What's In A Book?

This blog is based on three books: "Simone Weil" (1909-1943) by Stephen Plant; "Autumn Journal", by Louis MacNeice, (1907-1963) and "the poems of St. John of the Cross", (1542-1591) edited by Willis Barnstone. It is not a review of these books, but rather a bringing together of three people who, for me, are of some importance. I did think of calling the blog, In Praise of Reading but, What's in a book? is less in your face, more subtle, and as a consequence, I hope, more of a challenge.

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When I had finished typing up my notes in respect of the books mentioned above, books that I read over the Christmas and New Year period, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy the task was: especially in respect of Simone Weil: because reading anything to do with Simone Weil requires concentration, and at times a good deal of mental effort; which was why, writing the notes in the first instance seemed arduous. Plant's book is not a biography, but an introduction for those who are new to her writings; and I benefited from reading it, even though I have read all those of her works translated from French into English. And I was reassured by the fact that some of the more contentious issues that Plant focuses on, were issues that preoccupy me. And at a lesser level, I was unaware of the fact that she had resigned from the Free French movement in London, a month before her death, in August 1943.

I don't find Simone Weil attractive as a person, which from Simone Weil's point of view is how she would have wanted it to be; for an aspect of "decreation", an idea central to her thinking was, that we should rid ourselves of the "I": that we should seek to abandon the self to God, distilled, if you like, to the point of an essence that is so pure as to be indistinguishable from divine love. So in this context, it seems to me, that the manner of her death, (in relative obscurity), was wholly consistent with what gave meaning to her life. And though I believe that her personal spiritual standards were so exacting, as to be beyond the reach of most mortals, it is the very fact of her desire to know what is true, and her belief that truth was attainable if we choose to seek it out, that should draw us to her.

And were we to accept as little as 10 per cent of what she had to say, we should still love her for the journey that she made: she was not a plaster-cast saint, but someone who gave everything for her fellow human beings, years before she was drawn to Christ, and once drawn in his direction, tested herself to the limit, and exasporated others, especially those who had inherited the faith. She understood the limits of the intellect, and was deeply mistrustful of the Church as an institution; and she did not accept the popular perception of divine providence, (of how God works in the world): the idea, in the context of suffering, that God favours some for sorrow and others for happiness: (an idea that also equastes with how God relates to the physical universe). Besides which, she had a striking insight into the incarnation: as to how Christ, as God made man, of necessity (in the context of human suffering), had to be human to the point of complete separateness from his divinity, which for her was why he came to cry out from the cross: "My God. my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

For Simone Weil, suffering, properly understood and accepted, was the gateway to seeing the world from God's point of view, and consequently the pathway to his love. And suffering for Simone Weil was more than a theoretical abstraction: for many years she suffered from relentless headaches, which, years later, at Solesmes while following the religious ceremonies of Holy Week she came to understand in the context of the Passion of Christ. And not withstanding her academic training, she suffered fatigue and humiliation first hand, when "incognito", and still troubled by her intense headaches, she worked as an unskilled factory hand. And she is full of contradictions; for as Gustave Thibon points out, in philosophical and religious terms she was an artist, who, thinking on a broad canvas, jumped in, and looking at what she saw, considered it from every conceivable point of view, as a prerequisite to coming to a conclusion. But as we know, she didn't live to refine her aphorisms or come to a final conclusion on many important issues. As a consequence, and on our own personal journey, we have to build on what she has left us; a journey which may, or may not, end in the same place. But whatever the outcome, we will love her for having caused us to set out. And for those of us who lack her level of education, and qualities of intellect, if we persevere, she will take us to places new.

What I have just written, represents my thoughts as they came to me, and I seem to have been more successful here that on the two occasions when I tried to talk informally to others about Simone Weil. But then the page can't answer back. But when on our holiday in Sardinia I first discussed Simone Weil, and recalled among other things, how she refused to eat more than the rations allowed to those in occupied France, the reaction was one of immediate hostility, and she was dismissed. I had no reason to believe that the person I was talking to had any knowledge of her, but I seemed to have touched a raw nerve. So I came away wondering how they could be so dismissive, despite my having admitted to the difficulty in talking about what was a complex life, but in mitigation had pointed out that Simone Weil had been described as one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. Whether the raw nerve was religion, eating disorders, or a combination of both, I had no idea, but in effect she was dismissed as selfish and a crank. And when the subject came up again over the Christmas and New Year period with someone who is disposed to being "philosophical", the response was not one of interest, or wanting to know more, but with the disregarding: "That's her opinion", as though because it was her opinion, (Simone Weil's) it was of no more consequence than another opinion, or that other people's opinions have nothing to offer us that is either enlightening or relevant, because no one opinion is better: more informed than another.

So in the context of all of this, here are a few observations from Plant, that in the context of my own thinking and experience, I found especially pertinent:

   "......In the Church Christians believe, one learns the love of God not simply from direct encounter with God's perfection in prayer, but also in loving imperfect human beings who make mistakes and who grow through them in order to love each other as God first loved them. Without participation in such a community, without sharing in the messiness of relationships not only with the Church's saints but also with its sinners, the way in which the narratives of God on each page of the Bible may become the word of God was lost on her. By regarding as scandalous the particularity of God's history with Israel, by placing the decisive and unique gift of Godself in Christ in a series of self-revelations; and in picking and choosing from the Bible only those parts that fitted in with the synthesis of truth she judged to be present in human history, Weil made herself into the ultimate arbiter of truth. She was a player in a truth-game in which she was also the umpire, able to change the rules to accommodate the hand she had been dealt. How are we to evaluate her legacy?"

Now while this passage points up some of the complexities and limitations in Simone Weil's thinking, I am not sure that Plant was wise in using the metaphor of a card game in which she was a strategist, when such an image could imply that she was someone for whom the game was more important than the end result. She was a seeker after truth, who, (in a religious context), came to it from the outside, and as a consequence was uninhibited: she took nothing for granted, and so, took twists and turns that those of us who were indoctrinated in the faith and burdened with "tradition", were not ever likely to take. And those who knew her especially well, Father Perrin and Gustave Thibon, (both of whom could be just as forthright as Plant), never doubted her personal integrity, or in the case of Father Perrin in particular, (to whom she confided her spiritual autobiography), that her spiritual quest, and particular spiritual experiences, (however troubled), were anything other than authentic.

In his concluding remarks, under the heading,"Evaluating Weil's Legacy", Stephen Plant describes Simone Weil as at her best in, The Need For Roots:

   "where her experience of physical labour and her insights into the realities of human needs combine to offer a vision for society based on obligations not rights." and where "Her list of the needs of the soul and of the body, as compelling as they are original, have never yet been considered by politicians."

To which Plant adds that:

   "The questions raised by Weil challenge the foundations of our society. Being critical of our society is one thing, but Weil goes further. In The Need For Roots she offers alternative foundations that, if taken seriously could be used as the basis for a society that might be more just and decent..."

As for the idea that there might be such a thing as "Truth" he quotes Weil before going on to express his own view in terms of her legacy, a view that mirrors my New Year experience. The acid test for Weil, he reminds us, came from Weil herself, when she remarked that:

   "the eulogies of my intelligence are positively intended to evade the question:" Is what she says true?""

And Plant acknowledges that the concept of there being such a thing as Truth, is more than ever a problem for those of us who read her today, because:

   "The crsatz forms of tolerance on which much social intercourse and contemporary public debate trade means that truth claims are often quickly denounced as attempts to force one's personal opinions on others. "Truth" has become individual, personal: we speak as if "this is true for me, though it may not be true for you." Dogma, once the joyful teaching of truth, has become a dirty word, and to call someone "dogmatic" is to accuse them of intolerance towards others. Simone Weil," he tells us "suspected dogma but asserted truth. She believed that divine truth ran through many religious and philosophical dogmas and she claimed to know truth from falsehood with Plato's help. She argued that the presence of the same religious beliefs in different traditions meant that they must be true..."

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Until recently, my only experience of Louis MacNeice was a handful of poems that I had come across down the years, and not least among them, Carrickfergus, that we learned at school:

"I was born in Belfast between the mountains and the gantries
To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:"

And in Anthologies I had read different extracts from Autumn Journal. So given that he was a fellow countryman, and an Ulsdterman at that, I was intrigued to know more about him, and to read Autumn Journal in full: all 24 segments or 80 pages. When reading it I saw many parallels, (though not exact), with Simone Weil; and by the time I had finished, I had concluded that you could think of this poem as a prayer. For in his search for meaning and identity, his demons are ever present and he never quite leaves his inherited religious faith behind. In the penultimate chapter, xxiii, he is in Spain; it is December 1938, and the Spanish Civil War is drawing to a close, when, despite his uncertainties, and mindful of Ireland's troubled past, he turns to prayer, in which his own personal frailties find an echo in his alluding to Isaiah 40:4: "Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:"

The year has come to an end,
   Time for resolutions, for stock taking;
Felice Nuevo Anol
   May God, if there is one, send
As much courage again and greater vision
   And resolve the antinomies in which we live
Where man must be either safe because he is negative
   Or free on the edge of a razor.
Give those who are gentle strength,
   Give those who are strong a generous imagination,
And make their half-truth true and let the crooked
   Footpath find its parent road at length.
I admit that for myself I cannot straiten
   My broken rambling track
Which reaches so irregularly back
   to burning cities and rifled rose-bushes
And cairns and lonely farms
   Where no one lives, makes love, or begets children,
All my heredity and my upbringing
   Having brought me only to the Present's arms -
The arms not of a mistress but of a wrestler,
   Of a God who straddles over the night sky,
No wonder Jacob halted on his thigh -
   The price of a drawn battle.
For never to begin
   Anything new because we know there is nothing
New, is an academic sophistry -
   The original sin.

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   Now this segment of itself does not make the poem a prayer, but having prayed, this is the point at which he concludes that the time for self-pity is past, with the result that in the final chapter he absolves his demons, thereby laying them to rest:

"Now I must make amends
   And try to correlate event with instinct
And me with you or you and you with all,
   No longer think of time as a waterfall
Abstracted from a river.
   I have loved defeat and sloth,
The tawdry halo of the idle martyr;
   I have thrown away the roots of will and conscience,
Now I must look for both,
   Not any longer act among the cushions
The dying Gaul;
   Soon or late the delights of self-pity must pall
And the fun of cursing the wicked
   World into which we were born
And the cynical admission of frustration
   ("Our loves are not full measure,
They are blight and rooks on the corn.")
   Rather for any measure so far given
Let us be glad
   Nor wait on purpose to be wisely sad
When doing nothing we find we have gained nothing."

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As for what (in broad terms) Louis MacNeice and Simone Weil had in common, the points worth mentioning are these: They were of the same generation and both were teachers and classical scholars; and both had, to a greater or lesser extent, problems with identity. Simone Weil rejected her Jewishness, while Louis MacNeice was acutely aware of having been uprooted, when, at the age of ten, he was transported across the Irish Sea to be educated in England; and both were highly critical of the respective systems in which they were educated: structures that put conformity before personal development. And both, who were left of centre in politics, were drawn towards Spain, as symbolic of their personal ideals. In Simone Weil's case, to fight, and in that of MacNeice, as a place from which to draw inspiration for his humanist ideals. And both, though from quite different perspectives, wrestled with questions related to religious belief. MacNeice from the point of view of someone who inherited the faith as an Anglican: the son of a Church of Ireland priest, later a bishop. A faith that in Autumn Journal is ever present in the background. As an outsider making her way to Christ, Simone Weil was troubled by her own uncertainties, not least among them her concerns about the church as an institution, but also her unease, (not discussed here), about the wider implications, (for what she believed her role to be), by consenting to be baptised. On their journey both found inspiration in the Arts; and both, despite their respective demons, believed in engagement with the world.

Reading MacNeice has been a revelation, for his poetic skills are such that they are a stark pointer as to why I will never, (at its most meaningful), be a poet of substance. To begin with, and having started late, I lack MacNeice's breadth of education; and though I am acutely aware of the importance of imagery in poetry, which helps to sustain what is a condensed form of writing, I have to admire the way in which he sustains an idea, or reinforces a point; as here, in book vii, in respect of the fact that it is raining, which in turn becomes a metaphor for the national consciousness as it is affected by the preparations for war:

"Conferences, adjournments, ultimatums,
   Flights in the air, castles in air,
The autopsy of treaties, dynamite under the bridges,
   The end of laissez-faire.
After the warm days the rain comes pimpling
   The Paving stones with white
And with the rain the national conscience, creeping.
   Seeping through the night
And in the sodden park on Sunday protest."

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Or in book xxii where the Christmas holiday has just begun. It is snowing and MacNeice is heading south to find escape in what he knows to be the transient carnal delights of Paris; but not before he leaves us with an image of London, covered in snow, into which he weaves a sequence of potentially sinister images.

And in the context of how one thing can lead to another, I found myself reflecting on this passage from book xxi, in which MacNeice equates the Orange bands that were, and are, a part of the, "marching season" in Ulster, with "voodoo":

"And I remember when I was little, the fear
   Bandied among the servants
That Casement would land at the pier
   With a sword and a horde of rebels;
And how we used to expect, at a later date,
   When the wind blew from the west, the noise of shooting,
Starting in the evening at night
   In Belfast in the York Street district;
And the voodoo of the Orange bands
   Drawing an iron net through darkest Ulster,
Flailing the limbo lands -
   The linen mills, the long wet grass, the ragged hawthorn.
And one read black where the other read white, his hope
   The other man's damnation".

Now it wasn't the voodoo or the many other subtle political references, such as the use of the word, "wind", that would be readily understood by people who come from Ulster, that caught my attention, but this, the image of the Orange bands, "Drawing an iron net through darkest Ulster". Had Winston Churchill, I found myself asking, Louis MacNeice in mind, when he coined the phrase, "Iron Curtain", to highlight the political and ideological differences between Western and Eastern Europe after World War II? But more importantly, at this point, and before he exercises his demons in the final chapter, MacNeice reminds us of a tone of voice in the political divisions in Ireland, and in Ulster in particular, that is self-righteous, cold, and devoid of compassion:

"Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope,
   And God save - as you prefer - the King or Ireland
The land of Scholars and saints:
   Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush."

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Now here is language of a different order, the language of love:

   On a dark secret night,
starving for love and deep in flame,
   O happy lucky flight!
   Unseen I slipped away,
My house at last was calm and safe.

   Blackly free from light
disguised and down a secret way,
   O happy lucky flight!
   in darkness I escaped,
my house at last was calm and safe.

   On that happy night - in
secret; no one saw me through the dark -
   and I saw nothing then,
   no other light to mark
the way but fire pounding my heart.

   That flaming guided me
more firmly than the noonday sun,
   and waiting there was he
   I knew so well - who shone
where nobody appeared to come.

   O night, my guide!
O night more friendly than the dawn!
   O tender night that tied
   lover and the loved one,
loved one in the lover fused as one!

   On my flowering breasts
which I had saved for him alone,
   he slept and I caressed
   and fondled him with love,
and cedars fanned the air above.

   Wind from the castle wall
while my fingers played in his hair:
   its hand serenly fell
   wounding my neck, and there
my senses vanished in the air.

   I lay. Forgot my being,
and on my love I leaned my face.
   All ceased. I left my being,
   leaving my cares to fade
among the lilies far away.

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Now you would never suspect unless you knew something about the life of San Juan de la Cruz, (St. John of the Cross), that these lines were written by a Carmelite friar, or that they were composed against a backdrop of violence related to the Counter Reformation in Spain. Nor is there anything in the language, that of earthly lovers, that would have pointed to the fact that this poem, Noche Oscura or in translation, Dark Night, was written by a monk and mystic, who, in composing it, was aspiring to divine love. But the truth is that these lines were composed while San Juan, (who had been abducted and carried off from elsewhere), was held prisoner in a monastery of the Carmelite order by those opposed to the reforms that he, together with Saint Teresa of Avila, were implementing. In the early stages of his imprisonment, he was brought out daily from the confined space in which he was held and flogged by the monks. And when the prior, tiring of his obduracy, entered his prison, it was to give San Juan a good kicking as a means of persuasion. And paradoxically, in death, his mortal remains were shown no greater respect: acclaimed a saint, and with everyone wanting a piece of him, he was quite literally, dismembered:

   "Such was the desire to possess something of the saint - in life he had been simply a friar, a poet, and a mystic, - he was deprived of a leg, which he left behind at Urbeda, and an arm in Madrid, and fingers in various holy places. After he reached Segovia, a counter-appeal was made to Rome and his remaining limbs were cut off and sent back to Urbeda."

Willis Barnstone describes Dark Night as being the greatest of San Juan's poems, and ranks him among the foremost writers in the Spanish language, placing him on a par with Sappho, Li Po, Emily Dickinson and Cavafy. He speculates as to whether he might have been influenced by Fray Luis de Leon, "the great humanist and mystical poet", while a student at the University of Salamanca, and points up the fact that the principal influences that are to be found in the Spanish poetry of that era, are to be found in San Juan: Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, and Hebrew. And in an overview of his work he says this:

"In San Juan we feel the deepest, most withdrawn sense of solitude, though his theme was union. He sought freedom from the senses although his own poems comprise the most intensely erotic literature written in the Iberian peninsula from the time of the Moors to Garcia Lorca. Although he was a monk who had taken vows of chastity, his allegory to express oneness with an absolute being was the sexual climax of lovers. Usually he wrote in the first person singular, but his poems are never autobiographical in the ordinary sense of small incidents......he always wore a mask - normally that of the female lover - yet behind the mask the lyrical speaker of the poems is universally personal and, in an almost spatial sense, profoundly within San Juan himself. He looked for darkness to find fire, and was comforted by his unknowing, which gave him hope of knowing. He withdrew from the world to be closer to his God, yet nature and human love are the key to his poetry. To rise, San Juan fell to the blackest bottomland. To live, he had to die in life, his poems say. To waken he closed his eyes in order to see in the black night. As in the Platonic allegory of the cave, each step towards the sun of fire produced instant blindness and the sun itself oblivion. And while he moved toward the invisible, he gave us the things of this world in startling light. What he saw, he tells us, left him stunned and stammering, yet his words, far from being sloppy and vague, are clear in sound and meaning, with the plain economy of a perfect circle."

Now while I knew that the spirituality of St John of the Cross was of huge significance in Simone Weil's search for Truth, I was unprepared for the discovery that he, like her, was a Jew; the difference being, that while her parents were agnostic, his, (as was the practice at that time), were forced to convert to Christianity. In the context of his poetry, Willis Barnstone identifies the key stages, or "steps" in the spirituality of San Juan, as represented in his poems, as: via purgativa, (the purgative, "where by discipline and will one escapes from the dark night of the senses", by "annihilating the self"); via iluminativa, (illumination, where "one sees and feels the presence of God"); and via unitiva, (unity, where "man becomes one with God"). All this, from Simone Weil's point of view adds up to nothing less than a scientific proof for the reality of God. Something that she believed was within the grasp of all of us, (as it is within the grasp of those belonging to non Christian religions), if we choose to seek it out. In Oppression and Liberty she writes:

    "Those who think that the supernatural, by definition, operates in an arbitrary fashion, incapable of being studied, are as wrong about it as are those who deny its reality. The true mystics, like St. John of the Cross, describe the operation of grace on the soul with the precision of a chemist or a geologist."

For Simone Weil the operation of the supernatural was no more arbitrary than the operation of the universe. And in, Letter to a Priest, (in which she sought to identify the points of divergence between her beliefs and those of the Roman Catholic Church, to which she was deeply drawn, (notwithstanding her equally deep mistrust of the Church as an institution), we find this, something that, for me, does justice to a breadth of outlook in her, that was truly universal:

  

   "St. John of the Cross compares faith to reflections of silver, truth being gold. The various authentic religious traditions are different reflections of the same truth, and perhaps equally precious. But we do not realise this, because each of us lives only one of these traditions and sees the others from the outside. But, as Catholics are forever repeating - and rightly - to unbelievers, a religion can only be be known from the inside."

_________________

© Cormac McCloskey

"The SPCK Introduction to Simone Weil"by Stephen Plant
SPCK publications, 2007, ISBN 978-0-281-05938-6

"Autumn Journal" by Louis MacNeice
Faber and Faber, 1998, ISBN 0-571-19745-0
"The poems of St. John of the Cross", Edited by Willis Barnstone
New Directions Books, 1972, ISBN 0-8112-0449-9

Additional information relevant to the blog:

Solesmes, France: Solesmes Abbey, a Benediction monastery. It was here than an unidentified "young Englishman" in 1938, gave her a copy of the poem, Love, by George Herbert (1593-1633) a simple enough action that was to have a profound affect on her life.

Factory hand: Over the period of a year, 1934-1935, Simone Weil choose, as a part of her search for understanding, to share the life of the marginalised, working on the production lines at Renault and other places; an experience, together with her philosophical perspectives on it, that she documented in her journals. She was neither quick or naturally dexterous, consequently, after a year she was exhausted and in poor health.

Father Perrin & Gustave Thibon: Simone Weil was introduced to Father Perrin, a priest of the Dominican religious order, when, in 1941, because of restrictions placed on Jews in that part of France occupied by Germany, she moved with her parents to live in southern France under the Vichy Government. Pressing Father Perrin to help find her work, he introduced her to his friend Gustave Thibon, self taught in philosophy and a committed Catholic. Thibon found work for her in the local vineyards. Over a ten month period she had many discussions with Father Perrin on spiritual matters, and lengthy discussions with Gustav Thibon on things political and philosophical. Unlike Weil, Thibon was a supported of the Vichy government. When she last met Gustave Thibon to say good bye before leaving France in 1942 for a transit camp in Morocco, (on route to England via America), she gave him her philosophical notebooks and permission to use them as his own, if she had not returned within four years. Thibon who could not entertain the idea of taking credit for her work, arranged her aphorisms as he though best represented her, and published them under the title, Gravity and Grace. In similar circumstances she gave her spiritual autobiography, to Father Perrin, subsequently published under the title Waiting for God. She never sought to publicise her spiritual life, or draw attention to her special spiritual experiences. Not even Gustave Thibon was aware of them.

Israel: A Jew, whose family were completely assimilated into French society and culture, Simone Weil was deeply offended by the Biblical assertion that the people of Israwel, to the exclusion of all other races, were chosen by God.

The Need For Roots: Much to her dismay, when Simone Weil arrived in London in 1942, to join the Free French, she was given a desk job rather than being assigned as a recruit to the French Resistance, and an aspect of the work assigned to her, was to draw up a blueprint for the rejuvenation of French society, after the war. A society whose perception of itself had been gravely damaged by the German Occupation. The Need For Roots, is that blueprint.

Ulster: One of four provinces in Ireland. Ulster is the northernmost province, the greater part of which covers what is known as Northern Ireland.

Felice Nuevo Anol = Happy New Year

"Jacob halted on his thigh"= limped, Genesis 32:31

Orange bands: Those made up of members the Orange Order who parade in commemoration of the victory of the Protestant King William of England , over the Catholic King James of Scotland, (in support of the Irish), at what is known as The Battle of the Boyne, (1690)

Sappho, Li Po: Ancient Greek and Chinese poets respectively: Emily Dickinson and Cavafy: American and Greek poets respectively of the 19 and 20th centuries

Letter to a Priest. Written by Simone Weil to a French Priest working in New York, in the short time that she spent there in the autumn of 1942

Note: This blog, "What's In A Book?", was first published on Windows Live Spaces, by me on 21st January 2010