I am struggling with a book by Sara Maitland called A Book of Silence. I actually quite like it and there are parts that resonate deeply with my own experience of silence. The problem I am having is that the book is so resolutely Christian.

Actually I am not sure that is the real source of the problem but it is the only thing I can think of that explains what I am experiencing when reading the book. Let me give you an example. In the chapter called “Desert Hermits” she wants to discern and then understand the difference she perceives between two forms of silence. She has come to understand the two forms as the kind of silence that allows the Self to emerge (or create Itself) and the other is the kind of silence that abnegates personal identity, emptying one out until all that is inside is the Silence. The first (silence) she exemplifies with Kafka and then the Romantics and the second (Silence) with the those (usually Christian or at least religious) who seek an emptiness that is to be filled with God (or in the case of Buddhism, the loss of illusion).

She uses two quotes as reference points.

You said once that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess, that utmost of self revelation and surrender…that is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why can there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough. (Kafka, Letters to Felice)

We must cross the desert and spend some time in it to receive the grace of God as we should. It is there that one empties oneself, that one drives away from oneself everything that is not God and that one empties completely the small house of one’s soul so as to leave all the room free for God alone…it is indispensable: the soul needs the silence of it, the inward retirement, this oblivion of all created things. (Charles de Foucauld, from Ann Freemantle’s book Desert Calling)

Of course I can feel the difference between the way Kafka and de Foucauld sought – and the difference between what it is they sought. This sense of becoming empty (whether to release Self or destroy self) is one all essentially quiet people can intuitively grasp, even one like me who does not require a god to explain the sense of unbearable intimacy that comes from being overwhelmed by that which is infinitely large. And the thing is that both the Self and the Silence are that – infinitely large.

The fact that I can identify either way is part of the problem I have with Maitland’s silence/Silence. I do know what “both” feel like.  I know Kafka’s need as well as I do de Foucauld’s and they are not different, not really. They are both about the loss of the sense of separation. That which Maitland calls solitude/silence (evoking the Romantics) approaches the identity of self and universe by expanding self until it explodes in a kind of ecstatic sense of enfolding of the universe – not humanizing reality but including more and more into what it is to be “human,” so that “to be human” becomes ultimately meaningless — there is nothing that isn’t “to be human.”  This is what Robinson Jeffers was going for in his inhumanism (or should have been if he wasn’t so pissed off at our inveterate stupidity).  The Silence that the hermits sought, that is also achieved through making “to be human” meaningless. It is found by eliminating elements of what “to be human” means until one’s self/identity implodes — and that black hole of the Void (longed for by Simone Weil) is finally found to be at the center of the universe — where one’s self used to be.

Both paths lead to the same experience/event. There one finds a singular identity. It is universally encompassing and inexpressibly minute; monolithic and multitudinous, and our normal sense of isolation, incompleteness, finitude and threatened meaninglessness is utterly vanquished.

I suspect that my problem with what feels like an artificial division in Maitland’s book is compounded by the fact that even with her quotes she can’t seem to hold up the division. Near the end of this same chapter she gives us the words of an Egyptian hermit.

“What is there to love about the desert?
“We love the peace, the silence…You can pray anywhere. After all God is everywhere, so you can find him everywhere.” He gestured to the darkening and dunes outside. “But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself. (Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain)

This last is supposed to be an example of the second kind of seeker and yet, what the Silence provides is nevertheless the Self.

It is not, I think, the the goal of the querent that decides between the “exploder” or “imploder” as Maitland’s book implies, but something to do with cultural expectations and probably basic personality. A bit like solace sought…an extrovert will seek it in the company of others; an extrovert, no. Yet it is still solace that is sought, and found. It is these implications that bug me about the book and, to be honest, I associate this kind of rhetoric with the proselytizing tendencies of religious folk. Not fair perhaps, but there you are.

Does Maitland’s division matter?  I think it does. For the same reason that it is important to realize that ecstatic experiences are artifacts of the human brain and body and not artifacts of mythological beings (i.e. we have some power in the situation), the false division of silence and Silence obscures — and the whole point of seeking is to actually find.

I have little acquaintance with Charles Lamb and until I purchased The Essays of Elia I had only read one of his poems and that assigned in an English class somewhere, at some time. The Old Familiar Faces is a bit sentimental for my tastes and so though his name (and that of his sister Mary) had floated around in the discussions of Wordsworth and Coleridge, I had read nothing of him that made me understand the felt equivalence of the authors.

And then I found – in probably my favourite tiny used bookstore in Vancouver – a delightful burgundy bound small volume of Elia’s essays published and printed by Collins’ Clear-Type Press sometime around 1905. Some $19 later, I carried the little book up the street to the coffee shop, ordered my latte and started reading. I read “The South-Sea House” first and was delighted by the whimsicality of the characters but there was something else, like a deep current under the words. I couldn’t stop there and glanced through the table of contents and came upon “Witches and Other Night Fears.” Given my fascination for the use of female power images in other writers, that was were I went next.

He seems to me a very careful writer. That is, I sincerely doubt whether his juxtapositions were not carefully considered. He seems an author that delights in the subtle indicator, the quiet joke to make palatable a difficult truth. So when he begins the essay with a discussion about the “creed of witchcraft” and the problem of interpretation (taking our ancestors to be fools for belief) only to follow it closely with a child’s interpretation of Stackhouse’s biblical explication (and his “brief, modest and satisfactory” solutions to numerous apparent biblical contradictions), it seems unlikely that such a juxtaposition was not intended to order our experience and create meaning.

For me the moment of deepest, although quiet, hilarity in that essay is the scene where the young Elia is exposed in his dedication to Stackhouse’s book. The pictures, it seems, had his devotion.

In my father’s book-closet, the “History of the Bible,” by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station.  The pictures with which it abounds–one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon’s temple, delineated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot–attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to that hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes–and there was a pleasure in removing folios of tomes–and there was a pleasure in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf.

Sitting in the coffee shop, I had to place the little red-ribbon book marker, place the book upon the table and simply grin.

That child, straining for a book probably placed on a high shelf just so he wouldn’t see it, just as parents in the ’70s hid their copy of The Joy of Sex from their children, this is Lamb for me, this quiet teaching, this delight in the whimsical, the deep respect for what is real about how people go about things.

It made me want to find a digital copy of Stackhouse just so I could see the Witch. So I did, and after a diligent search (which made me late for work), I found a copy of the volumes and a copy of the Witch. Here she is. Can you make her out?

More on Lamb later. The dude is my hero.

For about a year and a half, when I was fourteen to fifteen, I lived in Pittsburg. I didn’t like the school in which I was enrolled very much so when I left the house in the morning I usually just didn’t go. Instead, I went to the museum, the Carnegie Library, the zoo and the various parks within reach of my feet. It was in the library that I first recall seeing a picture of the Venus of Laussel. I don’t remember reading the text of the art book I held. I presume it was on Paleolithic, Mesolithic and/or Neolithic art. What I remember is the shape of the book in my hands, the press of the metal walkway under my bottom, the gloss of the page and the sense of space that opened up as I sat and stared at the picture. I knew nothing about the statue, nothing about art or the human history of the Paleolithic but in that space I felt a connection knitting between me, the statue, the sculptor and the crescent horn-moon in her hand.
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Although our body and brain process each sense through a separate system, normally we only become aware of it after the various senses have been woven together. We experience sensation as a whole. We smell a flower in the garden and all at once, it seems, we smell its scent, notice its shiver in the breeze, feel the silk of its petals, hear the crunch of our knee pressing down into the bark mulch of the flower bed and see the faint green haze that seems to rise from its arched turgid leaves. But senses don’t actually work that way. We perceive the world through a limited set of categories that differ sense to sense.
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One would think the primary visual cortex is needed to see, but apparently not. Despite being blind because of damage to the primary visual cortex, a person is still able to perceive light well enough through other areas of the brain, that when prompted to “guess” where an unseen object is, patients (human and monkey) are able to grasp the object, shaping their hand to the appropriate contours prior to touching the object or knowing what it is. This is called blindsight.
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I dream of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Not often nor in any great detail, ATP (a high energy macromolecule essential to every living thing on the planet because it is our “energy currency”) winds its way through my dreams like a three-stranded woven cord, sometimes just itself on a dark background of a nearly empty dream and sometimes it comes across the stage of a dream in progress, taking the shape of something else. Last time it was a large black cat, a panther I suppose, from its size and disposition. When something like that happens, some intrusion of image or content, I stop staring at the dream unfolding and I look in surprise—this time at the molecule/cat unwinding itself across the field of my dream vision. I know in the dream it is ATP and at the same time it is a cat and the surprise of that wakes me in the dream to the fact that I am dreaming.
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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.