Simone on attachment, reality, and loss

I have recently begun reading Simone Weil. I learned about her through reading Czeslaw Milosz, who loved her. She was quite a woman... anyway, I am going to post now and then some of my favorite of the paragraphs. I'm posting them without commentary... I have a hope that it will get a conversation going in the comments.

***

The reality of the world is the result of our attachment. It is the reality of the self which we transfer onto things. It has nothing to do with independent reality. That is only perceptible through total detachment. Should only one thread remain, there is still attachment.

Attachment is a manufacturer of illusions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.

As soon as we know that something is real, we can no longer be attached to it.
Attachment is no more nor less than an insufficiency in our sense of reality. We are attached to the possession of a thing because we think that if we cease to possess it, it will cease to exist. A great many people do not feel with their whole soul that there is all the difference in the world between the destruction of a town and their own irremediable exile from the town.

The miser deprives himself of his treasure because of his desire for it. If we can let our whole good rest with something hidden in the ground, why not with God?
But when God has become as full of significance as the treasure is for the miser, we have to tell ourselves insistently that he does not exist. We must experience the fact that we love him, even if he does not exist.
It is he who, through the operation of the dark night, withdraws himself from us in order not to be loved as the treasure is by the miser.

To lose someone: We suffer because the departed, the absent, has become something imaginary and unreal. But our desire for him is not imaginary. We have to go down into ourselves to the abode of the desire which is not imaginary.
Hunger: we imagine kinds of food, but the hunger itself is real: we have to fasten onto the hunger. The presence of the dead person is imaginary, but his absence is very real; henceforward it is his way of appearing.

the story of my life, so far

Recipe for a crisis

Layer in an individual:
20 years upbringing instilling conservatism of morals, inquisitiveness of intellect, and independence of will.
1 church attended in formative years where most of the people appeared to be feeling or experiencing things not felt or experienced by this particular individual
4 years education in a liberal environment, reading beautiful, tormented, difficult books and meeting beautiful, tormented, difficult people
1 year spent mostly in the company of secure, more or less fundamentalist Christians, who are quite confident in what they believe and why

Add, in quick succession:
1 father converting to Catholicism
2 friends with hard questions, who won't take crap for answers

Stir vigorously. Watch the mix boil.

So if you haven't heard from me in the last month or two, and you're the kind of person who expects to hear from me more frequently and talk at great lengths, this is why. Not that I've intentionally gone into hiding, but just that I haven't reached out to talk as much because I haven't known what I would say. I still don't, exactly.

There are a few snowflakes blowing around outside. I mention it because I love snowflakes, and also because it is important to remember how much of the world actually takes place outside of my head.

Here are some questions I am not asking right now:
Who am I? I'm not really very worried about this. Actually I'm obsessed with it, but that's nothing new, so I'm not counting it as a question which makes up the current crisis. Asking who I am is not so much an activity as a continual mode of being.
What is my purpose in life? This is even less of a worry than "Who am I?" Teleology, naturalism, extrinsic and intrinsic finality... these are interesting ideas to play with, but from a practical standpoint they all break down to much simpler questions like "What should I do for the next hour?" (or possibly, depending on your philosophical view, "What will I do for the next hour?") Much like "Who am I?" this is a question which does not wait for an answer. It merely exists, to be answered further every moment.
Is there a God? I tried asking this one for a little while, about a month ago. It didn't stick. My aesthetic framework doesn't seem able to support such a question in its purest form. Taking "God" in a very broad sense, as some force or entity which drives, shapes, and/or evaluates the universe... well either there is or there isn't. And if there isn't any such thing, then there is no story to the world (an equivalent phrase might be "no meaning.") And if there's no story, I'm really not that interested. Stories are to my mind what blood is to my body. If there is no God, then I, as a maker of stories, am the most interesting thing in the universe. And since I'm going to go on making stories whether there is a God or not, then finding out that there's not a God (if such is the case) is not a high-priority activity for me.

Now we move to the questions I am asking right now:
What is God like? This is huge. I don't know if you noticed, but "some force or entity which drives, shapes, and/or evaluates the universe" leaves a lot of room for specification. There are many possibilities within this category. I haven't even begun to try and rule some of them out. An important sub-question to this is "What, if anything, does God require of me?" On this I have some thoughts, which I may try to flesh out in a later entry.
What is the source of the Christian belief which I have held as long as I remember? To say that my parents taught me to be a Christian is true, and trivial. Why did I believe them? Why did I never, seriously, doubt that what they told me was true? Does it owe more the to quality of my relationship to my parents (and friends and teachers who reinforced what they said) or to the quality of the universe? This may be the biggest piece of this task I'm embarked on: rejecting unsatisfactory sources of my belief and replacing them, if possible, with sounder ones.
What is the Bible? In the gamut of possibilities, from "every word is stamped with God's approval" to "it's a handful of literary works cobbled together by various religious and political bodies" where does the truth lie? I don't know where the answer to this question will come from, though I'm going to begin by investigating, in detail, the historical background and origins of various parts of it. So we'll see.

There is another question, one which I can't seem to either ask or not ask. In one way, it is the most important question of them all. But it deserves its own essay, and maybe soon I will write it.

What does all this mean? I don't know. It will come as a shock to many of you... it did to me. At times I think that faith, whatever it is, exists independent of intellectual belief; that all these doubts, which for me are real and vital concessions to intellectual honesty, may persist for months, years, even a lifetime, while my identification with Christ still lives on some fundamental level where it cannot be shaken. This is a comforting thought... though it still leaves a lot of questions about the shape my life will take, particularly my place in various social worlds.

Other times I listen to songs, or read poems or passages from books, that I once sang and read and celebrated as containing truths, truths which were as real-- though not as tangible-- as the tree in my front yard. And I feel like I've been robbed of my most precious possession.

on sharing

How to speak-- and to whom-- and of what? For me nearly all difficulty and all reward in human relation resolves to this: speech or silence. Was it always this way? Is this essential to who I am, or is it a state brought about by some sequence of experiences, or is it a phase I will grow out of? To be understood-- why is it still so important?

Maybe it is the search for an ally. Everything out there is so big, and so hostile, and so confusing, that I seek for one, just one, companion in my thoughts: one place where the battle and the search can cease, and I can rest. I have no such person-- probably no such person exists-- and even worse than the loneliness is the sense of being perpetually under attack.

And yet the impulse is to reach out, even with these thoughts, to present them to other eyes. What is it I want in response? What is the hope that these words fly on? Why do I permit myself such a ridiculous, overprecious phrase as "the hope these words fly on?"

It is at this point in writing, in my notebook with my fountain pen, whose current ink color is a bright pink, that I stopped to post those three poems. I wrote them three or four years ago, and there are lines and phrases in each that make me shudder. I want so badly to write well, to write elegantly, irreproachably, without cliche or evasion, convincingly, and beautifully. That there should be works of mine out there that betray the staggering weaknesses of those three poems is painful to me. I don't want those weaknesses aired.

Some of you will protest. Some of you will say, "But Ginny, I really liked those poems! I thought they were good." I know. In the genre they belong to, the genre of amateur poems which exist mainly to express to the author's own satisfaction some feeling or experience, they're not half bad. And in fact they do express, to my satisfaction, the things each of them were meant to. There are lines and stanzas in each of them that I will recite to myself, pleased. But it is my vanity, my aspiration, that says, Not enough! If I am to be a poet, I must be a great poet, an irreproachable poet, a poet without weaknesses and clumsy moments. And if I cannot do this, and I cannot, then my poems will be for myself only. If I must have weaknesses, they will be for my eyes only.

One of the beauties of learning to play go is that it shines a pitiless light on this vanity of mine. There is a beauty in good play that I crave, that I strive for, and that constantly eludes me. Instead I play sluggish, vulgar, fumbling moves; and if I ever tried to convince myself that it is not so, the final score would show me the lie. Worse yet, there is no end in sight. My teacher, who beats me four times out of five with a nine-stone handicap, loses as badly to people who lose as badly to still more people. This is well understood in the world of go; which does not make it any less painful to me. I hit a very bad wall early in my learning to play, where the gap between my aspirations and my abilities was so frustrating that it crippled me. I got over it-- I had to, or I would have had to stop playing-- but it still stings.

My teacher tells me that to improve I must play lots of games. This means lots of bad games, lots of weak and clumsy games which are still the best I can do. I have been making my peace with this. Now it is time to turn the same eye to writing. If I am to write, I must write a lot, and I must write much less brilliantly than I desire to (it is the only way I can write; so high is my vanity.) And I must, God help me, submit to criticism, as I submit to the review of one of my games.

One of the reasons this blogs sees so few posts is that I once designated it my "quality-controlled" blog. My other one, Chronicles of the Ephemeral, (which I do not want to delete, only because I'm so fond of the title) is where I post whatever thoughts or stories I feel like sharing, without worrying about whether they'll be of general interest or whether they're written well. Of course, once I put the expectation of quality on this blog, it was doomed to receive only rare updates. (Chronicles has been neglected, too, these last few months, but there are other reasons for that.) And of course the beauty of it is that Chronicles has many posts that are, in retrospect, much more interesting and witty and insightful than anything posted here. Bah.

So I am going to try and demolish the barrier between "quality-Ginny" and "regular-Ginny." It's an artificial distinction, and it causes harm in ways I'm only beginning to identify. There is only Ginny, foolish and weak and clumsy at times, but also, also, having her moments of quality. (This applies to much more than writing, by the way, but it is a good place to start.) After all, the world can absorb a few more bad poems without sustaining too much damage. If I hide my weaknesses, it is for my protection, not theirs. I think-- we will see-- I think I can do without that kind of protection.

three poems, from a time past, presented not out of pride but of necessity

Iron Maiden

This room is like a stone
Both of us sitting here motionless
Pressing wads of silence and pride over unspoken wounds.

When I look at you, my eyes bleed.
You are careful not to look at me at all.
If I should get up
To wash my face or get a drink
It would remind us both that we are here.

Once I called you by my name
And we laughed as at a perfectly understandable mistake.

The remote is handled with perfect courtesy:
“Would you like to watch something else?”
“Oh no, go ahead.”
“Are you sure?” “I wasn’t really watching anyway.”
Your books stacked beside you
are an unassailable wall.

This room is like a stone
And the floor is lined with knives
And I shudder to pierce in you or me
Some yet unbroken piece of skin.
If I should smile
It might pull open a crack in chapped and blistered lips
And pour forth a salty rush of red that you, or I, or both, may choke on.

They say salt water heals.
I have always been afraid of the sting.


***
Freshwater

Something broke—
ice or a storm
or a black crust
fragmented and floating
carried away on a newborn river.

A gladness like white flowers
springs along the banks.
The river breathes
in and out with the tide
of quiet awakening...

That life is still possible
that the thunder cries of birth
that the ice hatches the river
that you and I can lie side by side in the dark
talking of the stars.


***
White Christmas

I. Visitation
Snow falls from another place; layered
On trees in black-white limbs, it lies like
Eternity settled over that which dies.
Cold crystallizes air, splintering breath
And piercing silence into every throat;
Changeless it spreads, forcing blued fingers stiff,
Beating pliant flesh brittle.
Freezing, sharpening, it descends, shadow of
The hard bright dagger coming to split the earth.

II. Homecoming
Homecoming was a crawl, not a march,
A bloodied drag over frozen ground,
Toward a remembrance of warmth.
But she and he were gone to warm each other,
And on Christmas morning my father exploded
Because the juice pitcher was empty.
The sun bleeds pink every morning
Or fades up in grey invisibility.

Shall I tell you of the war and waste?
The grey lands, filled with the snap of invisible bows
And sting of arrows I could not duck—
I, the only pink and pulsing thing
In all the unwoundable cold.
I carry it with me
In my hard and black toes—
Let me sleep in sight of your fire.

III. The Party
His apartment was clean and white-walled;
Her influence was plain.
The graham-cracker cookies his sister taught me to make
Were laid on the table on a green plastic plate.
In the kitchen she talked with her friends
About the dresses– navy blue,
Which would not have flattered me anyway.
Their mothers both smiled and asked about my year
And told me to say hello to my family.
I was very cold.

IV. The Death
On Christmas morning my father exploded
Because the juice pitcher was empty.
That was the end.
Nothing was left except
The struggle not to break over
The scrambled eggs hardening on my plate.

V. The Fall
Cold is born soft
Leaving the iron air to fall
With the delicacy of an eyelash,
To blacken with the spit of a tire,
To fade with the heat of a breath.
Once I dug a foxhole in a snowbank
And lay there until nightfall.
Unthinkable: the dagger which descends
To pierce the earth and freeze its core
Comes with the lightness of dandelion seed,
Softly as a breath layering the earth
With eternity;
Draping frozen rocks and bitter trenches
With grace.