Humanities Underground

What Are You Going Through?

Prasanta Chakravarty   “Secretum meum mihi: the absence of reticence among many modern writers, the taste for autobiography and confession, the habit of admitting the public to the innermost recesses of an intimacy stripped of all reserve have never failed to surprise and scandalize me.” ~ Gustave Thibon (Introduction to Gravity and Grace)   A human body that has surrendered to gravity, and therefore has experienced free fall, is a strange creature—at once a corpse and a throbbing entity. Her will, desire, or outcome is irrelevant once the inevitable routine for the fall is initiated. The significant aspect for the creature in the clutches of force is that even with some kind of a harness, gravity does not go away. Its presence lurks about.  A body under gravity realizes that it is subject to forces that are beyond its mastery. The universe, as it were, enters into the body in pain. How do we become mindful of such primal vulnerability without immediately seeking protection that refuses to arrive? Can we sustain corporeal integrity by resisting free fall? Isn’t such falling as natural as the falling of ripe fruits, water, or a meteor? And then the final act of gravity: to be pulverized into utter oblivion. Gravity is an edict. As a response to this conundrum about force, an astounding  claim has been made by Weil scholar  J. Heath Atchley: “If one could learn to live with the body rather than in it—if one were body through and through rather than a kind of ghost occupying an empty shell—would not that change things, somehow?”  Or, in Weil’s own words: “One does not consent to [affliction] with abandon, but with a violence exerted on the entire soul by the entire soul.” This is the sense we get when Weil refers to the soul-killing lacerating force that is manual labour. There is no explanation as to why the labourer was selected for such crushing alienation in thus eking out her life. As a manual worker, Weil herself was left “in pieces, soul and body . . . the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul. . . . There [in the factory] I received forever the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red-hot iron the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves. Since then I have always regarded myself as a slave.” Henceforth, to be marked to lead a life of the afflicted suffuses all her thoughts and pronouncements about love, fairness and justice in a world that is at once callously ruthless and also fated to affliction. Beings are at once perpetrators and sufferers.   The Quartering of the Self Fated affliction is one of the faces of the divine. The other face is love. But there is a process of labour through which one might touch such grace. Weil gives it the name of attention.  How might attention look like?  Here is a clue how Weil thinks about the subject— “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. 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” One can detect in the passage the playing out of two movements. The attentive being awaits the object of its attention to penetrate its body and soul. The being itself does not have any agency by which it can petition the object of attention so that it could be granted grace gratis. Instead, grace, if it ever appears, must surprise the beseecher. The other factor is even more crucial: the seeker does not actively seek, but her mind is receptive to waiting.  Waiting is the emptying of the self, a manner of ‘spiritual quartering.’ For naked truth to shine forth, grace must penetrate the soul of the receptor, but the receptor herself must remain passive. Using knowledge for understanding has nothing to do with attention. The key is to suspend all thought. Readiness to receive grace means cultivating a kind of severe lateral vision like the man atop the mountain— simultaneously looking forward and below. Such passivity is required in order to counter our self-centeredness, which hopes to protect itself from the privations of body and soul. In such a state, one begins to see things only as one wants to see them or give in to a condition of fear and insecurity.  Weil says: “The principal claim we think we have on the universe is that our personality should continue. This claim implies all the others. The instinct of self-preservation makes us feel this continuation to be a necessity, and we believe that a necessity is a right. We are like the beggar who said to Talleyrand: “Sir, I must live,” and to whom Talleyrand replied, “I do not see the necessity for that.” I live by constantly inserting my personality in the world of relevance. To the world that is of little significance. Is there a way to reverse this process and speak incidentally of myself? Attention is this process by which we turn outside, away from our selves. It requires us to alter the direction of our heed and awareness. Attention makes us face the world on an altered gradient. What might we direct our visages to? The act of love is the highest form of attention.  In love the creature is gratuitous and generous to the point of being disinterested, oblivious to the presence of the infinite.  Is attention that aspect of one’s being which is not tied anymore to the vagaries of necessity

The Geometric Elasticity of Force

   Prasanta Chakravarty    An Honest Letter An exceptional testament about the nature of violence in times of civil war appears in the form of a letter: the one sent by Simone Weil to the novelist Georges Bernanos around 1938, being moved by his novel A Diary of My Times. In his work Bernanos, a devoted monarchist and a visionary, candidly describes the ferocity and casualness of violence on the part of the nationalists and church dignitaries as it unfolds at Majorca during the Spanish Civil War.  Weil had participated in the war on the Republican side. In her first encounter of the Civil War in 1936, nearsighted as she was, Weil stepped in a pot of boiling oil and completely burnt her lower left leg and instep. She found enough courage to return to combat. Should there be any confusion about the sides the two chose, she tells Bernanos early on in the letter that her native inclination has always been to side with the ‘despised strata of social hierarchy.’ This was the left radical Simone Weil who in her many teaching assignments and the grueling factory work among unskilled female labourers in the early 1930s realized and conveyed to everyone that ‘the organization of labour is the deepest root of oppression’—something that produced humiliation, which in turn, produced fatigue. But that confession of being with the oppressed strata is qualified immediately in the letter by a simple yet momentous addition: that the same associations were of a nature that proved instrumental in ‘discouraging all sympathies’ for her. What had happened that had led to such a fundamental perceptual hardening in a person who is exceptionally dedicated and driven in her acts, politics and thoughts? What did dehumanization look like at the front? The letter is actually a dialogue and an inner battle with her selfhood and its alterations as it passes through such extraordinary violent times. Writing the letter to her ideological antagonist who is equally alive to little acts of fiendish bestiality and its effects during extraordinary violent times seemed an obligation to Weil.  It was a leveling with what actually happens behind the lines during violent outbursts that takes humans to the brink of the purgatorial state of nature. In such circumstances, what does it mean to participate emotionally in a war, and at what price such first-hand knowledge? In the letter we come to witness Weil addressing a fundamental truth about nodes of intensity among the combatants: that grandeur and vice sometimes find a simultaneous natural outlet, so that all idealistic, righteous ventures are always sieved and purified at a point through the realist-determinist lens. But when the volunteer who joins the battle of resisting and fighting fascistic forces comes to square up with the realities of actual warfare, she often begins to weigh in the returns of her idealist immersion in the first place. On the one hand, the realist lens refracts back to sacrificial ideals as she ruminates upon the large catholicity of the anarchists. They did allow everyone to join their ranks. But what happens when idealists begin to waste themselves in a rut that begins to take a life of its own? Were the genuine radicals outnumbered by those who were impelled to political action by baser forms of violence? On the other hand, it is evident to those who live such a bloody war that love, an ambiance of brotherhood and, the demand for dignity among the humiliated are more than recompensed by a mix of immorality, cynicism and cruelty among those who profess equity and human dignity.  In Bernanos, Weil found a kindred soul who breathed the same odour of blood and terror as her, albeit the two nurtured diametrically opposite views about the political temperament of their times. In the rambling, confessional middle of the letter, Weil recounts several tales which depict the unleashing of actual anarchist terror, which is always offhand and banal: her almost witnessing the execution of a priest, a boy killed and his father instantly going mad, and a young prisoner given twenty-four hours to join the anarchist camp and having refused that option, shot dead in cold blood when he refuses.  In a different instance, the radicals, having discovered some haggard souls in the caves, shoot them to death lest they join the fascists. The reasoning for the mass murder is the key point: since the poor souls had not joined them and awaited the fascists, they were considered to be fascists themselves. It is not possible to hold on to any middle ground to those caught in the crossfire of civil war. And there are always justifications for such brutality: as some others were spared the anarchists considered their acts as humane and just. The final story concerns the manner in which an anarchist leader narrated the following incident to Weil: two priests were apprehended by the anarchists. Having shot one, the other was asked to leave. At twenty paces he was shot down too. Weil concludes the tale by pointing out the surprise on the face of the leader when he noticed that she was not laughing at his retelling of the incident.  Such punitive and murderous expeditions were rife in Barcelona at that time.  But the vital point is not about the number of people murdered. It has more to do with the attitude of those who committed those crimes in the name of transformation and equity. Weil emphasizes that she never saw among the intellectuals any remorse or disgust for the pointless killings. Rather the obverse was more forthcoming: ‘a brotherly smile’ whenever the killing of the priests/fascists was recounted to others.  Civil war converts human beings to automatons.  Fear is offset by a strange kind of courage among the partisan which inures them to all human loss and tragedy. After a point, you go with the tides and perform the motions. Shall we call this courage? Perhaps every act of courage has an underside. Perhaps there is no