying water for the war-mongering, propagandizing, neocon, AIPAC lobbyists, who in turn can anoint (with Old Testament oil) the heads of such Protestant worthies as Ronald “Bitburg” Reagan, and George W. “Burning” Bush—with Sarah “Voodoo Doll” Palin waiting in the wings: Exceptionalists all. From God’s lips to their ears, and on to Abu Ghraib. Mine eyes have seen the Glory—and it is us’ns!
Just a few idol thoughts.X
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Readings: Those Mean Ol' Existential Blues
X
Below are several short excerpts from three books that I am currently reading simultaneously. I was struck by how certain of the themes in these disparate volumes seem to strike sympathetic chords. I’ll kick it off with the following quote by Simone Weil from First and Last Notebooks:
Everything that is in the world is conditional.
That sounds harmless enough, even kind of obvious, until you start to consider some of its theoretical implications. Consider it, for instance, in the light of these excerpts from David L. Clark’s essay, “Otherwise than God: Schelling, Marion” *
Ineradicable melancholy is Schelling’s name for the underlying rapport that beings share with what conditions them, but which also forever eludes them.
And,
Life is no more and no less than the originary incorporation of its ground, the binding of itself to the absent alterity that sets existent beings on their perilous, mortal way. Ineradicable melancholy names the absolute conditionality of life, the subjectless, structural ‘recognition’ that life has from the start ‘lost control’ over its condition.
In the series of notebooks collected in one volume under the title, Some of the Dharma, Jack Kerouac makes the melancholy observation that:
It’s like we were all in jail and I’ve received instructions on how to escape. However I’m the only one now who realizes we’re all in jail, the others don’t know it yet they have an uneasy feeling that something is wrong but they put on gay fronts.
Kerouac—whose musing are heavily influenced by his contemplation of Buddhist scriptures—by equating human life to jail-time, implies that mere existence entails a kind of transgression, or guilt, resulting in the pain of an involuntary confinement.
Following Simone Weil, who sees this fundamental transgression as a theft, maybe we can understand Kerouac’s “jail” as a kind of “debtors’ prison”:
We have stolen a little of God’s being to make it ours.
God has made us a gift of it. But we have stolen it.
We must return it.
If only we could bring about Kerouac’s jail-break, we could, perhaps, begin to make this restitution.
But, while Simone Weil sees this feeling of conditioned freedom and existential debt as being owed to God, David L. Clark, explains F.W. Schelling’s interpretation that:
[H]umankind can never wholly possess itself or live entirely within itself, because it is always in arrears vis-à-vis its determining grounds.
Perhaps it is that which Jack Kerouac characterizes as “putting on a gay face” that Simone Weil sees as “lying to oneself” in extending the trope of existence as a borrowing transaction in the following:
The things of this world can serve as a kind of bank for the portion of our energy at our disposal – and it can be stored in them and even greatly increased by lucky speculations – but only at the price of lying to oneself.
Consciously or not, we intuit our indebtedness to the ground (or God) that gives us existence. Defensively, we create for ourselves the illusion of an autonomous self, either by self-delusion (Weil), or by self-distraction (Kerouac). Schelling, according to Clark, would have it that there is no exit through which to escape from these mean ol’ been-down-so-long-it-looks-like-up-to-me blues:
Life is the fundamental ontological structure of existent beings, whose pattern lies in God. If it were not for their agonistic and, in a sense, contingent struggle with the dark ground, these beings – divine and human alike – would instantly fade into the bloodless abstractions for which Schelling castigates European philosophy. Without the contrasting medium of the ground, without being conditioned by the ground’s otherness, nothing could ex-ist or stand-out, not even God. Animated and actualized beings are dependent beings: this is the lively equation that Schelling’s essay on freedom writes and rewrites.
Simone Weil speaks of this kind of thing elsewhere in terms of the need for obedience to necessity.
My personal observation is this: Only on Calvary do we see the tableau—sans any fancy philosophical birdsong—of the cost of true Freedom.
_________________________________
*Clark’s essay appears in the anthology, Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature, edited by Philip Leonard
X
Below are several short excerpts from three books that I am currently reading simultaneously. I was struck by how certain of the themes in these disparate volumes seem to strike sympathetic chords. I’ll kick it off with the following quote by Simone Weil from First and Last Notebooks:
Everything that is in the world is conditional.
That sounds harmless enough, even kind of obvious, until you start to consider some of its theoretical implications. Consider it, for instance, in the light of these excerpts from David L. Clark’s essay, “Otherwise than God: Schelling, Marion” *
Ineradicable melancholy is Schelling’s name for the underlying rapport that beings share with what conditions them, but which also forever eludes them.
And,
Life is no more and no less than the originary incorporation of its ground, the binding of itself to the absent alterity that sets existent beings on their perilous, mortal way. Ineradicable melancholy names the absolute conditionality of life, the subjectless, structural ‘recognition’ that life has from the start ‘lost control’ over its condition.
In the series of notebooks collected in one volume under the title, Some of the Dharma, Jack Kerouac makes the melancholy observation that:
It’s like we were all in jail and I’ve received instructions on how to escape. However I’m the only one now who realizes we’re all in jail, the others don’t know it yet they have an uneasy feeling that something is wrong but they put on gay fronts.
Kerouac—whose musing are heavily influenced by his contemplation of Buddhist scriptures—by equating human life to jail-time, implies that mere existence entails a kind of transgression, or guilt, resulting in the pain of an involuntary confinement.
Following Simone Weil, who sees this fundamental transgression as a theft, maybe we can understand Kerouac’s “jail” as a kind of “debtors’ prison”:
We have stolen a little of God’s being to make it ours.
God has made us a gift of it. But we have stolen it.
We must return it.
If only we could bring about Kerouac’s jail-break, we could, perhaps, begin to make this restitution.
But, while Simone Weil sees this feeling of conditioned freedom and existential debt as being owed to God, David L. Clark, explains F.W. Schelling’s interpretation that:
[H]umankind can never wholly possess itself or live entirely within itself, because it is always in arrears vis-à-vis its determining grounds.
Perhaps it is that which Jack Kerouac characterizes as “putting on a gay face” that Simone Weil sees as “lying to oneself” in extending the trope of existence as a borrowing transaction in the following:
The things of this world can serve as a kind of bank for the portion of our energy at our disposal – and it can be stored in them and even greatly increased by lucky speculations – but only at the price of lying to oneself.
Consciously or not, we intuit our indebtedness to the ground (or God) that gives us existence. Defensively, we create for ourselves the illusion of an autonomous self, either by self-delusion (Weil), or by self-distraction (Kerouac). Schelling, according to Clark, would have it that there is no exit through which to escape from these mean ol’ been-down-so-long-it-looks-like-up-to-me blues:
Life is the fundamental ontological structure of existent beings, whose pattern lies in God. If it were not for their agonistic and, in a sense, contingent struggle with the dark ground, these beings – divine and human alike – would instantly fade into the bloodless abstractions for which Schelling castigates European philosophy. Without the contrasting medium of the ground, without being conditioned by the ground’s otherness, nothing could ex-ist or stand-out, not even God. Animated and actualized beings are dependent beings: this is the lively equation that Schelling’s essay on freedom writes and rewrites.
Simone Weil speaks of this kind of thing elsewhere in terms of the need for obedience to necessity.
My personal observation is this: Only on Calvary do we see the tableau—sans any fancy philosophical birdsong—of the cost of true Freedom.
_________________________________
*Clark’s essay appears in the anthology, Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature, edited by Philip Leonard
X
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Reflections: ...And It's Good Enough for Me
X
A single piece of bread given to a hungry man is enough to save a soul – if it is given in the right way. ~ Simone Weil
The Good does not manifest under the aspect of excess.
The concept of abundance as a Good, therefore, can countenance abundance only as an opportunity for sharing: an equitable distribution of sufficiency.
X
A single piece of bread given to a hungry man is enough to save a soul – if it is given in the right way. ~ Simone Weil
The Good does not manifest under the aspect of excess.
The concept of abundance as a Good, therefore, can countenance abundance only as an opportunity for sharing: an equitable distribution of sufficiency.
X
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Reflections: It's Not What You Think
X
In my on-going effort to stir up interest in the thought of Simone Weil, I have begun posting selected examples of her aphoristic writings to my Twitter page on a daily basis.
One of the first volumes of Weil’s writings that I read several years back was First and Last Notebooks. As this book is rare and much too expensive for me to purchase, I later borrowed it a second time from the university library and took extensive notes on its contents. It is from these notes that I’ve been gleaning those lines that I’ve been posting on Twitter. Following below is one recent example:
The imagination works incessantly to block up the tiniest cracks through which grace might enter.
I also recently did a computer search of the library’s catalog for “Simone Weil.” One of the titles this search turned up was a book of philosophical essays, Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature, which included an essay on Weil authored by one James Winchell and titled “Semantics of the Unspeakable: Six Sentences by Simone Weil”. This sounded interesting, so I borrowed it.
As it turns out, I don’t much care for the piece on Weil: it’s too technical for the likes of me. I have found much in the book that I do like, however. For instance, in another essay, while explaining the influence of theologian Jonathan Edwards on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the author provides the following excerpts from Edwards’ “A Divine and Supernatural Light”:
The spiritual and divine light does not consist in any impression made upon the imagination. It is no impression upon the mind, as though one saw any thing with the bodily eyes; it is no imagination or idea of an outward light or glory or any beauty of form or countenance, or a visible luster or brightness of any object. The imagination may be strongly impressed by such things; but this is not spiritual light.
[…]
Natural men may have lively impressions on their imagination; and we cannot determine but the devil, who transforms himself into an angel of light, may cause imaginations of an outward beauty, or visible glory, and of sounds and speeches, and other such things; but these are things of vastly inferior nature to spiritual light.
Both Weil and Edwards present the reader (and prospective spiritual pilgrim) with a strong warning concerning the imagination. Simone Weil describes the imagination as blocking grace and thereby absenting it from the careless and inattentive soul. Edwards writes of imagination as distinct from the ultimate reality of the divine light, adding a strong caveat against the danger of delusion due to the imagination’s capacity to blind one with dazzling bullshit of great beauty.
Distrust the pontificating poet equally as you would the posturing pole dancer.
X
In my on-going effort to stir up interest in the thought of Simone Weil, I have begun posting selected examples of her aphoristic writings to my Twitter page on a daily basis.
One of the first volumes of Weil’s writings that I read several years back was First and Last Notebooks. As this book is rare and much too expensive for me to purchase, I later borrowed it a second time from the university library and took extensive notes on its contents. It is from these notes that I’ve been gleaning those lines that I’ve been posting on Twitter. Following below is one recent example:
The imagination works incessantly to block up the tiniest cracks through which grace might enter.
I also recently did a computer search of the library’s catalog for “Simone Weil.” One of the titles this search turned up was a book of philosophical essays, Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature, which included an essay on Weil authored by one James Winchell and titled “Semantics of the Unspeakable: Six Sentences by Simone Weil”. This sounded interesting, so I borrowed it.
As it turns out, I don’t much care for the piece on Weil: it’s too technical for the likes of me. I have found much in the book that I do like, however. For instance, in another essay, while explaining the influence of theologian Jonathan Edwards on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the author provides the following excerpts from Edwards’ “A Divine and Supernatural Light”:
The spiritual and divine light does not consist in any impression made upon the imagination. It is no impression upon the mind, as though one saw any thing with the bodily eyes; it is no imagination or idea of an outward light or glory or any beauty of form or countenance, or a visible luster or brightness of any object. The imagination may be strongly impressed by such things; but this is not spiritual light.
[…]
Natural men may have lively impressions on their imagination; and we cannot determine but the devil, who transforms himself into an angel of light, may cause imaginations of an outward beauty, or visible glory, and of sounds and speeches, and other such things; but these are things of vastly inferior nature to spiritual light.
Both Weil and Edwards present the reader (and prospective spiritual pilgrim) with a strong warning concerning the imagination. Simone Weil describes the imagination as blocking grace and thereby absenting it from the careless and inattentive soul. Edwards writes of imagination as distinct from the ultimate reality of the divine light, adding a strong caveat against the danger of delusion due to the imagination’s capacity to blind one with dazzling bullshit of great beauty.
Distrust the pontificating poet equally as you would the posturing pole dancer.
X
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Reflections: Some Notes on Purity
X
Matt.23:26 Thou blind Pharisee, first make clean the inside of the cup and of the dish, that the outside may become clean.
In thinking about ascesis, contemplation, prayer, it occurs that:
A mendicant who sets out with a full bowl plies his trade in vain.
....similarly,
In order to wash one’s cup—on the outside or the inside—one must first empty it.
…for clearly,
The empty cup has capacity for the reception of grace:
…and finally,
“God alone is worthy of interest, and absolutely nothing else.” ~ Simone Weil
I say that the dots connect.
X
Matt.23:26 Thou blind Pharisee, first make clean the inside of the cup and of the dish, that the outside may become clean.
In thinking about ascesis, contemplation, prayer, it occurs that:
A mendicant who sets out with a full bowl plies his trade in vain.
....similarly,
In order to wash one’s cup—on the outside or the inside—one must first empty it.
…for clearly,
The empty cup has capacity for the reception of grace:
…and finally,
“God alone is worthy of interest, and absolutely nothing else.” ~ Simone Weil
I say that the dots connect.
X
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Readings: On Cosmic Distance
X
Having previously conjoined the names of Franz Kafka and Simone Weil here, I was struck—when reading the essay on Kafka in the Joyce Carol Oates book, New Heaven, New Earth—by the similarity of the following passage excerpted from Kafka’s "A Message from the Emperor," to the passage below it, from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace.
First, Kafka:
The emperor…has sent a message to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun…The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, an indefatigable man; now pushing with his right arm, now with his left, he cleaves a way for himself through the throng… But the multitudes are so vast; their numbers have no end. …how vainly does he wear out his strength… Nobody could fight his way through here, least of all one with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.
Now, Weil:
God wears himself out through the infinite thickness of time and space in order to reach the soul and to captivate it. If it allows a pure and utter consent (though brief as a lightening flash) to be torn from it, then God conquers that soul. And when it has come entirely his he abandons it. He leaves it completely alone and it has in its turn, but gropingly, to cross the infinite thickness of time and space in search of him whom it loves. It is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes the same journey that God made towards it. And that is the cross.
…the sense of distance; the sense of cosmic loneliness; the sense, nonetheless, of the urgency of the journey that each passage evokes…
X
Having previously conjoined the names of Franz Kafka and Simone Weil here, I was struck—when reading the essay on Kafka in the Joyce Carol Oates book, New Heaven, New Earth—by the similarity of the following passage excerpted from Kafka’s "A Message from the Emperor," to the passage below it, from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace.
First, Kafka:
The emperor…has sent a message to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun…The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, an indefatigable man; now pushing with his right arm, now with his left, he cleaves a way for himself through the throng… But the multitudes are so vast; their numbers have no end. …how vainly does he wear out his strength… Nobody could fight his way through here, least of all one with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.
Now, Weil:
God wears himself out through the infinite thickness of time and space in order to reach the soul and to captivate it. If it allows a pure and utter consent (though brief as a lightening flash) to be torn from it, then God conquers that soul. And when it has come entirely his he abandons it. He leaves it completely alone and it has in its turn, but gropingly, to cross the infinite thickness of time and space in search of him whom it loves. It is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes the same journey that God made towards it. And that is the cross.
…the sense of distance; the sense of cosmic loneliness; the sense, nonetheless, of the urgency of the journey that each passage evokes…
X
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Reflections: Dopplegänging It
Have you ever found yourself understanding—understanding with real breadth and depth—another person concerning whom that understanding reveals the source of one’s personal existential trials in a clear light? For me, there have been at least two such persons: Simone Weil and Franz Kafka.
(What follows from this point on is only the roughest sketch of the possibilities touched upon, but in the form of a blog post, it will have to suffice.)
If Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, writing in the 19th century, began the most lastingly influential critical/taxonomic vivisections of Western bourgeois man—i.e., the first Modern man—it was Kafka, writing in the 20th century, who, having internalized the spiritual angst and existential anxiety revealed by those predecessors, exposed in his writings the dark depths of Modern alienation.
In proclaiming Kafka’s “central place in this century’s canon,” my favorite literary critic, Harold Bloom, notes in his indispensable text, The Western Canon:
“Certainly ‘Kafkaesque’ has taken on an uncanny meaning for many among us; perhaps it has become a universal term for what Freud called ‘the uncanny,’ something at once absolutely familiar to us yet also estranged from us. From a purely literary perspective, this is the age of Kafka, more even than the age of Freud. Freud, slyly following Shakespeare, gave us our map of the mind; Kafka intimated to us that we could not hope to use it to save ourselves, even from ourselves.”
Bloom—himself a kind of Gnostic Platonist—quotes the following as the acknowledgement of “a dualism that Kafka finds exists at the heart of everything and everyone”:
There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.
And when the world has been unmasked, Kafka says, what is revealed is that:
There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.
Compare this, if you will to what Simone Weil, in speaking in the context of necessity, calls “gravity”:
We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of gravity unless there is supernatural intervention.
And:
Generally what we expect of others depends on the effect of gravity upon ourselves, what we receive from them depends on the effect of gravity upon them. Sometimes (by chance) the two coincide, often they do not.
Particularly in light of that second quote, consider now these reflections of Roberto Calasso from the pages of K.:
Kafka was an expert on the feeling of being foreign or extraneous, and he began, in his last period, to consider it and represent it in his work in commonplace situations that became suddenly illuminating. For example, the family’s card-game ritual. For years, in the evening Kafka’s parents played cards. For years they asked him to take part. For years the son said no. ...Kafka inferred something quite profound: his behavior with his family made clear to him why “the current of life” had never swept him along, why he had always remained on the threshold of things that then eluded him.
I am reminded here of Simone Weil, always on the threshold of the Church, refusing to enter, much as Kafka refused to play cards with this parents.
Calasso continues:
It was Kafka’s suspicion, and this too arose from his observations of the family card game, that any practical initiatives on his part to camouflage himself in normalcy (and these could be as diverse an office job or halfhearted attempts to devote himself to gardening or carpentry) were simply palliatives or a clumsy way of masking behavior that remained as unmistakable, in its hopeless inconsistency, “as the behavior of a man who chases the wretched beggar from his door and then when he’s alone plays the benefactor by passing alms from his right hand to his left.”
I often find myself, in similar ways, feeling an inability to connect with others and instead playing a role in which both they and myself are imaginary creatures.
Again, Calasso:
This behavior corresponds to the sensation of going through life pressing his head “against the wall of a windowless, doorless cell.” The rest—“my family, the office, my friends, the street”—were “all fantasies, some closer, some further off.” Of them, “the closest” was “the woman.” And thus the endless attraction, since that closest of fantasies could condense within it all the others and act as their emissary.
In my own alienation, I find myself wondering: is what “the woman” was for Kafka as “the Cross” was for Simone Weil? Similarly, I am intrigued by speculating that what “the Castle”—with its all-powerful, intractably exclusionary, hierarchical bureaucracy— signified to Kafka, might in some important way be analogous to that which kept Simone Weil “waiting for God” on the cathedral steps, never to enter.
As presented in Simone Pétrement’s definitive biography of Weil, we learn that:
[Simone Weil] believes that Christianity is Catholic by right but not in fact.
“So many things exist outside [the Church], so many things that I love and do not want to give up… ....there is an absolutely insurmountable obstacle… It is the use of the two little words ‘anathema sit.’ …I remain with all those things that cannot enter the Church, the universal repository, on account of those two little words. …In order that the present attitude of the Church might be effective and that she might really penetrate like a wedge into social existence, she would have to say openly that she had changed or wished to change. …After the fall of the Roman Empire, which had been totalitarian, it was the Church that was the first to establish a rough sort of totalitarianism in Europe in the thirteenth century... And the motive power of this totalitarianism was the use of those two little words: ‘anathema sit.’”
As one might have heard it said in a smoke-filled church basement: “I can I.D. that totally.”
(What follows from this point on is only the roughest sketch of the possibilities touched upon, but in the form of a blog post, it will have to suffice.)
If Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, writing in the 19th century, began the most lastingly influential critical/taxonomic vivisections of Western bourgeois man—i.e., the first Modern man—it was Kafka, writing in the 20th century, who, having internalized the spiritual angst and existential anxiety revealed by those predecessors, exposed in his writings the dark depths of Modern alienation.
In proclaiming Kafka’s “central place in this century’s canon,” my favorite literary critic, Harold Bloom, notes in his indispensable text, The Western Canon:
“Certainly ‘Kafkaesque’ has taken on an uncanny meaning for many among us; perhaps it has become a universal term for what Freud called ‘the uncanny,’ something at once absolutely familiar to us yet also estranged from us. From a purely literary perspective, this is the age of Kafka, more even than the age of Freud. Freud, slyly following Shakespeare, gave us our map of the mind; Kafka intimated to us that we could not hope to use it to save ourselves, even from ourselves.”
Bloom—himself a kind of Gnostic Platonist—quotes the following as the acknowledgement of “a dualism that Kafka finds exists at the heart of everything and everyone”:
There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.
And when the world has been unmasked, Kafka says, what is revealed is that:
There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.
Compare this, if you will to what Simone Weil, in speaking in the context of necessity, calls “gravity”:
We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of gravity unless there is supernatural intervention.
And:
Generally what we expect of others depends on the effect of gravity upon ourselves, what we receive from them depends on the effect of gravity upon them. Sometimes (by chance) the two coincide, often they do not.
Particularly in light of that second quote, consider now these reflections of Roberto Calasso from the pages of K.:
Kafka was an expert on the feeling of being foreign or extraneous, and he began, in his last period, to consider it and represent it in his work in commonplace situations that became suddenly illuminating. For example, the family’s card-game ritual. For years, in the evening Kafka’s parents played cards. For years they asked him to take part. For years the son said no. ...Kafka inferred something quite profound: his behavior with his family made clear to him why “the current of life” had never swept him along, why he had always remained on the threshold of things that then eluded him.
I am reminded here of Simone Weil, always on the threshold of the Church, refusing to enter, much as Kafka refused to play cards with this parents.
Calasso continues:
It was Kafka’s suspicion, and this too arose from his observations of the family card game, that any practical initiatives on his part to camouflage himself in normalcy (and these could be as diverse an office job or halfhearted attempts to devote himself to gardening or carpentry) were simply palliatives or a clumsy way of masking behavior that remained as unmistakable, in its hopeless inconsistency, “as the behavior of a man who chases the wretched beggar from his door and then when he’s alone plays the benefactor by passing alms from his right hand to his left.”
I often find myself, in similar ways, feeling an inability to connect with others and instead playing a role in which both they and myself are imaginary creatures.
Again, Calasso:
This behavior corresponds to the sensation of going through life pressing his head “against the wall of a windowless, doorless cell.” The rest—“my family, the office, my friends, the street”—were “all fantasies, some closer, some further off.” Of them, “the closest” was “the woman.” And thus the endless attraction, since that closest of fantasies could condense within it all the others and act as their emissary.
In my own alienation, I find myself wondering: is what “the woman” was for Kafka as “the Cross” was for Simone Weil? Similarly, I am intrigued by speculating that what “the Castle”—with its all-powerful, intractably exclusionary, hierarchical bureaucracy— signified to Kafka, might in some important way be analogous to that which kept Simone Weil “waiting for God” on the cathedral steps, never to enter.
As presented in Simone Pétrement’s definitive biography of Weil, we learn that:
[Simone Weil] believes that Christianity is Catholic by right but not in fact.
“So many things exist outside [the Church], so many things that I love and do not want to give up… ....there is an absolutely insurmountable obstacle… It is the use of the two little words ‘anathema sit.’ …I remain with all those things that cannot enter the Church, the universal repository, on account of those two little words. …In order that the present attitude of the Church might be effective and that she might really penetrate like a wedge into social existence, she would have to say openly that she had changed or wished to change. …After the fall of the Roman Empire, which had been totalitarian, it was the Church that was the first to establish a rough sort of totalitarianism in Europe in the thirteenth century... And the motive power of this totalitarianism was the use of those two little words: ‘anathema sit.’”
As one might have heard it said in a smoke-filled church basement: “I can I.D. that totally.”
X
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Reflections: O'Connor on Weil - Part V: Conclusion
X
In wrapping up this exercise to introduce Simone Weil to a new readership by way of Flannery O’Connor, I will note that the last mention of Weil in a letter to “A.” was dated 20 July 63. Since O’Connor died on August 4, 1964, it is fair to say that having once been introduced to Weil, O’Connor maintained her interest to the end. O’Connor’s penultimate reference to Weil in the letters was this:
Never read Beauvoir. Never aim to. I think myself that Simone Weil is a trifle monstrous, but the kind of monstrosity that interests me. Indeed.
This has not been my first attempt to introduce Weil to new readers by way of a third party author. Not so long ago I completed another five-part series of posts quoting the whole a short biography of Weil by the novelist, Paul West. It is evident from his treatment of Weil that West, like O’Connor before him, found Weil to be “a trifle monstrous.” Be that as it may. I consider Weil’s biography to be every bit as important to an understanding of my devotion to her as are her writings. I therefore encourage persons who have taken an interest in this series of posts to begin here with a reading of the West bio and scroll up through the other four posts. I will post links to a couple of full-length biographies at the conclusion of this piece.
I find that since I launched Rodak Riffs, almost two years ago, I have written nearly forty posts tagged with the name Simone Weil. Several of these have contained quotes about her by other prominent writers. For instance: Elizabeth Hardwick and T. S. Eliot and Iris Murdoch. I add their recommendations to that of Flannery O’Connor.
I also recommend this previous post, which contains a link to a selection of Weil quotes.
A not-so-random sampling of previous posts featuring my application of Weil’s writings to whatever I was thinking about at the time, can be reviewed here and here and here and here and here and here. A bit of scrolling around in the Rodak Riffs archives for 2007 and 2008 will uncover a couple dozen more.
Of biographies, the one by her friend, Simone Pétrement, is probably considered the standard work. It is also the most hagiographic. My personal library also holds biographies by Robert Coles, Gabriella Fiori, David McClellan, and Francine du Plessix Gray. I can recommend them all, noting that some (e.g., Coles, du Plessix Gray) are less sympathetic to Weil’s “monstrosity” than others.
There: I’ve done what I can.
X
In wrapping up this exercise to introduce Simone Weil to a new readership by way of Flannery O’Connor, I will note that the last mention of Weil in a letter to “A.” was dated 20 July 63. Since O’Connor died on August 4, 1964, it is fair to say that having once been introduced to Weil, O’Connor maintained her interest to the end. O’Connor’s penultimate reference to Weil in the letters was this:
Never read Beauvoir. Never aim to. I think myself that Simone Weil is a trifle monstrous, but the kind of monstrosity that interests me. Indeed.
This has not been my first attempt to introduce Weil to new readers by way of a third party author. Not so long ago I completed another five-part series of posts quoting the whole a short biography of Weil by the novelist, Paul West. It is evident from his treatment of Weil that West, like O’Connor before him, found Weil to be “a trifle monstrous.” Be that as it may. I consider Weil’s biography to be every bit as important to an understanding of my devotion to her as are her writings. I therefore encourage persons who have taken an interest in this series of posts to begin here with a reading of the West bio and scroll up through the other four posts. I will post links to a couple of full-length biographies at the conclusion of this piece.
I find that since I launched Rodak Riffs, almost two years ago, I have written nearly forty posts tagged with the name Simone Weil. Several of these have contained quotes about her by other prominent writers. For instance: Elizabeth Hardwick and T. S. Eliot and Iris Murdoch. I add their recommendations to that of Flannery O’Connor.
I also recommend this previous post, which contains a link to a selection of Weil quotes.
A not-so-random sampling of previous posts featuring my application of Weil’s writings to whatever I was thinking about at the time, can be reviewed here and here and here and here and here and here. A bit of scrolling around in the Rodak Riffs archives for 2007 and 2008 will uncover a couple dozen more.
Of biographies, the one by her friend, Simone Pétrement, is probably considered the standard work. It is also the most hagiographic. My personal library also holds biographies by Robert Coles, Gabriella Fiori, David McClellan, and Francine du Plessix Gray. I can recommend them all, noting that some (e.g., Coles, du Plessix Gray) are less sympathetic to Weil’s “monstrosity” than others.
There: I’ve done what I can.
X
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Reflections: O'Connor on Weil - Part IV
X
Covering the period 1952-1963, there are sixteen separate references to Simone Weil noted in the index of The Habit of Being, the selected letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald. In my effort here to convince admirers of O’Connor that they should look into the writings of Simone Weil on O’Connor’s recommendation, I will not quote all sixteen. But I do have a few more to cite.
O’Connor’s interest in Weil was primarily as a Catholic:
30 October 55 to “A.”:
I think Mlle. Weil was a far piece from the Church too but considering where she started from, the distance she came toward it seems remarkable.
In a letter sent by O’Connor to “A.” fourteen months after the one quoted above, we see that O’Connor has not only maintained her interest in Weil, but, having been gifted with a set of Weil’s incredible Notebooks, her admiration has continued to grow:
28 December 56 to “A.”:
The Lord knows I never expected to own the Notebooks of Simone Weil. This is almost something to live up to; anyway, reading them is one way to try to understand the age. I intend to find that Time with her picture (some weeks ago) and cut out the picture and stick it in the front. That face gives a kind of reality to the notes. I am more than obliged to you. These are books that I can’t begin to exhaust, and Simone Weil is a mystery that should keep us all humble, and I need it more than most. Also she’s the example of the religious consciousness without a religion which maybe sooner or later I will be able to write about. [emphasis added]
On a personal note, I too was gifted by a life-long friend with a set of the Notebooks, and my reaction both to the extraordinary generosity of the gift and to the extraordinary gifts enjoyed in the reading of them matches O’Connor’s, word for word.
Simone Weil had a brother who was a world-class mathematician. She, too, placed great importance in math—and especially in geometry—in her understanding of the nature of Existence as passed down from the Greeks. I, like O’Connor, in my profound impotence before things mathematical, had to skim over some of these parts, fearing as I did so that I was missing out on the revelation of profound mysteries, but realizing at the same time that an inexhaustible fund of wisdom with which I am somewhat equipped to grapple was opening itself to me:
12 January 57 to “A.”:
Don’t worry about my spending any time computing the little figures in the Simone notebooks. I just go on to the next page. There are remarkable things there and if I really own the complete Simone Weil I feel very rich.
Very rich. Absolutely.
X
Covering the period 1952-1963, there are sixteen separate references to Simone Weil noted in the index of The Habit of Being, the selected letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald. In my effort here to convince admirers of O’Connor that they should look into the writings of Simone Weil on O’Connor’s recommendation, I will not quote all sixteen. But I do have a few more to cite.
O’Connor’s interest in Weil was primarily as a Catholic:
30 October 55 to “A.”:
I think Mlle. Weil was a far piece from the Church too but considering where she started from, the distance she came toward it seems remarkable.
In a letter sent by O’Connor to “A.” fourteen months after the one quoted above, we see that O’Connor has not only maintained her interest in Weil, but, having been gifted with a set of Weil’s incredible Notebooks, her admiration has continued to grow:
28 December 56 to “A.”:
The Lord knows I never expected to own the Notebooks of Simone Weil. This is almost something to live up to; anyway, reading them is one way to try to understand the age. I intend to find that Time with her picture (some weeks ago) and cut out the picture and stick it in the front. That face gives a kind of reality to the notes. I am more than obliged to you. These are books that I can’t begin to exhaust, and Simone Weil is a mystery that should keep us all humble, and I need it more than most. Also she’s the example of the religious consciousness without a religion which maybe sooner or later I will be able to write about. [emphasis added]
On a personal note, I too was gifted by a life-long friend with a set of the Notebooks, and my reaction both to the extraordinary generosity of the gift and to the extraordinary gifts enjoyed in the reading of them matches O’Connor’s, word for word.
Simone Weil had a brother who was a world-class mathematician. She, too, placed great importance in math—and especially in geometry—in her understanding of the nature of Existence as passed down from the Greeks. I, like O’Connor, in my profound impotence before things mathematical, had to skim over some of these parts, fearing as I did so that I was missing out on the revelation of profound mysteries, but realizing at the same time that an inexhaustible fund of wisdom with which I am somewhat equipped to grapple was opening itself to me:
12 January 57 to “A.”:
Don’t worry about my spending any time computing the little figures in the Simone notebooks. I just go on to the next page. There are remarkable things there and if I really own the complete Simone Weil I feel very rich.
Very rich. Absolutely.
X
Monday, May 25, 2009
Reflections: O'Connor on Weil - Part III
X
Back to business, then. We left off with Flannery O'Connor having been exposed to her first Simone Weil through the reading of books mailed to her by her penpal, "A." She has written to "A." on September 24, that she (O'Connor) finds Weil to be "tragic" and "comic."
Though we have only O'Connor's side of the correspondence, it is evident from the next selection (below) that "A." has written back to ask, "What the hell do you mean by dissing my Simone in this ignominious fashion!?!"
O'Connor immediately whips off this self-effacing clarification of what was meant by those two apparently negatively-weighted terms:
30 September 55 to “A.”:
By saying Simone Weil’s life was both comic and terrible, I am not trying to reduce it, but mean to be paying her the highest tribute I can, short of calling her a saint, which I don’t believe she was. Possibly I have a higher opinion of the comic and terrible than you do. To my way of thinking it includes her great courage and to call her anything less would be to see her as merely ordinary. She was certainly not ordinary. Of course, I can only say, as you point out, this is what I see, not this is what she is—which only God knows. But I didn’t mean that my heroine would be a hypothetical Miss Weil. My heroine already is, and is Hulga. Miss Weil’s existence only parallels what I have in mind, and it strikes me especially hard because I had it in mind before I knew as much as I do now about Simone Weil. …You have to be able to dominate the existence that you characterize. That is why I write about people who are more or less primitive. I couldn’t dominate a Miss Weil because she is more intelligent and better than I am but I can project a Hulga.
There you have it, dear readers--"the highest tribute": "She was certainly not ordinary" and "...she is more intelligent and better than I am...."
True dat. And this is why she should be read. And reread. And read again.
X
Back to business, then. We left off with Flannery O'Connor having been exposed to her first Simone Weil through the reading of books mailed to her by her penpal, "A." She has written to "A." on September 24, that she (O'Connor) finds Weil to be "tragic" and "comic."
Though we have only O'Connor's side of the correspondence, it is evident from the next selection (below) that "A." has written back to ask, "What the hell do you mean by dissing my Simone in this ignominious fashion!?!"
O'Connor immediately whips off this self-effacing clarification of what was meant by those two apparently negatively-weighted terms:
30 September 55 to “A.”:
By saying Simone Weil’s life was both comic and terrible, I am not trying to reduce it, but mean to be paying her the highest tribute I can, short of calling her a saint, which I don’t believe she was. Possibly I have a higher opinion of the comic and terrible than you do. To my way of thinking it includes her great courage and to call her anything less would be to see her as merely ordinary. She was certainly not ordinary. Of course, I can only say, as you point out, this is what I see, not this is what she is—which only God knows. But I didn’t mean that my heroine would be a hypothetical Miss Weil. My heroine already is, and is Hulga. Miss Weil’s existence only parallels what I have in mind, and it strikes me especially hard because I had it in mind before I knew as much as I do now about Simone Weil. …You have to be able to dominate the existence that you characterize. That is why I write about people who are more or less primitive. I couldn’t dominate a Miss Weil because she is more intelligent and better than I am but I can project a Hulga.
There you have it, dear readers--"the highest tribute": "She was certainly not ordinary" and "...she is more intelligent and better than I am...."
True dat. And this is why she should be read. And reread. And read again.
X
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