Nerves are at Ease, Nerves are Tense
Prasanta Chakravarty On August 4, 1943, a few days before her death and amidst war, Simone Weil began to describe to her parents, Selma (Mime) and Bernard Weil (Biri), from her little room in London, about the working conditions and daily life of her Cockney cleaning girl. Weil’s last few months in London are all about pubs in working class neighbourhoods, Sundays at Hyde Park, watching people and listening to orators and living in a cheap room (though absolutely satisfactory and suitably furnished). Weil worked in a small office at 19 Hill Street in London doing desk analysis of resistance reports. She calls her world pure Dickens. But unlike Dickens, she refuses to be sentimental with the humble people of England. She wonders why often faithfully and consistently depicting reality rings false? What exactly may lie underneath reality? The cleaning girl ‘takes care of herself with the boys’ and goes to the pub on Sunday mornings. She thinks war as bombs landing on her and “doesn’t have two ideas in her head, or rather not a single one” (Weil, 2024). And then Weil makes a double leap, but her leaps of thought always have some internal logic. First, a general comment about English people around her: “For dessert, people here sometimes eat strained apple compote without mixing anything else in, the way we do” (Weil, 2024). Such mixtures, she tells us, are called “fruit fool” and she finds the name delightful. It is from here that she jumps straight into her famous lines about Shakespearean fools—for the mixtures lie by making the consumers believe they are fruits while Shakespeare’s fools tell unadorned truth, following the visionary tradition. That the latter always pronounce unmitigated truth is not because they are sentimental but because they are tragic. And their tragedy lie (she concentrates on Lear) in the fact which Weil has been telling us all her life in many different ways: “In this world, only people who have fallen to the lowest level of humiliation, far below begging, not only without social consideration, but regarded by all as devoid of that primary human dignity of reason—only those people actually have the possibility of speaking the truth. All the others lie.” (Weil, 2024). They tell us plain and simple truth: “Pure truths, unadulterated, luminous, profound, essential.” She further adds that all her certificates and ‘intelligence” mean little when compared to the utterances of the fools and she would rather prefer their label. Degradation and abasement beget stigma. Those who lack material means and rational space to put their case forth just do not matter. This is not just a fact of medieval Europe but has actually taken new forms in modern living. Life is still dictated by structural subjugation which is invisible, extreme material scarcity, poor sanitation, and constant vulnerability to workplace debasement, community cancelling as well as to natural calamities like flood and earthquakes, disease and pandemic. And what about the widows, orphans, the elderly and the disabled in the small towns, kasbahs and villages of India? Even in the suburbs. Charity is hardly forthcoming; humiliation is. Everything is collateral damage. These are the people completely stripped of their social status. She calls such a state affliction. Such people lose all illusions—they can clearly see the false masks that make the social possible. Besides, the outcasts do not have to protect their social image. In the subcontinental tradition, such fools have certain variants—simpletons who blurt out unpleasant or unadorned truth, the wise renouncer who do not care about polite norms but can see the deeper truths of life, the vidhushaka (witty jester) who, alongside comic relief, questions power, moral hypocrisy or human flaws, and so on. But Weil is referring to a class of people who have been ousted by society and who have therefore been able to regain natural ability or power to say things that go beyond the pail of dignified or polite utterances. It is not acquired wisdom or thoughtfulness or jest. It is as if some kind of shining truth flashes in front of their eyes. We may have encountered one or two people of this kind in our lives. They may have already been nurturing a certain kind of unadorned seriousness and plain directness about them. That streak exacerbates owing to the tense political climate of our times and by the personal cost that such partisan times always extracts from individuals caught in the turmoil. Bad things happen because bad things happen. It is the same for good things. Nevertheless, the unsavoury nature of tumult and commotion elicits various kinds of reactions from people—stoic, retributive, or resignation perhaps? Some people are galvanized by adversity—they turn around and get back to life with fresh energy. All kinds of permutations emerge. I have known a young woman in Rohtak, through a celebrated Hindi poet friend, who has worked all her life tirelessly for local progressive causes and particularly in attending to women’s plight in that part of the semi-urban world. Deliberations and reason do not function in that universe in the way we usually expect them to do. It is a secretive world. The chain of social command is in place. Shrouded and lethal in a petrified traditional morass. The language of rights and equality are completely alien. Each step of progress is often balanced by counter-regressive inertia. Tenacity is the key, and yet failure is almost inevitable, for those who wish to bring about any change to the people around themselves. The repeated ordeals that the woman had to undergo cannot be adorned with adjectives. From her own family members and from other community people—physical, financial and psychological. She is herself a fighter, within and without; and a self-reflective person—no way easily triggered by whatever happened to her or others in her cohort. But the ordeals have made her a different being—chiselled with debasement and yet full of shining incandescence, materially completely present in every act that she does and yet almost other-worldly in her comportment. You