Prasanta Chakravarty
Unappeasable and plain. That is the reason Simone Weil is able to unburden and pull us deeper into relentless entanglements and by doing so, sets us free. “The woman who wishes for a child white as snow and red as blood, gets it, but she dies and the child is given over to the stepmother” (Weil, 1947/1952). There are few statements that can match the starkness of the utterance. Weil considers chance in utter bareness. Chance makes every hope for security turn into a numbing stupor, and hence a joy forever, playing out its momentary and repeated whim in the lives of stranded creatures. The woman had craved for a perfect child, which is a remarkably hyperbolic aspiration in itself, biologically speaking. A speck of hubris. And yet a turn of fortuitousness conspires to bequeath her exactly what she had wished for: a white and ruddy child. But what human agent is she to desire such a gift of grace? But she does, and just like that, her wish is fulfilled. Happenstance. And at that moment, perhaps during childbirth or soon after, the woman dies. She was otherwise perfectly healthy. Some error or medical complication? Or perhaps something completely disconnected to the event of childbirth. Maybe a stray fever or a developing condition turning rogue? Chance’s scythe is unerring. She does not live to savour motherhood. The newborn too, is now reared by another woman, the stepmother—an event over which the little one has no will of its own. The child’s life takes a completely different dimension and trajectory. Is the new home a refuge and a safe-custody? Will the new born be loved, or be indifferently treated as a step-child? At the least the kid’s growing up will be different. And the stepmother, who had no plans perhaps for a child at this time, or conversely, had prayed intensely to have a child of her own—now will come to rear the child. She is given the child—someone somewhere decides to give the child to her. The child is given over to her. Their dual lot. Not by any physical agent—not by the nurse in the hospital or the official at the orphanage, but by chance.
Do we still remember the second wave of pandemic in India? Thousands of corpses were detected floating in rivers in some parts of India and many more burnt on the banks. Dozens of bodies were being burnt in New Delhi too, on roadsides, since the crematoria were full. Round the clock. Veer Singh used to drive me occasionally from Noida–a suburbia of Delhi, to my university. One morning, at around 4 am, the door-bell rang. I opened the door and found Veer, with his 10-year-old daughter’s dead-body over his shoulder, coughing violently: “Saab, is nanhi sharir ko jalaane ka jagah nahi mil raha hai. Kal bete ko jalaane mein sab paise kharch ho gaye. Aaj ye. Kuch paise de do saab. Kuch bhi.” (Sir, I am unable to find a place to burn this innocent body. Yesterday I spent all my money to burn my teenage son. Today, this. Please help me with some money Sir. Any help will do”). I could do scant little. For a month Veer was not to be seen. And then he returned one Sunday and softly enquired whether I needed his services anymore. For the next three or four months he used to come sporadically: duty bound, but completely silent, with a vacant look about him. Then he disappeared again, never to be seen in the area. My life has moved on.
“The beings I love are creatures. They were born to chance. My meeting with them was also by chance. They will die. What they think, do and say is limited and is a mixture of good and evil. I have to know this with all my soul and not love them the less” (Weil, 1947/1952). She doesn’t love less. In fact, Weil’s love is infinite since all our meetings take place by chance. Infinite love for finite things in that they are limited and finite. That we shall die makes the density of life that much more wondrous and acute. A pattern of moment-making flows underneath our chance encounters with each other. The piercing odour of intimate distance is to be savoured with the entirety of one’s being. We cling to each other, so that the infinite is made momentary. For caesura is inevitable. Caesura makes chance beautifully stark. This truth she has tried to know all her life, with a singular immersion and a geometric precision. So, she waits, preparing herself and her readers, to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate our beings. Fragility projects the soul beyond time, into something enigmatic that must remain shrouded. Until grace arrives.
After actor Sushant Singh’s death in June 2020, his friend and actor Rhea Chakraborty became a lightning rod for relentless trolling, threats and media trials. Her torment was not restricted to social media. A case for abetment to suicide, mental torture and financial fraud was registered. It was a free fall. Under immense public pressure, all major governmental investigative agencies were mobilized. Eventually, she and her brother had to face jail time for a month under some flimsy pretext. A lookout circular was promulgated against the Chakraborty family. Bit by little bit, the family was completely broken and devastated. They tried to show nobility, but under such scrutiny, there was no possibility of maintaining sanity. Everyone cheered on. She and her family were fodder for a primordial death dance of creatures we call humans. The rest remained silent. As other creatures know, humans are hardly like other creatures; they are smooth operators: crafty, pitiless and craven. Meanwhile, Rhea had to face travel restrictions and her bank account was frozen. Most importantly, her career as an actor was finished forever, though she has tried some comebacks since, not doing very well. Chance carries mischance along with it. She has been exonerated of all changes in 2025. We have seen such ordeals for the past two decades or so, as time turned baroque and purgatorial in front of our eyes.
“It is intolerable to suppose that what is most precious in the world is given over to chance. It is because it is intolerable that it ought to be contemplated. Creation is this very thing” (Weil, 1947/1952). It is in the same question that Georges Battaile asks elsewhere: “Is it to avoid chance that we take refuge in life, in its brilliance, in its falsity and superficiality, in its shiny lies? If we seem lighthearted, is it from being infinitely sad? We are serious because we know something of the abyss—and this is why we erect barriers to that seriousness” (Bataille, 1945/1992).
Creation is fortuitous, but there is no reason to stave off that reality. The reality of necessity helps the most vulnerable to pierce through the cloak of stark affliction so that he can touch the arc of lucidity. Every pelted stone brings us closer to creaturely tenderness; every chance act of devastation makes us lyrical. Lyric hides its own mechanics—adrift, homeless, rhythmic, fragmentary. Some are chosen for clarity. Veer and Rhea’s visions were perhaps surprised as a wind entered their valleys: “sudden and silent/ in its arrival, drawing to full cry/the whorled invisibilities” (Geoffrey Hill, On Seeing the Wind at Hope Mansell).
Besides, is it not that chance cuts both ways? O necessity dearest, what images and truths have you shown me and to my dear ones! The momentary clarity that chance provides is also eternal. In The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a profound critique of controlling powers of science, Georges Bataille tells us that in the night of destiny lovers relocate each other. They discover themselves within the ring of a flaming hearth. Only a fugitive connection makes two people touch each other. Often there is silence, and beneath it lies burning passion. Such a stormy illusion is as real and true as anything we feel or touch. Each embrace is an ecstatic chance, materialized out of thin air. And therefore, Bataille would say: “the world of lovers is constructed, like life, out of a series of chances that give the awaited answer to an avid and powerful will to be” (Bataille, 1937). Chance (le hasard) is a kind of aleatory freedom that recurs in love as sweetness and generosity. But also, as wounds and combats—the cost of uniting in love. He goes on to explicate: “Simple coincidences arrange the meeting and constitute the feminine figure of destiny to which a man feels bound, sometimes to the point of death. The value of this figure is dependent on long-term obsessive exigencies which are so difficult to satisfy that they lend the loved one the colours of extreme luck” (Bataille, 1937). Love is winning hand of cards, which deepens in and through pain, but which is always the result of an arbitrary combination. Luck materializes divine ardour. Life risks itself and a dream figure turns into a living myth. To lovers, celestial glories are unveiled, but they are of indefinite presence.
And talking about love, Weil considers the fortuity of her birth and the union of her parents: “Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my father and mother is even more salutary than meditation on death. Is there a single thing in me of which the origin is not to be found in that meeting?” (Weil, 1952). Believer that she is, even her thought of God has origins in their chance meeting. “Chance, in French, has the same origin (cadentia in Latin) as échéance (“deadline”),” says Bataille (Bataille, 1945/1992). That is the reason love needs to be gambled away, risked in its entirety. Eternity is a fleeting gesture. Weil thinks differently, waiting and accepting this very momentariness.
When life reaches its outer limits, the grail of chance arrives out of nowhere. At the limits, everything comes to pass. Limit reminds us of the unlimited nature of the vast interconnectedness that creatures and matter and events share with each other. Does not chance also often give us a sense of déjà vu? The very permutations and combinations of life itself. It tells us that contingency is as immediate as it is eternal. Hence, Weil: “Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity” (Weil, 1947/1952).
Perhaps The Infinity of Grace may only come from myriad accidents that make life what it is? I had read O.V. Vijayan’s book by the same name in my college days, years ago. It is a story set during the Bangladesh liberation movement of 1971, spanning parts of Kerala, Kolkata and Dacca. The book has gained more significance to my body and mind over time. Kunjunni, a journalist, witnesses the inner dynamics of war (much like Weil did in the Spanish Civil War) and intimacy, and their nonchalant visceral turns. Creaturely relations are dynamic, he found out. Great love and parting are two sides of the same coin; what we call our own constantly recedes away from us, is always already distant, and yet that very distance may bring forth grace in reminding us of the intimate moments. Kunjunni keeps watching his own fallible self as he observes that self-less giving and mindless callousness and betrayal can germinate in the same individual. There are limits to people and relations during wartime. Each encounter in the journey teaches him something about life—for life offers us an ocean of gurus. The final assault comes when he realizes that his daughter, who eventually dies of leukaemia, was not his own. Seeking diksha from, and refuge in, an old school friend as a guru, he realizes his dead daughter is the guru that he is seeking—he is Shuka to Brihaspati, Nachiketa to Yama. Kunjunni feels he has traversed an immense battlefield, one which spanned ages. He had once sought to know what liberation meant. Does he understand it now? In one final section, Vijayan’s narrative voice harks at us: “In the gross body of man who forged weapons over and over again, and took to arms over and over again, a subtle journeyer watched in horror. Craving for primordial wilderness, untainted spaces and waters, in utter sadness that he could not have them back, the traveller abandoned his coarse body. He cursed that gross form, lost in the catacomb of the greed of war and the cleverness of reason. In the searing of that curse, cell parted from cell, in anguish, crying out confessions of dark sins, and set out in blind exodus to become the malignant disease” (Vijayan, 1987/1996). He seeks forgiveness and salvation, but there is no closure. There is no martyrdom or heroism in attachment and war, the novel tells us in every page: “Like the futility of war, futility of sin.” But only the journey, full of serendipitous encounters, could makes us free.
Chance exhausts and fascinates us. Bataille thinks anguish is contesting chance. He feels that turning away from the world and from bodies is a childish and shameful act. So, he would say: “Anguish says ‘impossible,’ and impossibility depends on whims of chance” (Bataille, 1945/1992). He accelerates necessity, and is convinced that chance needs to be gambled away. But Weil exhorts us to convert anguish into love, but only by taking chance and happenstance seriously. By means of waiting. Within the bowels of necessity, the grail of grace may or may not arrive.
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Bataille, Georges. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings,1927-1939. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
—On Nietzche. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1992
Hill, Geoffrey. “On Seeing the Wind at Hope Mansell.” Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Vijayan, O.V. The Infinity of Grace/Gurusagaram. New Delhi, London, New York, Sydney: Penguin Books, 1987/1996.
Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Trans. Arthur Wills. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1947/ 1952.
