reading Simone Weil's Gravity & Grace

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the chapter "Attention and Will" has got me by the hair. in fistfuls. i cannot look away. i cannot look away from my own face in the mirror. the indictment. the lesson.

"We have to cure our faults by attention and not by will." (p.169)

"Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love." (p.170)

"Love is the teacher of gods and men, for no one learned anything without desiring to learn. Truth is sought not because it is truth, but because it is good.
Attention is bound up with desire. Not with the will but with desire. Or, more exactly, with consent." (p.171)

like 3 gunshots right in a row. boom. boom. boom. or my face slapped. or maybe kissed? 3 kisses on the cheek. and then that fist in the hair that holds my head immobile and forces me to take a better, closer, longer look at what i assumed Attention and Will (and Love) are.

i have known that place. i have been there. that place, akin to prayer, that raises itself up (and my self along with it) when i am truly attentive. when i am absolutely engaged. the wonderment that courses through a body. i have experienced this while reading, drawing, running. i have felt it while singing in the shower. i have felt it in so many classrooms and while scribbling away in my notebooks.

but also: the result of heart break. the result of brutality. the result of devastation. just as wonderment has coursed through my body, so has an amazing despair. not all exaltation is pleasurable.

good does not always equal fun.

i say that to myself and see that there have been so many times when i have been a spoiled brat, kicking a screaming, because the Good Work i needed to do was also Hard Work and not fun at all. and i only see that, now, that i have been questioned about Attention and Will. i see that i have not been as attentive to myself as i thought. it is not the same thing as self-indulgence and it is not the same thing as self-abasement.

how to turn that focus, that attentiveness, toward myself in the way it is called for in the first quote?

thinking along these lines, this switch in lingo, gives me a new perspective on how to think of struggle and learning. i must pay attention to myself, see exactly what i am focusing on, discern if it is "good" and, if it isn't, (if it is horrible for me, wounding me, if i am only beating myself up) to refocus (attend) to the Good. the good i haven't given myself because it comes in a package i do not recognize or do not like. the good that finds me only through hard work. the good that is hard work itself. i must somehow love myself enough to learn how to do this... how to break the old, bitter habits.

i think that even something as horrible as self-hate is a habit. that malicious routine of pick pick pick and point point point: berating the self, attacking, snarling. as routine as brushing your teeth. it signals a corrupt notion of love.

maybe practicing Attention can teach me a new notion of love? a new notion of faith? maybe i have not yet truly "consented" to learning certain things? i have feared the lesson. maybe i have been afraid of looking at particular realities? seeing them, as they truly are and without any consolation, the realities alive in me.

philosophy is a necessity

kate durbin's The Simone Weil Fashion Project has reached right out of the computer screen and done something unnameable to my heart. pairing sentences from weil's philosophic/spiritual work with High Fashion photography is a concoction that, at first glance, may seem to dance at the boarders of sacrilege (for lack of a better word), but serves to heighten the power of simone weil's work. this pairing, which seems so odd given the very pious nature of weil's search and writings, highlights in such a violent and gorgeous way one of the main themes in her work. the nature of love.

i have been infected by the project in a very wonderful way. i ordered Gravity and Grace (the book kate is currently culling quotes from) and it arrived yesterday afternoon. i sat on my chilly front stoop with it, not even making it back in doors after finding it in my mailbox. an hour later, i made some chamomile and kept reading. another hour, another hour, another hour. i took notes. i looked up and it was bed time.

it has shaken out of me the first sentence i've been waiting for. the sentence i needed in order to begin my dream essay, The Value of Sadness. it is begun. it could take a very long time to write but it is begun.

the sentence is one of simone's.

"Love is not consolation, it is light."

and i thought about light. the physical element by with sight is made possible. love is sight. seeing. and this says absolutely nothing about liking what we see. that thought was welcome the very second i had it. and kate's project very much illustrates this thought: love, as a mode or way of being/proceeding, having nothing to do with what is preferable or pleasurable to gaze upon. it is acquiring the ability to see things as the actually are, not what desire would oblige them to be. things, people, ideas unclouded by Wants.

these thoughts stick in and refuse to be pulled out. and this is good because i have no urge to pull them out. if anything, i feel like pushing the thorns in deeper. to the origin of my confusion, my pain, my ideas... and see what happens then. what light might be found.

an act of unclouding. shooing the swarm.