simone weil - waiting on god

 A self involved, unconnected thought about Simone Weil and spirituality. 

 

 

Lots of things. Simone Weil startling out of the covers of her writings, serene in the knowledge she would die young. I put a bookmark on page 34 – which is how old she was when she died, or near enough, and think about how everything is different from the last time I read her. In the real world, two rainbows (promises) come and depart.

 

AM has read a lot. Everything I could think of, and can talk about these texts like she wrote them, conversed easily with the authors a century ago. It is one of her many qualities which lend her luminosity.

 

From Portobello beach’s black horizon, where we are clinging in order to honour AM’s departure to Norway, rises, rises - first a claw, a cat’s half closed eye, a forehead, and finally a coin, of light. It is the moon, familiar only to sailors, an impossible moon. It does not become hidden by the cloud but is rather a great thing that is burnt up irreversibly, like a comet. My eyes tear in sympathy for the wind and the souls of the wood we’re burning.

The fruit moon redeems everything, our shredded conversation, our selves huddled, the awful cold. AM says that out of all things she knows God planned this one for us to see – she jokes that this is the first time in millennia that God has spoken to us mortals directly, but that she’s sure about this moon. It is simple to agree. I will miss AM very much, a self described egg saint (although now they’ve converted to Judaism this title may not stick).

 

It is on the train home from the sand and jewels that I open Simone and begin to wait on G/g/od/o/g.

 

I immediately re-remember Simone as close to irresistible. It is not that I could feel such confident intensity, but that I long to. It is an envy – not solely, but vital to the experience of reading - which illuminates my anxious pencil marks. It is an envy for a parallel self; looking idly from the carriage window one sees a moment of bird, and you swap places, and in the next flash back. A bird can only be a bird; a human can flicker into birdness with enough attention. Simone’s first and most important teaching was about this.

 

“Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by this object, it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, … Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it.” (72)

 

A moment of attention will bring you closer to God – no, I must explain. God features here as a life thing or metaphor only otherwise this is unreadable. I’ll try to explain. I’ll exise Simone’s references to Christ. I’ll read into the text – what could God mean other than God? Certainly, this God is unlike the Catholic father enough that you can work with him. Actually, I get a bit weighed down by this and my eyes glaze over. I wish my edition had focussed more on her life of militant socialism.

 

Sweet fallible Simone; she gets headaches and holds herself to impossible standards. Competing against her brother. It is too easy to love others – God wants her to be apart. There is one right way to live and it is so so easy to do this but you are a disobedient coward. Part of my soul which longs for certainty and rules, is hypnotised by a prayer on how to live, leans into this, but it cannot be. As uncertain as a butterfly; as rigid as willow. My deviance is also myself.

 

All is needed is to jump. On the platform I reach inside myself and attempt to seek, to sense, by a change in air pressure, if there is space to leap, to wonder where I could leap to, away from Me. There is more. Destroy yourself. In order to create. Is it worth writing when you could be falling? Simone writes with a rough childish pride, exceptionalism which is natural to her, which you can sense her life’s work is to tamp down, about her reaching intellect, her exceptionalism.

 

If her river of God has taught her to be humble; then she will be the most humble, she will be not only a worm but a sinning worm given consciousness in order to know its lowliness (this is pride too). She knows this; something desperate, circling in her self knowledge. “Only perfection is sufficient.” Her life course was to gesture towards the possibility of perfection through submitting to the will of God. But oh – oh – you could say God, or Life, or a silver stream – it’s obedience like obedience to your body, to a lover, to gravity. I’ve felt this – have you? - and so I keep reading.

 

The ruminative letters to the silent priest which make up Waiting on God could be to God himself. Dear Father, I love you. Dear Father, I am not worthy of your friendship. I would rather you forget me than I cause you a moment of pain.  

 

All this is to say: Simone is resting in my bag while we are on the beach.

“I’m just not into the abnegation of the self. God does not want you to starve yourself to death in sympathy with people who are actually starving. Also, she was anti-Semitic, even if she was Jewish.” We move into the warm pub, as if to prove this point about the importance of nourishing the body.

 

Yes, but, it is in moments where I have forgotten, escaped, a leaden self, that I have caught on to something bigger. AM nods comfortably. My familiar theme is my imprisonment by my ego. While writing this, I tell AM the above humorous anecdote – about the moon - to AM who laughs. I wrote it wrong. I said that this moon was the first sign of God in millenia – I made it up and attributed it to them. In my embarrassment, AM looks sideways and tender for a second and says, “I hope you don’t think this is silly, but I know that God has acted on earth before that time.”

 

While watching a Studio Ghibli movie a friend who has recently tried to kill themselves says I wish I were dead like the stone trees. I respond that I wish I were one of the swarming insects who protect the forest, who are ugly. I wish to rot (to be inhabited by other beings), I wish to be rich, like a good loam (to be inhabited by other beings – to be possible): I don’t want to fuck or care anymore either, but I want to be a tree root. My friend points to still things and I point to the wriggle. God wants us to wriggle as she intended if she wants anything at all, if she can want. I want my friend to stay alive so I turn their attention from unbeing to being as gently as I can. It is not so gentle; my being relies on their being, because I love them, so I am a little rough.