Originally from Pharyngula

Having sort of dissed Pious Nietzsche earlier, I did want to say that my favourite chapter in the book was the one called “Paul’s Revenge.” I am not a Paul fan. Too much feminist religious philosophy for that ever to be the case. (Besides I like my hair and don’t see any need to hide it, and think that if it sets some dude off, then he has a problem not me, and if he makes it my problem, well, there are all kinds of ways to solve that, only some of which include non-violence.)

Having exposed some of my core concepts, let me tell you my favourite passage in the chapter. Benson says, “for Nietzsche, it (pity) is ultimately a disguised form of superiority: ‘To offer pity is as good as to offer contempt’. Precisely in the act of pitying, one places oneself above the one being pitied. thus, pity turns out to be a form of revenge, a way of retaliating against the other.”
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Here’s the sound of me putting a book down…

Yes that’s right. Silence.  I did not throw it. It did not hit the wall. Nevertheless, I will not be able to finish it.

Chapter 10 (the last chapter):

Nietzsche admits to being pious. Even though he calls himself a ‘godless anti-metaphysician’ (a phrase that truns out to be ironic precisely because Nietzsche is not godless), he still believes in truth, which has for millennia been equated with the divine.

That’s the passage that made me put the book down.
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So peardg posted this photo she took the other day. She was in the Juan de Fuca park in that deep and lovely old growth forest.  The night she came back, I got to see the original photos and, of course, they were evocative – but this one, now she has played with it, now it tells a truth that I sometimes get to experience directly (truth: below the fold if you’re interested).

When my brain veers left, my perception shifts. It usually involves all my senses in some way, but this picture is the best visual representation of what the forest is like for me when my brain jumps sideways.  There is almost always sound involved (I can’t remember a time when there was not anyway) and of course I can’t provide that here but the picture…yes, that’s it almost exactly. Just imagine it moving gracefully around you, dancing almost, and that your skin can feel the colours, and that you know what the trails of light mean.

The large sized picture is here.

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It can be exquisite, the idea of spiritual madness, the sensation of spiritual transcendence, but the more I read Simone Weil, the Jewish/Christian mystic the less I am sure about the “facts” of her madness (although I am certain of her experience of it) and the more I think of her life, and her death, as probably the most perfect example of possession by a story that I am ever likely to know.

The fierceness of her life, the tenacity, the arrogant humility of it, her abnegation of the self, all reach deep into the underlying assumptions about human nature coded into the Western god-story. Weil’s truly fine mind and her passionate intensity and spiritual fervor led to her death in 1943 from the long-term effects of “willful starvation,” its attendant malnutrition, bodily break down and loss of the capacity to heal. In a sense, probably without clear consciousness of the implications of her denial of her own corporeal state, Weil committed a slow kind of suicide, dying in her 34th year, dying, as it were, for her absolute absorption into the story of god that shapes the western mind.

She believed, essentially, that we are the space where god is not; that god retreated in order to create the space for its creations. That is, we are a god-void, an essential emptiness, while at the same time full of the things of the causal world. This dual state is felt to be intolerable, the void itself unbearable, yet, to fulfill our purpose—to empty ourselves and wait for god to fill us with grace—we must stop trying to fill the god-void with the human endeavor. We must endure what is unendurable. These things of causality, of the human world, to which we turn to ease the unbearable sensation of the void are what she considered the two greatest idols. These were “the self and the social.”

Born in Paris in 1909 Simone Weil was a young Jewish girl of good family during the years that broke Europe. Her parents were sophisticated, well educated, middle class French citizens. Her brother was three years older than she. He had a fair share of the family’s intellect and cultural curiosity; he favored mathematics and the wonders of the mystical East. Simone seems to have been, to some degree, following his lead. She naturally took to the ideas behind Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, and in her life and writings she seems to have assessed both Judaism and Catholicism by some of the precepts she discovered in her study of the East, but it was perhaps her exposure to the First World War as her family followed her father to his various war-time postings (he was a doctor) that focused her metaphysical interests along the tracks of both society and the individual’s responsibility within and to the world of the human—and to the divine.

She would have been only five when the war began and as a teen would have been exposed to the after-effects of the social and mental devastation that the First World War wrought amongst the people. The fact that the space between the wars could hardly be called kind to the Jews deeply affected Simone and her family both physically as well as mentally. In fact, in the last few years of her life, her parents, increasingly concerned for their joint welfare, decided to leave Europe, having already been driven from Paris to Marseille by the German invasion in June of 1940. Her parents planned to go to the United States. Simone was deeply patriotic but with little sense of how much her body would tolerate: she had organized protest marches for the workers in the Auvergne (1932); she worked in various French metal factories on the line (1932-1933), jobs physically difficult and demanding, ending her stint when she was too weak and ill to continue; she fought with the communists in Spain (1936) where she was scalded with boiling water, ending her time as a freedom fighter; Simone, who had gone to work as a field hand in rural France (1941) where she acquired pleurisy because she would not take comfort when she could.

Simone was reluctant to leave Europe but her parents would not escape without her, and she was really quite physically weak by this time (illness and migraines had been life-long companions), and so she left France with her parents in early 1942. Making their way through Casablanca to New York, the parents settled in the United States. Simone could not. She left for England in late 1942 and here she stopped. She worked for the French cause from its headquarters in London. She wrote reports for them and she wrote what was to be her final book, The Need for Roots there. All of her personal work, including what would become Gravity and Grace, Waiting on God and Oppression and Liberty were published posthumously. She died in the late summer of 1943, in a sanatorium in Kent, of the combined effects of exhaustion, repeated illness, malnutrition and general self neglect.

The concept of self-destruction was what she called decreation. For her, god created humans (and the world presumably) so that we could empty ourselves out and return, selfless, to that perfect emptiness which is god. In his introduction to Gravity and Grace Thibon, interpreting Weil’s thoughts, says that “so long as man does not consent to become nothing in order to be everything he needs idols. ‘Idolatry is a vital necessity in the cave.’ And among these idols the social one of the collective soul is the most powerful and dangerous.” The self and the social: the very things which created the human being that was Weil, allowed language to be born in the social space between her and the world which she fought to save, was for her, in the grips of this story, poison. She felt that as long as she was not a perfect vacuum that she got in the way of god’s grace—and turning to any comfort, whether this was food or the idea of a helpful, friendly god, debased spiritual energy, getting in the way of god.

Simone’s obsession was god, not church, nor really social welfare, not politics, nor the state of society. She sought in everything she did to empty herself to receive grace. She disliked the Jewish religious history, disliked the Roman Catholic Church and certainly disliked what she called the Great Beast of social control. She disliked both of the religious systems because of their behavior, their actions over history, and not because of what they had to say about the nature of god and human. She attended Mass; she sought god vigorously all through her adulthood. In 1938 she had a mystical experience in a church in which “Christ came down and possessed her.” But she was not a Christian; she refused baptism.

She was a mystic, caught in a time of broken and breaking people and her story of what her experiences and life means reflect that social contingency. She was obsessed by god and she was a woman of her time. She believed that “duty is given us in order to kill the self” but she also believed that

It is not surprising then that she did not fear death, or even that she seemed to court it. “To die does not commit one to anything, if one can say such a thing; it does not contain anything in the nature of a lie…at present I have the impression that I am lying, whatever I do, whether it be by remaining outside the Church or by entering it. The question is to know where there is less of a lie.” She could see, I suspect, that the self and the social world were stories but to her that meant that they were lies. This is because her god-story tells her that there is only one perfect truth, and her meticulous and fervent mind realized that this perfect truth was alien to everything it meant to be a living human being. The only way out of this quandary, without giving up the god-story, is to give up what it means to be human. This is why I say that the story possessed her and why I say god obsessed her. She sought truth; she could feel in her mysticism, the resonant emptiness underlying life but her interpretation—her storying—of that emptiness followed the guidelines of the god-story of the Western world. In other words, she felt she had to make a choice between the truth of her living experience and the truth of the story. She could not hold both truths and learn how to walk life inside the contraction, because she could not tolerate the idea that the god-story was in fact a story.

She said: “To love truth means to endure the void, and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.” So she died at the age of 34. Death is sometimes easier than living. Committing to the idea of life, it is perhaps one of the greatest challenges faced by someone who has grown into the world shaped by this particular brand of god-story.

I have recently been watching a discontinued TV show called Dead Like Me. It posits a world where some people, when they die, become grim reapers whose job it is to take the souls of other people who are themselves imminently dead. The main character, an 18 year old girl, dies in the pilot episode – dies by flying toilet seat – and starts her (eternal?) unpaid job as reaper. The show only went to two seasons. I have watched all of the first and 3 episodes of the last. It’s delightful.

I tend to like shows like this. Ones that create a world where there are things like paranormal insight, bodiless souls and odd creatures (in the case of Dead Like Me that’s gravelings –they’re the ones that set up the deadly accidents). When I am really tired, really stressed, I will watch (or read) something like this and feel soothed, reoriented.

I wonder about this, what this says about the power of atavistic notions for, of course, there is no life after death, no soul to take, no gravelings and accidents are just that. But really, of course, the show isn’t about death at all. It’s about living, about being in the world, and there is nothing to heighten the value of life like the closeness of death. Positing a world where death has a positive presence, where it exists as a thing itself, allows all kinds of life-moment mirrors. For example, the young woman in the TV show finds herself suddenly responsible for herself. She has been a real pain in the ass with regard to her parents: taken what they offer (home, food, clean sheets) for granted but now, as a reaper, there is no one offering. She suddenly has no place to live, no dinner waiting, no one to hurt by her sarcasm. Her death forces her to begin looking at her life. This is what I mean by a life-moment mirror.

I think that anthropomorphizing death in the form of human reapers is an easy way to create these “mirrors.” (Nothing grabs our attention quite like death, except perhaps sex and there are plenty of shows about that as well.) Human social life is something we deeply understand. Giving something completely alien and nonhuman (like meaningless accidents and death) an animal-like existence as well as a human face allows us to think about it, to try to extend ourselves outward into the world a little more from the relatively safe perch of humanity. Doing this is one aspect of learning: emotional learning, becoming more conscious of who and what we are.

I am a creature of the world. That means at least two things. First, I am born of a long line of apes and carry the complete history of primate evolutionary history in my genes, my behaviours, my senses, my reactions, my desires, my fears and my consciousness. So when I am at risk (even mildly) I turn naturally to what has always worked for my ancestral line – I make the world into a place I can understand. Hence the TV. Second, when I feel most myself, when I don’t feel so discombobulated, I still turn to the world of earth for answers. But at this point, I can try for more exacting insight. For the second that often either means science or poetry.

Like this poem by Melissa Kwasney:

Madrone

Animal, this nakedness, the bark
rolled back
as a bear or dog would bare its teeth.

Whose limbs, red and gold as mango,
flare like lanterns
among the darker, creek-side trees.

Glowing above the charred wrist
of root, they light
the wild iris in the muddy bottom.

They glow. They grow acrobatic,
offering their arms
shameless, they coil through the forest.

What is hidden inside us is suddenly
exposed to air.
The trunks gleam like a wound gleams.

Here is a mirror; a much subtler statement than Dead Like Me but still an anthropomorphizing of the world: a madrone-mirror. What ever it is to be a tree, it is not shameless or its unspoken corollary, shameful. This is an emotion we experience and find hard to understand consciously since its power is archaic and limbic and thereby not easily dis- and re-membered by our awareness. Looking at the world through narrative builds backdoors into our psyche and allows us to sneak in, peering around with the lantern that is narrative. So I watch paranormal TV shows and read poetry. I do this for my primate, worldly self, the one that is obsessed by what it means to be human, to be me. If I want to understand madrones themselves, or what death actually is, then for that, I need science.

When I was a child of about nine or so, some 6 years before I would move to Britain and go on my adolescent tour, but some time (a year or so) after the last shorter visit with relations in England, I lived for a while in rural Pennsylvania. It was an uncomfortable experience for me, not because of my skin color, which is pretty much white, but because of my cultural differences. My family was not Christian, nor did we behave so, and I suppose my differences were obvious. Everyone around us, for example, claimed to belong to Jesus (or to America, which curiously, especially in children’s minds, seemed to mean the same thing), and mostly, they were quite vociferous about the importance of salvation and warding off anything that might endanger grace. We were, I think, suspiciously quiet. In addition, I had a British accent, which, at first, my grade-school teachers took for a speech impediment, because they could not recognize it for what it was. (It was my father’s appearance with his pronounced British accent at a teacher’s conference that finally got me removed from my “speech therapy” sessions, which consisted of coloring pictures alone in the nurse’s room.)

By the time I was beaten up so visibly that my parents couldn’t pretend that the gulf between our family and those around us was not dangerous to their children, they had decided that perhaps Sunday school would be a way for my younger brother and me to integrate with the people with whom we went to school. And so for two weeks I went to Sunday school.

The memory is sharp in places. The basement room of the church: light came in on rafts of dust straight, it seemed to me, from the sky to the brown wooden tables where we children sat. There were eight or perhaps nine of us. I am no longer sure. I remember more clearly the man who was our teacher. In his black clothes, he had a sense of specialness that as a child I connected with, the sweep of his long belled sleeve, the plainness of his clothes, the way the sun lifted up his black-robed shoulders as if he were going to grow raven wings. I don’t remember the lesson, mostly because I could hear singing above me. Along the road where the church building stretched, upstairs in the sanctuary a service was being held. Adults, my parents not included, were singing far enough away that I could not hear distinct words but close enough that my ears would not move away from their attention to the feel of the singing. My whole body was tuned to the cadence of blue light that I could feel coming from the people-song above me. It was if the basement room where I sat was being filled with the yellow light of the sun and the blue light of the song. I was entranced by the way the two sources of sensation made me feel, and I suspect I didn’t give our teacher the deference which he thought I ought. But then he started to read us psalms and I heard that, even above the play of the light and song. I listened. When he was finished he assigned each of us a different psalm to memorize and recite the following week.

I don’t remember clearly what psalm I was to remember. I think it was the first one, because even today, I get a powerful sense of awe and wonder reading that song. It was the trees I think, their steadiness. At the same time, my awe of the psalm arises from realizing that spiritual steadiness, which comes from a kind of psychic rootedness—which comes from practices like quietly paying attention to the world—could be so clearly written and that many people, even those who claim this tradition as their own, apparently do not get at all what this implies. It’s as if they can read, even recite, but not understand: they can feel its power but not reason from its argument. It is the trees in that psalm that bear, for me, the lesson: Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked…they are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. It seems to me that it might be suggesting that the life-world of trees might have something to teach us about how to be happy, how to wait, where to take nourishment, how to root in a place where all these happy things can happen. It does not seem to me to suggest that, wanting apples in March, the tree should be cut down as unproductive.

I went back to Sunday school the next week. I remember that I was prepared. I felt excited, open. I liked the psalm and I wanted to feed its seed, sitting in my head as the memorized lines, so when it came my turn I stood in front of my chair as the other children had done before me but instead of closing my eyes and reciting my assigned verses I asked a question instead. I asked, what does it mean? I suppose I should have recited first then asked, but as it was I was so excited by the feel of the song in my body that I wanted an answer immediately and it never occurred to me that he might not want to answer me nor care whether I understood.

The young man in his black robe, in his sun garment, standing at the head of the table, hit me. For impertinence? I don’t know.

I took off, out of the church and across the road. My brother followed. A whole series of contingent events gusted up in the wind-storm of that slap. I ran across the road to the corner store. Even though my brother and I had never stolen anything in our lives, we stole some candy. My brother felt so guilty and scared, that he confessed to our father, telling him that I was the instigator (and I was the elder). My brother came to tell me. He told me that he confessed and that he had blamed me. I was still so angry, having refused to tell my parents’ why I would never go back to Sunday school or any church ever again, still so angry from that slap, from his face as he slapped me, from his look of fear and its unbidden rage, from his look of disgust, that I pushed my brother down. He fell down the tall slope behind our house that separated the forest from our dwelling. He rolled down. He hit his head on a concrete block and went utterly still. I thought I had killed him. I ran into the trees as my mother came running out from the house. I stayed out all night, only coming home the next day.

My brother, although knocked unconscious, lived without damage. My parents wisely said nothing to me, figuring, I think, that a night out in the forest was a good enough teacher. I never went back to Sunday school. I knew from that slap, from the night with the trees, knew deep in my body, even if not in my conscious mind, that there was a fundamental difference between what the trees in the Psalm had to teach and what religion had to offer. I knew what the trees had to offer was something I could be; I knew what religion had to offer would only cause more misfortune. I knew then that I was safer picking my fights on the playground. I thought I stood a better chance at surviving the cruelty of the people I went to school with, than I did surviving adult people who like chaff that the wind drives could not control themselves in the face of their own feelings.

To be clear: I knew all these things in the long moment between the slap and the next day when I came in from the forest, but I knew them not to speak them but as feelings in my stomach, legs, my skin and hands. Nothing could have dragged me into that church again and made me stay. My entire body rebelled, recognizing the danger.

And yet the forest, even though there were real fears, of skunks and dangerous plants, of drowning and broken legs far from home, these were manageable. They did not make me rebel, did not make me run from terror or hatred. They made me pay attention to where I stepped, knowing that if I was careful I could probably manage this. Contrary to the church, I knew the forest might take my life but it would never try to break me.

As an adult, I have not lost the anger, not in all these years, but I think about that young man with some compassion now. I wonder what kind of life drives a body to strike at its own young with so little provocation. I wonder at the tenuous hold someone like that must have on the system to which he has given his life that a child’s question about meaning should evoke such a response. I think about why he did what he did but I cannot come up with a plausible answer. I do not know what my question meant to him but I still, occasionally, think about it—especially when faced with another violently angry or abusive Christian. Today, I think mostly about his face and the revelation of his emotions, displayed, I am sure, without any conscious control. When faced with a child asking, he broke. I think now that this means that he doesn’t actually believe in his god nor even in his faith, but rather he believes only in his church, in his place within it, his position and his authority. And so when his church hates, he hates. When his church loves, he loves. He has, in a sense, become the system that animates him. Perhaps he had no other place to go.