Attention

I mentioned Simone Weil in an earlier post. I continue to read her on and off, in wide loops that come and go. I'm at LAX, heading to Paris. (Airports some kind of do-nothing space, or spatial abeyance, where sometimes, taking a breath, I think: what next? I like writing this blog, and do it so rarely. So that's a good "what next".) Loops: so, for some reason, and difficult though I find her, I like reading Weil when I travel. Not even sure why. Now the more I think about it these days, the more I'm pretty sure that I'm an atheist. But I don't always feel like an atheist. This is not the same as being an agnostic; when I'm certain there is no God, I'm very certain. At times, though, I experience the world as being utterly, utterly godsoaked, for want of a better word to describe it. (One day I should describe more about what the hell I actually think I mean by this.) But mostly, when I investigate it rationally, it's just: of course this is all there is. Perhaps at those times all I'm really believing is that there is simply no continuance of a "self" in an "afterwards". (Continuance of self: sometimes the belief seems so narcissistic, at its core.) But when I'm deeply in that place, believing this is truly all there is: it makes the world so infinite,in its finitude; and so beautiful, even as that beauty so strenuously jostles, at every single instant, to slip through the fingers.

So I'm not sure why this regular returning to Weil, the Christian mystic. Since I don't consider myself a Christian. (I like the Christ story as a fundamental metaphor of inner divinity, but I tend to agree with Joseph Campbell that believing in the literal intended meanings of religion is the equivalent of going into a restaurant and eating the menu, not the food). Perhaps the fact of her being such a beautiful writer is enough. It's a bit like my relationship with the book Abandonment to Divine Providence by the 18th century Jesuit priest Pierre de Caussade: I mentally "subtract" the Jesus stuff, and it becomes this marvellous book about meditation and surrender.

So where was I? (Airports: kind of like white noise as three-dimensional space. It's easy to become moderately distracted.) Where was I? - Simone Weil. I guess I read her because she wrestles with things that seem to matter: how to be; how to be here, inside this extraordinary, and extraordinarily improbable, existence, inside space and time. In Gravity and Grace she writes: "We have to try and cure our faults by attention and not by will."

"Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love." Also: "Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man."

In one version of the story, "Act without inattention" were the final words the Buddha ever said (to his manservant) before he attained nirvana, and ceased to seek. A strange double negative - does he just mean "Pay attention - to everything" or is there more to it?

I love also how Weil's links often move sideways, and slightly skewiff, from what you might logically expect. In film, David Lynch does this with our expectations of narrative. You wind up in a weird place, and yet thinking, "It makes perfect sense that I am here. There could have been no other way." Here's one of those Lynchian Weil moments that seems to hover just tantalizingly out of the reach of my capacity to understand it, to really get just what it is she is trying to say:

"We liberate energy in ourselves, but it constantly reattaches itself. How are we to liberate it entirely? We have to desire that it should be done in us - to desire it truly - simply to desire it, not to try to accomplish it. For every attempt in that direction is vain and has to be dearly paid for. In such a work all that I call 'I' has to be passive. Attention alone - that attention that is so full that the 'I' disappears - is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call 'I' of the light of my attention and turn it onto that which cannot be conceived."

Elsewhere (in the chapter "Atheism as Purification"):

"A case of contradictories which are true. God exists: God does not exist.Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure my love is not illusory. I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that nothing real can be anything like that which I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word. But that which I cannot conceive is not an illusion."

Finally, as the boarding announcement sounds: here are two old poems, from my book Totem, that touch in different ways on this universal experience of travel, and time, and tenderness. (Though not Weil. Though perhaps God.) (P.S., the next post I do will be about the Werner Herzog seminar I attended two weeks ago in LA, the Rogue Film School, about which I've been bursting to write.)


(Fluorescent)

In the white tedium of airports
The door to the soul of the world is ajar.
I glide along walkways and ramparts
For days in transit and transfer

Like a shade, through an atmosphere
Fluorescent with dislocation.
The air hums with inanity.
In all my loveless circumnavigation

There I am behind me. And yet it is
Exquisite to hallucinate in sleep deprivation.
We punch through the clouds into absence; thus
It was not an airport but a space station.



(Arc)

Down again through slanting sun
Into holding patterns and Dublin rain.
The plane banks languidly. The Wicklow
Mountains shine. There is the moon again.

The clouds wait shyly at the coast.
We make small circles on the great arc;
It occurs to me that God is love.
The long dusk darkens into dark.

Last rays: the fields of horse studs flash
Like lakes. This morning was Athens.
Three hundred of us descend and the curve
Of our loneliness lessens.

2. "There exists a 'deifugal' force. Otherwise all would be God." (Simone Weil)

I saw this image about a year ago, driving somewhere out beyond Mudgee and Orange in central western New South Wales, looking for locations for a short film I plan to make called "Air". I can't remember any more exactly where this place was; it was on a day of random driving through back-roads, and while I noted down locations of relevance to the film, this was just a "stop-the-car, did-I-just-see-that?" moment. And how lovely, and odd, it is. I'd love to know more about it, but figure I may never.

It's all pretty flat out there, but this was an area where I was winding up and down hills. This image was a long way from anywhere, on a rock face, close to the road, on a bend. What is it doing here? It's the kind of image you'd find stencilled around the inner city - close to an art school, perhaps, an obsessive little motif scattered in back alleys. But not all alone, a hundred kilometres outside of Mudgee. And what is the flying man doing exactly? Or thinking, on his lonely central western vigil? And are those wings? And is he wearing a suit? The shoes make me think so. And is that a signature? A "D"? And a kiss?

Right now I'm in Paris, and that road trip seems a long time ago. I've been reading "Gravity and Grace" by Simone Weil; this appears to have been just the right July, just the right hemisphere (Freudian pun), just the right Paris in which to read something really challenging - I have to concentrate, hard - that opens out, now and again, into these flashes of recognition. But it comes to you quite calmly. Reading Weil, it's like you are picnicking with astonishment. I mean, you spread the blanket, you open the picnic basket, and look - astonishing bread, astonishing knives that glint as you cut.

"To strip ourselves," she says, "of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world."

Later: "We have to go down to the root of our desires in order to tear the energy from its object. That is where the desires are true in so far as they are energy. It is the object which is unreal. But there is an unspeakable wrench in the soul at the separation of a desire from its object."

This morning I had breakfast with my friend Maria and her fiancé J-F the fireman, at his apartment above the fire station at St Sulpice. Then Maria and I rode bicycles across Paris to her apartment in the 18th, and then down to her dress shop, elegantly minimalist, in the 3rd. which she had to open around midday.

Eleven years ago I had ridden pillion on the back of Laurent E's moped, as we careened through this city that was everything he knew and loved. This was a bright time for him. But he never quite made it through, and died last year, far too young, and troubled. The last I saw him, eighteen months ago, he had run out of the café, crying with shame at where his life had gotten to. Perhaps my unexpected arrival had brought back for him memories of what once was. This week I will visit his grave, at the cemetery out near the Porte de Pantin. The first time, perhaps, I've understood the concrete necessity to say goodbye.

And yet today, whirling through Paris, trailing Maria the navigator, just as eleven years ago, watching the city unfold over Laurent's shoulder, what I experienced was a kind of flow. Which is nice, because for various reasons, these are stop-start times, and flow is not a given.

Weil: "In general we must not wish for the disappearance of any of our troubles, but grace to transform them."