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.
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Quote du Jour: At the Brink

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To live at the edge of death and of the stars is a vibration too tense for our veins to endure. There isn't even the child of a star and a woman as a compassionate intermediary. The heart must present itself alone before nothingness, and alone it must beat loud in the darkness.
XXXX~ Clarice Lispector, Soulstorm, "Silence" (tr. Alexis Levitin)

If you can write like that, you don't need to go to church.
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Readings: The Inside-Out

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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.
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*--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”
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Reflections: Why We Aren't Saints

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Having yesterday finished Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s lyrical novel about a woman who has undergone a violent spiritual crisis which she is attempting to explain to herself, The Passion According to D.H. , it has occurred to me that if Simone Weil had chosen to write narrative fiction, she might well have written a book much like this one. Here is a long excerpt by which to remember it:

XXXBut listen a minute: I’m not speaking of the future, I’m speaking of a permanent nowness. And that means that hope doesn’t exist because it is no longer a deferred future, it is now. Because God doesn’t promise. He is much greater than that: He is and never ceases being. It is we who cannot bear this ever-now light, and so we promise it for later only so we do not have to feel it right now, today. The present is God’s today face. The horror is that we know that it is right in life that we see God. It is with our eyes truly open that we see God. And if I put the face of reality off until after my death—it is though guile, for I prefer to be dead at the time of seeing Him, and so I think I won’t really see Him, just as I have courage really to dream only when I am sleeping.
XXXI know that what I am feeling is serious and has the power to destroy me. Because—because it is as though I were telling myself that the kingdom of heaven is now.
XXXAnd I don’t want the kingdom of heaven, I don’t want it, I can bear only its promise! The message I am getting from myself sounds cataclysmic to me, and once again close to the diabolical. But that is only for fear. It is fear. For doing away with hope means that I have to begin to live and not just to promise myself that I will. And that is the greatest fright I can have. Before, I waited. But God is now: His kingdom has just begun.

I don’t know if this is good theology. But I do know that it is powerful, visionary, writing.
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Quote du Jour: Only Stop

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To desist is a life's most sacred choice. ~ Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
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Quote du Jour: I Want To Hold Your Hand

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Give me your anonymous hand, for life is giving me pain and I don't know how to go on talking--reality is too delicate, only reality is delicate, my unreality and my imagination are more substantial.
xxx ~ Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
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Quote du Jour: A Dare

Creation is not imagination, it's running the huge risk of coming face to face with reality.

XXXX~ Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

Xhe Passion According to G.H.

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