The Weekly Weil #2
The Enemy Within
Well, hello dearies! Let me start by expressing my gratitude to
for a very generous shout-out and to everyone who decided to subscribe. Please note that I am not attempting a systematic exegesis of either Weil or Murdoch (mainly because I’m woefully unqualified to do so). Instead, I will make use of them as illuminating (and sometimes infuriating) interlocutors. As for the rest, I can only apologise in advance. Corrections, pushback and praise are much appreciated.1m.j.e.
xxx
In This Edition
Ye Shall Be as Gods
Decentering the Self
Decreation Aria
An Interlude of Daddies
Occasions for Unselfing
Other Business
Coming Next Week
Ye Shall Be as Gods
“You are God!” a pale, bald man tells you in an 84-minute-long YouTube video. Do you believe him? The answer may surprise you.
In her erudite and entertaining book Self-Made: Creating our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, Tara Isabella Burton argues that our belief in God hasn’t died, it has just been relocated:
We have turned our backs on the idea of a creator-God, out there, and instead placed God within us—more specifically, within the numinous force of our own desires. Our obsession with self-creation is also an obsession with the idea that we have the power that we once believed God did: to remake ourselves and our realities, not in the image of God but in that of our own desires.
Burton admits that this could be framed as “an empowering tale of progress and liberation from tyranny and superstition”, but she doesn’t dwell much on this perspective.
Maybe, though, the problem lies not in the false belief that we are gods, but in the shallow and childish image we have of godhood. Maybe, as mystics having been telling us through the ages, from the Upanishads to Emerson, we have forgotten our true divine nature:2
'A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.
'Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees, that the structure still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high. He adores timidly his own work. Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at himself and his house, and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt him and it. He perceives that if his law is still paramount, if still he have elemental power, if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is Instinct.'
Decentering the Self
Weil had a different mystic vision.
In the essay Forms of the Implicit Love of God, Weil says that we cannot love God directly before “He comes in person to take the hand of his future spouse”, but there are three/four ways to love God implicitly:
love of neighbour
love of the order of the world (ie love of the beauty of the world)
love of religious practices
(perhaps) friendship
However, to practise these loves, we first need “[t]o void ourselves of false divinity”:
We live in unreality, in dreams. To renounce our imaginary position at the centre, to renounce it not only with our intelligence, but also in the imaginative part of the soul, is to awaken to reality, to eternity, to see the true light, to hear the true silence.
Decreation Aria
In extracts from her notebooks that were published posthumously under the title Gravity and Grace, Weil went further, insisting on the need for decreation, which, in light of her death by self-starvation soon afterwards, makes for rather uncomfortable reading:3
Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual. At each moment our existence is God’s love for us. But God can only love himself. His love for us is love for himself through us. Thus, he who gives us our being loves in us the acceptance of not being.
Our existence is made up only of his waiting for our acceptance not to exist. He is perpetually begging from us that existence which he gives. He gives it to us in order to beg it from us.
Relentless necessity, wretchedness, distress, the crushing burden of poverty and of labour which wears us out, cruelty, torture, violent death, constraint, disease—all these constitute divine love. It is God who in love withdraws from us so that we can love him. For if we were exposed to the direct radiance of his love, without the protection of space, of time and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun; there would not be enough ‘I’ in us to make it possible to surrender the ‘I’ for love’s sake. Necessity is the screen set between God and us so that we can be. It is for us to pierce through the screen so that we cease to be.
Inspired and perplexed by Weil, the Canadian poet Anne Carson released a collection entitled Decreation in 2006, which includes Decreation: A Opera in Three Parts, which features a Decreation Aria “sung alone by Simone in an empty place”:
I am excess. Flesh. Brain Breath. Creature who breaks the silence of heaven, blocks God's view of his beloved creation and like an unwelcome third between two lovers gets in the way. It is creation that God loves— mountains and sea and the years after— blue simple horizon of all care. World as it is when I am not there. Undo this creature! Excess. Flesh. Brain. Breath. Creature. Undo this creature.
AN INTERLUDE OF DADDIES
Daddy number one: God the Father
I will readily admit that the most concise explanation for why Weil resonates with me is nostalgia. When I was a child I believed that I was a child of God.
This belief did not bring me much comfort. I couldn’t yet conceptualise my own death, but I had a pretty clear picture of hell — my family had loving planted the Calvinist doctrine of Total Depravity deep within my vulnerable little soul.
I was once jolted awake by a thunderclap on a warm summer night and in my mind’s eye I could see the clouds parting for the Seconding Coming of Christ and I prayed to Jesus to please forgive me please forgive my sins please forgive me Jesus please.
Daddy number two: St Paul
Jesus may be the poster boy for Christianity, but the doctrine was founded by Saul of Tarsus, who just couldn’t resist sticking it to us homos in Romans 1 verses 26 to 27. Sorry, church gays, it must be the Protestant in me, but I just can’t overlook that little detail.4
Daddy number three: R
I met R at my best friend’s new girlfriend’s housewarming when I was a 23-year-old gaycel (yes, we exist). R asked me out on a date the next weekend — I was so nervous I could not eat for days. R asked if I wanted to be his boyfriend. We were together for two months.
An incomplete list of things that R introduced me to:
basil pesto
filter coffee
pork pies
picnics in Greenside
Thai food
baking scones
dagga
kissing
blowjobs
anal sex
getting jerked off in a swimming pool
Nina Simone
An Education
Laura Brannigan
being in love
unwooded Chardonnay
lunch at the Troyville Hotel
being let down gently
Daddy number four: The Daddy Within (aka The Super-Ego)
In a brilliant essay entitled Against Self-Criticism, the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips explores Freud’s concept of the super-ego as “an internalised version of the prohibiting father” that is unable to be a just guide for our actions:
Like a malign parent it harms in the guise of protecting; it exploits in the guise of providing good guidance. In the name of health and safety it creates a life of terror and self-estrangement. There is a great difference between not doing something out of fear of punishment, and not doing something because one believes it is wrong. Guilt isn’t necessarily a good clue as to what one values; it is only a good clue about what (or whom) one fears. Not doing something because one will feel guilty if one does it is not necessarily a good reason not to do it. Morality born of intimidation is immoral.
Phillips proceeds to consider what Freud’s discussion of the Oedipal themes in Hamlet tells us about the difficulty of knowing ourselves:
Freud uses Hamlet to say that conscience is a form of character assassination, the character assassination of everyday life, whereby we continually, if unconsciously, mutilate and deform our own character. So unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we’d be like without it. We know almost nothing about ourselves because we judge ourselves before we have a chance to see ourselves.
How well did I know myself when I first read Weil? Did I use her austere view of love as just another opportunity to indulge my self-hatred? Has RuPaul been right all along?
Occasions for Unselfing
In The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts, Murdoch echoes Weil’s concerns that our self-centredness makes it difficult for us to see the world as it really is. She writes that the psyche “resembles a machine” which “is predisposed to certain patterns of activity”:5
One of its main pastimes is day-dreaming. It is reluctant to face unpleasant realities. Its consciousness is not normally a transparent glass through which it views the would, but a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain. It constantly seeks consolidation, either through imagined inflation of self or through fictions of a theological nature. Even its loving is more often than not an assertion of self. I think we can probably recognise ourselves in this rather depressing description.
Can we escape this trap? In an inspiring passage, Murdoch (again echoing Weil, but in more forgiving terms) sees in beauty “an occasion for ‘unselfing’”:
Beauty is the convenient and traditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a fairly clear sense to the idea of quality of experience and change of consciousness. I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.
This (temporary) forgetting of the self through paying attention to the world outside (by touching grass, for example) strikes me as more realistic solution than a commitment to radical self-denial.
Next week, I’ll have more to say about how Murdoch connects this need for ‘unselfing’ to the moral imperative of “really looking”.
Other business
- is consistently excellent, with recent highlights including advice for young writers and a passionate defence of free speech. Also doing the rounds again is his important manifesto against writing-as-branding.
- claims Tolstoy and Austen aren't world-historically unique and special geniuses, prompting interesting discussions in the comments.
A heart-wrenching short story by
.A fascinating essay on the Victorian obsession with dog breeding by
(via the always amusing )The brilliant
wants to manifest a new gay journal and is looking for collaborators.I really vibe with the lyrics of “Full of Life” by Christine and the Queens, from the album PARANOIA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE (a fantastic artistic achievement, complete with Madonna as “the voice of the big simulation”):
I consider myself a non-combatant in the terf wars, but I have to admit I chortled when I came across this sticker in South-East London:
Photograph by the author
Coming Next Week
To Love Is To Pay Attention
The Definitive Ranking of the Five and a Half Iris Murdoch Novels that I Have Read
Pictures of Dogs!
An Interlude of Mothers
& lots more …
Preferably public praise that will help attract more attention to this humble little newsletter. If it’s not too much of a bother. Ta.
The phrase “a god in ruins” first entered my awareness as the title of Kate Atkinson’s touching follow-up to her enthralling Life after Life.
Goddamnit! It’s only week two and I’m already getting tired of this sadass bitch! Girl logic is naming your newsletter after a problematic writer because you liked the punning potential.
As far as I’m aware, Weil never discussed homosexuality in detail; but the two instances I could find in Gravity and Grace are not exactly ringing endorsements.
Firstly, in a defence of other civilisations:
We give the faults of other civilizations as a proof of the inadequacy of the religions on which they depend. Yet if we look at the record of Europe for the last twenty centuries we have no difficulty in finding faults which are at least equivalent to theirs. The destruction of America by massacre and of Africa by slavery, the massacres in the South of France—surely these things are no better than the homosexuality in Greece or the orgiastic rites of the Orient. But it is said that in Europe the blemishes existed in spite of the perfection of Christianity and that in the other civilizations they existed because of the imperfection of religion.
Secondly, in discussing the collective as an ersatz of God:
Pharisees: ‘Verily I say unto you, they have received their reward.’ Inversely, Christ could have said of the publicans and prostitutes: ‘Verily I say unto you, they have received their punishment’—that is to say social reprobation. In so far as they have received this, the Father who is in secret does not punish them. Whereas the sins which are not accompanied by social reprobation receive their full measure of punishment from the Father who is in secret. Thus social reprobation is a favour on the part of destiny. It turns into a supplementary evil, however, for those who, under the pressure of this reprobation, manufacture for themselves eccentric social surroundings within which they have full licence. Criminal and homosexual circles, etc.
In contrast, Murdoch was a total fag hag.
In an ironic confirmation of this point, I was so entangled in self-doubts about writing this newsletter earlier in the week that I neglected to pay attention to the needs of someone very dear to me.
Thank you for the shoutout Mary Jane! What a great Substack! Also, great that you've discovered Tara Burton. She is really brilliant.